Here's a nice little murmuring fart to start a ball rolling. Are Perl scripts which go out on the web and grab dynamic content and bring it back to the mother machine for processing "wrong"? I beleive the crux of the issue here is what you do with it.

Currently I have a number of bots that dutifully get up at 6:24:00 each morning and get the content for my "Personal Newspaper" Then when I get up in the morning, I pop into my internal webpage and there it is. Among other things, I see the web comics that I like the most, as well as the current Perlmonks $norm rating, along with the calculated thresholds of $norm*2, $norm*3 etc. In the Fun Stuff section of the Code Catacombs, there's a script which uses Lynx to get the daily content of User Friendly and forward it on elsewhere. Yohimbe, who says he is responsible for putting together the UF systems, said that he was wondering what all those lynx requests for graphics were about. I would be interested in hearing more about how much of it goes on, whether or not there are a lot of evil people vs. a lot of benign souls like us who use it for personal use, and if anything has been heard from other web comic companies, and their takes on it.

The chief reason that I feel so pasisonately about this, is a few months ago, my ISP shut me down because a publishing company had complained that I was reposting copyrighted information without permission. They had discovered my newspaper without my telling ANYONE about it, and not providing any links to the rest of the web for bots to follow. No questions asked, my ISP blew my connection out of the water, and THEN called me to inform me they had done so. It was only after I signed a note saying that I'd take it down that they let me back on. Nowatimes, my newspaper is protected with lots of passwords, and is scrambled unless someone comes and enters a command from within my system, whereupon it only unscrambles for 10 minutes. Needless to say I don't want this happening again, but my question still stands. Am I so wrong to be doing this? Do we all do it? Do the publishers really care about folks like us? I put this to you to discuss.

~W

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