An update on the scraper situation

Bright Data offers a “free” VPN service; all that is needed is for the user to give Bright Data the ability to route traffic through the user’s device — to become a part of the company’s residential-proxy network, in other words. Every phone or other device that makes use of this VPN becomes yet another endpoint that will be used to attack web sites.

It’s amazing to me how bad these scrapers are at it, too. I’ve been battling them on my personal Forgejo instance and the amount of redundant pointless data they’re pulling is amazing. They’re also completely happy to overwhelm my server with so much traffic that they’re Three Stooges-ing themselves by essentially DDoSing the machine they want responses from.

I can only assume these scrapers are vibe coded and never critically evaluated.