Wolfram Alpha doesn't "get it"

http://blog.agiletortoise.com/post/3564424414/wolfram-alpha-doesnt-get-it

by agiletortoise • 15 years ago

187 100 15 years ago

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Full URL: http://blog.agiletortoise.com/post/3564424414/wolfram-alpha-doesnt-get-it

scott_s3• 15 years ago

Please submit full URLs only. We like to know where we are going.

agiletortoise4• 15 years ago

Sorry. For the record: http://blog.agiletortoise.com/post/3564424414/wolfram-alpha-...

joelhaus• 15 years ago

[off-topic] Assuming it was a shortened link, Twitter's new interface solved this issue by dynamically generating title="" tags that display the full URL on:hover.

Anyone aware of a good solution for this? Shortener API's + An open source script?

kragen6• 15 years ago

He says they are "totally within their rights", but he is wrong. He's making links to their web pages. They are not "totally within their rights" to try to forbid that.

torme2• 15 years ago

Not being combative, just genuinely curious, but how is this not legal? If it's part of their ToS it seems like it would be enforcable.

alextgordon• 15 years ago

You can put "Users may not breathe while using this website" in your ToS but that doesn't make it enforceable. A ToS has to have some basis in law.

JonnieCache2• 15 years ago

Are you sure of that? If so, you posses more certainty than most judiciaries/legislatures. It's a vexed and fraught issue.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Copyright_asp...

kragen6• 15 years ago

There may be cases where linking violates copyright (Total News seems reasonable, although that's really probably more of a trademark issue), but I think the main problem is that most judiciaries and legislatures are a bit unclear on how the internet works.

However, I'm also in a better position than judiciaries and legislatures, since I'm talking about right and wrong, not legal and illegal.

raganwald4• 15 years ago

As I read this, he's not making links to their web pages. He's deep linking to their content and displaying it within what appears to be a custom browser. While there is plenty of debate about the propriety of deep linking and whether sites have the right to bar deep linking, displaying content within a custom browser is analogous to 'framing' content without permission, and framing content a no-no.

Creating deep links to their content would be launching Mobile Safari with their content in it.

Now, it could be that after he talks to them and they have a look at his app, they decide that yes, he's framing their content but he does so in a manner they feel is in their best interests and is compatible with their business model as they see it. In which case, they will give him written permission to do so.

kragen6• 15 years ago

I'm dubious about this idea that web site owners have the right to dictate which web browsers their users are permitted to use to access their site, but it's certainly more colorable than a complaint about launching Mobile Safari with their page. It could be passing off, if nothing else.

jcarreiro2• 15 years ago

What is the difference between "linking" and "deep linking"? Whatever else W|A is, it is a web server and it responds to my requests by sending me web pages. Why does Wolfram get to decide for me which web browser I should use to view those pages?

hsuma• 15 years ago

The EFF has been doing some good work on TOS abuse. https://www.eff.org/issues/terms-of-abuse I'm sure they would be interested because this linking policy is absurd. There is no way a practice like this would be 'illegal' anywhere but on Apple's app store where I imagine Wolfram Alpha holds at least a little sway.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

Why doesn't Wolfram just block this? It would be a little bit of work, A naive solution is to use short-lived cookies. But there are more sophisticated means to ensure that users get to the result page via a query.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

They've always been pretty rent-seeking.

jwr2• 15 years ago

Seems to me the author doesn't get it. Wolfram Alpha specifies terms of service, which the author didn't read and subsequently violated.

jwr2• 15 years ago

I find it amusing that people downvote my comment. I guess it is much more rewarding to upvote overinflated stories about how Evil Wolfram Alpha "Doesn't Get It" (often without reading the story, I suspect). Makes for better drama.

Frankly, I would much rather read about a 2-bit adder implemented using 36 555 timers.

runningdogx• 15 years ago

You read every ToS for every service/product you use?

Community and social standards often trump legalese. For instance, most absurd restrictions in apartment rental agreements are not enforceable.

In this case, linking to another site, no matter how "deep" the link is, is common practice.

If WA really doesn't like it, they can prevent it by checking the referrer, or going even further by adding a pseudorandom token to their query page, switched every 5 minutes and valid for an hour or a day, and redirecting deep links which don't have a valid token.

Of course, doing that would probably kill some traffic they like, so they have a silly, selectively-enforced and probably unenforceable ToS clause instead.

