Cobalt is also completely free, without ads or any other monetization besides donations, it's purely meant to help normal people download videos for normal people purposes. It's not like they're a for-profit data harvesting outfit complaining about getting abused by another for-profit data harvesting outfit.
You're just saying that Cobalt is small and non-profit so they must be good and YouTube and ByteDance are big and rich so they must be evil. But if you only look that what they are actually doing here, it's very similar: bypassing protections to use a service in a way that the service provider doesn't like.
Then they either didn't set up CF correctly or they just use the mode in most headless browsers that bypasses default CF protection when CF is not in attack mode.
jsheard|1 year ago
Thomashuet|1 year ago
criddell|1 year ago
“bytedance's scraper was specifically built to go around cloudflare & other web security solutions, which is just genuinely evil”
So I would say it’s a fair comparison.
dewey|1 year ago
Then they either didn't set up CF correctly or they just use the mode in most headless browsers that bypasses default CF protection when CF is not in attack mode.