5 ms·
Okay, now is a good time to put my long-time idea on paper: we need a "cloud" power of attorney (not using the term digital so that people don't confuse it for
by smarx007 6y ago
Okay, now is a good time to put my long-time idea on paper: we need a "cloud" power of attorney (not using the term digital so that people don't confuse it for a regular one just signed digitally).
Key idea is this: access to internet and its services is essential (and at the web scale, so is automation), but bot abuse is real. It should be possible for any company to ban bots but then for a person with a account on the website to say: I am giving this tool my cloud power of attorney (best if signed through a digital govt id system, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID) and I take responsibility for what it does; you may not block it or erect CAPTCHAs for it, it scrapes/takes actions on your website on my behalf for my personal needs. This would make running a bunch of scripts on your own NUC or Pi an inalienable right while still allowing companies to fight unfair competition and plain simple DoS attacks.
- sundarurfriend 6y ago> It should be possible for any company to ban bots but then for a person with a account on the website to say: I am giving this tool my cloud power of attorney That's basically what API keys are, aren't they?
- smarx007 6y agoNo, many providers require to apply for API access, to pay for it, to be bound by T&C (some APIs require to you to cache data for max 24h) and also provide a crippled subset of actions through it. What I was saying is that none of that shall be allowed once a power of attorney has been given to a tool (obviously unless the website access is paid, then it's perfectly fine to charge for API access but then it should be offered on something like FRAND terms). Think of Chrome extensions detected and blocked by some websites, this would not be allowed under my proposal.
- kordlessagain 6y agoBuilding a distributed crowd sourced screen crawler.