Browsers' bid for relevance is turning them into time-bombs

Re:Browsers' bid for relevance is turning them into time-bombs by chriswarbo on Saturday July 09, 2016 @05:50AM (#12060801)

Google wants to steal Web content by downloading (i.e. pirating) it, using automatic programs called "crawlers" which cause pages to be served but don't provide any revenue via ad views. That's theft, and it shouldn't be allowed.

They also want to use that content in unapproved ways, for example to extract keywords and links. They then serve this unlicensed information publically, with their own ads.

Thankfully, we can put a stop to such wholesale commercial piracy by encrypting our content using EME.

</sarcasm>

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Re:Browsers' bid for relevance is turning them into time-bombs by sievebrain on Saturday July 09, 2016 @06:39AM (#12060894)

That's a really terrible analogy.

The web already has that kind of DRM and always did: robots.txt, enforced by social convention rather than encryption.

And yes some companies ban crawlers and try to get their content out of search engines for questionable reasons. More often, they try to strongarm Google so their content is still there, but they get paid for the privilege, which is not a reasonable approach and thus not supported by the robots.txt "DRM" protocol.

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Re:Browsers' bid for relevance is turning them into time-bombs by erlehmann_ on Saturday July 09, 2016 @09:40AM (#12061259)

robots.txt is not DRM: it can be freely implemented by anyone without special knowledge – and ignoring it does not lead to a criminal investigation.

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Re:Browsers' bid for relevance is turning them into time-bombs by nl on Saturday July 09, 2016 @06:45AM (#12060901)

No proponent of the technology has ever claimed any of that in this context. A sarcasm tag doesn't automatically make it a useful comment.

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Re:Browsers' bid for relevance is turning them into time-bombs by coldtea on Saturday July 09, 2016 @07:51AM (#12061023)

I think what the parent comment really needs is the:

<sarcasm-against-strawman /> tag.

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