Explicitly telling some junior software developer in China that he can call an API for free an unlimited number of times, then afterwards calling it abuse and him and a-hole dev is definitively a bit of an a-hole thing to do in my view.
No, effectively DDOS-ing a service just because it says it's free and unlimited is a dick move
People like those are a big reason for why we can't have nice things
It's quite possible that a random just contracted to write software for some embedded system, with no context how many thousands or millions of devices it would run on. So they looked up OP's site, sees "supports unlimited requests and is free", shrugs and just writes implements the code.
Or, the dev might be told the system only had a couple thousand users, then somebody else copied the code and deployed it on a million devices.
You don't know the story, and I think the moral here is not to blame a faceless Android dev from China, but to implement quotas and controls and avoid falsely boast on your website that your service has unlimited scalability.
Personally I would never rely on a service like this since it's 100% obvious it would be sudpectible to junior developers misunderstanding what is reasonable usage.
If you're putting up an API assuming all consumers will consume it in some limited and reasonable way, then you need to rethink things a bit.
However, would you still call it "detached from real life" if suddenly the manager from McDonalds starts showing up daily, filling a 100-gallon drum with ketchup because it is "free"? In law there is such a concept as a "reasonable person", which exists precisely to avoid people abusing loopholes like this.
What does this sentence even mean lmao
Autism-level consideration for what one says or not, if you say something is unlimited I'm going to take your word for it. If it's limited, tell me the limits. If it's free to a point, tell me the point. If I need to bust out the CC, tell me I need to bust out the CC.
Don't say your thing is free and unlimited if you can't handle unlimited traffic for free..
Hacker News would be on the complete opposite end of the anger scale if this was an ISP telling their users they can't actually use the "unlimited" they promised, haha
>if you say something is unlimited I'm going to take your word for it
The sentence refers to people like you. It doesn't make you incredibly clever to consider those sentences literally, like small children or those with under-developed empathy and theory of mind often do
It just makes you an inconsiderate numpty
>Hacker News would be on the complete opposite
Yes, there are lots of people on the tech scene that just don't get ideas like "don't abuse it", or "considering the consequences for other people"
It's not abuse if you say it's free and unlimited and someone uses it freely and unlimitedly! This is why sites have acceptable use policies and terms of service. This is why most sites don't say their tool is free and unlimited.
It is what those words mean. It is literal. If I read an acceptable use policy and then went on to use it in a way that is not allowed that would be silly.
> The sentence refers to people like you
> It just makes you an inconsiderate numpty
Speaking of "like small children or those with under-developed empathy and theory of mind", I'm not sure these were needed. Can we just discuss things? I promise my mind is open whether you insult it or not, I'm just not convinced by the argument at this point :)
I hope you got a nice slither of dopamine out of namecalling though in any case, haha
>I'm not sure these were needed
The original wording I was gonna use before deciding to be more considerate was "small children and autists"
If you can think of another short descriptor for "people who obtusely take things literally and are unable or refuse to account for other people's state of mind", I'm happy to use those instead
>I hope you got a nice slither of dopamine out of namecalling though in any case
In fact, it was far more than a sliver!
Upon further reflection, I think I got a lot of repressed anger for never having smacked people who can't behave unless they are explicitly told to do so, who actually need the "within reason" clause everywhere, and who are happy to play with technicalities when it comes to justifying their behaviour
I dunno if my mind is changed just yet but if I'm honest with myself adding it to a widely deployed app would be in my 'dick move' category.
Just set your own up, or use a DNS method which comes with the bonus of built in caching.
For what it's worth I've never actually taken anyone up on their unlimited offers, I try to keep my services neat and tidy :)
Got to love the cleverness with the people who design services with the assumption that there are no such people and then goes on to hackernews and cries when a kid in China breaks their site. Lol.
Insanely incompetent.
Besides that, odds are that this is malware of some sort hitting this service to get the infected device's public ip to phone it home for use in a command and control situation, and if so, they don't care that they are slamming this service.
Mobile devs who care about this type of thing will not need to make any sort of outbound connection anywhere to get the device ip address, it's right on the device already. These what's my ip sites are used by script kiddies and malicious software running on anything
"There's always an individual with autism-level consideration for what one says, isn't there?" isn't needed and I'd advise you to be more professional, or at least more human.
If you lie in your marketing material then you may put yourself in a mess. Big surprise.
If your audience is millions of users it’s millions * millions, not cool.
That's pretty crazy viewpoint.
Yes.
> That's pretty crazy viewpoint.
Companies that make millions of devices while abusing free APIs without giving anything back are assholes. Hmm, let me think?
No, it’s not.
Saying that someone is an asshole for using an API in a way which clearly should be possible according to the documentation is a very clear sign of that person being a junior developer who don't have actual real world experience of anything except toy projects. Any developer with some years of experience would understand that this would happen and he should not be surprised over it.
It's very possible that no one involved in this is even aware of this issue, so automatically calling them assholes is somewhat incompetent at best.
If a service is free & "unlimited" and they start using it, and you get mad, then that is not their fault, it's yours.
> Supports unlimited requests and is free.
Typically "unlimited" is more than a million.