Like a lot of things in the UK, the problem isn't the harshness of the law, it's the lack of prosecution. It doesn't matter what the punishment is when criminals know that the crime is extremely unlikely to be investigated or make it to trial.
The UK allows private prosecution, if it was a real problem the insurance companies would be using it, instead of attempting to make the state pay for it.
You still need to be able to realise something is fraudulent and pursuing prosecution has a significant cost to the insurer that is likely to be a net-loss financially. Not to mention the reputational risk of the public believing you prosecuted someone wrongly.
I have a gold wedding band and can have it resized if needed. Also, I don't wear my wedding band when exercising, and that doesn't reduce its utility for me much. But a health tracker ring is arguably at its most useful when worn during exercise, to having to take it off while working out is not great. This isn't limited to weight lifting, as others hav noted. It also applies to tennis or other racquet sports where it gets in the way, and to anyone whose hands swell significantly during exercise. I find that even long walks make my fingers swell quite a bit. So I'd either have to get a ring that's loose during everyday wear or take it off during intensive exercise.
Correct:Also, archive.* has actively edited archived sites to promote their agenda. Why folks continue to use them confuses me. One would think the big wikipedia purge would curb such behavior.
They bulk replaced one string (a name) with another one across many archived pages, and added malicious code to all archive pages that would rapidly send requests to gyrovague.com in an attempt to DDOS them.
Just out of curiosity, how do we know that what is in the Wikipedia comments is accurate? I have no skin in the game. I was just wondering. Anybody can post anything on Wikipedia comments. I find it odd that Ars Technica would use that as a source. Maybe it's fine for gossip and speculation but it shouldn't be in Ars Technica then.
And you obviously have no reason to believe me, but I was following this when it was happening at the start of this year and can confirm that the DDoS script and archive text replacements really did happen.
Convenience as a higher order motivator than disgust at the bad behavior of archive.{today,ph,...} mentioned elsewhere, I think is the point of the comment to which you replied.
That isn’t the point being discussed. The point being discussed is that it’s bad form to abuse a service (archive.org) that is provided for free, for the public good in order to run commercial scraping operations.
Yes, arguably, and for reasons I already gave. I’d genuinely spend a bit more time reading and thinking rather than replying. Your replies are pithy but you’re missing details and frankly making cognitive mistakes. (Apologies if this seems harsh, I don’t mean it as an insult, but this thread has blown up entirely unnecessarily- and yes, I know I’m not helping either!)
It is different, precisely because the end result is not the same - one broadly benefits the public while the other doesn't.
Substitute almost any disruptive public service to see the issue with your line of reasoning. For example - you seem to think that [ bulldozing private property ] to "construct an emergency fire break" is somehow different than [ bulldozing private property ] for any other reason.
Never mind that the sort of scraping being objected to is actually harmful to service health while what the wayback machine does is almost entirely unnoticeable.
The minuscule traffic generated by the wayback machine, which serves to preserve the content for years to come, is completely incomparable to the scrapers that hammer every single href linked on a website.
I'm guessing you use search engines, right? Those use scrapers and have to use scrapers. It's how they work.
A "scraper" is simply an automated process that fetches URLs intended for display to a human, and processes it. The act of scraping doesn't imply anything about:
1. The frequency of the fetches,
2. The way that the resulting page is processed.
Search engines scrape. Again, they have to. Same goes for archive.org.
Thing is, there aren't tens of thousands of search engines/archive.orgs that can overload a site at once.
You missed the XCancel flamewar yesterday. The consensus is we should be allowed to scrape data and bypass login walls if we dislike the site owner, or feel we are owed free access by arbitrary criteria, it's sort of an unwritten rule. Unless of course it's Google or Meta properties we're talking about because that might impact RSUs.
No they don't. Archive.org is co-operative, it respects robots.txt and allows deletion. It's also very slow. Archive.* is adversarial and archives sites that don't like it. That's why the FBI is trying to take it down.
Given that the root of the discussion is about Internet Archive being hit with huge traffic and not the functionalities provided by Wayback Machine, it very much is a distinction with a difference.
Internet Archive's traffic may not matter to you, but that's the main topic of this discussion, regardless of what you care or use website archival tools for.
They are 2 different services, run by different people, one goes out of their way to bypass paywalls while the other doesn't, one is banned by Wikipedia and the other isn't, etc.
I think it's a distinction worth making.
Not to mention that the Wayback Machine itself isn't exactly a good tool to bypass paywalls as most paid sites don't let them archive paywalled content anyway.
Yeah, you're mistaken. One archives web pages, the other maintains a list of paid-access accounts and fetches information from behind paywalls as a service.
archive.org is the more straight-laced archive that doesn't circumvent sites that try to block it, and removes content they deem 'problematic' even if not illegal or requested by the site owner.
Meanwhile archive.today/ph/is/etc is the guerrilla alternative run by a die-hard datahoarder that seeks to archive the information itself, bypassing whatever blockers/login pages/whathaveyou to achieve the result.
It's nice to have both options. When I archive a site, I usually use both for added resiliency.
Define Europeans - us Poles absolutely understand the danger. In fact I'd say we're already at war with Russia, the way they attack our democracy, our institutions and politics daily. But someone in Portugal might not see it the same way we do.
Many, maybe even most Russians would like to be part of Europe, even if they would complain about the terms that would enable them to join pan European organizations. For now they are just potential Europeans.
Russia being part of Europe is a fact and not a preference. It seems like you want to see Europe as being united against Russia instead of this being an internal European conflict, which it is.
Russia's urban centers being mostly located on the European continent doesn't make Russia European. They are, deservingly for starting a war in Europe, excluded from treaties enabling free trade and free movement. That's not a conflict with consequences limited to Europe, and the US apparently needs to be reminded, no matter who pays for the wedding reception.
