#Top Web Scraping Companies

[sixeyesonathiel]

cw: dubcon, non-con elements, somnophilia, manipulation, codependency, obsessive behavior, jealousy, netorare themes, explicit sexual content (penetrative sex, oral, fingering, degradation, breeding kink, choking, spit kink), voyeuristic surveillance, panty theft, dacryphilia, power imbalance, emotional abuse, forced dependence, explicit language, 18+ only, minors DNI.

rich boy roommate satoru who��s the sole heir of the gojo conglomerate, a silver-spooned prince with eyes like shattered sapphires and a grin that cuts deeper than any blade, born into a world where desire is a currency he spends without thought, yet starved for something real beneath the polished veneer of his charmed life. his penthouse is a glass cathedral overlooking tokyo, where he throws lavish parties to drown out the silence of his own heart, but it’s the glimpse of you—singing in a smoky bar, fake diamonds glinting in your ears, rented dress clinging to your curves—that snags his attention like a hook in his throat. he books you that night, not for your body, but for the way your sharp tongue slices through his bullshit, offering you a room in his apartment by dawn because he can’t stand the thought of you slipping back into the grime of your world.

rich boy roommate satoru who you meet under the dim glow of a bar’s stage lights, your voice a sultry thread weaving through the crowd, fake earrings catching the flicker of neon as you belt out lyrics about heartbreak you’ve never let yourself feel. he’s lounging in a vip booth, all long limbs and careless charisma, but his gaze locks onto you—not your body, but the defiance in your eyes, the way you hold the mic like it’s a weapon, and when he approaches you after, offering a wad of cash for “just a chat,” you laugh in his face, thinking he’s another rich prick playing games, until his soft, persistent charm and a promise of no strings convinces you to follow him to a quiet diner where he listens, really listens, to your stories of scraping by. by morning, he’s dangling keys to a spare apartment in his building, calling it a favor, but the hunger in his stare when you accept betrays the lie—he’s already weaving a web to keep you close.

rich boy roommate satoru who wastes no time reshaping your world, his generosity a velvet trap as he floods your closet with dresses, silk skirts so short they barely skim your thighs, tops that hug your tits until they spill over, all delivered with a sheepish grin and an “oops, must’ve misjudged the size.” he insists he’ll toss them and order replacements, but you, stubborn and wary of owing him more than you already do, shrug and wear them anyway, oblivious to how his breath hitches, eyes darken when he catches you in the kitchen, your tits practically falling out as you pour coffee. every morning, he tells himself he’s saving you from the life you led before him, erasing the cheap glitter of fake diamonds with real ones—earrings and a necklace that gleam like his wealth, a sparkling collar to mark you as his.

rich boy roommate satoru who can’t stand the thought of you selling yourself to strangers, his jaw tightening when you mention your clients, their sweaty hands and clumsy thrusts, because in his mind, you’re too good for that filth, too pure for the muck of your past. he tells himself he’s protecting you, offering you a job at one of his company’s cushy offices—easy work, fat paychecks—but when you shyly refuse, citing the debt you already owe him for the apartment, his blood simmers, because how can you be so demure, so soft-spoken, when you’re spreading your legs for anyone with enough cash? he masks his irritation with a lazy smile, thinking he’ll mold that innocence into something that belongs only to him, even if it means breaking you first.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s got eyes everywhere, not that you’d ever notice—tiny cameras tucked into the corners of your apartment, hidden in the vase of roses he sent, capturing every moment you think is private. he watches you on his phone at 3 a.m., your silhouette slipping out of a too-tight dress, or your fingers brushing against your panties as you change, and he’s hard as a rock, stroking himself to the sight of you unaware, his own private show. he tells himself it’s to keep you safe, to make sure no one else is touching what’s his, but the truth is he’s addicted to the thrill, to the secret of owning you without you knowing.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s got a habit of slipping into your room while you sleep, the city lights casting shadows over your face as he stands over you, heart pounding like a drum in his chest. he traces the curve of your hip with a featherlight touch, sometimes sliding your panties aside to slip a finger inside you, feeling your warmth clench around him as you stir, half-conscious, thinking it’s a dream. he’s careful not to wake you fully, but the thought of you waking up, catching him knuckle-deep, makes his cock throb, because even if you screamed, he knows he could make you beg for more.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s always stealing your panties, pocketing the lacy ones you wear for clients, the ones still damp with your scent, and keeping them in a locked drawer in his penthouse. late at night, he presses them to his face, inhaling deep, jerking himself raw to the thought of you wearing them for someone else, only to come back to him, his bed, his world. it’s a sick ritual, but it fuels his obsession, a reminder that no matter who fucks you, he’s the one who owns your soul.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s got a silver tongue, seduction dripping from every word when he leans close, whispering how much better he could make you feel than those clumsy johns you service. he’ll catch you in the kitchen, pressing himself against your back, his cock hard against your ass as he murmurs about how he’d eat you out until you’re sobbing, how he’d fuck you so deep you’d forget every other man. you laugh it off, thinking it’s just satoru being satoru, but the way his eyes darken tells you he’s not joking—he’s waiting for the moment you say yes.

