Slashdot Mirror
Should You Break TOS Because Work Asks You?
An anonymous reader writes "My boss recently assigned me a project that was all his idea, with two basic flaws that would require me to break multiple web sites' Terms of Service (TOS). Part requires scraping most of the site, parsing the data and presenting it as our own without human intervention. While we're safe on copyright issues, clearly scraping like this is normally not allowed. At times it might also put a load on those sites. The other is, for lack of better words, a 'load balancing' part that requires using multiple free accounts instead of purchasing space and CPU time for less than $2,000 USD per month. The boss sees it as 'distributed' computing when in reality it's 'parasitic.'
My question is: am I wrong about the ethics? If I do need to walk, how best can I handle it without damaging my reputation and future employment opportunities?"
And here is a good example of how Slashdot's moderation system is ineffective.
We have multiple +5 Insightful posts on this thread. Some of them tell this person that what he is doing is wrong, and then there's this one which goes the other direction completely. Yet both are treated equally as +5 Insightful.
Had Slashdot's system allowed scores above 5 then it would be more like a dynamic poll (and be more representative of what the populace thinks about the issue) than this hard-capped false ceiling that we have now.
As far as Karma (a useless stat anyway imho) you could still cap how much one can gain on a single post, but allow the score of the post to be unlimited.
Seriously, coding this in would take, what, ten seconds?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
So only women think that you are overrated?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.