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American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

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Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#321

Post by listenallyall »

snowwrestler wrote: post #306
listenallyall wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make sense? Bots rarely make HTTP requests for images, css, video clips, large JS files, custom fonts, etc. Real people do. A well-written bot just seeking some specific data can often complete it's task with less than 1% of the resources that would be sent to a "real" user.

Those are all static files that are easily (and typically) cached in front of the application. Pulling customer-specific data from an authenticated session taxes the application (and DB) directly.

I think you are over-estimating the use of caching in a lot of industries and a lot of companies. Further, a company that aggressively caches static files should also recognize the benefits of caching their most common database queries. Another replier to my comment mentioned his Air Canada point totals. The original post is about American Airlines. Point balances change infrequently. An airline could easily query every active customer (had a point balance change within the past 6 months) every 6 hours and keep all those values in memory, dramatically reducing individual DB queries. Or not, and instead choose to sue a very popular blogger and builder of a tool used by your best customers, pissing everybody off and looking extremely petty and customer-unfriendly in the process.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#322

Post by listenallyall »

drivebycomment wrote: post #271
listenallyall wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make sense? Bots rarely make HTTP requests for images, css, video clips, large JS files, custom fonts, etc. Real people do. A well-written bot just seeking some specific data can often complete it's task with less than 1% of the resources that would be sent to a "real" user.

Lol. Well written bot. You assume so much. Most bots are not well written at all, and more often buggy as hell generating unnecessary extra load.

True, although the more you lock down, obfuscate, and hide your data, the more the bot-writer is going to use the heavy guns to penetrate you. Points Guy, and Award Wallet are both attempting to provide a service that people, especially American Airlines's most valuable customers, obviously want -- AA could easily work with them, instead of against them (or provide the same service themselves).

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#323

Post by rhizome »

ksdale wrote: post #244
rhizome wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how regionalism pops up on the internet. Thing is, it's less than 10% of the country (and surely not all of those 29MM are on the internet), and there are other businesses surviving just fine foregoing a TAM of the whole country.

How can you be so sure it's not regionalism that's causing you to dismiss nearly 10% of one of the largest, richest countries in the world as inconsequential?

Oh, it absolutely is regionalism, in the form of "Texas is a corrupt legal shitshow and it can be a smart business move to refuse to do any business there."

And because HN only allows me like 3 comments a day, I'd like to emphasize "can."

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#324

Post by s1artibartfast »

artdigital wrote: post #289
KieranMac wrote: post #188

As an attorney who focuses in this area, I can say that the most interesting question is first where this case will be decided. Texas, and the Northern District of Texas in particular, has historically been the worst jurisdiction in the country for web scrapers to litigate. Southwest has a long history of litigating successfully there, including two cases from just last year. If TPG is going to win, first they'll nee…

As a non-american reader, it feels bizarre to me that the direction of a case changes so drastically depending on where it will be held, within the same country

For what it's worth the US is more like 51 countries or the EU. There are radically different laws in different states and even different rights

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#325

Post by pishpash »

joquarky wrote: post #285
whiddershins wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I wonder what if any legal difference there would be if TPG was only providing a web app that runs in the browser.

Also, would there be any legal difference if they wrote a browser plug-in/extension that provides additional information while you're logged into AA's site?

What if their plug-in advertises for competitors or defames AA or navigates the user immediately away? It's hard to argue it is still a browser/user-agent if it changes or editorializes somebody else's content beyond a certain point.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#326

Post by pishpash »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #117
enos_feedler wrote: post #59

I wrote a scraper for Air Canada's aeroplan program a few years ago. I wanted to track my points in my own custom native app. I probably had $10,000 worth of points in my account. One day I logged in to find out my account had been deactivated on suspicions of fraud. After several lengthy phone calls with their team (including sending them the node.js script I was using), I was able to get my account restored. For th…

I’ve been on the other side of this, defending against bots. Basically: Well-behaved and well-intentioned scraping bots are rare. You’d get a lot of users setting update rates to 60 seconds that did a new login every time and creating as much traffic as 1000 users. Then they’d release the script for integration with something people and suddenly you have 1000 people each creating 1000 times as many login requests as…

Why does it need any investigation of motivation? If you can block then you can as well implement backing-off logic on the server's side and serve all traffic. One of the other comments is right. There is some sort of discrimination on bots that probably will never be resolved until laws are put in place to give them certain equal access rights.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#327

Post by pishpash »

Spivak wrote: post #303
scoot wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, basically, you forgot to rate limit your API?

There’s no winning here. Sending back a bunch of 429’s is still part of your API. Sure it’s less expensive to do than the operation the client was probably requesting but it’s not free and it’s stateful. For the kinds of bad actors people are talking about in this thread you still want to blackhole them.

All you're doing is offloading the response to a piece of network hardware. It seems like what you're looking for is a technological solution for load management which you're forsaking in favor of a kludge, then blaming the user.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#328

Post by pishpash »

Spivak wrote: post #305
R0b0t1 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then of course there are people trying to make a business out of extracting your company’s data, If I can do this by hand there's no legal reason I can't do it by machine. You can try to defend against it, I guess, but the second you start impacting your obligations to someone else (like disabling their account after they paid you) you are in the wrong.

Accesses and privileges given to you does not always extend to agents acting on your behalf. Having a driver’s license does not grant someone acting on your behalf the right to drive on public roads if they don’t have their own license. And more directly it also doesn’t grant you the ability to use your autonomous driving software on public roads either.

Except in this case the app is the car.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#329

Post by enos_feedler »

listenallyall wrote: post #320
enos_feedler wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what "bots" you are talking about here. When I wrote a web scraper to get my Air Canada point values I used a script that fetches the web page and parses it. It was the only way i could get it to work. I had to steel the session token from the browser cookie in order to make it auth

I guarantee that, with some effort, you could write a script to emulate every HTTP call -- logging in, accepting the cookie (just a value in a Set-Cookie header), and requesting the point values, making sure that cookie value is in your Cookie header. Just because you could "only get it to work" one way, does not mean there isn't a far more efficient way.

Dude, this is my story about my experience. The context provided above is relevant to what I was doing. This has nothing to do with theoretical possibilities that you are speaking about it. You are in the wrong thread.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#330

Post by Spivak »

pishpash wrote: post #328
Spivak wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accesses and privileges given to you does not always extend to agents acting on your behalf. Having a driver’s license does not grant someone acting on your behalf the right to drive on public roads if they don’t have their own license. And more directly it also doesn’t grant you the ability to use your autonomous driving software on public roads either.

Except in this case the app is the car.

And just because you have a license doesn’t mean you can drive any vehicle on public roads. It has to be street legal and you need a different license for 18 wheelers.
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