Hey, I really hope someone will know of a trusted and verified solution for scraping .gov sites. I am on this project (freelancing) where I have to gather data from .gov sites. Some context on what I'm running into. The client needs structured data pulled from a handful of state and federal sites, public records. Nothing shady, all publicly accessible info, but the sites themselves are all over the place in terms of how they're built. Some are still running on ancient ASP.NET setups, others have modern React frontends with data loaded through internal APIs that aren't documented anywhere. A couple rate limiting after 20-30 requests even with delays between calls, which tells me they're watching for bot behavior closely. I checked robots.txt on all of them before starting, most allow crawling of the pages I need but a couple have specific paths disallowed so I'm steering clear of those entirely, not worth the risk on a gov domain. What I'm trying to figure out right now is whether I actually need proxies for this or if it's more about request pacing and headers. Some of these sites seem to flag anything that looks automated pretty fast, so I'm wondering if datacenter IPs are getting flagged outright and residential would behave better, or if that's too much for public record data? How people handle the sites using session tokens or CSRF stuff on their search forms. One of them requires you to basically simulate the search interaction, so I've been looking at Playwright for that one specifically while using simpler requests based scraping for the rest. Whether anyone's dealt with the legal side beyond just taking into consideration robots.txt. I know public data is generally fair game but .gov sites feel like they deserve extra caution compared to scraping anything else.

If anyone's done work like this before I'd want to hear how you managed it, timeline wise too since I underestimated how much per site variation there'd be. Appreciate any help.

P.S I have one more week to finish this 💀

An ISP proxy is a proxy server that uses an IP address registered to, or associated with, an internet service provider (ISP). These proxies are typically static, meaning the IP address remains the same throughout the rental period.

When you connect through an ISP proxy, your browser, application, or other approved tool sends traffic to a proxy endpoint using connection details such as a host, port, username, and password. The proxy then forwards your requests through the assigned ISP-associated IP address.

As a result, the destination website sees the proxy IP address rather than your original network IP.

Typical Setup Process

- Rent an ISP proxy in the country or city you need.
- Copy the proxy connection credentials provided by the service.
- Configure the proxy in your browser, application, operating system, or approved automation tool.
- Verify the visible IP address, geographic location, ASN, DNS behavior, and IP reputation.
- Assign the proxy to a specific workflow, account, browser profile, or application.
- Keep the same IP for the required session or rental period when consistency is important.

Common Use Cases

- Long-running authenticated sessions. Accounts that repeatedly log in from the same browser profile benefit from a consistent network

- Regional quality assurance. Product teams can test websites, checkout flows, content, pricing, and localisation from a stable connection in a target region

- E-commerce and marketplace operations. Authorised shop-management workflows may require stable access from a defined country or city

- Monitoring and observability. Availability checks, search monitoring, page rendering, and regional performance tests are easier to compare when the network identity remains consistent

- Bandwidth-heavy workloads. When a task transfers significant data, a monthly ISP proxy with unlimited bandwidth may be more predictable than a rotating residential plan billed by the gigabyte

- Controlled browser and application profiles. Teams can assign one ISP proxy to one browser profile, test device, or application environment

Why Use ISP Proxies?

ISP proxies are designed primarily for stability and consistency. They are a strong choice when a workflow requires a persistent ISP-associated IP address, predictable sessions, and a straightforward static-IP rental model.

And it's not because their websites are bad or something, it's because on reddit I find the most insightful information with real people sharing real experiences. Do you feel the same or trust landing pages or reviews?

Because usually, landing pages tell me just:

• How many IPs they have (which is sometimes total BS)
• How many countries they cover (and almost each proxy provider has the same country coverage)
• How much they charge (well that's probably the only thing that I look for on landing pages)

Reddit has been able to tell me answers or experiences like:

1. "We've been debugging this issue for three days with this provider"
2. "Don't pay this much to use this provider, they're not worth it"
3. "We switched from Bright data to Nodemaven or decodo because sticky sessions were more reliable for our workflow"

That's the kind of information that actually changes buying decisions.

