The web scraping tool of my choice still has to be WWW::Mechanize for Perl.
P.S. I wrote a WWW::Mechanize::Query ext for it so that it supports css selectors etc if anyone is interested. It's on cpan.
Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
11–20 of 232 posts
Re: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
#12Nice overview! The "unfortunately-spelled threat_defence.php" just uses British spelling though.
What's wrong with British spelling? It's also the English spelling using in India, Australia, New Zealand etc. By pure numbers, more people may spell it defence than defense. Americocentrism is quite annoying from the other side :)
Nothing? They were pointing out that the "unfortunately spelled" file is merely using the British way of spelling.
I'm wondering how they were misunderstood, given they even used quotations to show they were quoting the article which is the one that made the claim that it was "unfortunately spelled".
Re: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
#13Note that in some places this constitutes breaking the law.
Re: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
#14Note that in some places this constitutes breaking the law.
This is the first I've heard of this. Where/what laws prohibit web scraping?
Re: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
#15Nice overview! The "unfortunately-spelled threat_defence.php" just uses British spelling though.
What's wrong with British spelling? It's also the English spelling using in India, Australia, New Zealand etc. By pure numbers, more people may spell it defence than defense. Americocentrism is quite annoying from the other side :)
you are shooting the messenger.
Re: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
#16Great article!
Re: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
#17Note that in some places this constitutes breaking the law.
This is the first I've heard of this. Where/what laws prohibit web scraping?
Re: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
#18Note that in some places this constitutes breaking the law.
This is the first I've heard of this. Where/what laws prohibit web scraping?
It's almost always illegal in the United States. It's prohibited by a combination of the CFAA, copyright law, and contractual obligations imposed by Terms of Use, which are usually considered applicable if you load more than one page ("browsewrap").
The CFAA makes it a crime to access any computer network without authorization or in excess of granted authorization. The Terms of Use will usually prohibit "any automated or mechanical access" or use similar boilerplate that can be construed as a restriction on automated access. The implied license to make a copy of the page in RAM is no longer applicable and the scraper is thus infringing copyright.
Relevant cases are Craigslist v 3Taps, Facebook Inc. v Power Ventures Inc., and several others. This is at the point where it's basically well-established. The exception is Perfect 10 v. Amazon, where judges ruled that since it was Google and they don't want to break Google, it's OK. Copyright law allows such evaluations because each judge must decide whether a use was "fair" or not.
Re: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
#19Note that in some places this constitutes breaking the law.
How is this any different from Google doing it? It is okay for Google to crawl the Internet, but not okay to crawl Google Play? Google raising such an objection would be an ultimate irony.
Edit: On second thought, I guess you are referring to overcoming 403s and Captchas?
Re: Web Scraping: Bypassing “403 Forbidden,” captchas, and more
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the first I've heard of this. Where/what laws prohibit web scraping?
It's almost always illegal in the United States. It's prohibited by a combination of the CFAA, copyright law, and contractual obligations imposed by Terms of Use, which are usually considered applicable if you load more than one page ("browsewrap"). The CFAA makes it a crime to access any computer network without authorization or in excess of granted authorization. The Terms of Use will usually prohibit "any automate…
That's a very, very sad turn of events, and I have to wonder, how did we get there?
I'm increasingly feeling that the law is giving way too much control over content published on the Internet to the publishers.