Fortress - Stealth Chromium engine to bypass bot detection
Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
Fortress is a stealth Chromium engine that prevents scrapers and browser agents from being blocked by correcting the browser fingerprint directly within the C++ source code. Unlike JavaScript-based patches that often reveal automation, Fortress ensures native-code parity across all realms, making the browser appear as a standard Chrome installation to detectors like Cloudflare, CreepJS, and Sannysoft. It offers a drop-in solution for existing Playwright or Puppeteer workflows via CDP, requiring only a single line of code change to bypass advanced bot detection systems.
Fortress corrects that fingerprint inside Chromium's C++, so the browser presents as an ordinary Chrome install.
- csnover
Man, this sucks. I doubt there’s anything that I can say to get people to stop doing things like this, but the eventual outcome here isn’t going to be freedom for you to scrape sites that are trying to avoid being DDoSed by bots, but instead that we all end up in a world where device attestation is required to do practically anything online. And for what?
- TrevorFSmith
Is it ethical to scrape when a site has explicitly blocked bots? I know a fair number of people who run small sites who are already considering closing them down because the bots are relentlessly hammering their sites and driving up hosting costs.
- dclaw
This is really unacceptable folks. There are those of us that have to keep these sites up, and it's seriously been a few years of nightmare scrapers and botnets, and stupid things like this that you are trying to legitimize that will make this worse. If a site doesn't want you, you should go away. There's a reason for it. Not every website is backed by a billion/trillion dollar company with the resources to absorb things.
- RandomGerm4n
I think that instead of trying to prevent web scraping, websites should try to make it easier so that it generates less traffic. As long as any user is allowed to view the website, there will always be a way to scrape it anyway. If there were simply a monthly updated torrent available on a standardized subpage, such as example.com/scrape, scraping would be much less harmful.
- xnx
> Bot detectors flag automation by reading the browser fingerprint; Fortress corrects that fingerprint inside Chromium's C++, so the browser presents as an ordinary Chrome install.
This does not seem like it would work against anything but the most basic bot protection.