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Showing posts from May, 2019

Downloading https web content - the hard way (for wireshark fans)

Problem: You want to download some content (e.g. video) from a website that doesn't want you to download that content, only to stream it. You may want to do this to view it later (maybe it expires after a while), or to view it offline or on a different device. Please note that circumventing the content owner's wishes against downloading may be a legal problem, but there are less sofisticated ways of doing it (e.g. screen recording either software or with a camera pointed at your screen), so we'll analyze it from a technical point of view. Up until recently, downloading video content was fairly easy, by starting the debugger (F12 in the browser), going to the network tab, identifying the video resource, copying the curl command and pasting it somewhere for offline download. But the sites got clever and detect when you open the debugger and stop accessing the video content, so that you can't find the video link. The solution to this is more convoluted - we're going t