Comment by gpm
9 hours ago
> For example, you say "nobody cares if you reload one page", implying there is a limit -- where is that limit?
You can't demand this degree of specificity from laws - that's not how good laws work. The limit should be reasonableness and intent.
Refreshing hacker news every 5 minutes isn't unreasonable. Refreshing some 5GB file on archive.org that never changes would be unreasonable.
Hell it's easy to come up with examples that would be outright fraud (deceit to acquire something of value) and deserve criminal charges. Refreshing a booking website in a manner to trick it into thinking you're about to reserve something to prevent other people from doing so - e.g. to keep people out of nearby campsites on a camping trip.
> How many kids in a poor country do I need to hire in order to stay under that per-person limit and continue my business as usual?
Up to a jury. But there's clearly a limit at which the answer is "no amount". It's well established that distributed denial of service attacks are illegal after all.
I don't disagree with your overall point. You cannot determine intent by looking at an HTTP request.
Criminalizing a fan who really, really wants Taylor Swift tickets so that you also prevent ticket scalpers, who would do the exact same observable actions, is not going anywhere good.
When limits must be decided like this, our definitions cannot be enforced by technology, and we can't afford judges and juries to handle the scale of the current situation. Look at the original post I replied to, which appears to believe we can easily define "automated" in a way that's useful to meet the wishes of site owners against the wishes of site visitors, regardless of visitor intent and regardless of accommodation for disabled visitors.
> You cannot determine intent by looking at an HTTP request.
I believe this is the crux of our disagreement. Clearly you can't, which is why you must assume good faith and service all innocent-looking requests.
What you can do however is temporarily log and search for patterns in multiple HTTP requests. If you can then prove that these requests came from a bot via the plethora of fingerprinting measures already in use, you have grounds to make a complaint to the FTC, which would have the ability to subpoena the identity of the offending entity and, depending on their history, issue a warning, a fine or file a lawsuit.
The current status quo is that attackers have an advantage in that the worst thing that you can do to them is to temporarily block them, and you don't really want to do this because you're never 100% sure whether any _individual_ request is automated.
While I can't say that this law is good for this purpose, I am pointing out that the solution looks something like it. The goal is not blocking the individual, but doing something about infra-level abusers, at a volume where 95% accuracy is sufficient proof of wrongdoing. All of your arguments are valid and would be tried in court in response to this passing, hopefully for the better but ultimately it depends on how good the justice system is. This last thing is something no amount of technology can fix but in that case illegal scraping is the least of our problems.
> our definitions cannot be enforced by technology
... that's why the proposed law doesn't try to?