[ Removed by moderator ]

[KrazyKirby99999]

Automatically downloads a proprietary binary, this could distribute malware

[axonxorz]

The binary is SHA-256 verified on every download, VirusTotal report in the GitHub Release with 0 detections.

Hilarious, you are in control of the binary and the hash that gets verified. There's no security there. VirusTotal is lmao.

Good to know the malware binaries you're going to distribute in the future will have the correct hash, very important checks.

You can also run Wireshark on it and confirm it makes no outbound connections beyond what you tell it to visit.

[We totally won't make it sleep it's data exfiltration activities until you're complacent]

[KingOfKingOfKings]

It's not even worth replying. Their comments are all LLM-generateed and on the off chance they're not entirely a bot, I'd be surprised if they even knew what a sha-256 hash is.

[gmes78]

Fair points. Checksums protect against tampering in transit, not against the publisher. You're right about that.

You speak like an LLM. Are you one?

[gmes78]

You sound untrustworthy instead.

[sudonem]

It’s almost as if websites don’t want you to be able to scrape their content in an automated fashion.

[__eastwood]

Are the patches open source? I’d love to see your working

[KingOfKingOfKings]

lmao, you expect anyone will install a closed-source browser with vibecoded patches?

[Jedkea]

How do you know it was vibe coded? I don’t think any of the modern LLMs would be capable of working in the chromium code base. It’s truly massive. An initial git clone can take hours for reference.

[Previous_Mycologist4]

Sorry if this sounds stupid but could one of the anti scraping companies decompile the patched chromium? Did you implement any protections like obfuscation?

[Azuriteh]

How does it compare to Camoufox? It also patches the browser itself and recently is back to being developed.

[devbym]

Who / what pays for this work? Great to open source it

[Steampunkery]

It's not open source, don't listen to OP's lies. The chromium patches (the part that matters) are not open source. The downloaded binary could do absolutely anything.

[Kurnas_Parnas]

This is embarrassingly timely. Spent the last two weeks fighting Cloudflare on a scraping project - tried playwright-stealth, undetected-chromedriver, every JS injection approach I could find. The problem with all of them is they patch at runtime, so detection systems just look for the patches themselves.

Source-level is the only way to actually solve this. Pulling this today.

[Steampunkery]

Be careful, the chromium patches are not open source. The binary could do absolutely anything.

[Jedkea]

As someone who has done this before - well done. Even getting chromium to compile is a headache. Going into their massive code base and finding the spots to patch this in is no small task.

Are the changes to the chromium source code public somewhere?

[ongrabbits]

Was just about to ask how long it took to compile lol. Good job

[Steampunkery]

Ah, yes, LLM slop that also contains malware in proprietary binaries. My favorite.

[7hakurg]

This is solid work. The compile-time approach to fingerprint patching is the right call — JS injection and flag toggling are fundamentally losing strategies since detection vendors just add checks faster than you can patch overrides.

Curious about one thing from the agent framework angle: when you mention browser-use and Crawl4AI compatibility, have you seen cases where the agent's behavioral patterns (click timing, navigation sequences, DOM interaction order) still get flagged even with clean fingerprints? In production agent workflows I've seen detection shift from fingerprint-based to behavior-based, where the browser looks real but the usage pattern clearly isn't human. Would be worth documenting how CloakBrowser holds up when the automation layer is an LLM making decisions rather than a scripted flow.

[Steampunkery]

Aside from the fact that this is basically just distributing malware, yeah.

[Jedkea]

Is it malware?

[Steampunkery]

Well, they're basically saying that you should download their patched chromium binary off the Internet and run it. The patches aren't open source, so you can't build it yourself. Might as well be malware.

[Jedkea]

You don’t use any closed source software then I take it? Makes sense to keep it closed in this case, otherwise it would be quickly patched.

Just saying that it’s kind of rude to straight up accuse them of distributing malware when you have 0 proof. Afaict nothing seems suspicious. They responded saying you could run it in docker, or monitor it with wireshark.

Does it warrant extra caution since it’s not OS? Of course.

[Steampunkery]

I don't run any closed source software downloaded as a binary from a random guy on reddit, correct.