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Thanks for the Surprise Integration with My Website, Apple

asaph.org

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Re: Thanks for the Surprise Integration with My Website, Apple

#181

Post by ihuman »

slivym wrote: post #58
dcow wrote: post #41

> I'm genuinely thrilled that someone at Apple deemed my chord calculator technology worthy of inclusion in the iOS shortcuts gallery. If anyone from Apple is reading this, please reach out using JGuitar.com's contact form. We can work together to make this experience even better. I can provide high quality SVG images of all chord diagrams, support alternate tunings, instruments and more. Is everyone missing the fact…

The reason everyone is reacting the way they are is because this news really isn't about this particular website. It's about the fact that the largest corporation on earth has decided it can freeboot everyone else's content. It's part of a trend too. Google a topic and on the right hand side of the page you'll see the first paragraph from Wikipedia. How exactly do you expect wikipedia to survive if no one ever has to…

How is this freebooting? Apple isn't rehosting the data from the website.

Re: Thanks for the Surprise Integration with My Website, Apple

#182

Post by asaph »

Author here. Thanks everyone for your thoughtful feedback. I intentionally wanted to strike a cooperative tone in putting this story out there. When the largest company in the world features your side hustle in their brand new product, it's an opportunity, not a reason to "lawyer up". You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Would I have preferred attribution and a heads up? Sure. But I'm frankly more interested in how I can help improve the user experience and further incorporate my software into Apple products. If anyone from Apple is reading this, let's talk. You can reach me here:

https://jguitar.com/contactus.jsp?subject=Guitar+Chord+Finde...

And those concerned about JGuitar.com's scaling or bandwidth costs need not worry. JGuitar.com serves several million pageviews/year, and is well optimized to handle the traffic coming from these shortcuts.

Re: Thanks for the Surprise Integration with My Website, Apple

#183

Post by brennebeck »

rchaud wrote: post #178
brennebeck wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists. Serious question: do you believe that letter to be immoral or indicative of immoral behavior? Or something specific? Edit: format; quote.

I don't see anything wrong with the letter; if you want to be paid for use of your software, that's reasonable. Gates basically expressed that he disagreed with the philosophy of the club. Nothing wrong with that. What's happening with Jguitar however is that a big tech player that exists because people pay for their software (iOS) setting a precedent where they're actively siphoning content outside the garden and fe…

Thanks for clarifying.

Re: Thanks for the Surprise Integration with My Website, Apple

#184

Post by reaperducer »

emodendroket wrote: post #126
cyborgx7 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is released under creative commons. That is literally the worst example you could have picked.

If you search for questions like "how long should I bake a frozen chicken thigh?" you'll get chunks of text from Web pages which are not CC-licensed.

This might not be a great example, either.

Most cooking web sites tag their HTML with things like itemprop="recipeIngredient", and itemprop="recipeInstructions", hoping to get featured by Google in this way.

Re: Thanks for the Surprise Integration with My Website, Apple

#186

Post by reaperducer »

greeneggs wrote: post #120
forthefuture wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the time I don't see a link to Wikipedia. If I Google "Malta" there is a paragraph on the right and no link to Wikipedia. This also happens in Google Maps, when you click on a city and they have the blurb, much of the time there is no link, so you have to leave the page to Wikipedia the name of the city. Actually having just tried a few different queries, it seems to be inconsistent. I'm not sure why they'd s…

Those Maps blurbs, like for Malta, do not come from Wikipedia.

The text, which starts with "Malta is an archipelago in the central Mediterranean between Sicily and the North African coast. It's a nation known for historic sites related..."

is on a million web sites. I thought maybe it was from CIA World Fact Book or some other free source, but it's used so often by so many shady sites, it's hard to know where it originated.

In this case, it's a question of who is scraping whom.

Re: Thanks for the Surprise Integration with My Website, Apple

#189

Post by JdeBP »

reaperducer wrote: post #186
greeneggs wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those Maps blurbs, like for Malta, do not come from Wikipedia.

The text, which starts with "Malta is an archipelago in the central Mediterranean between Sicily and the North African coast. It's a nation known for historic sites related..." is on a million web sites. I thought maybe it was from CIA World Fact Book or some other free source, but it's used so often by so many shady sites, it's hard to know where it originated. In this case, it's a question of who is scraping whom.

It's from Michelin.

* https://travel.michelin.co.uk/malta-national-map-801/

Re: Thanks for the Surprise Integration with My Website, Apple

#190

Post by benregenspan »

ihuman wrote: post #181
slivym wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason everyone is reacting the way they are is because this news really isn't about this particular website. It's about the fact that the largest corporation on earth has decided it can freeboot everyone else's content. It's part of a trend too. Google a topic and on the right hand side of the page you'll see the first paragraph from Wikipedia. How exactly do you expect wikipedia to survive if no one ever has to…

How is this freebooting? Apple isn't rehosting the data from the website.

It's not freebooting, it's more akin to hotlinking. Which is arguably worse - they're using the author's IP and hosting infrastructure without offering sufficient credit or so much as a heads-up.

This could quickly make a side project unsustainable, if the owner of a (hypothetical, not this specific) project has limited $ for hosting costs. The author of the project can't make use of the obvious strategy of dropping in an ad or two to defray hosting costs because the images are being hotlinked. This kind of behavior would be a violation of the ToS on almost any site that has one; it would certainly be a violation of Apple's own ToS. But beyond that, it's just thoughtless and rude.

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