<story><title>The /unblock API from Browserless: dodging bot detection as a service</title><url>https://www.browserless.io/blog/2024/02/26/unblock-api/?apcid=00620de59ffc742367908900&amp;utm_campaign=unblock-api-announcement&amp;utm_content=unblock-api-announcement&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=ortto</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mmcclure</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t help but feel a little conflicted about things like this in the current climate. On one hand, as a developer trying to just get some updated stuff into a spreadsheet, this looks extremely useful.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are a lot of people right now that want to keep stuff accessible to humans and not have it scraped for models. I know the lid&amp;#x27;s completely off the box on that front so it&amp;#x27;s probably useless to fight it, but seeing &lt;i&gt;products&lt;/i&gt; explicitly designed to circumvent bot prevention feels kinda bad.</text></comment>
<story><title>The /unblock API from Browserless: dodging bot detection as a service</title><url>https://www.browserless.io/blog/2024/02/26/unblock-api/?apcid=00620de59ffc742367908900&amp;utm_campaign=unblock-api-announcement&amp;utm_content=unblock-api-announcement&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=ortto</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adsthrowaway99</author><text>For a while I worked in ads, and the specific team I was in put us in a position of being on both sides of this. We were tasked with monitoring advertisements for fraud, which meant we both had to catch bot traffic, but also we had to check ads for scams&amp;#x2F;phishing&amp;#x2F;etc. So on the one hand we were trying to plug holes in our own bot detection for botnets trying to drive up impression numbers to get website operators paid more, but on the other hand we were trying to bypass bot detecting on the part of phishing page authors (who would do things like display a totally plausible e-commerce page if they think the ad viewer is a bot, but a bank of america phishing page if they think it&amp;#x27;s a real user).</text></comment>