Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

You break highlighting and copy-and-paste. If I want to share or comment on a piece of your website... I can't. I guess this can be a "feature" in some rare cases, but a major usability pain otherwise.

I'm not a fan of all the documentation and marketing content for this project evidently being AI-generated because I don't know which parts of it are the things you believe and designed for, and which are just LLM verbal diarrhea. For example, your GitHub threat model says this stops "AI training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, etc.)" - is this something you've actually confirmed, or just something that AI thinks is true? I don't know how their scrapers work; I'd assume they use headless browsers.

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The irony of building an anti-AI project but writing your marketing and HN post with AI.

    function decodeObscrd(htmlOrElement) {
      let root;
      if (typeof htmlOrElement === 'string') {
        root = new DOMParser().parseFromString(htmlOrElement, 'text/html').body;
      } else {
        root = htmlOrElement || document;
      }
    
      const container = root.querySelector('[class*="obscrd-"]');
      if (!container) { return; }
    
      const words = [...container.children].filter(el => el.hasAttribute('data-o'));
      words.sort((a, b) => +a.dataset.o - +b.dataset.o);
    
      const result = words.map(word => {
        const chars = [...word.querySelectorAll('[data-o]')]
          .filter(el => el.querySelector('[data-o]') === null);
        chars.sort((a, b) => +a.dataset.o - +b.dataset.o);
        return chars.map(c => c.textContent).join('');
      }).join('');
    
      console.log(result);
      return result;
    }

Reminds me of when AOL broke all the script kiddy tools in 1996 by adding an extra space to the title of the window. I didn't have AOL, but my friend made one of those tools, and I helped him figure it out.

All I want is an API for my AI, you can ask me for my public key, if you want my human identity verified. The collateral damage of this bot hunting is the emergence of personal AIs. Do we really want that? It feels regressive. (I see the hypocrisy here, we are fighting the scrapers that feed the LLMs that runs our personal agents)

Nice. I have been working on something which utilizes obfuscation, honeypots etc and I have come to a few realizations-

- today you don't have to be a dedicated/motivated reverse engineer- you just need Sonnet 4.6 and let it do the work.

- you need to throw constant/new gotchas to LLMs to keep them on their tows while they try to reverse engineer your website.

This is an interesting idea... it'd be a fun side project to implement enough of a CSS engine to undo this

couldn't read the hero text on my phone

it's white text and the shader background is also mostly white

> Your content, obscured.

Is that supposed to be a good thing?

Another thing you can do is to install a font with jumbled characters: "a" looks like "x", "b" looks like "n", and so on. Then instead of writing "abc" you write "jmw" and it looks like "abc" on the screen. This has been used as a form of DRM for eBooks.

It breaks copy/paste and screen readers, but so does your idea.

I too, hate people that:

* Copy text

* use a screen reader for accessibility purposes (not just on the web, but on mobile too. Your 'light' obfuscation is entirely broken with TalkBack on Android. individual words/characters read, text is not a single block)

* use an RSS feed

* use reader mode in their browser

If you don't want your stuff to be read, and that includes bots, don't put it online.

> Built this because I got tired of AI crawlers reading my HTML in plain text while robots.txt did nothing.

You could have spent that time working on your project, instead of actively making the web worse than it already is.

I hate everything about this, please use your time on this planet to make life better for people instead of worse.

It is better for a million AI crawlers to get through than for even one search index crawler, that might expose the knowledge on your site to someone who needs it, to be denied.

I'm surprised that you don't appear to be using it on obscrd.dev lol

This is also what Facebook does.

Same result: screen readers and assistive software is rendered useless. Basically is a sign of "I hate disabled people, and AI too"

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