The linked article covers some ways to tap a touch screen without a finger. That’s probably the most comprehensive document on the topic yet those options all seem impractical for my needs.
So here’s my problem:
Travel websites are increasingly enshitified and consumer-hostile (and often Tor-hostile). They are also protectionist with the data as they use anti-bot tech (which really amounts to anti-human tech b/c bots serve humans). Kiosks are a refuge of a sort (almost, kind of).
Some kiosks have useful information without the anti-bot shenanigans, but they are also still designed to be labor intensive. Kiosks that sell train or bus tickets force users to supply a specific date of travel and specific destination. For me, the date of travel depends on the price of the ticket, but the UI does not allow users to know the price until after they fill out a form. Sometimes I don’t even know the destination because the city I visit depends on the price as I look for a cheap trip somewhere.
What we need is a tool that will enter all combinations of queries for ranges of travel dates and times and for sets of origin-destination pairs. Is there hardware that can handle this job? If the kiosk is a touch screen, my knee-jerk instinct was for a laser do the job of a finger. But after further checks, I don’t think a laser can have an electro magnetic effect or whatever is needed.
Apart from convenience of being able to harvest a dataset and do my own queries, I also imagine some handicapped people (e.g. without the use of arms) have the same problem and would benefit from the same solution. The dataset could then be openly published to everyone, not just the exclusive demographic who is able to reach the website of the carrier and tolerate the enshitification.
So you're planning on sourcing your own kiosk from somewhere and running data gathering on that? Do I understand that right?
Did you check whether you can just directly address the same API that a kiosk would talk to?
No. But for answering my physics question it would not matter either way whether I own the kiosk.
My question is also general. There are different kiosks for different purposes by different companies.
I do not control any of the kiosks that have the data of interest. And even if I did they would likely be running closed-source software. I also do not control the network that any of the kiosks are attached to, so no chance of probing the traffic to discover their API calls.
The APIs that the kiosks use could potentially be the same undisclosed/opaque API that their website uses -- we can only guess. But there are prejudices involved. The kiosks likely get different treatment for a number of reasons, based on their IP address, user-agent string, authentication creds, etc. I have never seen anti-bot junk on the kiosks that sell travel tickets. If I were to discover how to masquerade as a kiosk on some particular network, that’s a lot of work for a solution that would then only work on one particular vendor’s kiosk. It would be too specific to work on kiosks by other suppliers. Having a machine use the kiosk human UI would easily adapt to any kiosk.