https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/musk-sues-data-scrapers-blames-them-for-twitters-impaired-user-experience/
X Corp. lawsuit says unidentified scrapers forced Twitter to impose rate limits.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/446751
Alternative title: Musk sues data scrapers, blames them for Twitter’s “impaired user experience”
See: SCO Group's secretly Microsoft-backed lawsuits against Novell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group%2C_Inc._v._Novell%2C_Inc.
...and if you don't believe me about being, "secretly backed by Microsoft":
http://techrights.org/2009/08/07/sco-and-anti-linux-microsoft-lawsuits/
Maybe if Twitter provided a reasonably priced API, people wouldn't have to resort to scrapers.
Scrapers aren't ever going to use an API, but Twitter could have just blocked unrecognized traffic if they wanted. I'm sure it's covered by the TOS.
i think what the previous dude said is, people wouldn't not have resorted to use scrapping if there was a good api. one of the major reason people/organisations choose scrapping is because it's better than paying insane amounts of money for insane(ly low)amount of api calls.
There was a good API before Elon essentially shut it down. But that is irrelevant.
The reason mass data scraping like OpenAI does would not rely on an API is because they are getting data from the entire Internet (and other sources that aren't online). They want raw data and they want as much and as varied as possible. It's much easier, cheaper and practical to build tools that scrape websites generically than to integrate with thousands of completely independent and different APIs.
It's the same reason that Reddit complaining about "AI taking all of our data" is bullshit. "AI" is just a convenient excuse and the most recent tech buzzword.
They are largely mad because of how effective the AI is. If data was being used just to improve Swype for texting people would care less. I care more about artists' complaints about getting replaced than big tech companies complaining that content they didn't create is being used to create things.
Also I decided to read openAI's GPT2 paper and they were pretty clear about their created dataset:
"Instead, we created a new web scrape which emphasizes document quality. To do this we only scraped web pages which have been curated/filtered by humans. Manually filtering a full web scrape would be exceptionally expensive so as a starting point, we scraped all outbound links from Reddit, a social media platform, which received at least 3 karma. This can be thought of as a heuristic indicator for whether other users found the link interesting, educational, or just funny.
The resulting dataset, WebText, contains the text subset of these 45 million links."
That's a nice sized dataset from real people that's already somewhat filtered by quality. They were totally scraping Reddit very specifically and now that people see it's effective, anyone else who wants to make their own chatgpt or wants to improve their models will do the same.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
It's worth noting here for context that:
Twitter can remove their servers from the public facing internet if they don't want the traffic.
Twitter very much does not want that to happen. Remember two weeks ago when Musk reversed his decision to block anyone but registered users from seeing tweets because Google started removing links to Twitter since they were dead?
Right-wingers don't just want to be bigoted assholes with megaphones, they want to make sure decent people have to hear them too.
Yeah, people think this is like trying to stop drive by bots that are looking for PHP vulnerabilities, it isn't.
Usually you are attempting to stop someone who is spending their entire day trying to scrape your site. It's a full time job trying to stop them and even then it's a cat and mouse game at best.
Still don't think Elon is going to get anywhere with this though.
The same way any large web service would identify a sudden increase in traffic, whether malicious or not. For the servers I manage, we end up dealing with more unintentionally out-of-control bots than we do legitimate hack or DDoS attempts.
Yes. They had to reverse that because they fucked it up so bad. This seems like the follow up to that - they couldn't block people from accessing their data without making it worthless, so now they're going to harass anyone getting their data without paying through the nose for it, even though it has to be publicly available to be useful, in hopes that it will force idiots to pay in.
Pretty sure Elon knows this is unwinnable. Data scraping isn't illegal, unless you can prove that the scrapers intended to cause harm to Twitter in the process. He's doing this to harass whoever made him make an embarrassing mistake with the rate limits. He has a history of spending a stupid amount of money to (unsuccessfully) save face.
Also maybe twitter could show damages (and even then) but what the fuck kinda damages would this company have to be able to have a valid case?
Yeah each scrape is probably just as efficient as a page load (if not more due to caching).
You can't complain about other people impairing user experience when you've had like 3 different instances of tanking the servers all by yourself.
"You can't impair the user experience! Only I can do that!" -Elon "Emerald Mine Money" Musk
It is amazing to remember what Twitter was before Musk, and what it is now. This is one bloke, supposedly a business genius
Is this like the moment in the dictatorship when the enemy is some outside force and not the incompetence of the leadership?
The failing to pay your bills is impairing the user experience.
That and continuing to cater to brain-rotted conservatives.