Comment by arbol
3 months ago
The solvers are a problem but they give themselves away when they incorrectly fake devices or run out of context. I run a bot detection SaaS and we've had some success blocking them. Their advertised solve times are also wildly inaccurate. They take ages to return a successful token, if at all. The number of companies providing bot mitigation is also growing rapidly, making it difficult for the solvers to stay on top of reverse engineering etc.
> when they incorrectly fake devices
And how often does this happen? Do you have any proof? Most YC companies building browser agents have built-in captcha solvers.
That's a good question. I haven't checked the stats to see how often it happens but I will make a note to return with some info. We're dealing with the entire internet, not just YC companies, and many scrapers / solvers will pass up a user agent that doesn't quite match the JS capabilities you would expect of the browser version. Some solving companies allow you to pass up user agent , which causes inconsistencies as they're not changing their stack to match the user agent you supply. Under the hood they're running whatever version of headless Chrome they're currently pinned to.