Well creating a bot is not per se illegal, so assuming the maliciousness-detector on the server isn’t perfect, it could serve the zip bomb to a legitimate bot. And I don’t think it’s crazy that serving zip bombs with the stated intent to sabotage the client would be illegal. But I’m not a lawyer, of course.
Disclosure, I'm not a lawyer either. This is all hypothetical high level discussion here.
> it could serve the zip bomb to a legitimate bot.
Can you define the difference between a legitimate bot, and a non legitimate bot for me ?
The OP didn't mention it, but if we can assume they have SOME form of robots.txt (safe assumtion given their history), would those bots who ignored the robots be considered legitimate/non-legitimate ?
Almost final question, and I know we're not lawyers here, but is there any precedent in case law or anywhere, which defines a 'bad bot' in the eyes of the law ?
Final final question, as a bot, do you believe you have a right or a privilege to scrape a website ?
> Can you define the difference between a legitimate bot, and a non legitimate bot for me ?
Well by default every bot is legitimate, an illegitimate bot might be one that’s probing for security vulnerabilities (but I’m not even sure if that’s illegal if you don’t damage the server as a side effect, ie if you only try to determine the Wordpress or SSHD version running on the server for example).
> The OP didn't mention it, but if we can assume they have SOME form of robots.txt (safe assumtion given their history), would those bots who ignored the robots be considered legitimate/non-legitimate ?
robots.txt isn’t legally binding so I don’t think ignoring it makes a bot illegitimate.
> Almost final question, and I know we're not lawyers here, but is there any precedent in case law or anywhere, which defines a 'bad bot' in the eyes of the law ?
There might be but I don’t know any.
> Final final question, as a bot, do you believe you have a right or a privilege to scrape a website ?
Well I’m not a bot but I think I have the right to build bots to scrape websites (and not get served malicious content designed to sabotage my computer). You can decline service and just serve error pages of course if you don’t like my bot.