rich boy roommate satoru who buys you everything—designer bags, heels that make your legs look endless, perfumes that linger on his sheets—but it’s the diamond necklace he clasps around your throat that feels like a chain. he tells you it’s to replace the cheap shit you used to wear, to make you shine like you deserve, but deep down, he’s marking you, branding you as his creation, his doll to dress up and parade. every time you wear it, he’s reminded of how he’s rewriting your past, making you someone who belongs to him and no one else.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s always touching you, casual but deliberate—fingers brushing your neck when he adjusts your necklace, a hand lingering on your waist when he guides you through a crowded party. he’ll tug you onto his lap during movie nights, his breath hot against your ear as he teases about how you’d look better naked, and though you swat him away, the heat pooling between your thighs betrays how much you crave his touch. he knows it, too, and the smirk on his face says he’s just waiting for you to break.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s got a knack for showing up when you’re with clients, “accidentally” running into you at hotels or bars, his charming grin masking the rage in his eyes when he sees another man’s hand on you. he’ll slide up, all smooth talk and expensive cologne, introducing himself as your “friend” while his grip on your arm screams mine, and the client scurries off, intimidated by the sheer force of his presence. later, he’ll fuck you in his car, rough and possessive, growling about how no one else can have you, his cock slamming into you so hard the seat creaks, leaving you trembling and marked.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s obsessed with your stories, the way you recount your clients’ fumbling attempts at pleasure with a laugh, detailing their quick finishes and awkward groping. he listens, leaning forward, cock straining in his pants as he imagines you under them, only to replace them in his mind—his hands, his mouth, his dick making you scream instead. he tells himself he’s better than them, that you deserve him, but the twisted part of him loves the details, loves jerking off to the thought of you being used, because it makes his claim on you that much sweeter.

rich boy roommate satoru who tries to wean you off escorting, dangling carrots like a trust fund or a private studio where you could sing instead, his voice soft but insistent as he paints a picture of a life without strangers’ hands on you. you hesitate, not because you love the job, but because his gifts—the apartment, the clothes, the jewelry—already feel like shackles, and taking more would mean surrendering the last shred of your freedom. he hides his frustration behind a playful pout, but inside, he’s seething, because you’re choosing that dirty world over him, and he won’t let that stand.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s got a thing for your demure nature, the way you blush when he compliments your singing or duck your head when he stares too long, and it drives him fucking wild that you can be so shy while spreading your legs for strangers. he’ll tease you about it, calling you his “little contradiction,” but there’s an edge to his voice, a quiet fury that you can play innocent while letting random men fuck you raw. he wants to ruin that shyness, to make you so dependent on his praise, his touch, that you’ll never look at another man again.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s always pushing boundaries, like the time he “helps” you relax after a long night, his fingers kneading your shoulders before slipping lower, massaging your tits through your dress until you’re gasping. he’ll chuckle, acting like it’s all a game, but when you don’t stop him, he’s sliding a hand between your thighs, fingering you until you’re soaking his wrist, your moans echoing in the penthouse. he doesn’t let you come, though, pulling away with a smirk, saying you’ll have to beg for it next time, conditioning you to need his hands, his control.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s got a savior complex, not that he’d admit it, convincing himself he’s pulling you out of the gutter, giving you a life you could never have without him. he’ll buy you a grand piano for your singing, install it in his penthouse, and watch you play, thinking he’s giving you a future, not a cage. every gift, every favor, is a thread in the net he’s weaving, and when you thank him with that guileless smile, he feels like a god, even as he’s plotting to keep you his forever.

rich boy roommate satoru who loses his shit when you tell him about your new boyfriend, some stable, kind nobody who takes you to coffee shops and holds your hand like you’re fragile. he’s livid, pacing his penthouse, because he’s been pouring his soul into you—paying your bills, dressing you up, listening to your every word—and you throw it away for a guy who’ll probably fuck you in missionary and call it love? he corners you one night, voice low and dangerous, saying you’re ungrateful, that you’re wasting yourself on someone who can’t fuck you like he can, and the hurt in his eyes cuts deeper than his words.

rich boy roommate satoru who starts sabotaging your relationship, subtle at first—cancelling your dates by “accidentally” scheduling emergencies, planting doubts with offhand comments about how “normal” guys get bored fast. he’ll hack your phone, reading your texts, smirking at your boyfriend’s sappy messages, then send anonymous tips to make him question your loyalty. when that’s not enough, he’ll fuck you in your sleep, slipping into your bed while you’re out cold, his cock sliding into your slick cunt as he groans your name, knowing you’ll wake up sore and confused, wondering why your boyfriend’s touch doesn’t feel the same.

rich boy roommate satoru who’s relentless in bed, the night he finally snaps, pinning you to his mattress, his hands bruising your wrists as he fucks you like he’s punishing you for choosing someone else. his cock slams into you, deep and unforgiving, each thrust hitting your cervix until you’re crying, babbling “i love you, satoru, i love you,” as he chokes you just enough to make your head spin, spit dripping from his lips into your open mouth. he grabs your phone, video-calling your boyfriend mid-thrust, angling the camera to show his balls slapping against your ass, your tits bouncing, your face twisted in pleasure as you scream his name, making sure your boyfriend sees every second of you falling apart.

rich boy roommate satoru who doesn’t stop after the call ends, flipping you onto your stomach, fucking you into the sheets until your voice is hoarse, your body trembling from overstimulation. he’ll pull your hair, growling about how no one else can make you come like this, how your pussy was made for him, and when you’re sobbing, begging for a break, he’ll slow down just to edge you, keeping you teetering on the brink until you’re pleading for his cum. he’ll fill you up, groaning as your cunt milks him dry, then spread your legs to watch it drip out, marking you as his, knowing you’ll never go back to that nobody after this.

