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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • That doesn’t make any logical sense. You cant tie legal authorization to an unsaid implicit assumption, especially when that is in turn based on what you do with the content you’ve retrieved from a system after you’ve accessed and retrieved it.

    When you access a system, are you authorized to do so, or aren’t you? If you are, that authorization can’t be retroactively revoked. If that were the case, you could be arrested for having used a computer at a job, once you’ve quit. Because even though you were authorized to use it and your corporate network while you worked there, now that you’ve quit and are no longer authorized that would apply retroactively back to when you DID work there.


  • If I put a banner on my site that says “by visiting my site you agree not to modify the scripts or ads displayed on the site,” does that make my visit with an ad blocker “unauthorized” under the CFAA?

    How would you “authorize” a user to access assets served by your systems based on what they do with them after they’ve accessed them? That doesn’t logically follow so no, that would not make an ad blocker unauthorized under the CFAA. Especially because you’re not actually taking any steps to deny these people access either.

    AI scrapers on the other hand are a type of users that you’re not authorizing to begin with, and if you’re using CloudFlares bot protection you’re putting into place a system to deny them access. To purposefully circumvent that access would be considered unauthorized.