2.5 KiB
Google Colab Automator, without Selenium!
What is this
Google Colab is a Google service which gives free, temporary, use of virtual machines with powerful NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Normally this is used to train ML and other AI models, but nothing impedes the use of the service for other purposes, such has password cracking with hashcat or crypto mining.
The downside is that the account gets temporary blocked when a too long intense use is detected.
Qwiklabs (qwiklabs.com) is a third-party service which gives temporary Google Accounts for training in Google Cloud Shell use. Their first course (https://www.qwiklabs.com/focuses/2794?parent=catalog) is completely free, others require some in-site credits to be purchased.
Combining the two services, infinite temporary and disposable Google Accounts can be obtained from qwiklabs and used for mining on colab, until the qwiklabs session expires or the miner gets blocked by Colab. At such point, a new session can be started. That's basically free money. Obviously this can also be used for non-malicious tasks, as long as the Colab notebook is publicly available (e.g. as a github gist). After a certain time number of times repeating the course, the qwiklabs account might reach it's quota for that course and a new one needs to be created. I'll will look into a way of automating account creation in the future. For now, use temp mails from temp-mail.org when creating accounts
Why no selenium
Selenium carries some javascript and other stuff which can easily be detected by most websites - GColab and Qwiklabs included - and get the session blocked, especially if captchas are involved (There are workarounds to captchas for selenium - https://github.com/ohyicong/recaptcha_v2_solver - but often the captcha doesn't even get presented to the user if an automated browser session is detected)
The workaround
Use a plain chrome/firefox session, and automate by programmatically controlling mouse and keyboard. Basic anonimizing of the web session is still needed (spoof ip/mac, change useragent/geolocation/timezone). Actions need to be done at a human speed, or the bot could be recognized as an actual one
Mouse and Keyboard automation
Mouse and keyboard are automated using https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
For simpicity, and to avoid messing up the OS by clicking on the wrong stuff, both chrome and pyautogui can be started in a separate Xephyr (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xephyr) window, where they can harm no one.