Same old same old. Only these days it gets done by building data centres in across the river New Jersey and as-the-bird-flies microwave links between New York and London...
Front running is where you get information about a trade before the trade happens, illegally, and get your own trade in first with advance knowledge that you should not have. That's still 100% against the law whether a computer is involved or not. Do it and you will go to jail. If you got your information from the public market because it is a thing that already happened, then ok. That is really just fine. Other laws might be being broken somehow in other ways or they might not but seriously that's the whole point of a public market and using public information. Everyone has the chance to react as fast as they can.
In the case of this sort of information-speed arbitrage you're not making any stock analysis decisions, you just know an index has to respond a precise way to the stocks within it, and you're able to beat this information to the exchange and buy it ahead of the change.
An analogy would be to redefine all killings (lawful or otherwise) as "murder". It's not helpful. Words have specific meanings in specific contexts, so lets stop overloading them so much when we don't have to.
I hope this clears things up.
Eg https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/priva...
I've worked for an options market maker, chasing nanoseconds of latency improvements. If you want racks in the exchange data center, you have to pay more to be on one side of the room vs. the other, because the latency improvement for being a couple hundred feet closer actually matters.
https://hackaday.com/2018/05/12/hft-on-hf-you-cant-beat-it-f...
https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/ (Many people who work in HFT are quite familiar with it.)
It's an entertaining and fascinating "view of the inside."