Use of published information is still always constrained by copyright law. If I had a copyrighted movie playing on my television visible through the window, and you recorded that, redistributing that recording would unambiguously be a violation of copyright law and piracy.
I’m also a little confused by what you’re saying here; are you asking whether scraper bots are illegal, or whether they’re immoral/unethical?
Looking through your window is already covered by a lot of laws (it’s legal sometimes in some places if you didn’t take reasonable effort to prevent it [like closing the blinds], and as long as there was no trespass). Of If I captured a small enough section of a video - say one frame in a photo- that likely is fair use. It is not crystal clear.
I’m getting to the ethical aspect but also trying to be pragmatic. “Publishing a bunch of information on the internet accessible without authentication” is an action that is fundamentally incompatible with controlling the use of that information.
The law cannot substitute for common sense; criminals are gonna crime.
The speed of fibre optic cabling has more to do with signal integrity and bandwidth than any difference in propagation delay. In fact, in some cases a signal can travel faster on a copper wire (0.8c) than it can through an optical fibre (0.6c).
Campsite team, if you happen to be reading this: consider whether a more permissive license still meeting the FOSS definition, like GPL or AGPL, would better fit your needs.
GPL means that anyone who modifies the source code, or integrates it into a larger work, has to release the modified version.
So this would ensure that everyone’s contributions continue to help the wider community. As a side effect, it would also prevent anyone from using your work without releasing the source code for their project or product, benefitting open source as a whole.
The choice is obviously ultimately yours. I personally didn’t realize the benefits of GPL until recently.
> GPL means that anyone who modifies the source code, or integrates it into a larger work, has to release the modified version.
Is this accurate? I thought GPL only required distributing the source alongside binaries. If you're running GPL code as a web service, I don't think there's a requirement to release the source to your users.
In this case, you would want the Affero General Public License (AGPL) which specifically has a carve-out (in?) for web servers. Section 13, "Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License." [0]
[0] "[...] your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (...) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version"
I would prefer a more permissive license, such as MIT or Apache. Zulip is similar software, produced by a commercial company, and it is MIT licensed. The primary reason for this is that it isn't always clear with copyleft licenses where the boundary is between being a new separate work that uses the GPL software API, or when it is a derivative work of the GPL software. Also, as they are shutting down, there isn't really any reason for them to worry about some one else using the code in a permissive way.
(That being said, a copyleft license is miles ahead of the CC NC license for software!)
Not an audio command, but even just holding down the volume and side buttons to open the power off menu, without actually powering off your phone, triggers the same behavior.
That locks the phone, but a reboot presumably drops a lot of in-memory caches, to one degree or another. I don’t know whether (or how well) iOS zeroes out memory, but I can certainly imagine the AFU state is easier to target than the BFU state.
1. That’s kind of the point of free software, is it not? If you don’t want people “leeching” off of your software for free, don’t make it free.
2. Reddit is an amazing source of coding information and general Q&A on an extremely wide variety of topics. I would not characterize all of it as chitchat.
I regularly work with a wide variety of project managers, product owners, secretaries, etc…
I swear that most of them willfully misunderstand everything they’re told or sent in writing, invariably refusing to simply forward emails and instead insisting on rephrasing everything in terms they understand, also known as gibberish that only vaguely resembles English.
> I find it questionable that a government agency should be collecting analytics on its visitors in the first place
I don't agree with them using known abusers of personal data for the tooling, but this is what I was talking about.
I don't like them using Facebook for analytics, I don't know what they were getting from it. But the basic premise of analytics, I think they should do.
Sure, but the answer they gave to this reporter was the same usual corporate garbage response that included "we need analytics to market our products" (???)
I think it's fucked up that any agency is "marketing products" at all, but inasmuch as this is necessary in some way, surely they don't need the kind of surveillance marketing that's questionably even worth it for corporate advertisers to use. It literally reads like a google or facebook lawyer wrote it
The problem is that the USPS isn't really a "government agency". It's a weird hybrid where in some ways the USPS is more or less forced at act as a private company would. I agree that it's bonkers that a national postal service would need to "market its products", but the USPS is constantly facing funding issues (in no small part due to its weird setup), so they have to do something to... well, drum up business.
I agree that they shouldn't be using tracking code from Facebook etc. for their analytics, but they do need analytics of at least some sort. I think that should hopefully be uncontroversial.
That wasn't always true, and changes in that direction were made to a lot of government agencies, doing things like making them pretend their budget is a business and that they need revenue streams is nonsensical and doesn't work, and I can say that with confidence because every time such changes are implemented the value of the department goes downhill fast, to the point where some people speculate that the intention of such policies is to kill those agencies. I sometimes buy that, but I also think we should acknowledge that while neoliberal political projects are often cynical and greedy, they are also often the result of incompetence. I see a certain naivete in people whose core competency has been gaining power through social influence not knowing how to actually build systems that work
i mean the entire last few decades or so people have been banging the drum that parts of government, like the USPS, should "operate like a business" or even be privatized. so this being an end result of that is not that shocking, unfortunately.
What's even sadder is that this is said in an economic and regulatory environment that has gradually winnowed away all the examples of businesses that made the argument even the slightest bit compelling if you squinted
I’m also a little confused by what you’re saying here; are you asking whether scraper bots are illegal, or whether they’re immoral/unethical?