Hacker News Reader

Comment by cxr | Hacker News Reader

In order to create the data source that LinkedIn's extension-fingerprinting relies on to work, someone (at LinkedIn*?) almost certainly violated the Chrome Web Store TOS—by (perversely*) scraping it.

* if LinkedIn didn't get it from an existing data source

View on HN

Programmers don't appreciate the fact that you can just violate terms of service. You can just do it. It's okay. The police won't come after you. Usually.

Indeed. I read a lot of comments like these one you are responding on HN. It seems like there is a type of person who thinks that writing down what their rules are has some magical power.

“This isn’t what it was intended for”. Who cares?

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away I would encounter warnings on pirating websites saying “If you are an FBI agent you are not allowed to continue on this site”. Imagine their utter disbelief and shock if they were to be arrested by an FBI agent that clicked past the warning anyway.

I agree is must be programmers as a type that like rules a lot and, they think, what a perfect world it could be if people would follow them.

I'd ask who you think you have me confused for or where you got that quote from, but I know how little it matters insofar as getting you to recognize whatever delusion led to your comment.

I am sorry, I wasn't reacting to you I was reacting to the commenter who said:

"Programmers don't appreciate the fact that you can just violate terms of service."

> comments like these one you are responding

That's my comment.

I think the point is more "in order to prevent people from scraping their site, which is against their ToS, they scraped some other site, against its ToS".

Read "in order to have more money, I did things that caused other people to have less money"

When someone who sees the world through a lens of morality notices somebody operating without morality, it is startling.

And it deserves a call out! The benefits to being so cynical that you’re numb to it come with a lot of tradeoffs

3000 extensions is few enough that a small team could download each extension manually over a few months. You don't need to scrape at all.

In the first place, no one said they needed to, only that they probably did.

Secondly, it's not "3000 extensions". They didn't somehow magically divine that the 2953 (+/-47) extensions we see here were the ones that they needed to download in order to be able to exploit the content-accessible resources described in their extension manifest. They looked at a much larger set, and it got filtered down to these 2953 that satisfied the necessary criteria.

Lol no, did you even read the list? You could pay someone to just search "LinkedIn" and "talent" and "recruiting" on the chrome web store and download each extension. It's probably harder to automate this than it is to do it manually. This is something you could develop in an afternoon and pay a small team of people to do for pennies on the dollar. Even ten thousand extensions is nothing. Spread that over years and this is trivial.

For someone choosing to be so obnoxiously condescending, you are excruciatingly stupid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com