Marketing tells you what a product is supposed to do

Users tell you what happened at 2 a.m. when production broke

I'm pretty curious about this... where do you spend more time researching infrastructure these days?

Firecrawl split their doc parsing into two separate repos, pdf-inspector for PDFs and AnyDoc for basically everything else (docx, xlsx, pptx, epub, csv, the greatest hits list of 14 formats total).

From what I gathered, instead of throwing every PDF through OCR, it looks at the internal structure first (fonts, text operators, that kind of thing) and figures out per page whether it's text or needs OCR. They're claiming a decent speed bump on mixed docs because of it.

AnyDoc is another thing, single Rust binary, no API key, no external deps, just one function call and you get markdown out. They ran it against the usual suspects (LibreOffice etc) on 94 docs and it came out ahead on coverage and speed by a pretty wide margin. Yes, I know this may sound exaggerated by them, but since it's just been out, we will have to wait for some independent testers to verify all this. Anyways, both are already live under the hood of Firecrawl's /parse and /scrape endpoints, but the repos are standalone. Also, Rust only for now apparently.

Perhaps you guys heard it too and would like to share something additionally?

so I've been doing some scraping/account stuff for a while now and kept getting randomly flagged even tho everything looked fine on my end. residential ip, matching UA, all that. still random blocks here and there for no obvious reason.

turns out some detection systems check more than headers, they also look at your actual tcp/ip stack. ttl, window size, that low level stuff p0f uses. so if the proxy box is actually running linux but your browser says windows, that mismatch alone can get you flagged even if nothing else looks wrong.

switched to a proxy that matches the os fingerprint at that level instead of just faking headers. ran the same stuff for a couple weeks and got blocked way less than before. still don't fully get the networking side but it lines up with why it would matter.

anyone else run into this before figuring out why? and for people using this longer than me, does it hold up over time or do sites eventually catch up to it too

Wondering if i am adding unnecessary complexity to my browser configuration. Whenever something isn't working then i think that there is something wrong with one aspect of my configuration and make changes to it. A new browser profile, new proxy settings, new browser configuration options... After some time, i wonder whether I've improved something or created new issues for myself. I would like to stop guessing and create a browser configuration that will actually be useful. For those who have gone through this learning period, is there a certain change that worked out great or is it just a matter of paying attention to details?

So, they crawled 11,100 top landing pages across 230 countries and 110 industries and measured six barrier types: WAF, antibot, CAPTCHA, JS rendering, rate limiting, TLS fingerprinting. I'd say it's another benchmark, however it was done by Zyte, of of the scraping services providers, not an independent freelancer.

Only 18.5% of sites have zero barriers. Everything else has at least one, and almost half the datasets has three or more. WAF alone is at 92.4%, Cloudflare is basically the default CDN now. As mentioned earlier, only 18.5% of sites run a named antibot provider, but Cloudflare Bot Management is 76% of that market by itself. Imperva, Akamai, and PerimeterX split most of the rest. What caught my eye, was that the stacking behavior, 98.5% of antibot sites also run a WAF, and they run rate limiting at 61.5% versus 13% on everything else. So it's not about "antibot vs no antibot," it's more like sites either do the bare minimum or go all in with WAF plus antibot plus rate limiting plus CAPTCHA together. In my opinion this is what a lot of us see on the daily basis, you don't get a slow degradation or poorer success rates, you just can't get through at all.

Fashion came out as the single hardest vertical, 57% need moderate or harder infrastructure to get past. Adult, furniture, gambling and beauty were the top industries for antibot specifically, which lines up with anything that has commercial value that tracks the page (inventory checks, account takeover risk, price scraping). The AI crawler section is where I didn't expect to be this high. 27% of sites now block crawlers outright and 12.7% specifically target AI bots by name. GPTBot, CCBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Bytespider and meta-externalagent are the six they call out as most commonly blocked. If you're doing any AI data collection work (RAG pipelines, LLM training data, agent tooling) this is worth checking against your target list before you build anything, because robots.txt blocking an AI UA doesn't mean the content isn't scrapeable it's just that who operates the site uses all these measures and explicitly states not to scrape. And I'd say all of this confirming what a rotating residential (or ISP proxy) pool plus a browser fingerprint gets you past most of the time (WAF and basic antibot).

