I wonder if this other pending investigation has anything to do with how they were somehow able to get away with operating a completely unlicensed taxi service globally without any apparent regard for the law.

Right... The ones screaming that the internet is going to end. The end is nigh. Misrepresenting open comments of the FCC. Misunderstanding the law. Screeching every slur they can think of is. Yet, the one quoting jurisprudence and law is the one peddling FUD.

Oh no! A I can't break the group think and mass hysteria that people have worked themselves into. What fear have I presented? What Uncertainty? What doubt? All I have done is try to understand the situation through jurisprudence and law without throwing out petty insults that are so common that you initiated. You are a hypocritical piece of shit. Fuck off to your bandwagon where you can feel smug circle jerking the others that think exactly like you.

You can't make something unpublic. If your state/jurisdiction makes something public that shouldn't be, it really is on them.

If it is a dark tunnel > You were eaten by a Grue.

It's not a standard with any legal weight - just something some people agreed to do. And failing to implement it is still not hacking - and are you saying Volkswagen was hacking?

"Google can scrape the site and show the product offered in all these sites. "

This can be difficult. I don't know about others, but Costco products often have special UPC codes (identifiers). The same item from the mfgr has a different number which is also used by smaller retailers. If Amazon & Walmart do likewise with special codes, it will be harder to compare prices with a Google search. And that's the whole point, of course.

All this shilling has got me illing!
I can't believe the turnout here for this one!

People still use the Bookface, so why not?

You're reading it wrong. Using your login and ignoring terms of use is a breach of contract (albeit a unilateral EULA). It is not and should not, however, be considered felony computer hacking under the CFAA.

Yes, I do realize that. And when you're talking about a rule that forces private businesses to give up control of their own communications and property, it calls for actual legislation. Just like actual legislation from congress explicitly sets some boundaries within which the FAA must (and must not) regulate some aspects of remote controlled aircraft.

As of the last few days, I'm getting this now. Any posted video in the feed plays for 2-3 seconds as you scroll to it and then goes straight to an ad. It keeps me from watching videos on Facebook, which is fine by me. Sometimes you just need an interruption to remind you that you weren't wanting to watch in the first place.

They mention this thing called a "Watch" hub, and I've never seen this.

That's true, I didn't think of it because I only have one contact who's using it.

...and you have a lack of facts.

Well, I think on the general principles both sides agree. From there I want to be an optimist on enshrining those principles to law.

Do you have any idea how many really useful regulations are not actually written into law per se? That's the only way the federal government can function. The congress is sooooo dysfunctional that they relegate the execution of the law to the *gasp* executive branch. If the congress had to agree on changing the decibel level at which hearing protection was required, do you think we would ever get anything done? If it were left to the states, we'd end up with a race to the bottom. I'm all for the 10th amendment, but the states have proven just as corruptible as the federal government.

Yes, we really need to think a lot more about how to design space habitats and try out a variety of ideas in simulation and reality. Below is an excerpt from something I posted in 2003 to an Slashdot article on "Jeff Bezos' Shot At Space":
https://science.slashdot.org/c...

While it is excellent to see multiple billionaires pursuing cheap access to space (CATS), this seems like a problem that will be much easier to solve as new materials and processes come along (diamondoid jet nozzles, fusion, etc.) in the near future. Several of these entrepreneurs are of course already using newer materials and processes (composites, active dynamics, small ground crews augmented by fancy computers and software) relative to what NASA is stuck with in maintaining an aging Shuttle.

While I would never say such innovative effort is wasted, it would seem that launch technologies, while sexy, might really deserve somewhat lower priorities than the issue of what to do when we are in space. The fact is, we can launch people now, and relatively off-the-shelf technology (e.g. Ariane or Saturn V equivalent rockets) if manufactured in large quantities are probably Cheap-enough Access To Space for the next ten to twenty years (until nano-tech makes far better launch systems possible) especially if we are willing to accept 5% human casualties for launch (which is probably a far lower casualty rate than most human settlement travel activities historically).

