dark-knowledge VS uBlock

"A curated library of research papers and presentations for counter-detection and web privacy enthusiasts": https://github.com/prescience-data/dark-knowledge

What you said is contrary to the stance of Tor browser devs and not backed up by actual research. Here you can find a good collection of research papers: https://github.com/prescience-data/dark-knowledge

Browsers are complicated and you won't find a single analysis covering all aspects. For a security analysis Madaidan's blog is a good starting point. For a privacy analysis you need to learn the common tracking methods and which solutions or mitigations are available in which browser (and if they are properly implemented). You could start by learning about the different forms of tracking through state (cookies, cache, storage, ...), which is still one of the most used tracking methods. Of course you also need to check the easy things like telemetry. Then there is fingerprinting which is a huge topic on its own. This is where it's even more fun. You need to start reading research papers, not just one but many and you need to check mitigations used in browsers and their statistical implications (data about this is unfortunately very rare).

It's difficult to distinguish without having the knowledge yourself. Maybe Reddit is just not the right place, because most experts don't have the time to argue with non-experts on social media. You can look what experts write in research papers, or in the bug trackers of browsers with fingerprinting mitigations like the Tor browser.

Plus curated list of research papers here if you want to go deep on the subject matter: https://github.com/prescience-data/dark-knowledge

They become a significant part of your browser fingerprint. If you have a lot extensions installed, this alone could make you uniquely trackable. (See research papers here: https://github.com/prescience-data/dark-knowledge and https://fingerprintjs.com/blog/ad-blocker-fingerprinting/ )

https://github.com/prescience-data/dark-knowledge (search for "extension")

A dedicated list of research papers on browser fingerprinting: https://github.com/prescience-data/dark-knowledge

"I'm a noob and using python with selenium to do some basic scraping on StockX" and scraping protected website like stockx with perimeterx is not possible. It's all about reverse engineering, browser introspection, fingerprint (from hardware to software canvas), then you still need tons of ips to rotate and cooldown, finally protection evolve with time and you have to redo most of the things to pass again. A company like Scrapfly exists because it's more expensive to do and maintain such solution internally, look at their public repositories on GitHub low level stuff, network spoofing stacks, packet manipulation, custom angle libs. It takes a long time to learn vs something like `asp=true` from their docs https://scrapfly.io/docs/scrape-api/anti-scraping-protection If you have time and are more interested in this side, you could start to read https://github.com/prescience-data/dark-knowledge and look at https://github.com/berstend/puppeteer-extra/tree/master/packages/puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth project to see how it works. Do not attempt stealth project helping you to bypass at scale, it's public, anti bot companies are aware and spot it easily - most of the time they don't block directly and use bad fp generated to recognize bots and map proxies ips to collect it and deducted the subnet or residential > My main question is, would it be better to try and make my script act "more human" It's a legend that anti bot use or detect "human" behavior, this signal is not very important, you can randomly move the mouse or things, like is fine, having 0 input events, is suspect but not that much in fact - tactile systems do not trigger any events until you touch so it can't be a strong signal due to false-positive - and doing "behavioral detection" is a big lie in the industry, you can experiment by doing dumb things, it's still passing and at scale ... and when they say "machine learning" it's just basic stats like a throttle do but based on browser fingerprints rather than IP. If you hit some path, like login, registration and payment - they can use some very heavy system with GPU canvas and stuff like but not used for scraping yet > are other methods like switching drivers and using proxies the way to go? Using proxies yes, but with wrong fingerprints (chrome headless, a browser running on server hardware, browser in docker and so on) In fact, there is no magic, mixing driver change nothing, they still manipulate a spotted browser - some are just more flexible than other to spoof correctly some part - like js worker interception to inject scripts and hook correctly but that's all.

Check out uBlock Origin's per site switches [1]

[1]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

If ads, in particular on YouTube, are the problem, anything Chromium-based is probably only going to get worse and worse (see [1] and [2]). So that basically leaves you with Firefox and Safari.

I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Or if on mobile, it is well worth it to look up adblock options for the browser you use.

What are the compelling advantages of Chrome nowadays?

Chrome is working to limit the capabilities of ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/11/chrome-pushes...

Whereas a compelling advantage of Firefox is that uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Advertising networks have often been vectors for malware. Using an ad blocker is an important security measure. Even the FBI recommends ad blockers:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221?=8324278624

> It allows for 30,000 dynamic rules

That is not what we mean by dynamic filters. From https://developer.chrome.com/blog/improvements-to-content-fi...

> However, to support more frequent updates and user-defined rules, extensions can add rules dynamically too, without their developers having to upload a new version of the extension to the Chrome Web Store.

What Chrome is talking about is the ability to specify rules at runtime. What critics of Manifest V3 are talking about is not the ability to dynamically add rules (although that can be an issue), it is the ability to add dynamic rules -- ie rules that analyze and rewrite requests in the style of the blockingWebRequest permission.

It's a little deceptive to claim that the concerns here are outdated and to point to vague terminology that sounds like it's correcting the problem, but on actual inspection turns out to be entirely separate functionality from what the GP was talking about.

> Giving this ability to extensions can slow down the browser for the user. These ads can still be blocked through other means.

This is the debate; most of the adblocking community disagrees with this assertion. uBO maintains a list of some common features that are already not possible to support in Chrome ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b... ) and has written about features that are not able to be supported via Chrome's current V3 API ( https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as... ). Of particular note are filtering for large media elements (I use this a lot on mobile Firefox, it's great for reducing page size), and top-level filtering of domains/fonts.

> "Its happened before"

> That's not an argument

It's a subheading to "2. Browser engine monopoly". The subsection's purpose is describing how bad things were during the IE monopoly to reinforce that it's something to be avoided.

> in fact you could counter-argue that IE left a lot of technical debt

That would be agreeing with the article, unless I understand what you mean.

> On top of that, the internet was very different back then.

In a way that now makes it harder for truly new competing engines to pop up due to increased complexity of the web.

> I'm still not convinced, why would I change my browser?

The points made in the article are:

* Increased privacy, opposed to willingly giving your data to an ad-tech company

* Helps avoid a browser engine monopoly which would effectively let Google dictate web standards

* It’s fast and has a nice user interface

Onto which I'd add:

* Content blockers work best on Firefox (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...), doubly so when Manifest V3 rolls out

* Allows more customization of interface and home page

* UX improvements, like the clutter-free reader mode, aren't vetoed to protect search revenue as with Chrome (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467)

Advertising networks are vectors for malware:

https://www.cisecurity.org/insights/blog/malvertising

https://www.malwarebytes.com/malvertising

https://theconversation.com/spyware-can-infect-your-phone-or...

So if you're concerned about security then you want the browser with the best ad blocker.

uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...