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Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

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Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#71

Post by downandout »

saurik wrote: post #18
prepend wrote: post #2

This is positive news. It seems like the more liberal approach taken when protocols were written is being challenged more by young users who grew up under more stable rules that accepted terms of service as very strong. When I was growing up you went by what the protocol allowed. If an http response came back you have access, if it prompted for credentials, then you didn’t have access. The mere idea that a web server…

I continue to be shocked that Twitter convinced an entire generation of software developers that you need to obtain something called an "API key"--which can somehow be refused or even revoked once granted--in order to write a client for their protocol. "Back in my day", we just reverse engineered the official client and used whatever algorithm it used to talk to the server and called the war won :/.

I write bots for various purposes all the time. For the exact reasons you mention, I rarely bother even looking at APIs anymore and go straight to mimicking HTTP headers from a web browser for the functions I need.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#72

Post by aidenn0 »

kbos87 wrote: post #65
pwaai wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone that was prevented from distributing Linux at high school because the administrators thought that any copying was piracy I remember having this discussion with in HS and also at work with people who were convinced pirating a PSX game is same as stealing, while not realizing there is no evidence that suggests a pirated copy means a lost sale (people can't afford it in places like Brasil where they still p…

A pirated copy doesn’t need to equate to a lost sale in order for it to be stealing. You took something of value that was created or owned by someone else. Whether it’s a physical or nonphysical good is completely beside the point.

English is certainly imprecise, but I would claim that if I commit some act X, and you have no less property than if I had not committed act X, then whatever else we can say about act X, I fell confident that it is not stealing.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#73

Post by Feniks »

michaelmrose wrote: post #20
danans wrote: post #17

IANAL, but violation of terms of service seems like a breach of contract, not a crime. For that sort of thing there is always the civil court system if the plaintiff feels like their loss due to the violation is high enough to warrant pursuing the legal case. But maybe the actual loss caused by the automated downloads in this case wasn't high enough and they pushed the criminal angle to make some kind of point.

There was no loss. They are attempting to missuse the law in order to provide an oportunity to destroy a competitor because Oracle is run by bad people.

There's a loss now. I bet Oracle's legal team was not cheap.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#74

Post by rpedela »

benchaney wrote: post #58
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about that.. controlling access to your server is much more important today because tech is ubiquitous, and a big target for bad actors. In the old days very few people would know enough and care enough to reverse engineer your protocol.. when a service has billions of users and valuable data, that changes. If Twitter did not have an API key, they would spend 2x the money on absorbing & defending against DDoS…

> If Twitter did not have an API key, they would spend 2x the money on absorbing & defending against DDoSes and security vulnerabilities. That cost would get passed on to us with frequent outages and many more ads in our feeds. Or a leak of someones DMs. This is complete nonsense. Attackers aren't going to follow your TOS, so what possible benefit could asking your users to do it on little more than the honor system…

API key != TOS

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#75

Post by pharrington »

kbos87 wrote: post #65
pwaai wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone that was prevented from distributing Linux at high school because the administrators thought that any copying was piracy I remember having this discussion with in HS and also at work with people who were convinced pirating a PSX game is same as stealing, while not realizing there is no evidence that suggests a pirated copy means a lost sale (people can't afford it in places like Brasil where they still p…

A pirated copy doesn’t need to equate to a lost sale in order for it to be stealing. You took something of value that was created or owned by someone else. Whether it’s a physical or nonphysical good is completely beside the point.

Are you asserting that the salient moral property of theft isn't a party removing a thing from another party, but rather a party gaining a thing made by someone else?

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#76

Post by dakomind »

Larry Ellison should be shot for treason.

These traitors who want to make up crimes should be shot for treason.

They are negative members of society who do negative work.

Letting them live is unethical and immoral.

Shooting Larry Ellison to death is the right thing to do.

Pretending that crimes exist when there are terrorists who want to murder Americans harms the war effort, it means you're helping the terrorists.

Larry Ellison is making up crimes and charging Americans with them in order to help terrorists. This is why he must be shot to death.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#77

Post by alphaalpha101 »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #31
saurik wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to be shocked that Twitter convinced an entire generation of software developers that you need to obtain something called an "API key"--which can somehow be refused or even revoked once granted--in order to write a client for their protocol. "Back in my day", we just reverse engineered the official client and used whatever algorithm it used to talk to the server and called the war won :/.

It should be illegal for companies like Twitter to forbid this. Users should be free to access their data, and free to use any tool to do so. The revered network effect is anti consumer and it must be broken. This is the one regulation that could save a nation from FB, Twitter, Instagram and their ilk. Any politician to run on this could shoot somebody in the middle of a crowded street without losing my support.

The one regulation that could save a nation from FB, Twitter and Instagram is to ban advertising. All of it. Ban all advertising anywhere for any reason.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#78

Post by alphaalpha101 »

aplorbust wrote: post #8

"... the bounds of criminal law should not be defined by the preferences of website operators. And private companies shouldn't be using criminal laws meant to target malicious actors as tool to enforce their computer use preferences or to interfere with competitors." If a website operator wants to control if a user can access the website, then there are ways to do this without resorting to criminal prosecution. Throu…

>If a website wants to control how a user accesses the website, there is no way to enforce this under the criminal law.

Hopefully you are right. You definitely should be right, and in an ideal world you are right, but I hope you also happen to be right in the world we live in.

Accessibility demands that you cannot force a user to use a GUI, mice or touchscreens, for a start.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#79

Post by Sniffnoy »

jopsen wrote: post #67
keldaris wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, they're a combination of it being hard work and there just not being enough of a qualified developer community around Pidgin etc. to put in the effort required. I think people generally underestimate the sheer amount of work involved in reverse engineering an IM protocol, even one that's not particularly well obfuscated.

Back in the day when protocols ran over HTTP it was also a lot easier for amateurs to pick up wireshark. But if we know that the company is going to respond by changing the protocol. Then who wants to spend time reverse engineering it?

That hardly seems like much of an explanation. Look at the old protocols Pidgin and other clients of the time (e.g. Trillian) spoke -- AOL, MSN, Yahoo... those didn't run over HTTP. More importantly, the companies did respond by changing the protocols; the client-writers kept up all the same. So that's not something that's different between then and now.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#80

Post by Sniffnoy »

cosmie wrote: post #51
Sniffnoy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this system of "API keys" why Pidgin doesn't handle all these new IM protocols, and why there's no other good old-fashioned multi-protocol clients for them (that I'm aware of)?

Franz[1] is the closest thing I’ve found to a client around newer IM protocols. [1] https://meetfranz.com/

Huh, interesting. Its website isn't very informative though. I can't find a list of protocols, annoyingly.
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