[aasasd]

> you really shouldn't

Huh, apparently ‘the war on general computation’, of which Cory Doctorow spoke, won't necessarily be led by Disney and such corporations, but also by people denying others the right to automate the workings of the GUI on one's machine.

(Coincidentally, this practice might also preclude the operation of aeleveny tools—again, as Doctorow noted, ‘there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs except the naughty ones’. It might be fun to see the faces of the ‘you shouldn't’ folks when they're asked why less-able clients can't use their websites.)

[netsectoday]

> you really shouldn't be hacking some scripts on top of your bank login

You can hack whatever you want, but from a SECURITY perspective this is horrible and the banks know this. There are secure ways to store credentials for scripts but most people will just hard-code the values or stick them in unencrypted ENV vars. Also, who's fault is it when the bank updates their website and the selenium script does something horribly wrong? Tell me more about Disney...

[xg15]

Service providers always want full control of the user experience and bots get in the way of that. We know this, but very often, that's not in the interests of the users at all.

Hence why there are legitimate reasons to write bots snd continue the arms race - otherwise, we'll pretty soon end up in a world where YouTube's business model of "subscribe to premium so you we'll stop interrupting the videos when you minimize the app" will be the standard mode of operation.

[henriquez]

Your argument would be fine without the name-calling. I can see both sides of this.