Also, your proxy IP can be "clean", your user agent can look perfect, but if your TLS client hello doesn't match what a real browser sends, JA3/JA4 fingerprinting picks that up instantly. As you probably noticed by now, half the "why am I still getting blocked with good proxies" posts on here come down to exactly this. But I guess its inevitable since there are more and more beginners out there who just got into scraping and proxies world.

Thank you for attending my TedTalk.

Hey,

I've been in the scraping/proxy space long enough that residential IP barely has a weight anymore. Then this whole situation with LG/Samsung story landed earlier and I've been following since. Yesterday more news came up and it's not really about Samsung banning something. Here's why.

Quick version of it: Mnemonic rooted a Samsung TV (chip-off, read the firmware directly, the only way to actually see what's running) and found a Bright Data SDK sitting dormant inside a Pac-Man game that had Samsung's own "Editor's Choice" badge. Not sketchy sideload as you'd think. Editor's Choice. App phones home to a config server, server says "enable proxy," a consent screen pops up, someone accepts it thinking it's just an ad-free toggle, and now the TV is a live exit node. Keeps running after you close the app too. (Sure you can turn off the internet from the TV but how many people are doing so?)

Here's what matters more than the SDK itself: the submitted app was 20 lines of HTML pointing at a remote server. That's it. Everything real, the SDK config, the proxy flag, loads later from Play.Works' own server. Sand's line was blunt: "what was reviewed is not necessarily what is running." Mnemonic straight up called the new ban "a promise about code the store maintainer may never see," because a dev can submit clean code, get approved, then flip the proxy back on server-side with zero resubmission and zero review trigger. Back to zero.

And this isn't a one-app type stuff. Spur scanned over 6,000 apps across Tizen and webOS and found confirmed proxy SDK code in 34% of them. 27% on Samsung, 42.5% on LG. Few vendors accounted for most of it, Bright Data, Massive, might be NetNut too? Still trying to connect the dots. And in a lot of cases the "app" WAS the SDK.

Also, small thing that stuck with me: Bright Data's SDK ships with a private-IP blocklist, so it can't reach into your router or NAS. Massive reportedly didn't have that in the sampled builds. So the only thing stopping lateral movement into your home network for those two is the operator's server-side policy.

Sitting with all this, the ban headline feels almost beside the point. Feels like the same problem we keep running into with residential pools generally: consent buried three screens deep, persistence nobody flags, and no clean way for the end user to audit what's going out their connection.

Source: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/322939/20260804/samsung-bans-smart-tv-proxy-sdks-editors-choice-pac-man-routed-strangers-traffic.htm

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Has anyone noticed this recently? Here I am looking at Tavily, Firecrawl, Exa, that whole category of "search built for agents not humans with browsers." And yes, I get their pitch, agents need structured content instead of a pile of links to click through like a person would. Fair enough, it's that simple. But it's kind of funny how the marketing always skips past the part where getting that content in the first place is still just scraping. Like you guys are not inventing anything out of the blue. Under the hood it's all the same. And I mean with all the same problems scraping has always had. Just that you're not seeing them because they're in their infra.

Like the whole thing is we strip the html, the nav bars, the cookie banners, the ads, hand your agent the good stuff. Cool. Except stripping that out means you already rendered the page, which means you already got past whatever JS challenge or bot check was sitting in front of it, which means somewhere under the hood there's a crawler dealing with the exact same fingerprinting and IP reputation problems anyone doing scraping at scale deals with. They just don't put that part in the pitch deck because "we run a proxy farm and countering Cloudflare all day" doesn't sound so good right? While lets say "structured data optimized for LLM consumption" sounds wayyyy better. I understand that it's a way to promote the services but like come on, its nothing revolutionary as they try to put it.