Yes, obviously - but I'm not sure how that's related. Or maybe actually in fact it speaks of the fact that some terrorist acts within Russia were commited by or on the order of the Russian government.
How do you know if it was a correct decision, if not through hindsight?
I stayed for over 4 years with my first girlfriend, and it felt like the correct decision at the time to try and make things work. In hindsight I really really wish I hadn't and I regret doing so. Is that any different?
Well, thank you for editing your post to not ask me if I only like microwave dinners.
I guess maybe it's a cultural thing - I've never seen anyone ever make mash potatoes with skins inside, and mash is a dinner staple here(in fact both here in the UK and Poland where I'm originally from).
I mean it reminds me of this article where a university professor asked his students if you can put a toaster in the dishwasher. Everyone replied no, obviously not. But as the professor replied - why not? Your average toaster works perfectly fine after going through a dishwasher, once properly dried. The answers ranged from "you're not supposed to" to "it's electric"(sic).
Just because we think you shouldn't do something doesn't mean you really can't is the takeaway I guess. We don't normally eat apple cores but you could and you'd be perfectly fine.
That “properly” is doing most of the heavy lifting there. The reason i would be weary of running the dishwasher with a toaster inside because i would worry that liquids trapped around thin electric conductors will corrode them. In othet words toasters were not designed to be easy to “properly” dry them out. And that damage might not be appearant right away or after a single wash.
In fact i wouldn’t trust the professor’s claim that the “toaster is perfectly fine” unless the professor conducted a lot of experiments. And even then i would only trust it with the toaster models he tested the claim with.
There even was a HN thread about this anecdote. I remember though that someone there made the counter argument that, yes, the toaster will be fine, but the dishwasher will be full of icky chemicals that you don't want to have on your dishes...
I've literally re-read it this year again and I couldn't disagree more, like, to a point where I wonder if we even read the same book. That book made me scared of dying when I was a child, and it made me appreciate the finality of death again now that I'm a grown up. There's nothing there that "glorifies" suicide - we could have a meta 2026 conversation about whether it's trying to say that yes, terminally ill people _should_ be able to decide what they want to do with their own lives, but that's not the message the book is going for(imho) - it's about bravery and loyalty even through the darkest of times, and about sacrifice(not suicide!!!) that comes from standing up for what you believe for. I don't personally believe in afterlife, but just as much as I loved the idea of naningalia when I was a child I still love it now - it gives children hope that even in the darkest moments of despair, there is something better waiting for them. The main character literally dies of ilness at the start, being bed bound for a long time without his loving brother and mother who doesn't know how to help him. The fact that he chooses to join Johnatan at the end in the trip to the "next" level of afterlife couldn't be further from glorifying suicide.
I read it this year to kids and the book says basically - no biggie, there is no death, you commit suicide to move to another level to be with your brother, you can't lose him, you have infinite lives in this videogame called Life.
And what if I F up the next level? no biggie, you just commit suicide again to be with him, there is no such thing as death, after each death you just move to another level.
So there is no risk at all you will lose your brother/relative, very F up thing to teach the kids, exactly opposite from what should make them scared of dying which is PERMANENT and there is no next level, where you can be with your family again.
That's such a dishonest read of the book I don't actually know what to say. To me, joining Johnathan at the end is the conclusion of the entire book of love, loyalty and bravery. Nowhere does it say "meh, no biggie just kill yourself". If that's the message you took from it then I strongly encourage you to sit down one evening and read it again. The biggest "proof" of it not being treated lightly is obviously all the inhabitants of the valley of cherries enduring, surviving and fighting against oppression instead of as "just killing themselves" to go to the next level. Even at the end Johnathan makes it sound like it's a rumour and maybe there is something there, but no one knows for sure, same as naningalia was at the beginning - people hope there is a better afterlife, but that's all it is - hope.
The "dishonest read" is a strange accusation. I think I was about 11 or 12 when I read the book and my reaction was - "err, so they just going to keep killing themselves willy-nilly? Well thats a bit dumb". I did like the story though and reread the book later several times, but the suicide bits felt always so weird.
Dishonest as in - it requires ignoring 99% of the book and focusing on the last couple pages, ignoring the entire struggle, bravery and sacrifice that lead to that moment.
>>err, so they just going to keep killing themselves willy-nilly
Well so your 12 year old self I guess missed the part where Johnathan was mortally wounded and about to die. The fact that Karl decides to join him in death is not a glorification of suicide, and I don't know how it could possibly be read that way. There's literally nothing willy-nilly about it - again, it doesn't appear to be some well known fact or even a fact at all that there is another "level" beyond that one - it's a guess, a hope at best. And Karl decides to jump with his dearest brother because(as made incredibly explicit multiple times throughout the entire book) - he loves him more than anything in the world and cannot imagine parting with him again. You make it sound like a video game where characters go "meh, let's try again" - it's absolutely not so. Before he died the first time, Karl wasn't sure if Johnathan was telling the truth about afterlife or if he wanted to just make him feel better in his ilness - and now that Johnathan was mortally wounded, Karl knew that only bravery and hope and love for the people you care about is worth living(and dying) for. That's what the book is about.
In my first comment I even made this explicit - I said that as an adult, this book makes me appreciate the finality of death - and you might ask, how is that so, given that in this world it looks like you can just keep dying over and over again only to go to higher planes of existence. And the answer is simple - with every death, you lose everything except for hope. Hope that you are going to wake up again in a better world and that the people you love will still be there. But you don't know. In my personal life I don't believe in it - but for children, this is the greatest gift - hope. Especially struggling ones that see no bright path anywhere - hope is all they have. And as you can tell, for majority of the book the hope was "we can win persevere against hardship and evil" and not "we can kill ourselves and hope the next world is better".
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