Oh, I'm fully aware that it might cut it off, and then I'll use the FreeSleep project or, failing that, the mod where someone replaced the base with another temperature controller.

Right, but as I just said obeying a disallow directive isn't legally mandatory, so it doesn't mean much.

The difference depends on context, of course.

Generally speaking there are several cases to consider:

(1) Site requires agreeing on terms of service before browser can access content. In this case, scraping is a clear violation.

(2) Site terms of service forbid scraping content, but human visitors can view content and ...
(2a) site takes technical measures to exclude bots. In this case scraping is a no-no, but for a different reason: it violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
(2b) site takes no technical measures to exclude bots. In this case, the answer is unclear, and may depend on the specific jurisdiction (e.g. circuit court).

(3) Site has a robots.txt file and ...
(3a) robots.txt allows scraping. In this case, even if the terms of service forbid scraping, the permission given here helps the scraper's defense.
(3b) robots.txt forbids scraping. In this case obeying robots.txt isn't in itself legally mandatory, but it may affect your case if the site takes other anti-scraping measures.

Not *explicitly*. Offering such a database would be an invitation for people to look at the whole data broker industry. So what you, as a databroker who tracks and piegeonholes every human being who uses the Internet to a fare-the-well, do to tap into the market for lists of gullible yokels? You offer your customer, literally anyone with money, the ability to zero in on the gullible by choosing appropriate proxies.

For example, you can get a list of everyone who has searched for "purchasing real estate with no money down". Sad people who buy colloidal silver and herbal male enhancement products. People who buy terrible crypto assets like NFTs and memecoins. Nutters who spend a lot of time on conspiracy theory sites.

It's kind of like doxxing someone. You might not be able to find out directly that John Doe lives on Maple St and works for ACME services, but you can piece it together by the traces he leaves online. Only you do it to populations wholesale.

Biggest problem is a company like eight sleep has the marketing. So if someone really wants a temperature controlled bed, it's hard to know what a credibly good one is. I *think* Chilipad is a good one, but it's a pretty pricey thing to evaluate and thanks to internet-everything, it's not like you can see for yourself.

But yeah, Eight sleep deserves every amount of bad press they can get for being such a douche company.

They have local controls on most recent models, *however* the controls will deactivate unless the cloud control has blessed the user in the last 24 hours. Before getting going, they'll talk to local phones without internet, but *only* for the end of getting the WIFI set up. They know exactly how to make local phone control work.

It was never about cost savings, it was always about a path to forced recurring revenue. They opened with early adopters not having to pay subscription fee, but still forcing them through the servers. Early adopters also didn't have to pay too much and actually had a decent warranty. When they managed some good momentum, they cranked up the price, tanked the warranty, and forced subscription.

The code was written toward the purpose of forcing the users into a monthly subscription.

The goal was not to deliver the best user experience. To the extent they have tried to accommodate demands for local control, they have predicated it on having relatively recently been 'blessed' to let the user do that within the last few hours. That takes explicit effort to implement a local control loop and make sure it gets approval.

My wife insisted on it and we bought one when they were getting started and relatively cheap and the subscription was not yet required. We've been grandfathered in so we don't pay the subscription, and thanks to the leaks we have been upgraded to the latest model, so I have familiarity.

They are a shit company with a decent hardware design (now) that stops short of being good all around precisely to gouge users.

Even worse, they have a local control loop, but they deliberately cripple it.

If the bed is 'on' (which is only allowed through their cloud connection), then you can locally adjust things fine. However it will refuse to do this if the internet hasn't approved the device to operate locally.

This 'enhancement' was added after people demanded local remote or buttons or *anything*. They implemented an earbud-style tap side of bed N number of times for adjusting temp or dismissing alarm.

So they know precisely what they are doing, it's not dumb engineering, it's malicious engineering.

wait a week or two and the details will change completely.

Trump is nothing if not mercurial. His fans will tell you he's playing 11 dimensional chess... I have my doubts, but let's say that's true. The problem is that when it comes to the economy it's not chess. It's more like basketball, and the President is the point guard calling plays, except the play being called keeps changing before the players can execute the last call. It's a tough time to be running a business, you can't plan out more than a couple of weeks.

When I want to point out to the kind of morons who post on the Internet, I'll tuck this post away.

But what if no one is ever going to use the output anyway? Might not need to check it.

I've dealt with *way* too many business processes that have people generate obscene amounts of prose that no one will ever read or even skim or reference.

I remember one of these companies championed that they used LLM to complete an important 'overhaul' of their source code. The 'overhaul' was generating separate document detailing all these uncommented functions and what the LLM guessed they were supposed to do and how in plain text. The theory was that if one day they actually wanted to start porting this code to something else, that document would be 'helpful'. And of course:
- They never will do that porting
- Even if they did, the developers will likely ignore that document.

Question to what extent was revenue reduced versus deferred. If 90% of their customers couldn't reach competitors either, was revenue lost or did it just happen later?

The thing is that this is terrible for all the outages to be aligned for the internet users, but for the providers, the thought that outages are likely to align with competitor outages might be a pretty solid mitigation, so long as the outage doesn't exceed what they might incur themselves. Even a longer outage common with competitors may be better than a shorter outage that *only* impacts them.

Certainly if AWS was down enough that someone could get a competitive advantage by moving it would drag on them, but if it's not *much* worse than their own outages, well there's a comfort in making sure your competitors are more likely to go down with you.

Yup, the sad truth is that if you really want to save children, you need to ban parents.

But what is the tax? These services are down and no one is blaming the companies, they just say it's an Amazon problem. No one is penalizing a company because their Internet services went down just like most of their competitors

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.