rich boy roommate satoru who thrives on your tears, the way they streak your face when he fucks you too hard or when you realize your boyfriend’s gone for good, and he’ll lick them off your cheeks, his tongue hot and possessive. he tells you it’s your fault for pushing him to this, for making him jealous, but the truth is he loves seeing you broken, loves knowing he’s the only one who can piece you back together. every sob makes his cock twitch, and he’ll fuck you again, slower this time, whispering that you’re his, always his, until you’re too exhausted to cry anymore.

rich boy roommate satoru who conditions you to crave him, making you dependent on his touch, his voice, his money, until you can’t imagine a life without him. he’ll withhold affection when you mention work, only to shower you with it when you stay home, training you like a pet to seek his approval, his cock, his bed. by the time you realize you’re trapped, you’re too addicted to his chaos, to the way he makes you feel alive, to ever leave, even when you catch glimpses of the cameras, the stolen panties, the truth of what he’s done.

rich boy roommate satoru who moves you to a new city, far from anyone who might remember your old life, setting you up in a penthouse identical to his, where he can watch you through the cameras he’s installed there too. he’ll visit unannounced, fucking you against the floor-to-ceiling windows, your body exposed to the skyline as he whispers about how no one else will ever have you, how he’s your future, your everything. you don’t argue, because deep down, you know he’s right—you’re his, and the thought of anyone else touching you now feels like a betrayal.

rich boy roommate satoru who buys you a ring, not an engagement ring, but something heavier, a band of diamonds that sits like a collar on your finger, a constant reminder of who owns you. he’ll slide it on while you’re sucking him off, his cock stuffed down your throat as he murmurs about how it’s a promise—you’ll never need to sell yourself again, because you’re his to fuck, his to love, his to ruin. you gag around him, tears mixing with spit, and he laughs, thrusting deeper, knowing you’re too far gone to say no.

rich boy roommate satoru who owns you completely by the end, your body and soul molded to fit his desires, your days spent waiting for his touch, your nights filled with his cock and his voice. he’ll fuck you whenever he wants—on the kitchen counter, in the shower, while you’re half-asleep—each time more possessive, more demanding, until you’re nothing but his slut, his doll, his everything, and you love it, love the way he’s broken you down to nothing but him. you’ll wear his skimpy dresses, his diamonds, his marks, and when he pulls you onto his lap at parties, showing you off like a trophy, you’ll smile, because you’re his, forever his, and there’s no one else you’d rather be.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

We're living through one of those moments when millions of people become suddenly and overwhelmingly interested in fair use, one of the subtlest and worst-understood aspects of copyright law. It's not a subject you can master by skimming a Wikipedia article!

I've been talking about fair use with laypeople for more than 20 years. I've met so many people who possess the unshakable, serene confidence of the truly wrong, like the people who think fair use means you can take x words from a book, or y seconds from a song and it will always be fair, while anything more will never be.

Or the people who think that if you violate any of the four factors, your use can't be fair – or the people who think that if you fail all of the four factors, you must be infringing (people, the Supreme Court is calling and they want to tell you about the Betamax!).

You might think that you can never quote a song lyric in a book without infringing copyright, or that you must clear every musical sample. You might be rock solid certain that scraping the web to train an AI is infringing. If you hold those beliefs, you do not understand the "fact intensive" nature of fair use.

But you can learn! It's actually a really cool and interesting and gnarly subject, and it's a favorite of copyright scholars, who have really fascinating disagreements and discussions about the subject. These discussions often key off of the controversies of the moment, but inevitably they implicate earlier fights about everything from the piano roll to 2 Live Crew to antiracist retellings of Gone With the Wind.

One of the most interesting discussions of fair use you can ask for took place in 2019, when the NYU Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy held a symposium called "Proving IP." One of the panels featured dueling musicologists debating the merits of the Blurred Lines case. That case marked a turning point in music copyright, with the Marvin Gaye estate successfully suing Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for copying the "vibe" of Gaye's "Got to Give it Up."

Naturally, this discussion featured clips from both songs as the experts – joined by some of America's top copyright scholars – delved into the legal reasoning and future consequences of the case. It would be literally impossible to discuss this case without those clips.

And that's where the problems start: as soon as the symposium was uploaded to Youtube, it was flagged and removed by Content ID, Google's $100,000,000 copyright enforcement system. This initial takedown was fully automated, which is how Content ID works: rightsholders upload audio to claim it, and then Content ID removes other videos where that audio appears (rightsholders can also specify that videos with matching clips be demonetized, or that the ad revenue from those videos be diverted to the rightsholders).

But Content ID has a safety valve: an uploader whose video has been incorrectly flagged can challenge the takedown. The case is then punted to the rightsholder, who has to manually renew or drop their claim. In the case of this symposium, the rightsholder was Universal Music Group, the largest record company in the world. UMG's personnel reviewed the video and did not drop the claim.

99.99% of the time, that's where the story would end, for many reasons. First of all, most people don't understand fair use well enough to contest the judgment of a cosmically vast, unimaginably rich monopolist who wants to censor their video. Just as importantly, though, is that Content ID is a Byzantine system that is nearly as complex as fair use, but it's an entirely private affair, created and adjudicated by another galactic-scale monopolist (Google).

