Comment by CoastalCoder
19 days ago
I wonder if it would work to send Meta's legal department a notice that they are not permitted to access your website.
Would that make subsequent accesses be violations of the U.S.'s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?
Crashing wasn't the intent. And scraping is legal, as I remember per Linkedin case.
There’s a fine line between scrapping and DDOS’ing I’m sure.
Just because you manufacture chemicals doesn’t mean you can legally dump your toxic waste anywhere you want (well shouldn’t be allowed to at least).
You also shouldn’t be able to set your crawlers causing sites to fail.
intent is likely very important to something like a ddos charge
5 replies →
It's like these AI companies have to invent scraping spiders again from scratch. I don't know how often I have been ddosed to complete site failure and still ongoing by random scrapers just the last few months.
If I make a physical robot and it runs someone over, I'm still liable, even though it was a delivery robot, not a running over people robot.
If a bot sends so many requests that a site completely collapses, the owner is liable, even though it was a scraping bot and not a denial of service bot.
The law doesn't work by analogy.
1 reply →
Then you can feed them deliberately poisoned data.
Send all of your pages through an adversarial LLM to pollute and twist the meaning of the underlying data.
The scraper bots can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
> I wonder if it would work to send Meta's legal department a notice that they are not permitted to access your website.
Depends how much money you are prepared to spend.
No, fortunately random hosts on the internet don’t get to write a letter and make something a crime.
Unless they're a big company in which case they can DMCA anything they want, and they get the benefit of the doubt.
Can you even DMCS takedown crawlers?
2 replies →