There is also an issue of focus -- people focus on reusable vehicles, but the reality is that it is so costly to get things into space that there is not much point in returning either people or equipment after they have been launched. At best, Apollo era reentry capsules for people who want to come back to earth are good enough. For example, the space shuttle costs so much to launch relative to its production cost it should really be left in orbit as usable equipment (since anything in orbit is worth its weight in gold), and people returned in a small capsule if at all. Even if launch costs are greatly reduced, I think that a general outward trend of humanity will still reflect some of this economics (short of a space elevator). For example, in the USA, most people who went "West" during the 1800s probably never came back East.

So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical protypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossipped about by academics.)

Almost everything proposed as a reason to launch into space doesn't make sense, as much as people have touted various suggestions. The closest might be He3 mining for aneutronic fusion if we otherwise had that technology, but even that issues (energy) is probably more easily solved through conservation, energy efficiency (e.g. R60+ home insulation), and photovoltaic and wind etc. alternate energy modes (which are rapidly proving cost effective for many applications, and will be only more so with new processes and materials over the next twenty years). Asteroid mining turns out to not be that useful, since recycling is a much better idea. Zero gravity turns out to not be so valuable after all for manufacturing, since most of the processes can be done on earth, or alternative materials used. And so on for various other issues.

Exploration is noble and important as a long-term spiritual quest, but it is a dubious priority in the short term considering how much ground based telescopes can do quickly on earth, how valuable cheap robot probes are, and how we are already slaughtering the other terrestrial intelligences (Muslims, Aborigines, elephants) and extraterrestrial intelligences (whales, octopods, etc.) we know of without much concern or attempt to communicate and pursue any sort of cosmic brotherhood.

The only really sensible thing to do in space is to live there under various social and technical systems. People like Freeman Dyson, Gerard K. O'Neill, and Marshall T. Savage and many others have discussed these issues. We aren't able to pursue this because we don't know much about how to support human life on earth. We have little understanding of the Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science Buckminster Fuller proposed back in the 1930s or so. Economics is a multi-trillion dollar joke, with economists having about zero knowledge on how technical economies really work or develop (otherwise, why have no developing nations left that category in one hundred years?) We need to better understand how life is supported on earth both biologically and technically so that we can replicate it out there, and so we can then use asteroid resources, sunlight, and empty space to support quadrillions of conscious souls pursuing diverse ends in some sorts of diverse collaborations (such as J.D. Bernal proposed in the 1920s.).

As a bonus, once some people live in space, mine asteroids for their own purposes, capture solar energy for their own purposes, use self-replicating manufacturing systems for their own purposes, then CATS really becomes CATE (Cheap Access To Earth) and for spacers who might be 1000X more wealthy than groundhogs in terms of materials and energy and innovation and cooperation, CATE would be easy, and CATS then piggybacks as a slight imbalance in CATE tourism (although why most spacers would want to go anywhere near a gravity well would probably be a deep psychological question with profound moral overtones like "spacer's burden" and all that rot).

So, while it is great to see all these billionaires pursuing CATS, it would be great to see more people pursuing DOGS (Design Of Great Settlements). Since NASA is stuck running an obsolete space ferry it has little attention left over for DOGS. Since Billionaries are doing the sexy CATS stuff, that leaves the rest of us to go to the DOGS.

And disclaimer: DOGS is essentially what I am working on with the Pointrel Foundation and related activities, but unlike Jeff Bezos (a sort-of classmate from Princeton -- Hi Jeff!) what I am working on with just my own spare time (not being a billionaire, and frankly, realizing even a billion bucks is not even a bone to throw to the DOGS) is how that issue of what to do if we got into space could be pursued the same way Debian GNU/Linux is pursued. And, I find, when you pursue such a space settlement design science in the right spirit, the work is also immediately applicable on Earth as sustainable technology (such as our garden simulator -- intended to help people grow food wherever in the cosmos they live). My wife and I published a paper on how an open source / free software collaboration style approaches could be used to make DOGS happen in the 2001 Space Studies Institute symposium on Space Manufacturing and Space Settlement. I really should put that up on the website sometime... Till then, the OSCOMAK site http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... is a much earlier vision along these lines... [and includes a link to that 2001 paper]...

I call you a partisan shill because you peddle self-serving justifications and lies. As far as I'm concerned you're the one peddling FUD and from what I see, no one with a half brain is buying it.

