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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

That’s why the author explains that the page loads in a real Google Chrome instance on a real Mac mini from the same residential IP as his other devices.

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You do know that bot blockers keep track of metrics besides user agent and IP address? Hotels and concert ticket selling websites use some of the most aggressive bot blockers out there.

I do. Most of these bot blockers block bots because of scale: these bots operate with superhuman speed and their traffic comes from all sorts of IP addresses. Tools like Anubis appear because such bot traffic dwarfs human traffic. And they typically have fake User-Agent headers set to a browser while their TLS/HTTP fingerprints would suggest they are made from curl or the requests library.

This is different. There is no scale. The bot’s browsing session exactly replaces a human session. The browser is real.

If there is no scale, there is no point of using OpenClaw. Furthermore, it seems OpenClaw uses headless Chromium (which is trivial to detect).

Well I read the article. It seemed to me that the way the author is using OpenClaw is trivially done manually. The author just didn’t want to use the computer and preferred to chat with an AI. You might think there is no point and I would agree.

it uses a real chrome browser window (that i can see when i remote desktop into the mac mini) that's been very good so far.

re: scale, is it that this whole project is worthless bc nobody needs it, or is it that its so good that scale is a requirement? this is a project i built for myself, i'm not commercializing anything

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