Ask HN: How do you feel about web scraping?

Re:Ask HN: How do you feel about web scraping? by DougWebb on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @11:49AM (#14507364)

Like I said, someone who does a poor job securing their content, but who are not exposing it directly via publicly-exposed links, are not granting public access.

Your example is more akin to the maid wandering off leaving the front door open. That's not an invite to come in, that's a poor choice of maid.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you feel about web scraping? by randomdata on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @07:24PM (#14510672)

I respectfully disagree. We don't use terms like 'request' and 'server' because the mechanism is akin to a door wide open.

We can agree that a maid that lets the wrong people in is a poor choice of made, but the maid is the one responding to the request. A door/lock does not deal with requests at all.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you feel about web scraping? by jklein11 on Thursday June 08, 2017 @09:38AM (#14514071)

In this scenario though the maid is not choosing to wonder off, the homeowner is telling the maid to leave the front door open.

To extend this analogy a little bit, lets say that the homeowner told the maid that they can "give the old tv, the toaster or any other item in the garage to anyone who asks." A stranger comes and asks the maid for the golf clubs in the garage that the homeowner forgot about.

In this case, the homeowner did not explicitly expose the golf clubs to the public, but gave permission to the maid to give them out. Did the homeowner not grant public access to the golf clubs?

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