If anyone else did this then some useless lawyer would be activated from their slumber to send out OSS devs cease & desists based on supposed violations of sacred terms and conditions.
This project is the future that we were promised but it is under threat by supposed legal challenges.
What if the demo asked the email to be sent as a message via whatsapp desktop instead? That would (according to their anti-freedom lawyers) constitute an offense worthy of legal threats.
The tech industry needs to reckon with ToS trolls before it's too late.
Rules for thee not for me. Scraping for instance is bad only when other people do it.
Technically speaking though, user facing websites are built with quite weak UI accessibility in mind. Partly to prevent others bots from using it. I worry less about the LLM/AI particularities, and more about adding yet another comprehensive layer to the stack. It’d not exactly be standing on solid foundation.
During the 2010s Web 2.0 there was a brief moment where open APIs and such were trending, which was a bit of rejuvenation of interoperability across companies, domains, applications etc. To simplify we can call it cross-app interactions, like auto hotkey, Automator, etc. An LLM controlled broker falls in that domain as well. But now that “closed binary fuck you” model came back industry wide, it’s almost impossible to build such things. (It’s hard enough to build integrations when people are cooperating. When they’re actively adversarial, things generally break quickly, if they work at all)
Just wait until application designers start to create machine-hostile interfaces to prevent vision models from recognizing what to click, or introducing rate limits on UI interactions. There is a strong desire to control how one's product (app, website, or whatever) is used.
Me neither but I’ve also scraped sites and seen this is very commonplace. Especially the last couple of years it’s been ramped up. Twitter and Reddit locking down api access. You know that gchat and facebook chat were both open back in the day? Today you’re lucky if you can use a niche web browser to access a large web site. So I don’t mean accessibility necessarily in terms of human accessibility, but in a broader sense. Some of the anti-bot measures are creating problems for humans as well.
I don't understand why anything in the demo would count as T&C violation. Who would be offended on what basis? If I can automate my desktop with a preprogrammed script, then this is not different.
As I said, if the demo opened Whatsapp and sent a message then their lawyers would harass the OSS developer of the tool with C&Ds and they'd consider it a breach of their ToS and block your account.
This is not hyperbole, that's what they will do based on precedent. And it doesn't matter about the validity of their claims because the calculation as a victim to these legal threats is that this $800bn megacorp is able to ruin your life for what amounts to less than pocket change and these big law firms are incentivized to come after you.
Adversarial interop should be an inalienable digital human right. This way companies will be forced to give API access or risk interoperability being legally scraped against their will.
This project is the future that we were promised but it is under threat by supposed legal challenges.
What if the demo asked the email to be sent as a message via whatsapp desktop instead? That would (according to their anti-freedom lawyers) constitute an offense worthy of legal threats.
The tech industry needs to reckon with ToS trolls before it's too late.