mynameyeff

Interesting!

I was building a browser automation for a website, and kept hitting these unexplainable roadblocks where my requests would yield different responses. I wanted to know why and wrote a basic script that was able to detect that the website was using geolocation block (e.g., "You can't view this content in your country") and my browser automation was egressing from an edge function on a server in a Baltic country.

Once I was able to make this mental connection, I tweaked my browser automation so that for that particular web property I would use a USA-based IP address. After making this fix, the browser automation was able to run successfully!

I think there may be other uses for BotScope, but that's how I started going down this road. Thx for asking!

Yea, a few actually.

Azure Front Door, ModSecurity, Fastly Next-Gen WAF to name a few.

I built a platform to detect any kind of anti-bot / anti-agent tooling that’s installed on a website. Cloudflare Bot Manager has the lion's share of the market but there are a litany of other ones offered by Akamai, Vercel, Amazon, and DataDome that have significant representation too.

In total, there's about 30+ different products that BotScope can detect. The entire catalog is here: https://botscope.org/abaam

A few technical details you might find interesting:

- Scans are full browser webpage loads. Not just `curl` requests.

- Scans are executed from datacenter IP addresses to closely mimic automated bot/agent webpage access.

- There isn't any kind of pentesting or destructive stuff happening... just pure recon!

- The product has API keys, and a hosted MCP server so scans can fit into agent/CI/internal-tool workflows too (I realize how meta this is).

Curious for your thoughts & feedback!

MSNBC commentators today said some things today that were so horrendous.

Indeed.

Charlie Kirk never really presented him this way but he was the founder & head of one of the largest think-tanks that is up there with Heritage Foundation. TPUSA was responsible for translating conservative values to Gen-Z/YA who were an all-but-forgotten demographic by mainstream GOP.

Precisely, it is Orwellian to attempt to misdirect people using language.

Who’s Dale??

Yikes... looks like Apple sun is setting. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Dark patterns abound. Maybe not a scam, but some deal of white collar fraud.

I mean, these "kids" are rockstars. Why are they being juvenilized by the Wired writer?

The crypto part isn’t something you turn off. It’s buried in a menu somewhere. For all intents and purposes, it’s a pretty elegant UX.

What are your qualms with Brave Browser?

If you enjoy high-end scotch, you're a good person in my book.

huh i thought everyone already knew this

Wow, very cool. I was looking for something like this

Pretty rad! Thx!

Dad??

I think you have the most feeds I've ever heard someone having.

Does elfeed work well enough that you don't get anxiety that you might be missing a good article?

Whoa... that sounds like a pretty compelling tool... does it use AI to create topic-specific folders?

In a sense, the aggressively FOSS approach of Wordpress opened the doors for this.

Agreed.

Gnarly...

It is better to use several open-source projects that "do one thing well" instead of a single product that attempts to do everything well.

If we can advance portable specs so different open source projects can interop... that would be better time spent.

Yea I didn't realize that my launch day would fall flat without allowing users to create an account. Rest assured... this isn't vaporware/techbro software!

Re: Cards. I just posted a tweet on our account showing how you can change from cards, to a regular list view. See: https://x.com/coretext_io/status/1836034921028325615

More peripheral aspects of the product & business.

Our motivation: Using a mouse is the de facto device for the web, but it requires fine motor skills that feels incongruent for RSS readers. Why? RSS is primarily text-driven media, and the human-computer interface should be text-driven too. There's something about using a keyboard that feels more efficient and, consequently, more pleasurable!

Our biz model: After the beta, we'll be releasing a Long-Term Support (LTS) version of the app so that people can self-host CoreText. Our "cloud managed" version will be closed sourced but have bleeding edge features slightly upstream from the LTS release. The cloud managed version will be ~$3USD/month. We want to be as FOSSy as possible, but also want to bootstrap the business so that CoreText can have at least 1 full-time employee. I think this is a good plan, but willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Loose thoughts: CoreText will be staunchly anti-algorithm so articles will always be chronologically-sorted by latest/oldest articles. "Suggested articles for you" is one of the lamest things to happen to RSS readers. We also have a healthy disdain for advertising & government so we won't be doing anything weird with user data. We also have a FISA Warrant Canary in case we're forced to comply to any warrants (https://coretext.io/warrant-canary). Lastly, there will never be any kind of platform lock-in so exiting CoreText will always be frictionless whether you're a free/paid customer. We want to honor Aaron Swartz's original vision of RSS as the most popular decentralized & portable layer of the web.

Ok gotcha. I'll keep that in mind... Thx!

Ah ok. Should I remove this post?

Thx! Yea I actually reached out to her last week, and I'm planning on installing her reporting tag after our launch day.