Google's copyright enforcement system is a cod-legal regime with all the downsides of the law, and a few wrinkles of its own (for example, it's a system without lawyers – just corporate experts doing battle with laypeople). And a single mis-step can result in your video being deleted or your account being permanently deleted, along with every video you've ever posted. For people who make their living on audiovisual content, losing your Youtube account is an extinction-level event:

https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online

So for the average Youtuber, Content ID is a kind of Kafka-as-a-Service system that is always avoided and never investigated. But the Engelbert Center isn't your average Youtuber: they boast some of the country's top copyright experts, specializing in exactly the questions Youtube's Content ID is supposed to be adjudicating.

So naturally, they challenged the takedown – only to have UMG double down. This is par for the course with UMG: they are infamous for refusing to consider fair use in takedown requests. Their stance is so unreasonable that a court actually found them guilty of violating the DMCA's provision against fraudulent takedowns:

https://www.eff.org/cases/lenz-v-universal

But the DMCA's takedown system is part of the real law, while Content ID is a fake law, created and overseen by a tech monopolist, not a court. So the fate of the Blurred Lines discussion turned on the Engelberg Center's ability to navigate both the law and the n-dimensional topology of Content ID's takedown flowchart.

It took more than a year, but eventually, Engelberg prevailed.

Until they didn't.

If Content ID was a person, it would be baby, specifically, a baby under 18 months old – that is, before the development of "object permanence." Until our 18th month (or so), we lack the ability to reason about things we can't see – this the period when small babies find peek-a-boo amazing. Object permanence is the ability to understand things that aren't in your immediate field of vision.

Content ID has no object permanence. Despite the fact that the Engelberg Blurred Lines panel was the most involved fair use question the system was ever called upon to parse, it managed to repeatedly forget that it had decided that the panel could stay up. Over and over since that initial determination, Content ID has taken down the video of the panel, forcing Engelberg to go through the whole process again.

But that's just for starters, because Youtube isn't the only place where a copyright enforcement bot is making billions of unsupervised, unaccountable decisions about what audiovisual material you're allowed to access.

Spotify is yet another monopolist, with a justifiable reputation for being extremely hostile to artists' interests, thanks in large part to the role that UMG and the other major record labels played in designing its business rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Spotify has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to capture the podcasting market, in the hopes of converting one of the last truly open digital publishing systems into a product under its control:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein

Thankfully, that campaign has failed – but millions of people have (unwisely) ditched their open podcatchers in favor of Spotify's pre-enshittified app, so everyone with a podcast now must target Spotify for distribution if they hope to reach those captive users.

Guess who has a podcast? The Engelberg Center.

Naturally, Engelberg's podcast includes the audio of that Blurred Lines panel, and that audio includes samples from both "Blurred Lines" and "Got To Give It Up."

So – naturally – UMG keeps taking down the podcast.

Spotify has its own answer to Content ID, and incredibly, it's even worse and harder to navigate than Google's pretend legal system. As Engelberg describes in its latest post, UMG and Spotify have colluded to ensure that this now-classic discussion of fair use will never be able to take advantage of fair use itself:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/news/how-explaining-copyright-broke-the-spotify-copyright-system/

Remember, this is the best case scenario for arguing about fair use with a monopolist like UMG, Google, or Spotify. As Engelberg puts it:

The Engelberg Center had an extraordinarily high level of interest in pursuing this issue, and legal confidence in our position that would have cost an average podcaster tens of thousands of dollars to develop. That cannot be what is required to challenge the removal of a podcast episode.

Automated takedown systems are the tech industry's answer to the "notice-and-takedown" system that was invented to broker a peace between copyright law and the internet, starting with the US's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA implements (and exceeds) a pair of 1996 UN treaties, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the Performances and Phonograms Treaty, and most countries in the world have some version of notice-and-takedown.

Big corporate rightsholders claim that notice-and-takedown is a gift to the tech sector, one that allows tech companies to get away with copyright infringement. They want a "strict liability" regime, where any platform that allows a user to post something infringing is liable for that infringement, to the tune of $150,000 in statutory damages.

Of course, there's no way for a platform to know a priori whether something a user posts infringes on someone's copyright. There is no registry of everything that is copyrighted, and of course, fair use means that there are lots of ways to legally reproduce someone's work without their permission (or even when they object). Even if every person who ever has trained or ever will train as a copyright lawyer worked 24/7 for just one online platform to evaluate every tweet, video, audio clip and image for copyright infringement, they wouldn't be able to touch even 1% of what gets posted to that platform.

The "compromise" that the entertainment industry wants is automated takedown – a system like Content ID, where rightsholders register their copyrights and platforms block anything that matches the registry. This "filternet" proposal became law in the EU in 2019 with Article 17 of the Digital Single Market Directive:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/today-europe-lost-internet-now-we-fight-back

This was the most controversial directive in EU history, and – as experts warned at the time – there is no way to implement it without violating the GDPR, Europe's privacy law, so now it's stuck in limbo:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/eus-copyright-directive-still-about-filters-eus-top-court-limits-its-use

As critics pointed out during the EU debate, there are so many problems with filternets. For one thing, these copyright filters are very expensive: remember that Google has spent $100m on Content ID alone, and that only does a fraction of what filternet advocates demand. Building the filternet would cost so much that only the biggest tech monopolists could afford it, which is to say, filternets are a legal requirement to keep the tech monopolists in business and prevent smaller, better platforms from ever coming into existence.