I don't see any reason why such provisions need to be enforced legally, since they can be enforced technologically in most cases. Expanding the law because of laziness is a horrible precedent.

wnoise• 15 years ago

It's not clear to me why the author should be bound by terms of service that he never agreed to.

A web request is merely a communication with the web server. The server is free to do what it wills with such a request. If Wolfram doesn't want to respond to requests from the author's apps, that's well within their rights. Similarly if they do respond, it's because they explicitly set it up to so respond.

dpcan4• 15 years ago

You break the rules, you pay the consequences. Ignorance is NOT an excuse.

He's "in his situation" (edit) with Wolfram because he didn't do his due-diligence and contact them first before linking to them in his app.

EDIT: He seems to understand this, and admits that he "goofed", yes.

treeface• 15 years ago

Where does it say he's mad at them? All he's saying is that this policy isn't very web-friendly.

dpcan4• 15 years ago

Lots of down-votes, but no replies. I can't figure out if the down votes are proving that I'm right or if I totally missed something.

raganwald4• 15 years ago

Or perhaps your point is couched in a way that antagonizes people for some reason? You'll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

derleth• 15 years ago

Have you ever seen The Big Lebowski?

"You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."

Natsu• 15 years ago

I assume it's because other people noticed the part where he said that he missed that part of the ToS, even though he checked for funky terms. It's pretty normal to be able to link to a website and terms forbidding that are abnormal.

So, yeah, he goofed a bit, but they could have been more flexible.

blahedo• 15 years ago

> You break the rules, you pay the consequences. Ignorance is NOT an excuse.

While this is technically true, I feel that it has slipped to the level of a polite fiction rather than a core civic principle. People pretty much never read contracts anymore because they've gotten so long and dense, and the contract writers know this and make them longer and denser anyway. Apple, among others, presumes you won't actually read their agreement before clicking through---they don't bother to sync up the printable version, don't provide a diff, and their system times out before you could possibly have read even a small part of the document. (I've written about this before, at some length: http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html .)

__david__• 15 years ago

You're making an assumption that Wolfram Alpha has any right to specify how they are linked to. You can only "break the rules" if you believe this is a rule in the first place.

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

These ToS clauses protect their paid iPhone app from being replicated in the browser, which is pretty much exactly what you did. So it is effectively you who didn't get it :)

zephjc• 15 years ago

Which gets to the root of the Wolfram's real issue with it: If you go to wolframalpha.com on an iOS device, you are shown an ad for their $1.99 app (which you can ignore and continue to the mobile version of their site).

If you go straight to a query, it bypasses this.

The O.P.'s app bypasses their ad, and Wolfram doesn't like that.

jrockway2• 15 years ago

The built-in web browser that Apple includes with the iPhone also violates this via its "bookmark" feature.

jcarreiro2• 15 years ago

I am not a Terminology user, and I do have the Alpha app on my iPhone. But I still think this is foolishness on the part of Wolfram. I am more likely to use W|A if I can click on a button and jump straight to the page I want, then if I need to switch apps myself and retype my query.

bpodgursky• 15 years ago

I think it's important to note that many queries on Wolfram Alpha are VERY heavyweight--I've had complex calculations and rendering take 30 seconds to a minute to finish. It's not like Google where a query get a result in a few milliseconds. So while Terminology is not likely to be querying it with lots of formulas, I think the policy exists so a badly thought out automated querier can't accidentally put a huge load on Wolfram's engine.

troels2• 15 years ago

I really don't think that is the case.

troels2• 15 years ago

Just to qualify that, since apparently it wasn't clear. If their site is that prone to dos'ing, they would probably use something other than a tos to protect it with.

steveklabnik6• 15 years ago

There's an easy technical solution to this: just block the freaking querier.

Also, if they didn't render a result as an image, maybe it wouldn't take so freaking long...

malnourish2• 15 years ago

Now, I am probably wrong but am asking this due to curiosity. Could they conceivably use HTML5 to render dynamically thus reducing resource/load cost?

Edit: No to Now

cldwalker• 15 years ago

this isn't surprising considering this is the same company that took over a year to release a free api: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126037

kbutler2• 15 years ago

The problem with the Wolfram Alpha terms of service is that they forbid natural, common uses of the web site.

"The Wolfram|Alpha service may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time."

Think for a minute what that forbids. Generating links programmatically, yes. Tweeting links? Yes. Emailing a URL? yes. Bookmarks? Oh, yeah...

