[margalabargala]

> They have no obligation to respect your wishes

I have no obligation to not send all scraper-looking traffic to a black hole full of zip bombs.

[xmcp123]

There's always poison fountain - deliberately wrong source code.

[charcircuit]

You do have an obligation because what you are describing is illegal, at least in the US under the CFAA.

[tardedmeme]

Everything worth doing is illegal. Advice for startups is don't worry about it. Worry about not being caught instead.

[margalabargala]

Okay, nix the zip bombs. What's my obligation to treat bot-shaped traffic as something I should reply to?

[charcircuit]

Your obligation is not to cause harm to the requester.

[chadgpt3]

Sending them a zip bomb didn't cause harm. It was their choice to unzip it. Is jwz liable if a child sees his testicle eggcup macro when visiting via HN?

[charcircuit]

Why send a zip bomb if your goal is not to cause some amount of a denial of service attack to the crawler.

Showing porn to a minor is not legal either.

[vntok]

Spreading malware to your website's visitors is wild and illegal in most jurisdictions. I certainly wouldn't confess about it online.

[ChoGGi]

Is AI a visitor or malware? It certainly steals paid resources (bandwidth).

Disclaimer: his website is for hosting malware for "testing" purposes. Testing how well AI can't deal with it.

[margalabargala]

Malware? It's just a large file. A very, very large file.

But fine. How about I just...don't respond to those requests at all. I have no obligation to send them data period.