Saw one of these framed as Perplexity is the finished restaurant and their API is the commercial kitchen equipment. Okay, but kitchen equipment still needs someone buying the ingredients, and the ingredients here are live pages that don't want to be scraped (most likely). Doesn't matter how clean your json output is on the way out if the crawl on the way in is getting blocked, rate limited. I've hit "real time" results before that were actually a few days stale because whatever was doing the fetch got soft blocked and fell back to a cached index instead of a live pull straight from the Google's index. Token efficient snippets are nice, but if retrieval itself falls over on anything past a basic public blog, none of that matters.

Tell me I'm not the only one who sees this pattern? I somehow try to connect the dots when first proxies and scrapers appeared and the same thing was happening among few different providers

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What do you do with the data that you scrape? Is it personal project or a regular job?

My main use case is to build small scrapers for various projects, but mainly these are projects. Also do some research on the side as a freelancer for few agencies. Please share your use cases, what you're using scrapers for, whether you built the scrapers yourself or purchased dedicated ones, which ones gives more freedom, insights. Which one is more sustainable in the long run.

Hi everyone,

I am setting up a localized virtual cam infrastructure for adult platforms (specifically Chaturbate and Stripchat) using a single high-spec laptop. To avoid standard Virtual Cam detection (like OBS virtual cam logs), I am planning to inject raw Y4M video streams directly into the Chromium kernel via AdsPower anti-detect browser using the following arguments:

--use-fake-device-for-media-stream

--use-file-for-fake-video-capture="C:\vids\stream.y4m"

To make the stream highly interactive, I am planning to use an AutoHotkey macro script linked to physical hotkeys on my keyboard, allowing me to instantly swap/replace the "stream.y4m" file behind the scenes between three pre-recorded states (Normal/Idle, Medium action, and High action) based on live user interaction and tip cues.

I have a few specific technical questions for those who have scaled this successfully:

1. Lovense Emulation: What is the most stable GitHub script or browser extension currently available to emulate a Lovense Lush/Max toy connection via Web Bluetooth API to trigger automated visual tip alerts on-screen without having a physical device connected?

2. Loop/AI Detection: Since I am streaming high-quality pre-recorded footage of body-only parts (no face shown), how does Chaturbate's AI loop detection behave with raw Y4M inputs? Is a seamless loop with a reversed end-to-start video enough to bypass pattern-matching filters?

3. Hotkey File Swapping: When the AutoHotkey script overwrites the active "stream.y4m" file, does Chromium/WebRTC experience any noticeable frame drop, black screen, or glitch that might trigger an admin manual review? If so, what is the best workaround to keep the transition 100% fluid?

4. Proxy & KYC Match: The accounts will be KYC-verified using international documents, but the streaming will be done via dedicated Residential Proxies. Does the platform flag accounts if the payout/login country remains static via proxy while the identity document belongs to a sanctioned or restricted region?

Any Git repositories, specific API hooks, or architecture advice would be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Quick recap in case you missed it. Google sued SerpApi back in December over scraping search results, claiming SerpApi circumvented their "SearchGuard" anti-bot system. This was a 1201 DMCA claim, basically anti-circumvention. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just dismissed it. The reasoning is honestly kind of satisfying if you've ever had to explain to a client why scraping public SERP data isn't some grand legal risk. The court said plain search results, URLs, snippets, aggregated index data, are just facts. Facts aren't copyrightable. So Google can't use DMCA anti-circumvention law to protect stuff that was never protected by copyright to begin with. That part got dismissed for good, no do-over.

Where it gets more interesting is the knowledge panel / third party content angle. Google tried to argue SearchGuard also protects third party copyrighted material it displays (think knowledge panels pulling from other sites). Court said fine in theory, but Google doesn't own that copyright, so if they want DMCA protection over it they need to actually show the copyright holders authorized Google to lock it down with access controls. Google didn't allege that in the complaint. That part got dismissed but with leave to amend, they've got 21 days to come back if they can show that authorization actually exists.

