CamShield just shipped version 0.6. Here's a recap of what's been built since 0.4.
What CamShield is (for newcomers)
CamShield is a free, anonymous, no-account tool that automatically scans nearly 60 pirate sites to find your stolen content. Enter your username, the scan runs in parallel across the entire database, and you get a list of URLs ready to use in your DMCA claims.
No account. No stored data. Your username never stays on our servers beyond the scan, even the scan logs are anonymous.
A quick sprint from v0.1
v0.1 → v0.4: The foundations
Modular scraper, multilingual interface (FR/EN/ES), async scanning via Celery so the site doesn't freeze during scans, real-time progress, result persistence across pages, and ~50 new pirate sites added to the database. A community submission form was also integrated so users can report sites that aren't covered yet.
v0.5: A technical overhaul with Decodo
The quiet release, but the most significant one under the hood.
The toughest pirate sites run Cloudflare in aggressive mode. The kind of protection that blocks virtually every standard scraper. Until now, CamShield worked around this with FlareSolverr, an open source tool that drives a headless Chromium browser to solve Cloudflare challenges. It worked, but it was expensive in RAM: multiple Docker instances running permanently on the server.
In v0.5, I integrated the Decodo API as the advanced scraping engine for these resistant sites.
Results:
FlareSolverr instances cut in half
Server RAM usage dropped significantly
Reliability on Cloudflare-protected sites improved
A note on current limitations
CamShield is still in beta and completely free. I'm funding everything out of pocket, and costs add up fast. This kind of project needs a powerful VPS to run fully. For now, I've implemented a concurrency lock to prevent simultaneous scans and avoid potential server crashes. It's a small trade-off, but until I have the resources for better infrastructure, it ensures every scan runs cleanly.
v0.6: Sorting by platform
This is the headline feature of this release, designed specifically to make your DMCA process easier.
When you scan your username, CamShield detects video URLs across pirate sites. These videos often come from recordings of your streams on specific cam platforms: Chaturbate, Stripchat, Cam4, BongaCams, MyFreeCams, etc. That information is frequently encoded in the URLs themselves.
CamShield now parses those links and automatically sorts them by source platform when the information is available. Instead of a raw list of hundreds of mixed URLs, you can instantly see which content came from which platform, and file your DMCA claims platform by platform.
v0.7 and v0.8: Upcoming automations
Version 0.7 should be landing soon. With it, you'll be able to receive your scan results by email. I'm still working out the best way to implement this to make your life as easy as possible, thinking along the lines of an attached Excel tracking sheet, a dedicated online page with your scan seed, and similar options.
v0.8 will be more technical and will take longer to ship. I'll be starting work on automated web crawling to find new sites to add to the scanner. Something I've been doing by hand until now. The goal is to semi-automate the addition of new pirate sites. This work will also lay the groundwork for the site's admin interface, the creation of a proper database, and eventually real model accounts in CamShield, which opens the door to the most requested features for this kind of project: takedown tracking and automated DMCA filing.
Support CamShield!
CamShield is an independent project, built and maintained on a volunteer basis. If the tool is useful to you, every contribution goes directly toward server costs and the scraping tools that keep it alive.
Thank you to everyone who tests, reports bugs, and shares. That's what keeps this project moving forward. ❤️