Selfhosted

40438 readers

475 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world

HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz

284

13 Feet Ladder (github.com)

submitted 11 months ago by tree@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A site similar to 12ft.io but is self hosted and works with websites that 12ft.io doesn't work with.

How does it work?

It pretends to be GoogleBot (Google's web crawler) and gets the same content that google will get. Google gets the whole page so that the content of the article can be indexed properly and this takes advantage of that.

link: https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 28 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

It amazes me that all it takes is just changing user agent to Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) and it can bypass paywalls on many sites? I thought those sites would try harder (e.g. checking if the ip address is truly belong to google), but apparently not.

[–] andrew@radiation.party 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Checking ip ownership is a moving target more likely to result in outcomes these sites don’t want (accidentally blocking google bots and preventing results from appearing on google).

Checking useragent is cheap, easier, unlikely to break (for this purpose, anyway) and the percentage of folks who know how to bypass this check is relatively slim, with a pretty small financial impact.

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's not necessarily a moving target when entire blocks can be associated with Google.

[–] andrew@radiation.party 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Unless they are permanently only using specific addresses or blocks and will never change that up, I’d consider it a moving target.

[–] efstajas@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Google literally has an official list of IP ranges for their crawlers, complete with an API that returns the current IP ranges that you can use to automate a check. Hardly a moving target, and even if it is, it doesn't matter if you know exactly where the target is at all times.

[–] aniki@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

Same. I thought there would be more stuff happening in the background but when I saw it's just hijacking the google bot headers to display the html i was a bit disappointed it's so stupidly easy.