Filternets are also incapable of telling the difference between similar files. This is especially problematic for classical musicians, who routinely find their work blocked or demonetized by Sony Music, which claims performances of all the most important classical music compositions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music

Content ID can't tell the difference between your performance of "The Goldberg Variations" and Glenn Gould's. For classical musicians, the best case scenario is to have their online wages stolen by Sony, who fraudulently claim copyright to their recordings. The worst case scenario is that their video is blocked, their channel deleted, and their names blacklisted from ever opening another account on one of the monopoly platforms.

But when it comes to free expression, the role that notice-and-takedown and filternets play in the creative industries is really a sideshow. In creating a system of no-evidence-required takedowns, with no real consequences for fraudulent takedowns, these systems are huge gift to the world's worst criminals. For example, "reputation management" companies help convicted rapists, murderers, and even war criminals purge the internet of true accounts of their crimes by claiming copyright over them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

Remember how during the covid lockdowns, scumbags marketed junk devices by claiming that they'd protect you from the virus? Their products remained online, while the detailed scientific articles warning people about the fraud were speedily removed through false copyright claims:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#copyfraud

Copyfraud – making false copyright claims – is an extremely safe crime to commit, and it's not just quack covid remedy peddlers and war criminals who avail themselves of it. Tech giants like Adobe do not hesitate to abuse the takedown system, even when that means exposing millions of people to spyware:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/theres-an-app-for-that/#gnash

Dirty cops play loud, copyrighted music during confrontations with the public, in the hopes that this will trigger copyright filters on services like Youtube and Instagram and block videos of their misbehavior:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#bhpd

But even if you solved all these problems with filternets and takedown, this system would still choke on fair use and other copyright exceptions. These are "fact intensive" questions that the world's top experts struggle with (as anyone who watches the Blurred Lines panel can see). There's no way we can get software to accurately determine when a use is or isn't fair.

That's a question that the entertainment industry itself is increasingly conflicted about. The Blurred Lines judgment opened the floodgates to a new kind of copyright troll – grifters who sued the record labels and their biggest stars for taking the "vibe" of songs that no one ever heard of. Musicians like Ed Sheeran have been sued for millions of dollars over these alleged infringements. These suits caused the record industry to (ahem) change its tune on fair use, insisting that fair use should be broadly interpreted to protect people who made things that were similar to existing works. The labels understood that if "vibe rights" became accepted law, they'd end up in the kind of hell that the rest of us enter when we try to post things online – where anything they produce can trigger takedowns, long legal battles, and millions in liability:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/08/oh-why/#two-notes-and-running

But the music industry remains deeply conflicted over fair use. Take the curious case of Katy Perry's song "Dark Horse," which attracted a multimillion-dollar suit from an obscure Christian rapper who claimed that a brief phrase in "Dark Horse" was impermissibly similar to his song "A Joyful Noise."

Perry and her publisher, Warner Chappell, lost the suit and were ordered to pay $2.8m. While they subsequently won an appeal, this definitely put the cold grue up Warner Chappell's back. They could see a long future of similar suits launched by treasure hunters hoping for a quick settlement.

But here's where it gets unbelievably weird and darkly funny. A Youtuber named Adam Neely made a wildly successful viral video about the suit, taking Perry's side and defending her song. As part of that video, Neely included a few seconds' worth of "A Joyful Noise," the song that Perry was accused of copying.

In court, Warner Chappell had argued that "A Joyful Noise" was not similar to Perry's "Dark Horse." But when Warner had Google remove Neely's video, they claimed that the sample from "Joyful Noise" was actually taken from "Dark Horse." Incredibly, they maintained this position through multiple appeals through the Content ID system:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#warnerchappell

In other words, they maintained that the song that they'd told the court was totally dissimilar to their own was so indistinguishable from their own song that they couldn't tell the difference!

Now, this question of vibes, similarity and fair use has only gotten more intense since the takedown of Neely's video. Just this week, the RIAA sued several AI companies, claiming that the songs the AI shits out are infringingly similar to tracks in their catalog:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/record-labels-sue-music-generators-suno-and-udio-1235042056/

Even before "Blurred Lines," this was a difficult fair use question to answer, with lots of chewy nuances. Just ask George Harrison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord

But as the Engelberg panel's cohort of dueling musicologists and renowned copyright experts proved, this question only gets harder as time goes by. If you listen to that panel (if you can listen to that panel), you'll be hard pressed to come away with any certainty about the questions in this latest lawsuit.

The notice-and-takedown system is what's known as an "intermediary liability" rule. Platforms are "intermediaries" in that they connect end users with each other and with businesses. Ebay and Etsy and Amazon connect buyers and sellers; Facebook and Google and Tiktok connect performers, advertisers and publishers with audiences and so on.

For copyright, notice-and-takedown gives platforms a "safe harbor." A platform doesn't have to remove material after an allegation of infringement, but if they don't, they're jointly liable for any future judgment. In other words, Youtube isn't required to take down the Engelberg Blurred Lines panel, but if UMG sues Engelberg and wins a judgment, Google will also have to pay out.

During the adoption of the 1996 WIPO treaties and the 1998 US DMCA, this safe harbor rule was characterized as a balance between the rights of the public to publish online and the interest of rightsholders whose material might be infringed upon. The idea was that things that were likely to be infringing would be immediately removed once the platform received a notification, but that platforms would ignore spurious or obviously fraudulent takedowns.

That's not how it worked out. Whether it's Sony Music claiming to own your performance of "Fur Elise" or a war criminal claiming authorship over a newspaper story about his crimes, platforms nuke first and ask questions never. Why not? If they ignore a takedown and get it wrong, they suffer dire consequences ($150,000 per claim). But if they take action on a dodgy claim, there are no consequences. Of course they're just going to delete anything they're asked to delete.

This is how platforms always handle liability, and that's a lesson that we really should have internalized by now. After all, the DMCA is the second-most famous intermediary liability system for the internet – the most (in)famous is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

This is a 27-word law that says that platforms are not liable for civil damages arising from their users' speech. Now, this is a US law, and in the US, there aren't many civil damages from speech to begin with. The First Amendment makes it very hard to get a libel judgment, and even when these judgments are secured, damages are typically limited to "actual damages" – generally a low sum. Most of the worst online speech is actually not illegal: hate speech, misinformation and disinformation are all covered by the First Amendment.

Notwithstanding the First Amendment, there are categories of speech that US law criminalizes: actual threats of violence, criminal harassment, and committing certain kinds of legal, medical, election or financial fraud. These are all exempted from Section 230, which only provides immunity for civil suits, not criminal acts.

What Section 230 really protects platforms from is being named to unwinnable nuisance suits by unscrupulous parties who are betting that the platforms would rather remove legal speech that they object to than go to court. A generation of copyfraudsters have proved that this is a very safe bet:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

In other words, if you made a #MeToo accusation, or if you were a gig worker using an online forum to organize a union, or if you were blowing the whistle on your employer's toxic waste leaks, or if you were any other under-resourced person being bullied by a wealthy, powerful person or organization, that organization could shut you up by threatening to sue the platform that hosted your speech. The platform would immediately cave. But those same rich and powerful people would have access to the lawyers and back-channels that would prevent you from doing the same to them – that's why Sony can get your Brahms recital taken down, but you can't turn around and do the same to them.

This is true of every intermediary liability system, and it's been true since the earliest days of the internet, and it keeps getting proven to be true. Six years ago, Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that allowed platforms to be held civilly liable by survivors of sex trafficking. At the time, advocates claimed that this would only affect "sexual slavery" and would not impact consensual sex-work.

But from the start, and ever since, SESTA/FOSTA has primarily targeted consensual sex-work, to the immediate, lasting, and profound detriment of sex workers:

https://hackinghustling.org/what-is-sesta-fosta/

SESTA/FOSTA killed the "bad date" forums where sex workers circulated the details of violent and unstable clients, killed the online booking sites that allowed sex workers to screen their clients, and killed the payment processors that let sex workers avoid holding unsafe amounts of cash:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/09/fight-overturn-fosta-unconstitutional-internet-censorship-law-continues

SESTA/FOSTA made voluntary sex work more dangerous – and also made life harder for law enforcement efforts to target sex trafficking:

https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta-2020/

Despite half a decade of SESTA/FOSTA, despite 15 years of filternets, despite a quarter century of notice-and-takedown, people continue to insist that getting rid of safe harbors will punish Big Tech and make life better for everyday internet users.

As of now, it seems likely that Section 230 will be dead by then end of 2025, even if there is nothing in place to replace it:

https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/bipartisan-energy-and-commerce-leaders-announce-legislative-hearing-on-sunsetting-section-230

This isn't the win that some people think it is. By making platforms responsible for screening the content their users post, we create a system that only the largest tech monopolies can survive, and only then by removing or blocking anything that threatens or displeases the wealthy and powerful.

Filternets are not precision-guided takedown machines; they're indiscriminate cluster-bombs that destroy anything in the vicinity of illegal speech – including (and especially) the best-informed, most informative discussions of how these systems go wrong, and how that blocks the complaints of the powerless, the marginalized, and the abused.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/files/banner_library/yt-fu-1b.png

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[feminist-space]

"Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts.

Instagram is a necessity for many artists, who use the platform to promote their work and solicit paying clients. But Meta is using public posts to train its generative AI systems, and only European users can opt out, since they’re protected by GDPR laws. Generative AI has become so front-and-center on Meta’s apps that artists reached their breaking point.

“When you put [AI] so much in their face, and then give them the option to opt out, but then increase the friction to opt out… I think that increases their anger level — like, okay now I’ve really had enough,” Jingna Zhang, a renowned photographer and founder of Cara, told TechCrunch.

Cara, which has both a web and mobile app, is like a combination of Instagram and X, but built specifically for artists. On your profile, you can host a portfolio of work, but you can also post updates to your feed like any other microblogging site.

Zhang is perfectly positioned to helm an artist-centric social network, where they can post without the risk of becoming part of a training dataset for AI. Zhang has fought on behalf of artists, recently winning an appeal in a Luxembourg court over a painter who copied one of her photographs, which she shot for Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam.

“Using a different medium was irrelevant. My work being ‘available online’ was irrelevant. Consent was necessary,” Zhang wrote on X.

