Read Scraping A Public Website Doesn’t Violate the CFAA, Ninth Circuit (Mostly) Holds by Orin S. Kerr

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down a groundbreaking decision today on the federal computer hacking law,  the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).  In HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, the court held that scraping a public website is likely not a CFAA violation.
Under the new decision, violating the CFAA requires “circumvent[ing] a computer’s generally applicable rules regarding access permissions, such as username and password requirements,” that thus “demarcate[]” the information “as private using such an authorization system.”  If the data is available to the general public, the court says, it’s not an unauthorized access to view it—even when the computer owner has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the visitor telling them not to visit the website.
This is a major case that will be of interest to a lot of people and a lot of companies.  But it’s also pretty complicated and easy to misunderstand.   This post will go through it carefully, trying to explain what it says and what it doesn’t say.

This decision is critical to maintaining an open web, at least in the United States.
Read Why I Have a Website and You Should Too by Jamie TannaJamie Tanna

A persuasive look at the many reasons why you should have your own website, and some of the benefits it will bring you.

This post has a lot of takeaways for non-developers and even non-technical people. You don’t need to be a geek to have a website.

Personally, I think it’s vitally important, for example, to use a website to maintain a record of all the free accessibility testing you do as a person with disabilities. While I’d rather that the “f*ck you, pay me” approach be adopted instead of every organization and its brother jumping on mailing lists and social media asking for free work from persons with disabilities, maintaining a record of all the free work you do that can be used later to complete the experience section of your resume is the next best thing.

Bookmarked Under-Engineered Text Boxen by Adrian Roselli (Adrian Roselli)

This is the latest, and not last, in my informal series of posts on under-engineered controls. Generally I am looking at the minimum amount of CSS necessary to style native HTML controls while also retaining or improving accessibility and honoring different user preferences.

Glad to see I’m not the only one who uses “boxen” as plural for “boses”.