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by cyanydeez1 days ago |
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upvoteby SR2Z21 hours ago|
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Because this isn't clearly against the law, nor should it be. If websites want to ban based on IP address lots of innocent users get caught in the cross-fire.

I'm not sure what the solution would look like - maybe Cloudflare's payment required for requests beyond a certain limit? But I think that the world needs user freedoms now more than ever.

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upvoteby bell-cot23 hours ago|
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"He who has the gold makes the rules" is older than the pyramids.
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upvoteby mschuster9121 hours ago|
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> The question is more about why the US and others can't properly enforce the bullshit all this amounts to.

It would cost too much money, either for police to raid all the physical shops and ebay sellers selling dodgy IPTV boxes, or for ISPs to hire enough competent support staff to monitor and respond to abuse@ email addresses and follow through.

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upvoteby TurdF3rguson21 hours ago|
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What exactly should be illegal here? Scraping websites? AI agents? Not following robots.txt?
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upvoteby aorth13 hours ago|
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The excessive scraping and ignoring robots.txt only breaks the informal social contract established over the past decades of the open internet.

The real problem is the companies offering money to developers if they include unrelated SDKs in their calculator or flashlight (for example) applications. Those SDKs add functionality to incorporate those devices into a network that can be used for scraping. The traffic is little, but is distributed over millions of residential devices all over the world, making it difficult to categorize or block. That should be illegal, and that's what Google et al can be expected to be policing on their app stores.

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upvoteby inigyou9 hours ago|
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On what grounds would it be illegal though? Things don't become illegal just because you don't like them. They may become illegal just because the president doesn't like them, but I don't think you're him, and in the absence of that, there has to be a majority of Congress and most of them want a reason.
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upvoteby robinsonb57 hours ago|
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Because they don't have the informed consent* of the owner of the device wich ends up running the code?

* no, small print in a click-through agreement doesn't count.

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upvoteby inigyou6 hours ago|
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It's not illegal to run code on a device without informed consent to everything the code does. The CFAA may be excessively broad but it isn't that broad.
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