News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Debunking Cloudflare’s recent performance tests. Parent comment

Re:Debunking Cloudflare’s recent performance tests by wraptile on Monday December 06, 2021 @09:25PM (#29468503)
I'm not a lawyer but could someone explain to me could you be legally persecuted for this? It's "Terms of Service" - I broke the terms by performing the benchmarks and Cloudflare no longer provides service to me. Lets say I'm a scientist and I'm fine with never using cloudflare services but this benchmark is important for my field - would cloudflare have a case here? I'd imagine that would be quite absurd but corporate law very much already is.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Debunking Cloudflare’s recent performance tests by gary_0 on Monday December 06, 2021 @10:14PM (#29468737)
The feds ruined Aaron Swartz's life for violating "Terms of Service", so people are right to be fearful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#A...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Debunking Cloudflare’s recent performance tests by kingcharles on Monday December 06, 2021 @09:40PM (#29468589)
Yes. Here in Illinois violating terms of service carries up to 5 years in prison.

https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/fulltext.asp?DocName=0...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Debunking Cloudflare’s recent performance tests by lelandfe on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @08:22AM (#29472170)
Anti-benchmarking clauses are sometimes called DeWitt clauses after Oracle famously tried to get a professor fired for testing their offerings. https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/

I never knew how true that anecdote was but that’s typically the boogeyman story that gets passed around for things like this

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Debunking Cloudflare’s recent performance tests by dathinab on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @01:16AM (#29469535)
Depends on the country you are in, in the US, thinks seem bad. See the other posts.

In the EU there are various ways of ToS are limited in their power, if that applies here I'm not sure.

But they are basically forbidding you to evaluate how well a product you (might be) paying for works, depending on what they advertised they might even prevent you from evaluation if the advertised product characteristics uphold. Especially in the later case I guess that the ToS clause would be void.

[ Parent | on HN ]