Microsoft is promoting a whole page full of offline browsers just to help people steal shit.
They gleefully promote it too:
Quickly and efficiently download entire sites or sections of a site for viewing and browsing when you are not connected to the Internet.Just what we need is a major corporation sticking some shit like this in front of people's faces that may not even be aware such tools existed in the first place. That's right, America's largest software company has become the Pied Piper of scraping websites.
Any words of caution about copyright, that your IP may get banned for abusive practices or anything else?
Hell no.
Hey Microsoft, you gonna pay for my web hosting bill when the assholes that download all these offline browsers blow my fucking server out of the water with ridiculously high bandwidth abuse?
I didn't think so.
Well, fuck you Microsoft, just fuck you.
3 comments:
This may piss you off but offline browsing is not stealing. It is no different than videotape or tivo. If they take that content and publish it somewhere then that is stealing. It also is not stealing by using your bandwidth. I agree it is stealing if they try to hide what they are doing but as long as they follow the robots.txt they are not stealing. At least you can stop people from offline browsing the TV stations can't.
Ogle,
You miss the point copyright aside...
The TV bandwidth and server resources are the same no matter what you record.
When you DOWNLOAD a website, like mine with 40K+ pages, it puts a strain on the server and a huge dent in my bandwidth.
Fact is that most webmasters are naive and don't even know it's going on, don't have robots.txt, have no clue and get taken for a wild ride.
BTW, on MY website it IS against my TERMS to crawl the site without permission, plainly posted which they will also steal...
At a minimum, we have a license violation ;)
Look on the bright side: since it's a Microsoft product, it will be utterly insecure.
Their loss due to Identity Theft >>>> your loss due to bandwidth.
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