Detecting Chrome headless, the game goes on
I run the division at my company that builds crawlers for websites with public records. We scrape this information on-demand when a case is requested, and we handle an enormous volume of different sites (or sources as we call them). We recently passed 700 total custom scrapers.Recently, we have seen a spike in sites that detect, and block our crawlers with some sort of Javascript we cannot identify. We use headless Chrome and selenium to build out most of our integrations, I'm starting to wonder if the science of blocking scraping is getting more popular...I don't think what I'm doing is subversive at all, we're running background checks on people, and we can reduce business costs by eliminating error-prone researchers with smart scrapers that run all day.I don't want to seem like the bad guy here, but what if I wanted to do the opposite of this research? Where do I start? Study the chromium source? Can anyone recommend a few papers?