Reverse engineering the obfuscated TikTok VM

Very impressive work! I always enjoy a good write up about reverse engineering efforts and yours was really simple to follow.

Many popular/large websites and bot protection services usually have environment checking as a baseline and mouse-movement tracking in some of the more aggressive anti-bot checks.

It's always interesting to see how long it takes from when the measures have been defeated/publicised until the service ends up making changes to their mechanism to make you start over (hopefully not from scratch).

All credit should go to Lukas https://github.com/LukasOgunfeitimi

I was sharing this here since I thought it was a great write up, but did not intend to pass it off as my own!

There is certainly always a good amount of push and pull, though my personal concern as a contributor to yt-dlp under another alias is more about archival of the underlying media rather than automating things like comments.

YouTube also uses an interesting scheme for authenticating requests for media as well which required implementing a very basic JavaScript interpreter within Python for yt-dlp too. I expect this kind of thing to continue to become even more common and complicated.