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CS
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Joined: 04 Apr 2022
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CS
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 Mon May 02, 2022 3:12 pm |
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| zimmertr wrote: | | At least make it free come on. That use of shaka is absolutely not aloha. 😡 |
This one is free https://campflare.com/
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Cyclopath
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Joined: 20 Mar 2012
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Cyclopath
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Mon May 02, 2022 3:26 pm |
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From reading this link, it's like Google for camp sites. It lets you search for available ones, and even has an alert feature that can send you a text message* when a site becomes available. It doesn't make reservations on your behalf which is what we're talking about because people here keep claiming it's going on. I guess this is the closest anybody has found yet though, so thanks for bringing it to my/our attention.
* Don't give your phone number to shady entities. A person can break into your email with your phone number, and once they have that they can "forgot my password" at your bank. This is called a sim swap attack, which is a little misleading because it doesn't require the sim card or access to the phone, just the number and which carrier.
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Cyclopath
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Joined: 20 Mar 2012
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Cyclopath
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Mon May 02, 2022 3:36 pm |
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| zimmertr wrote: | | At least make it free come on. That use of shaka is absolutely not aloha. 😡 |
I really hope recreation.gov's security is good enough that they won't service thousands of requests from the same IP, and a lot of other things.
If they're doing a good job, bots that aren't running through an anonymization service will just get blocked.
In an ideal world, they'd have to charge. The fact that free ones exist means they don't have good security at least for being scraped.
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zimmertr
TJ Zimmerman
Joined: 24 Jun 2018
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Location: Issaquah |
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zimmertr
TJ Zimmerman
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Mon May 02, 2022 3:48 pm |
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In my experience, software like this is usually just released as FOSS and intended to be self hosted and plug into your own notification service. For example, Google's SMTP which is free.
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jaysway
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jaysway
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Mon May 02, 2022 3:59 pm |
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| Cyclopath wrote: | | jaysway wrote: | | So the question isn't "can people use bots on recreation.gov" because people clearly do. A better question is "how often are people acquiring permits using bots on recreation.gov." |
No that's not clear at all. I was expecting it to be because people in here speak about it like it's a fact. But so far no one is aware if any evidence that bots are being used to make reservations or enter permit lotteries. |
You are correct that there isn't any evidence that bots are used for tasks beyond scraping and alerting of available permits. I would be shocked however if someone(s) haven't completed the extra step of having the bot actually make the booking. For a competitive permit where the person just wants to grab a single permit on a desired date, the bot wouldn't even have to go through the entire booking process, it would just need to add the permit to the user's cart and alert them and then they would have 15 minutes to complete the booking manually. But again, it is entirely possible to create a bot that does all the steps. Thankfully nobody has open-sourced that capability. I agree with altasnob that if people has created this, they have kept the code to themselves. The advantage that you get from building this system is diminished if you let everyone else use it.
For your second use case of entering permit lotteries, are you talking about having a bot simply enter a user into a lottery that they could have done manually, or someone creating multiple fake accounts (perhaps automated by the bot) and having them all enter the lottery? A bot isn't terribly useful in the former case, and the latter is less of a bot issue and more of a fake user issue. Presumably Booz Allen can prevent duplicate/fake accounts by matching emails, phone numbers, and credit cards?
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jaysway
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jaysway
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Mon May 02, 2022 4:04 pm |
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| zimmertr wrote: | | In my experience, software like this is usually just released as FOSS and intended to be self hosted and plug into your own notification service. For example, Google's SMTP which is free. |
Absolutely. Heck, even if your bot does the scraping 5x a day from your personal computer that will put you ahead of 99% of people. Like I said earlier, I checked for Enchantments cancellations once every couple of days the other season and managed to get a Core cancellation. Just having a minimal scraping and alerting system creates a huge advantage for the problem of finding permit cancellations.
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Cyclopath
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Cyclopath
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Mon May 02, 2022 4:11 pm |
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| jaysway wrote: | | You are correct that there isn't any evidence that bots are used for tasks beyond scraping and alerting of available permits. I would be shocked however if someone(s) haven't completed the extra step of having the bot actually make the booking. For a competitive permit where the person just wants to grab a single permit on a desired date, the bot wouldn't even have to go through the entire booking process, it would just need to add the permit to the user's cart and alert them and then they would have 15 minutes to complete the booking manually. |
It's harder to get a bot to interact correctly with web forms, for a lot of reasons. It's actually hard to do something like a shopping cart because when you add a human go to a website in Chrome or Firefox, the web server gives you a different cart. None of this is insurmountable, but scraping is basic script kiddy stuff and now we're talking about actual programming. The talent pool for building a genuinely advantageous bot is much smaller.
