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379 points mobeigi | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.266s | source
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DanielHB ◴[] No.41869510[source]
I want to share a story in a somewhat related topic:

anti web-scraping techniques

The most devious version I ever seen of this, I was baffled, astonished and completely helpless:

This website I was trying to scrap generated a new font (as in a .woff file) on every request, the font had the position of the letters randomly moved around (for example, the 'J' would be in place of the 'F' character in the .woff and so on) and the text produced by the website would be encoded to match that specific font.

So every time you loaded the website you got a completely different font with a completely different text, but for the user the text would look fine because the font mapped it to the original characters. If you tried to copy-and-paste the text from the website you would get some random garbled text.

The only way I could think of to scrap that would have been to OCR the .woff font files, but OCR could easily prevent mass-scraping due to sheer processing costs.

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1. teraflop ◴[] No.41869684[source]
That seems like it ought to be straightforward to defeat without OCR. If you know that a particular glyph looks like the letter J, then you just need to parse the WOFF file, find that glyph's data, and find the character that maps to it. It's definitely annoying enough to deter a casual scraper, but there's nothing conceptually difficult about it.

You do need to determine the "correct" character code for each glyph, but there are lots of ways to do that, on a spectrum from manual to automated. And you only need to do it once.