Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience they're one of the most useless and difficult companies I've ever tried to interact with.
The entirety of the universe is contained in the preceding two comments.
A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
391–400 of 416 posts
Re: A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has that ever worked? I can't find any record of judgments one way or the other, on their website or elsewhere.
I know ProjectHoneyPot was pushing a $x billion litigation against a spammer. I don't remember if/how that was resolved. This guy[1] apparently spent years just suing email spammers and occasionally winning. [1] https://www.danhatesspam.com/index.html
I also found the $1 billion lawsuit (against a bunch, not just one spammer, I believe), and could also not find any sort of resolution - not in legal docs, news pages, or project honeypot itself.
Re: A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
IP packets have a source field, which can be fake and not their actual IP. That's a Facebook IP, but the packet might not have actually come from it.
If they made actual requests that went through, a connection got established. That won't happen with a faked source.
Ah okay, thanks for helping me learn :)
Re: A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
#394I once made a PHP page which fetches a random wikipedia article, but changes the title to "What the fuck is [TOPIC]?". It was incredibly funny, until I started getting angry emails from people, mostly threatening a form of libel lawsuit. Turns out, since it was a front for all of wikipedia[1], google was agressively indexing it, but the results rarely made it to the first search page. And since this isn't exactly an…
I understand why people got angry, though. The title was rougly "What is this '' shit?"[1], with "shit" in this Hebrew context also able to be interpreted as calling the subject "shit".
Saying "מה זה לעזאזל X?"[2] is closer to "what the fuck is X?" (except it's more "what the hell" than "what the fuck").
[1] I wasn't sure how to portray this to non-Hebrew speakers but, surprisingly, Google Translate actually nailed it: https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...
[2] Google Translate got this example right, too: https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...
Re: A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
#395We've had the same issue. They were doing huge bursts of tens of thousands of requests in very short time several times a day. The bots didn't identify as FB (used "spoofed" UAs) but were all coming from FB owned netblocks. I've contacted FB about it, but they couldn't figure out why this was happening and didn't solve the problem. I found out that there is an option in the FB Catalog manager that lets FB auto-remove…
Side question: how did you get in contact with facebook? I've an ad account that was suspended last year and gave up trying to contact them.
try contacting their NOC, they _may_ give you a human that can help.
Re: A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Set up a robots.txt that disallows Facebook crawlers, sue Facebook if the crawling continues for unauthorized access to computer systems, profit.
robots.txt is not a legal document. It is asking nicely, and plenty of crawlers purposefully ignore it.
Legal document is a tricky phrase to use. "No trespassing" signs are usually considered sufficient to justify prosecution for trespassing. If the sign is conspicuously placed, it does not usually matter if you actually see the sign or not.
I am not as familiar with law around accessing computer systems, but I imagine that given some of the draconian enforcement we've seen in the past that a robots.txt should be sufficient to support some legal action against someone who disregards it.
Re: A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
#397This is one of the better HN threads in a while. Starting from an easily described problem, it goes into a number of interesting directions including how FB seems to DDOS certain sites for reasons unknown, defenses against such attacks and DDOS in general, GPL licensing, how to collapse HN conversations, etc.
Not a profound comment. But it was really fun to follow the path down the various rabbit holes. This is why I like HN.
Re: A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curiousity question: does FB use Gmail/Google suite?
FB uses Office365 for email. It was on-premise Exchange many many years ago, but moved "to the cloud" a while back.
Feels odd to read Facebook uses office365/exchange for emails. they haven't built their fsuite yet, I thought they would simply promote Facebook messenger internally. I'm only half joking.
Re: A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flattered that your few, boring lines of CSS and HTML (that could easily be reproduced by a monkey) was used on someone else's website?
Sounds like yes, they are flattered for exactly that. And it's totally ok. There exists small joys in life, like being flattered for something that other people might not think are much of a big deal. I guess that's one reason why something may be called flattering in the first place, if they didn't see it as being all that much in their own eyes, but somebody else appreciates it.
And it's a beautiful lightweight theme.
Re: A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure man no problem. The code for my theme is here BTW with credits To your original blog https://github.com/napolux/coding.napolux.com/
Am inexperienced in the technicals of this, is "taking inspiration" from someone else's website grounds for a copyright or gpl violation? When I've worked with designers it usually starts "pick a site that inspires you", where the deliverable has resemblance.
The distinction can be difficult to make, but I think it is relatively clear here.
I'm "reading between the lines" here so could be wrong, but "looks like your site is using a theme based on" implies to me that there is enough code (markup, styles, perhaps script) similarly that is enough to not be pure coincidence. That suggests using some of the code not just being inspired to produce a clean-room design, so the GPL is relevant.