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One time when I lived in Rome, I was near Ostia and I saw a public water fountain. The funny thing though was that someone had attached a water hose to the wate
by umvi 6y ago
One time when I lived in Rome, I was near Ostia and I saw a public water fountain. The funny thing though was that someone had attached a water hose to the water output and then ran the hose into their house. Free water!
"If there's a publicly exposed service with no authentication or security in place, it is not the fault of an individual for using it. It's clearly not illegal, and neither is it unethical. If [the city of Rome] wants to protect their [water service] from unauthorized use, they are perfectly capable of doing so."
I disagree that it is not unethical. I would hope most people recognize that abusing a free service to avoid a paid service is unethical.
- colordrops 6y agoYour analogy is flawed in that there are likely laws protecting used of the water of that fountain. Not so with an open service on the internet. Further more, it's not an ocean sized fountain run by a monopolistic corporation and one of the only places to get water, with simple technology to restrict who can get water if the corporation so decided.
- umvi 6y ago> Your analogy is flawed in that there are likely laws protecting used of the water of that fountain. Not so with an open service on the internet. All analogies are flawed. I would hope the difference between something being ethical and unethical is more than just a law. Again... abusing a free service to avoid a paid service is (usually) unethical and dishonest, regardless of legality. Doesn't matter if you are plumbing your house with public water intended for tourists, filling your backpack with all the honey packets from all the Chick-Fil-A's so you never have to buy honey again, or buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of $1 coins from the government with credit cards so you can profit off of taxpayers. It's abuse of a free service, and it's unethical.
- colordrops 6y agoIt's only unethical if you strongly support the current economic policies and incentive structures for large corporations. I and many others do not. They do not deserve the tax perks and monopolies granted them and their banker financiers that let them build so much wealth on the backs of the lower classes. Also, why don't they just protect their endpoints with authentication? It would be simple. They choose not to. There is not an easy way to protect public water or Chick-fil-A honey packets, so ethics is the main mechanism. Not so with internet services. There are countless well tested mechanisms for this.
- Fogest 6y ago"endpoints with authentication" -- Because you don't have to login to watch YouTube... It's not easy to block third party access, it often ends up being a whack-a-mole style game where you block it and then they just get in using a different method. YouTube already has been doing this. On top of this you are taking money from the creators of the content, not just YouTube itself and violating their terms of service. If a service tells you not to do it, and you still do it anyway it's quite clear you are being unethical.
- colordrops 6y agoWhether a corporation tells people to do something or not is not a direct mapping to whether something is ethical or not. It wouldn't be wack-a-mole if they just had proper authentication instead of using the freemium model. It's their choice to open up their APIs to unauthenticated anonymous users due to their shady advertising revenue model, and the costs are calculated in their models. BTW, I've never once read or signed any agreement with YouTube, so I have no idea what you are talking about when you say "the service tells you not to do it". Even if there was more prominent messaging of the sort, it's not the job of the user to twist themselves in knots to assist wealthy rent seekers' desires to apply ancient business models based on physical property to modern information systems.
- Fogest 6y agoI see you chose to ignore part of my reply mentioning the creators you are taking content from without paying. YouTube does not care as much, but the creators are the ones hurt the most, not YouTube.
- colordrops 6y agoThis points more to a problem with the monopolistic walled garden rather than the user. It's like saying a slave won't have food if you shoot the slave owner.
- ehsankia 6y ago> in that there are likely laws protecting used of the water of that fountain We're talking about unethical, not illegal.
- colordrops 6y agoRight, that's covered by the second part of the post that was not quoted by you.