How Airport Websites Try to Stop You Scraping Them (And What I Did About It)

<p>Building a bot detection engine is challenging, but making it resilient against adversarial attacks, denial-of-service (DoS), and subtle concurrency bottlenecks in production

<p>I spent a week trying to scrape YellowPages.com with Python. Most tutorials online are from 2021-2023 and silently fail now. Here's what I found.</p> <h2> The tutorials are all

<p>You launch a headless Chrome instance, point it at a target site, and the first response is a 403 or a CAPTCHA. The IP is residential. The user-agent string looks like a normal

<p>If you have ever pointed <code>BeautifulSoup</code> at a modern job board and then wondered why you got only a fraction of the visible listings, welcome to the club. Many of

<p>Every AI agent has the same problem. You ask it to read a webpage and it comes back with a 403, or worse, 5000 tokens of navigation bars and cookie banners.</p> <p>I spent the

<p>Most AI agents handle web blocks the same way: hit a wall, throw a CAPTCHA solver at it, hope for the best.</p> <p>The problem? Half the time it's not a CAPTCHA.</p> <p>I've

<p>Two months ago I shipped UNPWNED, a passive web security scanner aimed at indie hackers and developers shipping AI-generated code (Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0).</p> <p>I

<blockquote> <p><strong>TL;DR:</strong> The screenshot you took six weeks ago is wrong. I don't mean subtly wrong — I mean the button you're pointing to says "Submit Order" in