The Ethics of Scraping

I’ve recently been given a commission to do a piece of coding involving grabbing information from another website and displaying it in a different manner. Obviously I won’t say much more about the brief – don’t want to annoy the customer or expose myself!

The brief got me wondering – how legal is it to grab content from another website? I guessed it was probably another one of the ‘grey areas’ that surround the internets at the moment, however another issue concerned me slightly more… how ethical was it? My script essentially steals information from a website for use in other ways, that the original publisher has no control over. Since the website in question publishes no open API or content feeds for this purpose, surely they mustn’t want this information being scraped from them? The website being scraped is essentially just a collection of many different items, published by their own individual owners. Do they want the information scraped and re-published?

I’ve heard of another case from a friend (again, won’t get into details) whereby a company is keeping a tight fist around its data. This is sort of understandable, but again the website in question is aggregating many different peoples data. Is the website being anti-competitive  by not releasing APIs?

I will sleep better once this script is out of development and off my server – I know I wouldn’t like it if someone else was doing this to my website! However – the customer is always right, and I won’t disappoint!

To kill a… Fiat Punto?!

Picture the scene, me driving happily up the M6 on Friday evening on my way to the Network Gathering in Windermere this weekend, when all of a sudden – disaster strikes!

*Dun dun dunnnnn*

Warning lights on the dashboard, engine starts to make funny noises, so I pull over into the Lancaster services. And then the car dies. Turn the key: nada. Its deceased… steam pouring from under the bonnet.

Some very kind gentlemen offers to lend me a hand pushing the car (I was blocking the slipway!) when to my embarrassment – the Highway Patrol pull up! Being pushed into a parking spot followed by a jeep with lots of flashing lights on… nice.

Anyway, 40 minutes later the AA pull up, the guy shoves some water into the engine, and off I toddle again. Make it about 2 miles down the road when it happens again! This time he decides its the head gasket that has gone, so off I go again, only this time being towed!

Arrive back in Poynton late on Friday night, and end up abandoning the car in the seediest part of Poynton Industrial Estate because the sodding garage is locked up for the weekend!

Cut to today, car goes into garage, I get told it’ll cost £550 to repaid. Plus the insurance is due up – another £1100. Bye bye all my money for uni for next term!

Skype for iPhone released

Skype have just launched their official iPhone client in the UK! Woop!

My first reaction was definitely one of ‘wow’ – the interface is slick, and a quick phone call to their ‘test service’ (didn’t want to wake anyone!) revealed the call quality to be excellent, although it seemed that a little part of my test message was dropped.

Only problem I can see with it is the lack of cell network support, I’d really like to be able to make calls on the go without having Wi-Fi nearby. Other ‘nice to have’ would be the use of background processing on the iPhone, but that is Apples’ fault obviously. Maybe push notifications could be used somehow in this app? We shall wait and see…

My new addiction

And they say small things amuse small minds? Never been more true!

Found an absolute gem in the iPhone App store the other day: Flight Control [iTunes link]. Here’s my go at a little review!

The UI is much smoother than I’ve seen on many iPhone games, simplistic menu options and tutorials make this game so easy to dive in to. The basic idea of the game is to guide planes onto a runway (you can probably see why I like it already!), whilst making sure they don’t collide with each other. It’s harder than it sounds!

There are 4 types of aircraft in this version: light aircraft, helicopters, medium and large jets. All of which move at a slightly different speed – the controllers nightmare! I’m sure nothing this drastic would occur in real life though (aircraft landing within split seconds of each other?!), or else I’d only be able to land 66 planes before killing someone!

The use of the touch-and-drag interface on the iPhone coupled with clever use of the on-screen graphics and onboard sound make the game extremely easy to use, it takes mere seconds to get started.

Overall, I’ve no regrets on spending 59p on this app, and I can’t wait to see how it will be expanded on in future releases

P.S. I wanted to include some screenshots, but no matter how hard I try, the iPhone won’t let me take them off the internal memory :-(

Published!

Woop! I’ve had one of my projects (Twit2MSN) published by the good people at Messenger Plus! Live :-D

The script can be found at: http://www.msgpluslive.net/scripts/view/520-Twit2MSN

I hope to be able to get version 1.2 done this week, and get that published soon

Last.fm Boffin

http://www.last.fm/group/Audioscrobbler+Beta/forum/30705/_/510180

Been trying out the ‘Boffin’ tool from Last.fm this evening – and I’m astounded!

Basically, it scans your PC for music, groups it by tag, and then lets you play only music with a specific tag. For instance, I’ve had “Trance” selected for a while now, and it just keeps shoving on amazing tunes I didn’t even know I had!

Obviously, its on an Alpha release, but the technology demonstrated behind it is superb. Didn’t take long to scan my entire music library, and did a pretty good job (so far) of getting the tags and grouping them.

Its also nice to see what my music library mainly consists of (hope the picture works!):

Can’t wait to see this incorporated into the main Last.fm program!

Invaders must Die

Downloaded the new Prodigy album yesterday, and I’m currently in two minds as to whether I like it or not.

The title track is pretty awesome, and ‘Omen’ is epic (I owned that before), however a lot of the other stuff just isn’t their style, neither old school Prodigy or new-electro Prodigy.

I’d say I do regret buying this one, but its definitely one to get for free (not that I encourage that!)