[HN Gopher] Cory Doctorow: 'We do not have fast companies anymore'
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Cory Doctorow: 'We do not have fast companies anymore'
Author : meiraleal
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-09-26 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastcompany.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastcompany.com)
| lacker wrote:
| I read Cory Doctorow's new book, and I like his ideas in the
| abstract. I think he overestimates the amount that the tech
| companies use the law to defend themselves, though.
|
| _There's no technical reason you couldn't use scrapers and bots,
| to pull in the posts from the people you follow and reply to them
| without really being a Twitter user. And the thing that stops us
| from doing that is that there are laws that allow Twitter to come
| after you and destroy you if you did._
|
| There are many scrapers for services like Facebook. Most of them
| don't pay attention to the law. Facebook fights these by funding
| "site integrity" teams that intentionally break the compatibility
| for scraping tools.
|
| The key difference here is between goods and services. When
| someone sells a physical good, like an IBM PC in the 1980's, they
| can't stop you from reverse engineering it. If you build
| something that works with it, the manufacturer doesn't have any
| options any more. The devices are "out in the wild".
|
| For a service, like Facebook, the technical arms races work
| differently. If someone creates a popular extension that, for
| example, removes ads from your Facebook feed, a team of Facebook
| engineers will start working on breaking that extension. You can
| fix it again, they can break it again, this can just keep
| happening. As long as Facebook can spend more money to break your
| service than you can to fix it, your product will never really
| work smoothly.
|
| This isn't to say that regulation is doomed. For example,
| requiring iPhones to use USB-C seems like it has clearly
| succeeded. The law to make phone numbers portable also seems to
| have succeeded. I just think that it will not work to simply
| "reset the law to neutral" like Doctorow imagines. If we want
| services like Facebook and Twitter to be open and interoperate,
| we need to have specific legal requirements.
|
| For example, should an application be allowed to export your
| contacts' birthdays from a social media service? Their phone
| numbers? Should an application be allowed to export your entire
| social media posting history?
|
| These aren't obvious questions to me - openness and privacy are
| often in conflict.
| deely3 wrote:
| 1. These terms govern your collection of data from Facebook
| through automated means, such as through harvesting bots,
| robots, spiders, or scrapers ("Automated Data Collection"), as
| well as your use of that data.
|
| 2. You will not engage in Automated Data Collection without
| Facebook's express written permission.
|
| 3. By obtaining permission to engage in Automated Data
| Collection you agree to abide by these Automated Data
| Collection Terms, which incorporate by reference the Statement
| of Rights and Responsibilities.
|
| ....
|
| From:
|
| https://m.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php
| zlg_codes wrote:
| If you don't have an account with Facebook, they have no
| relationship with you and cannot point to any contract like
| ToS because you never agreed to anything.
| hintymad wrote:
| He's not wrong. Lockheed used to build U2 prototype that could
| fucking fly from ground up in 150 days with like 20 people? Now
| companies will build a 200-person team to build damn UI. Of
| course, I'm exaggerating, but that's the idea.
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(page generated 2023-09-26 23:01 UTC)