moomoomoo309@programming.dev
on 25 Mar 11:57
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Something that annoys me about people who love to harp on about how bad Mozilla is because they’ve gone downhill (which they have): Who is better? Genuinely compare them to their competition. Google? Heck no. Brave? Nope. Microsoft? Absolutely not. Apple? No. People complain about how much Mozilla spends on advocacy, but then when they actually do the advocacy, they’re happy about it! They’re perpetually stuck between a rock and a hard place because they’re pulled in both directions and thus, Firefox suffers. But, are they actually a broken clock? Really?
I guess to be a little clearer: If you compare Mozilla to their past selves, they lose. If you compare Mozilla to anyone else in that space with the resources to develop a browser, they’re still the best of the bunch by a country mile.
Mozilla seems to be doing fine to me. Most of the people complaining about them don’t give any indication that they themselves are doing anything particularly helpful either.
How exactly does a website stop a web scraper specifically from a org?
I mean isn’t that the whole point of web scraping? That if it’s publicly available, anybody, including people like ICE, will find a way to get the data?
astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz
on 24 Mar 13:20
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Yeah, it’s not technically impossible to stop web scrapers, but it’s difficult to have a lasting, effective solution. One easy way is to block their user-agent assuming the scraper uses an identifiable user-agent, but that can be easily circumvented. The also easy and somewhat more effective way is to block scrapers’ and caching services’ IP addresses, but that turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You could also have a paywall or login to view content and not approve a certain org, but that only will work for certain use cases, and that also is easy to circumvent. If stopping a single org’s scraping is the hill to die on, good luck.
That said, I’m all for fighting ICE, even if it’s futile. Just slowing them down and frustrating them is useful.
threaded - newest
Fighting ICE automatically gives you 20 morality points.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day
Something that annoys me about people who love to harp on about how bad Mozilla is because they’ve gone downhill (which they have): Who is better? Genuinely compare them to their competition. Google? Heck no. Brave? Nope. Microsoft? Absolutely not. Apple? No. People complain about how much Mozilla spends on advocacy, but then when they actually do the advocacy, they’re happy about it! They’re perpetually stuck between a rock and a hard place because they’re pulled in both directions and thus, Firefox suffers. But, are they actually a broken clock? Really?
I guess to be a little clearer: If you compare Mozilla to their past selves, they lose. If you compare Mozilla to anyone else in that space with the resources to develop a browser, they’re still the best of the bunch by a country mile.
Mozilla seems to be doing fine to me. Most of the people complaining about them don’t give any indication that they themselves are doing anything particularly helpful either.
How exactly does a website stop a web scraper specifically from a org?
I mean isn’t that the whole point of web scraping? That if it’s publicly available, anybody, including people like ICE, will find a way to get the data?
Yeah, it’s not technically impossible to stop web scrapers, but it’s difficult to have a lasting, effective solution. One easy way is to block their user-agent assuming the scraper uses an identifiable user-agent, but that can be easily circumvented. The also easy and somewhat more effective way is to block scrapers’ and caching services’ IP addresses, but that turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You could also have a paywall or login to view content and not approve a certain org, but that only will work for certain use cases, and that also is easy to circumvent. If stopping a single org’s scraping is the hill to die on, good luck.
That said, I’m all for fighting ICE, even if it’s futile. Just slowing them down and frustrating them is useful.