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by AtNightWeCode 818 days ago
Rate limiting per user is mostly a thing of the past. You set other rate limits and various rules and then get the rate limit per user for free.
1 comments

> Rate limiting per user is mostly a thing of the past

Someone please tell this to fidelity. After 3 wrong password attempts they lock your account.

Fidelity are clowns. They've spent an impressive effort breaking every god damn third party integration AND using Akamai to block scraping. I can scrape Ameriprise fine, but no matter how creative I get Fidelity gives back a weird error on login.

(This is on top of them not sending any actionable email when changing my contributions to 0 in between pay periods)

I'm rolling my 401k out as often and fast as possible. I hate American banks so much.

> us[e] Akamai to block scraping

Would https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate help? Haven’t tried with Akamai, but did help with another widely used CDN that shall remain unnamed (but has successfully infused me with burning hate for their products after a couple of years’ worth of using an always-on VPN to bypass Internet censorship and/or a slightly unusual browser).

I'm using this to fill forms interactively and emulate a user. https://github.com/rust-headless-chrome/rust-headless-chrome

Afaict, it drives a stock Chromium instance. I'm not sure how Fidelity is detecting it, but they detect it even in normal headful mode. Idk if there's some JS that notices there's no mouse-move movements.

It's just not worth the headache. I despise bending over backwards for companies like this. But obviously I have no choice since they're my 401k plan facilitator.

> Fidelity are clowns. They've spent an impressive effort breaking every god damn third party integration AND using Akamai to block scraping.

What’s funny/sad is they probably pat themselves on their back thinking their security is so advanced and awesome. Financial services web integrations are all total clown shows.

but can't you buy API access? I would assume that's more of a business decision to promote paid for API access, rather than "security" against scraping.
And they convert usernames to sets of digits so they can be entered more easily on phones. Naturally this results in a lot of collisions.