alt Hacker NewsEnough with playing around the issue. The way out of this mess is not to protect with tech that works but with principles and laws.
This is not a tech problem. This is about what should or should not be legal.
Nor it’s a question of having time to implement solution X or Y.
If someone attacks you yes, you should have better security but you also need to have legal recourse, or it will never stop.
Ddos is already illegal.
I am not a lawyer so don’t ask me for exact resources, which vary by country anyway, but stop treating scrapers as an inescapable force of nature.
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I agree in principle. The tech community naturally has a tendency to reach for tech solutions to societal problems. But without jurisdiction, laws are meaningless.
If you create a law that says you have to honour robots.txt files, what do you do if an IP from another country fails to do so?
The question is, even if you identify who is the source of the traffic, are they even in a place where you can realistically sue them? The problematic traffic generally is not the bots that identify themselves, but the ones that are using residential proxies and try to be a non-fingerprintable as possible.