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Only two of those are malicious. Buying products at the price offered is perfectly legitimate, regardless of all the scaremongering to the contrary.
by ikeboy 7y ago
Only two of those are malicious.
Buying products at the price offered is perfectly legitimate, regardless of all the scaremongering to the contrary.
- eli 7y agoNot sure what "legitimate" means here? Legal? Running aggressive web crawlers is in many instances against the rules for consumer cloud servers. For example, AWS requires that you obey robots.txt if you run a crawler there. https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/report-aws-resource-crawling/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/repor... In my experience a lot of bots seem to be running on hacked servers or through hacked/insecure proxies. I'd imagine tracking down the owner or someone upstream of those boxes could be effective in taking them offline.
- ikeboy 7y agoWhat does that have to with my point? Bots used to purchase inventory (and that aren't otherwise commiting fraud by using stolen credit cards or something) are not malicious.
- eli 7y agoAre they following the sneaker website's robots.txt while doing that? If not, they are probably violating the AWS terms regardless of whether you believe that activity is "malicious."
- ikeboy 7y agoif they're running on AWS, which most crawlers are not When I've run scraping software in the past I used DigitalOcean, which doesn't contain a requirement to abide by robots.txt. As far as I can tell it's both legal and consistent with their ToS to run a program that makes purchases on a website.
- coldpie 7y ago> Bots used to purchase inventory are not malicious. There's no way you're in this conversation without being aware that scalping is a controversial practice at best. https://theconversation.com/the-economics-of-ticket-scalping-83434 https://theconversation.com/the-economics-of-ticket-scalping... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_scalping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_scalping
- ikeboy 7y agoI'm well aware that many economically illiterate people like to scaremonger about scalping. That doesn't make them right.
- coldpie 7y agoOr perhaps they are interested in optimizing the process for something different than what you are optimizing for.
- ikeboy 7y agoMaybe I'd believe that if they stopped saying things like scalping harms the producer, and acknowledged that they want a less efficient market.
- JakeTheAndroid 7y agoif a single bot controller can buy up an entire stock of limited items legitimately, that is malicious as that company is not longer able to meet the needs of their consumers. That's bad for the company.
- ikeboy 7y agoIf it's profitable for anyone to resell, that implies the company priced below the market price and there would be a shortage without scalpers. So the company is unable to meet the needs of its customers in any event. Scalpers just make it somewhat more efficient.