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altasnob
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altasnob
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Mon May 02, 2022 4:12 pm |
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Washington State Parks campground reservations offers alerts through their website. Same as campflare above, you tell them what campsites you want and when and they email you if it becomes available. Recreation.gov should do the same thing.
Another great thing Washington State Parks is doing is if you no show for your first night, if you don't get there by 11 am the next morning they cancel your remaining reservation and put it back online. They wait until 11 am the next day to do this just because some people have legitimate reasons they weren't able to get there for the first night of the reservation. This helps combat the problem of wealthy people, who don't mind eating the cancellation fees, booking things just in case they want to go.
 Cyclopath
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Cyclopath
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Cyclopath
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Mon May 02, 2022 4:15 pm |
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| zimmertr wrote: | | In my experience, software like this is usually just released as FOSS and intended to be self hosted and plug into your own notification service. For example, Google's SMTP which is free. |
To be clear, when I said it shouldn't be feasible to do this for free I was referring to hosted services like campnab and the others that have been presented in this thread. But yeah, if the unfairness I've been hearing about for years is real, in it would be more like you just described.
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zimmertr
TJ Zimmerman
Joined: 24 Jun 2018
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zimmertr
TJ Zimmerman
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Mon May 02, 2022 4:19 pm |
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| Cyclopath wrote: | | It's actually hard to do something like a shopping cart because when you add a human go to a website in Chrome or Firefox, the web server gives you a different cart. |
The use of Selenium or a similar tool is the nuance here. As it can directly control your browser like a human. Instead of just making raw API calls.
Study this software. It's what I used when trying to buy an RTX 3090. I ran multiple instances of it simultaneously on my personal server.
https://github.com/Hari-Nagarajan/fairgame
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Cyclopath
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Cyclopath
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Mon May 02, 2022 4:43 pm |
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| zimmertr wrote: | | The use of Selenium or a similar tool is the nuance here. As it can directly control your browser like a human. Instead of just making raw API calls.
Study this software. It's what I used when trying to buy an RTX 3090. I ran multiple instances of it simultaneously on my personal server.
https://github.com/Hari-Nagarajan/fairgame |
That looks really neat. I prefer to use the classes under System.Net like HttpClient, or to use the embedded browser control when I need to be stealthy.
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reststep
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reststep
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Mon May 02, 2022 4:45 pm |
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Looks interesting, anyone here used campnab?
"The mountains are calling and I must go." - John Muir
"The mountains are calling and I must go." - John Muir
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BeardoMcGrath
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Joined: 16 Jan 2018
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| altasnob wrote: | | Another great thing Washington State Parks is doing is if you no show for your first night, if you don't get there by 11 am the next morning they cancel your remaining reservation and put it back online. They wait until 11 am the next day to do this just because some people have legitimate reasons they weren't able to get there for the first night of the reservation. This helps combat the problem of wealthy people, who don't mind eating the cancellation fees, booking things just in case they want to go. |
I expect this is a bigger issue than bots. I don't believe there's anything in the rec.gov system for car CGs that would stop you from reserving every Friday and Saturday night from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Assuming sites ~$25 a night, that's $600, a hefty sum for many but a worthwhile cost of convenience for others.
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kiliki
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kiliki
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Mon May 02, 2022 6:43 pm |
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Along the same lines, I was disappointed to learn of all the Facebook groups where people sell their reservations. Here's one but there are others. I don't know if people scalp or not, but I used to have great luck snagging cancellations for permits/reservations and don't like that people don't just cancel and put the reservation back in the system.
I do think it's possible the complaints about bots are overstated. Last year I heard a tourist accuse locals of using bots to book up the spaces of the San Juan ferry. No, there's way more of us that want spots on the ferries than there are spots, and if you don't book exactly when they open, you may be out of luck.
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Cyclopath
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Cyclopath
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Mon May 02, 2022 7:35 pm |
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| altasnob wrote: | | I also assume it will just be tech dorks doing it for themselves, not monetizing the bot (so how would we know if this is being done). I have had a few friends in internet security who would totally be into something like this, not just to get a campsites/permits, but just for kicks. |
| jaysway wrote: | | I agree with altasnob that if people has created this, they have kept the code to themselves. The advantage that you get from building this system is diminished if you let everyone else use it. |
I've been thinking about making a permit reservation bot, and giving it away for free to anybody who wants it:
1 - To level the playing field. I thought some people had bots and others didn't, which sounds unfair.
2 - To force recreation.gov to improve their security to actually level the playing field.
3 - It's technically interesting.
But it sounds like all the talk about not being able to go somewhere because of bots is speculation, and doing this would be helping people cheat instead of helping people compete fairly.
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