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Re:Breaking the Open Web Won't Stop the Bad Bots by Spivak on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:24PM (#50311453)
> normal people can avoid needing to care about the distinction by endeavoring to not kill anyone to begin with

It's the same thing here, a normal person will never run afoul of this law. It is entirely industry professionals who will be affected and they have legal departments who will figure out where the line is to the millimeter. Sure translating to legalese is hard and I expect this kind of legislation will be mostly common law after a bunch of lawsuits but the giveaway that it will be fine is that assigning "bot/not bot" to a given situation is something we all agree on in the industry. There isn't really that much borderline here. You can't accidentally build a web scraper operating off a residential proxy network and it's pretty obvious when you decide to disguise your traffic because you don't have the consent of site you're scraping.

Even the horribly contrived borderline examples boil down to "but I should have the right to actively deceive and circumvent security measures designed specifically to keep me out" which is a pretty tough sell.

Re:Breaking the Open Web Won't Stop the Bad Bots by makeitdouble on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:53PM (#50311703)
> You can't accidentally build a web scraper operating off a residential proxy network

Unless I'm missing something, most of the time you ask an agent to do any type of comparison or analysis between mtiple options offered online, scrapping will be involved at some point.

Anything that doesn't have a well-known and very public, free API will be a prime target for scrapping.

Re:Breaking the Open Web Won't Stop the Bad Bots by AnthonyMouse on Saturday October 31, 2026 @12:17AM (#50313166)
> It's the same thing here, a normal person will never run afoul of this law.

Its terms are so broad and ambiguous that they're already doing it and the thing you're actually relying on is that they wouldn't be prosecuted, which is an entirely different thing.

> It is entirely industry professionals who will be affected and they have legal departments who will figure out where the line is to the millimeter.

"The courts will sort it out eventually" is the worst excuse for drafting it poorly to begin with, and doesn't do anything for you during the decades it takes for that to actually happen.

> Even the horribly contrived borderline examples boil down to "but I should have the right to actively deceive and circumvent security measures designed specifically to keep me out" which is a pretty tough sell.

This seems like the thing where corporations co-opt the term "security" to mean "anyone doing anything we don't like" as if they had any right to that to begin with.

Journalists should be able to investigate misconduct. Customers and customer agents should have bulk access to pricing data. Real people shouldn't have to view the speech of other real people through the proprietary interface of a corporate intermediary that people only use because it has a network effect.

Re:Breaking the Open Web Won't Stop the Bad Bots by Spivak on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:49PM (#50344329)
I mean it's great that you have a long and idealistic wishlist that interestingly implies that journalists ought to be allowed to break into buildings and offices but you do realize that this law changes nothing on your list, right? The reason stealth residential proxies are even a thing is because companies already do literally everything you wish in that list they wouldn't.

It's bananas that for some reason sketchy "vpn" apps that let even sketchier people bypass bans is the hill you want to die on. This hole was always going to get plugged the minute it attracted any kind of significant notice and entitled AI companies run by libertarian nutjobs hammering sites ruined it for everyone. The bill you want is one of non-discrimination and I think we both know the powers that be will never let that pass—we still don't even have net neutrality.

I want to live in your world, especially the bit where journalists are sanctioned super spies, but this isn't the road. To use your idealism people shouldn't have to use a weird proxy system to access websites in the manner they please.