hottest-100-bot

tl;dr

works totally fine if it weren't for those meddling reCaptcha's
it was a 2-day PoC, so yeah the code isn't pretty
educational purposes only - I'm no law-man but I'm sure commiting gambling fraud is frowned-upon

Why does anyone do anything?

You can place bets on the results? But it's a public voting system...
Surely, that can be manipulated for profit?

If it is your vice, some prominent Australian betting companies will offer the opportunity to lose your hard-earned money on predicting the results of ABC's Triple J Hottest 100 - a well-loved music poll. The voting is open to all whom sign-up to the broadcaster's website.

Allowing bets seems wild to me; surely, those voting results aren't kept in Fort Knox, insiders can see what direction the tide pulls, & what, if any, measures prevent foul play? Maybe I'm cynical, but someone could try creating some-sort of voting bot that behaves as close to a human as possible and influence the vote for a profit. Perhaps not to elect a surprise winner but ensure the victory of a popular song.

Usage

Voting already closed, mate. And, what kind of person would want to rig a vote for financial gain? tsk tsk tsk

Construction & train-of-thought

Vote requires a verified ABC account. Let's use some common temporary-mail service to manage that. tempmailo is great; it uses various domain names for its temporary email so if one is flagged for concern, at least another may sneak through.
ABC account creation also requires personal information: name, gender, suburb, phone, etc. names Python package can be my random-name-generator that also accepts gender. Kudos to schappim for a list of Australian postcodes; it's better than an RNG & if I want to get fancy I could sample by population - best we don't make thousands of votes from Woop Woop.
We're not going to do anything too hard like trying to reverse-engineer the voting API; you can vote in a browser so let's mimic that with playwright. Damn playwright has some nice tools to make it so easy to develop with.
At this point, it works. Running main.py does everything needed to submit a vote successfully - even passes the reCaptcha (* we'll discuss that later). But it's going to be a bit suss if thousands of votes come from my single IP address. Let's distribute this.
I'll use Render, a web-services SaaS with a free-tier that doesn't require my credit card, to test hosting the script on their servers. Their free-tier is limited, so I need make this script to act like a website & I'll have some other health-check SaaS to ping the site at some irregular intervals to trigger the voting bot. FastAPI is great for quickly making the API the site will use to expose the voting script.
Okay hang on... The deployed bot scripts are now getting stuck on reCaptcha; who could've seen this coming. So, despite running "incognito" browser sessions & have no issues with reCaptcha on my machine, the theory is that it allowed so because of how reCaptcha categorised my IP address versus Render's.
I'm not going to sink time trying to single-handedly out-wit Google's reCaptcha service, so let's call it a day. There are services out there that do offer such reCaptcha solvers for money though...

Install playwright

More of a reminder for myself than anyone: