So late last night I was playing around with some scripting that interacted with HN (submitted a story). I'm not a hacker in the technical sense, so I was just playing around to see what I could make. After a few runs, I got an ominous email from pg asking "What are you doing?". Scary stuff.<p>Has anyone else experienced this? Is this an automated email when abuse is detected or did I really raise some red flags? Its from pg's email address, but the sender is "<censored>". I'm pretty curious about all this since he didn't reply to my reply.<p>Thanks.
Scary stuff? If he was really that scary I'd go as PG for Halloween and watch all the little future entrepreneurs wet their pants when they see me. Either that, or I'd float them a couple bucks each for 6% of their candy.
On the other hand, you should <i>definitely</i> continue "playing around to see what I could make". That's how you become a hacker (not to be mistaken with a cracker).
If you've never had someone contact you to stop (spamming|scraping|crawling|DOSing) their web service, then you're not experimenting enough.<p>That said, once they ask you to stop, it's the decent ethical thing to simply stop :)
It's ok. I did something stupid ages ago (posting a thread more reddit-suited than HN IIRC, which I might not) and got an email from pg politely but firmly asking me never to do it again. Just do as the man asks and don't worry about it.
<i>Its from pg's email address, but the sender is "<censored>"</i><p>Just a guess, but judging by the first part of that address, PG might prefer that the address not be made public.
Yup, I did this a couple years ago when working on a javascript-based bookmarklet that would reformat the live hn site to look better on iPhones. One wrong semi colon and it was upvoting every story on the page. pg sent me a 'What are you doing?' type of email, to which I replied and all was well.
See xkcd: <a href="http://xkcd.com/810/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/810/</a><p>"But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?"<p>"Mission Fucking Accomplished."
To be fair when i realised i had enough scripting knowledge to be dangerous i did try some things like this. My advice is to definitely try stuff like this out, because its an excellent learning experience, but on places you dont care about being banned from, theres a million HN clones out there, go forth.<p>In order to learn to develop things to withstand such attacks you first need to understand them yourself.
I got the exact same email from pg a couple of years ago. I had installed the XSS Me addon to Firefox, and inadvertently had it spamming the submission form.