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Trickster Dev

trickster.dev

Code level discussion of web scraping, gray hat automation, growth hacking and bounty hunting

SecurityPythonReverse engineering

’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
117 from 11 Nov 2021 to 3 Dec 2025
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://trickster.dev/index.xml

2025 4

  1. Advanced network traffic interception techniques with mitmproxy
  2. Scraping Next.js web sites in 2025
  3. Setting up rooted Android emulator with Frida and mitmproxy
  4. jq: tool and language for JSON processing

2024 6

  1. Katana: web crawler for offensive security and web exploration
  2. Lesser known parts of Python standard library
  3. Simple ways to find exposed sensitive information
  4. Understanding SOCKS protocol
  5. Scraping Clutch for B2B company data
  6. SSH tips and tricks

2023 34

  1. Retrospective scraping of historical data from Internet Archive snapshots
  2. Obscure corners of a standard macOS installation
  3. Scraping data from Google Places API
  4. Extracting data from elasticsearch API
  5. Setting up mitmproxy with iOS 17.1
  6. Parsing HTML documents with Beautiful Soup
  7. Solving a simple JS challenge with sandboxing
  8. Abusing GOAT mobile API for data scraping
  9. Scrapy by example: scraping company data from Yelp
  10. Back to the terminal: the new era of CLI and TUI software
  11. Restringer: modular JavaScript deobfuscator
  12. Using Scrapy-playwright for integrating browser automation with Scrapy
  13. Self-defending JS code and debugger traps
  14. Abusing Ahrefs Backlink Checker
  15. Don't JSFuck with me: Part 3
  16. Prompting the LLM is no substitute for knowledge work
  17. Understanding JavaScript packers
  18. Scraping product data from Nike.com
  19. How do they (try to) block bots: a broad review of automation countermeasures
  20. CrawlSpider and link extractors for rule-based crawling in Scrapy
  21. Intro to Bash scripting for scraping and automation
  22. Don't JSFuck with me: Part 2
  23. Don't JSFuck with me: Part 1
  24. Understanding HTTP/2 fingerprinting
  25. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: reducing nestedness, unflattening the CFG
  26. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: reducing indirection, undoing string concealing
  27. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: constant folding and propagation
  28. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: AST modification APIs
  29. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: untangling scope confusion
  30. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: 3 ways to create nodes and subtrees
  31. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: transform prototyping and plugin development
  32. Understanding Python generators for scraping and automation
  33. Scraping Yahoo! Finance with Python
  34. Vim is touch-typing on steroids

2022 66

  1. Scrapy simplified: developing a single file web scraper
  2. Getting the data under version control with dolt
  3. Understanding SPF, DKIM, DMARC for email security and deliverability
  4. SMTP, IMAP, POP3 and MIME: understanding email protocols
  5. Wget tips and tricks
  6. Axiom: just-in-time dynamic infra for offensive security operations
  7. Scraping legacy ASP.Net sites with Scrapy: a real world example
  8. Making heuristics smarter with GPT-3
  9. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: defeating string array mapping
  10. Active DNS recon techniques
  11. Passive DNS recon techniques
  12. HTTPX: modern Python module for doing HTTP(S) requests
  13. Recon-ng: modular framework for OSINT automation
  14. cURL beyond the basics
  15. Running Stable Diffusion on Vultr
  16. Experimenting with DALL-E
  17. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: removing unreachable code
  18. Building Python script CLIs with argparse and Click
  19. ImageMagick: programmable image processing toolkit
  20. Writing custom Scrapy middleware for proxy pool integration
  21. Decompiling Android apps
  22. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: extracting hardcoded data
  23. More tools of the trade for scraping and automation
  24. JavaScript AST manipulation with Babel: the first steps
  25. Javascript obfuscation techniques by example
  26. How to scrape Zillow with Python and Scrapy
  27. Understanding TLS fingerprinting
  28. How to scrape Youtube view intensity time series
  29. Understanding Abstract Syntax Trees
  30. Notes from The Bug Hunters Methodology - Application Analysis v1
  31. Building higher-order automation workflows with n8n
  32. Importing Shopify product info programmatically
  33. Turning Scrapy spider into API with ScrapyRT
  34. Scraping Instagram API with Instauto
  35. Scapy: low level packet hacking toolkit for Python
  36. Strategies and patterns of gray hat social media automation
  37. You probably don't need AWS and are better off without it
  38. Compiling Python programs with Pyinstaller
  39. Notes on TBHM v4 recon edition
  40. Writing web scrapers in Go with Colly framework
  41. Creating DC proxies on cloud providers
  42. SMTP user enumeration for fun and profit
  43. Running GUI apps within Docker containers
  44. Reproducible Linux environments with Vagrant and Terraform
  45. Decrypting your own HTTPS traffic with Wireshark
  46. Scrapy framework architecture
  47. How to scrape pages behind login with Python
  48. Using Scrapy pipelines to export scraped data
  49. How to use Scrapy Cloud
  50. Sending notifications programmatically: let me count the ways
  51. Evaluating MS Playwright for gray hat automation
  52. Automating spreadsheet tasks with openpyxl
  53. Scrapy framework tips and tricks
  54. Email harvesting from Github profiles
  55. CAPTCHA solver services for scraping and automation
  56. Introduction to Scrapy framework
  57. Tools of the trade for scraping and automation
  58. Harvesting emails from Google search results
  59. The very basics of XPath for web scraping: less than 1% of XPath language to scrape more than 90% of pages
  60. Using proxies for web scraping and automation
  61. Setting up mitmproxy with Android
  62. Setting up mitmproxy with iOS 15
  63. Using Python and mitmproxy to scrape private API of mobile app
  64. You don't typically need Selenium for scraping and automation
  65. Easier JSON wrangling with jq, JSONPath and JSONPointer
  66. Python Web Scraping: tips and tricks

2021 7

  1. Grayhat Twitch Chatbots
  2. Automating Google Dorking
  3. Using ephemeral Onion Services for quick NAT traversal
  4. Sending mass DMs on Reddit through API: a small experiment
  5. Introducing GPT-3: Playground and API
  6. How does PerimeterX Bot Defender work
  7. How to download embedded videos