MAMEWorld Forums - News

> "Hello,
>
> We have recently blocked all non-North American traffic to court data hosted on the
> Judici website. Judici is contractually obligated to take proactive measures to
> prevent the bulk dissemination of court data. Due to ongoing attempts to collect this
> information in bulk from sources outside the United States, as well as additional
> security concerns, we reluctantly took the step to block all foreign traffic.
>
> Unfortunately, this has caused some legitimate consumers of court information to be
> blocked from accessing the case information on Judici. While we do apologize for any
> inconvenience this may have caused you, we will not be restoring access to case
> information where the requests originate from outside North America.
>
> You may still call or fax the individual Circuit Clerk's offices to inquire on a
> case. The following link will give you the mailing addresses and phone numbers for
> all the County Circuit Clerks in Illinois:
>
> [redacted because I don't want to give these people business]
>
> Sincerely,
> Judici Support Staff"
>
> In other words, "We're stereotypically lazy fuckwits who think that the entire world
> outside of ARE COUNTRY doesn't exist, and rather than do a more nuanced IP ban, we're
> just banning everyone other than good ol' 'Murrica!"

"Hi,

I don't mean to sound flippant, but wouldn't it be a better idea for your IT people to earn their pay by blocking specific IP addresses or even /8 or /16 ranges rather than performing a blanket ban of all IPs originating outside of the USA? Somehow I doubt that your contractual obligations are as black-and-white as the choice between "Disseminate all court records to the Russkies" and "Let everyone from every country, including American expats, revel in their own filth and squalor outside of the guiding light of Uncle Sam, bereft of the valuable insight of Judici".

For what it's worth, the guy in charge of your IT department should be fired or at least given a stern talking-to, because with about 5 minutes' worth of searching on Google I was able to find an HTTP proxy that allowed me to view the desired record anyway, from my godless commie home here in Sweden. I can understand the desire to prohibit the bulk scraping of data, but let's be honest here, preventing all and sundry from accessing your site out of some sense of security is counter-productive - it's just going to galvanize people to try to find a way around your lackadaisical security. For that matter, any live individual who wants to access the site is going to do so anyway via the exact method I mentioned, and I would wager my next paycheck that any foreign data-mining company worth its salt is already using a domestic proxy.

If you really cared about the bulk collection of data, you would simply require users to register with your website and then login in order to view records, possibly with a captcha after a maximum number of queries has been exhausted. It might require more work from your IT staff, but it would at least justify their salaries - because with how things appear right now, they're probably just browsing the web for amusing pictures of cats most of the time for lack of anything better to do.

All the best,
-R"

We'll see what their response is, if they respond at all.