It’s about a bazillion times easier to reverse engineer colab if you just SSH into it. You can set up a reverse proxy. I used ngrok back in the day, but maybe they blocked it.

The most interesting thing was a custom binary that mounts your Google drive as a folder. I was able to copy it off colab and use it on my own Linux boxes, which was handy in a “oh neat, lookie there” kind of way. I assume it’ll break whenever they update their api, but you’d still be able to just grab the new binary from a random colab instance.

There’s also a custom script they run to set up everything, using Node. It spawns a bunch of stuff that I’ve forgotten. (It was 2019 when I was poking around, and a pandemic has a nice way of wiping one’s memory of ye olden hacking days. Still a bit sad I never got to go to the tensorflow conference.)

Anyway just ssh in and ls -la / and you’ll see one or two interesting folders. You can rsync them down to your box and examine at your leisure.