alt Hacker NewsThe eternal fight between bots and anti-bot systems.
The difference now is that big companies themselves promote/offer bots, but they also don't like to be scraped and use captchas.
What do we do now? Is it allowed to use automated tools to interact with any system? Is it allowed to scrape data? Are there any laws for this?
If we do things manually it is ok, but not if we use a bot?
Confusing (legal) times...
> Is it allowed to use automated tools to interact with any system?
I'd hope so, because that's what we're doing right now. Your browser is automatically speaking HTTP for you so that you don't have to.
Am I having a bit of a laugh? Maybe. But really, services should be user-agent agnostic. That's the whole "agent" part of User Agent and the founders of the Internet had incredible foresight to name it this way.
> Is it allowed to scrape data?
You mean, request data and receive what the other server voluntarily transmits?
> Are there any laws for this?
There was a court case that said the above is fine, thankfully, since that's how the internet works. There's probably other cases going on and I'm sure at least one of them will have some unfortunate tech-illiterate result that makes things worse for anyone who understands this stuff.