Zhang and three other artists are also suing Google for allegedly using their copyrighted work to train Imagen, an AI image generator. She’s also a plaintiff in a similar lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI.

“Words can’t describe how dehumanizing it is to see my name used 20,000+ times in MidJourney,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “My life’s work and who I am—reduced to meaningless fodder for a commercial image slot machine.”

Artists are so resistant to AI because the training data behind many of these image generators includes their work without their consent. These models amass such a large swath of artwork by scraping the internet for images, without regard for whether or not those images are copyrighted. It’s a slap in the face for artists – not only are their jobs endangered by AI, but that same AI is often powered by their work.

“When it comes to art, unfortunately, we just come from a fundamentally different perspective and point of view, because on the tech side, you have this strong history of open source, and people are just thinking like, well, you put it out there, so it’s for people to use,” Zhang said. “For artists, it’s a part of our selves and our identity. I would not want my best friend to make a manipulation of my work without asking me. There’s a nuance to how we see things, but I don’t think people understand that the art we do is not a product.”

This commitment to protecting artists from copyright infringement extends to Cara, which partners with the University of Chicago’s Glaze project. By using Glaze, artists who manually apply Glaze to their work on Cara have an added layer of protection against being scraped for AI.

Other projects have also stepped up to defend artists. Spawning AI, an artist-led company, has created an API that allows artists to remove their work from popular datasets. But that opt-out only works if the companies that use those datasets honor artists’ requests. So far, HuggingFace and Stability have agreed to respect Spawning’s Do Not Train registry, but artists’ work cannot be retroactively removed from models that have already been trained.

“I think there is this clash between backgrounds and expectations on what we put on the internet,” Zhang said. “For artists, we want to share our work with the world. We put it online, and we don’t charge people to view this piece of work, but it doesn’t mean that we give up our copyright, or any ownership of our work.”"

Read the rest of the article here:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/06/a-social-app-for-creatives-cara-grew-from-40k-to-650k-users-in-a-week-because-artists-are-fed-up-with-metas-ai-policies/

[vickyvicarious]

Oh yes, the feeling that you have to rely to the creeper who you loathe so much that you have come to hate even the rooms he resides in, that he's not the scariest thing in your life, that you have to run to his arms for safety. Horror! Dracula claiming him was the high point of the entry (than the almost-bite)

Honestly, yeah. The dynamics between Dracula and Jonathan are so scary, to the point that all the supernatural events are the cherry on top rather than the main course, as far as the horror of this section goes.

Dracula does so much manipulation here, holds so many different kinds of power over Jonathan, and multiple levels of each too. He's got physical power - both in the sense of the castle being a prison, and in the sense of his incredible strength. He's got social power - as a noble, and as a client/boss. He's got monetary power over Jonathan too, able to potentially make or ruin his career. He has so much control over Jonathan's ability to express himself - he's the only company available to him, he's forcing him to keep up a pretense of friendship, he's limiting and controlling his communication with others. Jonathan has no escape: he can't go out of the castle because he's locked in, he can't go many places inside the castle because he's locked out of them, and now he can't leave the rooms Dracula wants him in because otherwise the vampire ladies will get him, and within those rooms there is nowhere safe from Dracula himself. Jonathan has seemingly no action he can take: if he sneaks around behind Dracula's back, a greater threat awaits. If he acts openly, Dracula's own threat may become realized. If he doesn't act at all, he's doomed. If he acts at all, he's doomed. If he trusts Dracula, he's doomed. If he doesn't trust Dracula, he's doomed.

Of course, the supernatural elements are the mechanics by which Dracula increases the stakes, the threats underlying the charming veneer. Specifically, the introduction of the vampire women is what puts Jonathan in this seemingly inescapable box, and one with potential threats to something even greater than his life.

But Dracula's playing this Bluebeard role and could have done so with some more mundane threat as well, without changing too terribly much about his own actions. Where he's scariest (at least to me) is in these interactions with Jonathan, in these manipulative webs and traps he lays out in his words, in the way he pushes so many boundaries until they're forced to collapse or warp under the pressure. Jonathan's privacy keeps getting worn away. Dracula's speech and touch get more familiar and more possessive. He started out the first night blaming Jonathan for the things he did himself ('oh, why did you make your conversation so interesting we had to stay up all night?') and escalates until now he's making Jonathan be the one to act, and to suffer the consequences: whether in forcing him to lie to his loved ones, or in dangling the bait of sleeping outside his room and then only barely saving him when he does. And Jonathan has no real choice but to act. To fail to do so, in one way or another, would mean giving up all hope at escape or likely even survival. But because he has to act, he winds up feeling complicit. He ends up in situations where Dracula thanks him, forgives him, saves him. It keeps putting them on seemingly the same side, with Jonathan in a lesser/reliant role. And that's all a huge lie, at its core. But in a very real way, it's true too, to an extent. More and more, he's getting layers of resistance scraped away, and having to seek safety from Dracula now is so, so horrifying. In many ways all he truly has left is his will to live, his internal determination to resist - and now he's been given powerful incentive not to trust in that latter part too much. It's absolutely brutal.

He's walking a wire that just keeps getting thinner and thinner. All he can possibly do is try to keep this balancing act going, and hope for something to change that will give him more options down the line.

[the-overthinktank]

in what way is it a doomed investment? I've seen a lot of artist lose their jobs to it already, it has had a greater impact than nft's and right now they're going on to make ai video's. I'm sure the bubble will break eventually but, yea share your thoughts.

