Re: Hacking The Register
"Will I get sued if I publish this info on-line?"
This is my personal 2p. This is not a Register corporate final say. If you're making legit HTTP requests like any other browser, and rendering the HTML/CSS in your own way, you're no different to any other browser.
Attempts to circumvent security or other protection mechanisms in the website wouldn't be very nice; we'd take a dim view of that. But if you're fetching and submitting stuff via vanilla HTTP, and rendering it in your own way, then how are you any different to the huge range of bots and user agents that hit us every day? Even if 1,000, or 5,000, or 10,000 people used your tool a day, it wouldn't be noticeable.
Having said that: your tool sounds like it's ditching adverts. Don't forget that we are entirely independent and advertising funded. We're not backed by a magazine giant, nor a VC consortium, pulling the puppet strings on our output. Some ads piss people off; we try our best to not let that happen. Our ad ops guys are superb at responding to complaints about ads.
My rent, the food I eat, the vacations I take with my wife, are paid through advertising. Same goes for everyone contributing. Give that at least a little thought as you browse the site through a text terminal. It's not about the numbers - some people use ad-blockers and that's just the way it goes - it's the principle I'm talking about.
Thanks for reading.
C.