Enforceability of the ToS aside, I think the original author is correct: that phrase in the Terms of Use shows that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't "get" the way the web works. Or at least they give too much free reign to lawyers who don't get it.

tptacek2• 15 years ago

Tweeting a link seems like a good example of a "common sense use of the website" that could bring it to its knees if some queries take 30+ seconds to complete.

perlgeek• 15 years ago

Caching exists.

dasil003• 15 years ago

If WA lived up to its promise—which it doesn't, not by a long shot—then 30 seconds would definitely be an acceptable wait for the perfect answer. I don't see how it would bring anything to its knees? Why should the latency propagate? Just need a loading page, problem solved.

mc32• 15 years ago

>The problem with the Wolfram Alpha terms of service is that they forbid natural, common uses of the web site.

It seems that that only applies to general circumstance usage. That is, it appears, once can enter into arrangements with W|A to allow non-human usage of website.

To prove, just search for "calories in apples", for example in Bing or Google search.

ugh• 15 years ago

I have to enter into an agreement with W|A if I want to bookmark a page?

StrawberryFrog• 15 years ago

The problem with the Wolfram Alpha terms of service is that they forbid natural, common uses of the web site.

Exactly. For instance, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=does+wolfram+alpha+get+...

abcd_f• 15 years ago

And the answer is Sometimes - http://i53.tinypic.com/2vkhrt2.gif

That's a good one, W|A :)

clare• 15 years ago

Not in defense of Wolfram Alpha, I'm just curious if W|A does this out of concern of possible degeneration effect on their search accuracy caused by programmed search queries? For a human user of W|A, he will construct the query with certain syntax, and further drill down the search query with W|A's recommendations. W|A may very well monitor the pattern of user search queries to optimize their search algorithm. It is possible that programmed search queries, especially coming from a third party application where users do not use the W|A like syntax, may "pollute" the usage pattern for W|A and affect their algorithm's efficiency. Just my 2 cents.

lell• 15 years ago

A lot of people in this thread are concerned about the TOS and whether or not it is enforceable. But did anyone notice that he claims wolfram served apple a DCMA notice for the app? That law was supposed to be for copyrighted artwork. Aren't wolfram alpha, and other sort of dynamic procedural output from websites more of a service than an artwork (or a 'work' as it is probably termed in the DMCA? It seems a bit pretentious to refer to the output of something like wolfram, google, etc. as a 'work.' I could see a website in it's entirety as a 'work.' But the output of a service doesn't strike me as a 'work.')

jrockway2• 15 years ago

I am sure with infinite money on both sides, if this were litigated, the OP would win. You have the right to write a computer program that sends an HTTP request to a site, even if the site's ToU say that you can't. After all, you can send a request without having ever read or seen the ToU.

The server should simply refuse to reply if the user has not agreed to the terms of use.

Apple will do what Wolfram says, but that's because Apple is acting in its best financial interests (30% of $1.99 for WA's app), not because Apple is legally bound to not distribute an app that links to Wolfram Apple.

Stormbringer• 15 years ago

The problem is twofold:

(1) semantics (fun for the whole family!) what does deep linking mean in this context? We all say deep linking is bad, but to some the pre-populated query isn't deep linking, but to others it is.

(2) one of the (entirely sensible) things the Wolfram Alpha guys seem to be saying is "please don't hook bots up to us". Now no doubt some will bluster and say that if it is there in public they have a right to consume all the bandwidth and resources - after all if they didn't want people to do that they should just [insert complex but fragile technological solution that would quickly fail or be worked around]. As it happens, what this guy was doing falls into that category of automated client.

So on the basis of either one of those (if you squint real hard) I can see Wolfram Alpha's point of view.

_b8r0• 15 years ago

It seems to me that agile tortoise doesn't "get it". Regardless of Wolfram Alpha's licence, it's Wolfram's decision as to what you can and can't do. That was made clear in the licence.

The bottom line is that Agile Tortoise didn't study the licence hard enough, if he had he would've seen that Wolfram Alpha wasn't the right fit for his tool. If he'd have looked further he'd have probably seen that http://duckduckgo.com/ has an API that he may well have been able to use to get the same results.

Instead he may now have to modify his software and probably resubmit it to Apple for review.

Measure twice, cut once. This applies as much to software licensing as carpentry.

agiletortoise4• 15 years ago

UPDATE: Wolfram listens and changes policy

http://blog.agiletortoise.com/post/3587122629/wolfram-listen...

Wolfram Alpha doesn't "get it"

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