Congratulations, active user number 12.

Your nerd-shaming ways will be the end of you.

Word of advice, if you care to listen. You need something else other than "Trump Bad, we oppose" and this.

1994 and the Contract with America Republicans beg to differ. They basically ran on a platform of "Bill Clinton sucks, vote for us" and it mostly worked. They formed a large enough voting bloc in the House to control not only the legislation that their own party could pass, but the entire House. It made a lot of career politicians really nervous until they figured out how to marginalize and control them.

Tell that to Volkswagon, who "failed to implement" the standard regarding how their vehicles respond to situations they can interpret as being "testing".

Robots that ignore the robots.txt standard are not just "failing to implement." They're ignoring the standard for their own gain.

I am quite confident that if there is a background check company in the U.S. which is using records archived by a non-government organization (for more than an vanishingly short period of time) to provide employers with arrest record information they are currently facing, or will soon be facing, a class action lawsuit for Civil Rights violations. They are also likely being investigated by, or soon to be investigated by both the federal Civil Rights Commission and various state equivalents.
Perhaps you are unaware of the controversy around companies using criminal records as a basis for declining to employ someone, but there are places in the U.S. where it is illegal for an employer to ask if a prospective employee has been convicted of a crime because this disproportionately affects African American applicants. If refusing to hire someone who has been convicted of a crime is considered racist in some jurisdictions, think how they would react to an employer refusing to hire someone because they had been arrested without being convicted. And while employers might be able to avoid being a target, someone would notice the company providing the background checks with that information (and any reasonably competent attorney could write court filings which would shut them down almost immediately).

They sucked you in to their free service, before facebook was popular. MySpace wasn't really appropriate for work colleagues and other professional relationships.

They then made a mobile web site and redirected all mobile users to that site, to keep you investing your time and using their service

Then they removed the mobile website and redirect you to install their app, which you can't install without giving it permission to access to all your contacts.
When you log in to the app, it uploads all your contacts.

The "automated" "homework" that someone else claimed the website needed to do is already a standard. There's a "robots.txt" exclusion file that is a standard way of specifying what a robot is allowed to do and not allowed to do.

It used to be very poor netiquette for a robot to ignore that file. Now it seems that the attitude is fuck the website operator, he's got to hide his stuff behind closed doors to keep abusive robots from taking his website down. It's A-OK to do anything that a website physically allows you to do, despite any explicit restrictions.

One fine morning I found my website unresponsive and essentially broken. A fine robot operator thought that he would index and put into a search engine of some kind the output from a web-based tide prediction program. This was a program that took about 20 seconds to calculate the predicted tides at a certain location at a certain time, and then send back a graph with some text.

To make it convenient for users, it also had buttons for "tomorrow" and "yesterday", and a menu for selecting other locations. This helpful indexer was making "today" and "tomorrow" requests every ten seconds, for a page that takes 20 seconds to create. I think you can probably guess the obvious result. Should the robot wait until the current request is finished before making the next one? Fuck no, that's too slow and makes too much sense. If the server cannot keep up, fuck it.

Robots.txt? Who cares, huh? "Please don't abuse my site by running a robot against it" means nothing to some people. It's a shame that we can't have nice things.

If only "take[ing] snapshots" didn't cost the laundry owner time and money and prevent others from being able to glance at the stuff, your analogy would be accurate. People taking snapshots is not, of course, the issue. It's the automated systems that load the servers into a halt.

If only people would stop electing terrible legislators.

Can't have that. The voters are helpless little angels and can only do what the TV tells them. Because, you know, like, democracy is hard, and the glittery money dazzles. I mean, they all want laws passed, but they never offer up anybody who will make an honest effort of it. Apparently, it's supposed to happen automagically, even as they reelect the same old crooks into office.

Now watch the magic!

The "Al Gore invented the Internet" meme wasn't even funny to those of us who belong on Slashdot back in the days it was popular. It is especially lame in 2017.

I think they've already tried that

They tell the people running the bots they're banned from their website, but have nothing to physically stop them.

After telling them "you're not allowed to access our public website" they then try to get them prosecuted for illegally accessing a computer system when they keep doing it.