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Cloudproxy – hide your scrapers IP behind the cloud

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Re: Cloudproxy – hide your scrapers IP behind the cloud

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, all their product data is available for affiliates: https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/

Also, the document says "Product Advertising API is free". I am confused.

The access is only provided to active affiliates with sales. Amount of access is counted by number of sales too. More sales = more API access.

Re: Cloudproxy – hide your scrapers IP behind the cloud

#74

Is it ethical to scrape things, trying to bypass prevention methods, against the expressed wishes of a site?

As someone who has to deal with a lot of bots, bot networks and other weird scraper apps people use: The biggest issue is that most of these tools are not behaved very well. This tool is clearly designed to circumvent protections, rate limits mostly, against scraping that might be essential to keep things running. They follow links that are explicitly marked as do not follow, they do not even try to limit their rate,…

Just so you know, adding rel="nofollow" has never been intended to prevent bots from following those links. Even famous crawlers like Bingbot will sometimes follow, and index pages linked to by "nofollow" links.

The only thing that rel="nofollow" does is tell search engines not to use that link in their PageRank computation.

If you do want to block well-behaved crawlers from crawling parts of your site, the proper way to do that is to use robots.txt rules.

Re: Cloudproxy – hide your scrapers IP behind the cloud

#75

Is it ethical to scrape things, trying to bypass prevention methods, against the expressed wishes of a site?

It doesn't really matter what's ethical and not, or what the site's wish - what matters is what the law says [1]. I don't want my neighbours smoking on the balcony below me, as I can smell their smoke but the law doesn't allow my building to ban it without consensus. Alas... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/14/supreme-court-revives-link...

I care since I try to be ethical in my actions.

Re: Cloudproxy – hide your scrapers IP behind the cloud

#77
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the analog age, imagine someone made a card index of some interesting data you can come in a shop to consult, for a fee. Would breaking into their premises to steal or copy the cards be on the same side of the line as the digital variant?

Scraping a website in your analog analogy would be a store where those index cards would be plastered to the shop’s windows, visible from the outside. The “scraper” would come by every day and manually copy (as in, write in their own notebook) what was on those index cards that are visible from the street. So the question is: would you consider that stealing?

It's more like you going to the public library to borrow every single book they have. Thereby forcing the library staff to handle all your requests. You would probably not expect to be allowed to do this in real life.

Re: Cloudproxy – hide your scrapers IP behind the cloud

#79

In a related note the US Supreme Court just 10 days ago vacated a previous ruling against LinkedIn blocking a Scraper service. So the issue is back to the 9th circuit for a new determination that might, if reversed, change the landscape for Cloudflare and anyone else these operators try to sit behind. https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/linkedin-corp-v-...

I don’t think the Supreme Court ruled they can’t block them with technical means, just that they can’t sue them if they get around the block.

Re: Cloudproxy – hide your scrapers IP behind the cloud

#80
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the document says "Product Advertising API is free". I am confused.

The access is only provided to active affiliates with sales. Amount of access is counted by number of sales too. More sales = more API access.

Thanks. This is very helpful. This information is not provided on the documentation.
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