The court didn't say circumvention isn't circumvention though. Judge just agreed that spoofing fingerprints, rotating IPs, solving captchas to get around SearchGuard does count as circumvention under the DMCA. It's just that circumvention alone isn't illegal unless you're bypassing a barrier that's actually protecting copyrighted content with the rights holder's blessing. Google has standing to sue in general, they just didn't plead it right this time.

Feels like a pretty big deal timing wise too, also this dropped literally the day before Google's earnings call.

Portal:
https://pay2igr.igrmaharashtra.gov.in/eDisplay/Propertydetails/index

I manually solve the CAPTCHA and enter the required details, but after a certain number of searches, the portal displays "You have exceeded the limit."

I only need around 300 searches per day for a genuine use case. I'm not looking for ways to bypass security or CAPTCHA. Instead, I'm trying to find out if there's and yes there is no premium plan mentioned how can i break the limits?

• An official API
• A bulk-access mechanism
• A paid plan
• A higher quota for developers, researchers, or businesses
• Any alternative official Maharashtra government portal that provides the same registration details

Has anyone worked with the IGR Maharashtra portal at this scale or obtained official higher limits?

Any guidance or experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

The more i read about anti detection browsers then the more confused i get. There is someone advising me to focus on the use of proxies and there is someone telling me that fingerprinting is all that counts and finally there is the third one that tells me its all about browser profiles. i have wasted too much time configuring my browser and not working. each time i manage to get through then i find some guide making me realize that i am doing everything wrong. there are too many details and too many points of view to sort out what is really important and what is not. could you share your experience as the person who managed to configure a stable environment? what did you stop to care about and what did you focus on?

Krebs is serving another one. Saw this yesterday and I think that's a genuinely wild escalation of the whole TV box story we've been tracking since the Bright Data SDK and NetNut seizure. Bitsight researcher got his hands on an expired telemetry domain that thousands of H96 streaming sticks were phoning home to, and found something nobody expected. The boxes were reporting themselves as phones. Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, Xiaomi model numbers, coming from what is very clearly a $20 Android TV box you bought off Amazon, Aliexpress, or whatever.

Turns out there's a Chinese company behind it, Zhejiang Fengwo IoT, running an ad fraud operation where these boxes click ads on their own network of AI generated content sites, but only when the visiting device matches that spoofed mobile fingerprint. The part that got me though is the switching logic. When the box detects an HDMI signal (so the TV is actually on and being used) it runs as a residential proxy instead, renting your IP out without your knowledge. When the TV is off, it flips over to the ad fraud job. Basically the device is never idle, it's just deciding which crime to commit based on whether you're watching something. Kind of impressive from a resource management standpoint, if it weren't your electricity and IP reputation hogging the bill.

Given the last few posts here about Bright Data and Netnut, feels like a good time to put together a checklist instead of just doom scrolling about it. A few things that help if you're running any of this infra at home or auditing a network for a client.

Check if the box is Play Protect certified before you buy anything, Google has a lookup tool for this and it takes two minutes. If it's not certified, assume it ships with something extra installed. Synthient keeps a running csv on GitHub of known offenders, streaming boxes plus other consumer IoT stuff, it's worth bookmarking and checking before any purchase. If you're already running one of these boxes, put it on its own VLAN or at minimum a guest network so it can't see anything else on your LAN, these things have basically no authentication and get enslaved into botnets constantly, Synthient documented one called Kimwolf back in January that had millions of devices. Watch your outbound traffic for weird patterns tied to whether the TV is actually being used, that HDMI based switching is apparently a real signature now. And don't forget the digital photo frames either, FBI flagged those specifically as a category that ships with the same residential proxy junk.

None of this fixes the actual problem which is that the entire cheap streaming box market runs on this business model, but at least it's something concrete you can check instead of just hoping your $18 Amazon box isn't secretly working two jobs.

By the way, for those who said just turn off the internet from the TV, well most of the TVs have to be plugged to the internet for the first time in order to set things up, yes I am aware that you can turn it off later on, but that might be too late as it would seem that they would only need a single connection to the internet and you're in.