How I Broke the Anti-Bot Behind Nike, Kick, and Twitch
20 points by vaguelytagged
20 points by vaguelytagged
Interesting writeup. I'm surprised the anti-bot payload would be as big as 477 KB, but maybe I'm just not used to how bloated stuff on the web is these days. (Also, maybe it compresses well on the wire.)
I did this for the love of the game. [...] I hosted it on a server and sold access to a few people who were doing Twitch account generation
This seems… kind of sketchy? I'm usually pretty supportive of reverse engineering, whether it's for research, for education, or just for fun; besides, security by obscurity is destined to be defeated sooner or later. But if you're selling the solution, that feels less wholesome to me. Even if you lose money on it (as the author did), you're still encouraging others to violate terms of service, which feels like it's in a different category.
Beyond the ToS violation, I don't see what non-malicious use there could be for creating a ton of Twitch accounts. I only ever see bot farms used to inflate viewer counts or to harass streamers.
This seems… kind of sketchy?
Yeah, it was all fun and games until I read that sentence. Not companies I would shed tears for, and still an accomplishment. But taking money puts this in another category.
bloated stuff on the web is these days
It's kind of hard to care about it as much as some people do. Most of us outside of Germany are on broadband connections both at home and on the go.
I don't shed a single tear for exploits in any of these large market cap companies' platforms. Sell them to the highest bidder. They won't pay you.
The article suddenly changed. Now it just says that the CEO is cool