Here's an article I recommend reading.

We're at the peak of a tech hype cycle. People are absolutely getting hurt and laid off from billions of dollars being poured into the latest money hole that the developers double pinkie prommy will actually work the way they're advertising... at some later date; but I suspect the main staying power for this tech is going to be spam/advertisement generation and disinformation. If you want to provide a quality chat service or make art worth looking at, human intervention is necessary even if you use generative AI as a starting point. While none of this is... good, in the same way NFTs and useless dotcom sites were not good, I am skeptical of a lot of the panic around generative AI replacing humans long term because I think it lends legitimacy to the people claiming it can competently do that.

I also think a lot of the panic around tumblr specifically is kind of redundant. I don't appreciate the site fucking condoning it, but all major social media sites have already been getting fed into these things. There is (currently) no real way to stop these companies from throwing whatever they want off of google into the machine and claiming they totally only use non-copyrighted goods, because they're drawing from billions of images and source texts and there's (currently) no easy way to check besides combing through those massive databases.

Besides, if you publicly post art online, there's already dozens of other websites scraping income off of your work. The social media you use hosts ads, and your art and presence on social media is what draws in new ad viewers and revenue. And there's aggregator sites that draw from and repost stuff from other social media sites, and they host ads. Listacle "news" sites put their top ten favorite web finds on a page covered in ads. Web searches that show your art in a pile of other images host ads. If your art is popular, the number of sites scraping income off of your work grows proportionately. This is my personal opinion, but I'd say AI is a new hat on a commons-exploitation problem that's as almost as old as the internet.

[abivanceconnect]

Social Media and Privacy Concerns!!! What You Need to Know???

In a world that is becoming more digital by the day, social media has also become part of our day-to-day lives. From the beginning of sharing personal updates to networking with professionals, social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have changed the way we communicate. However, concerns over privacy have also grown, where users are wondering what happens to their personal information. If you use social media often, it is important to be aware of these privacy risks. In this article, we will outline the main issues and the steps you need to take to protect your online data privacy. (Related: Top 10 Pros and Cons of Social media)

1. How Social Media Platforms Scrape Your Data The majority of social media platforms scrape plenty of user information, including your: ✅ Name, email address, and phone number ✅ Location and web browsing history ✅ Likes, comments, and search history-derived interests. Although this enhances the user experience as well as advertising, it has serious privacy issues. (Read more about social media pros and cons here) 2. Risks of Excessive Sharing Personal Information Many users unknowingly expose themselves to security risks through excessive sharing of personal information. Posting details of your daily routine, location, or personal life can lead to: ⚠️ Identity theft ⚠️Stalking and harassment ⚠️ Cyber fraud

This is why you need to alter your privacy settings and be careful about what you post on the internet. (Read this article to understand how social media affects users.) 3. The Role of Third-Party Apps in Data Breaches Did you register for a site with Google or Facebook? Handy, maybe, but in doing so, you're granting apps access to look at your data, normally more than is necessary. Some high profile privacy scandals, the Cambridge Analytica one being an example, have shown how social media information can be leveraged for in politics and advertising. To minimize danger: 👍Regularly check app permissions 👍Don't sign up multiple accounts where you don't need to 👍Strong passwords and two-factor authentication To get an in-depth overview of social media's impact on security, read this detailed guide. 4. How Social Media Algorithms Follow You You may not realize this, but social media algorithms are tracking you everywhere. From the likes you share to the amount of time you watch a video, sites monitor it all through AI-driven algorithms that learn from behavior and build personalized feeds. Though it can drive user engagement, it also: ⚠️ Forms filter bubbles that limit different perspectives ⚠️ Increases data exposure in case of hacks ⚠️ Increases ethical concerns around online surveillance Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of social media will help you make an informed decision. (Find out more about it here) 5. Maintaining Your Privacy: Real-Life Tips

To protect your personal data on social media: ✅ Update privacy settings to limit sharing of data ✅ Be cautious when accepting friend requests from unknown people ✅ Think before you post—consider anything shared online can be seen by others ✅ Use encrypted messaging apps for sensitive conversations These small habits can take you a long way in protecting your online existence. (For more detailed information, read this article) Final Thoughts Social media is a powerful tool that connects people, companies, and communities. There are privacy concerns, though, and you need to be clever about how your data is being utilized. Being careful about what you share, adjusting privacy settings, and using security best practices can enable you to enjoy the benefits of social media while being safe online. Interested in learning more about how social media influences us? Check out our detailed article on the advantages and disadvantages of social media and the measures to be taken to stay safe on social media.

[human-psyche]

BLACK.

CHAPTER 1

Heavy rain pelts the landscape of Seoul in a slow, torrential drizzle, rivulets of water pouring like glass beads from the night skies that envelop everything in a blanket of sombreness. The continuous sound of the rain covers the rest of the noise coming from the city, farther and farther away as Yoongi runs. 

A firing gunshot dissipates the monochrome silence, then another, each aimed in his direction; both miss their target but his pursuers don't stop, rounds of bullets hitting the wall of the train station he ducks behind to catch his breath.

Min Yoongi is his birth name. 09 is his number. August D is a code.

He was and is known by many names of which the combination above describes who he is shortly. In the world he lives in, one's value is measured in kill counts: the greater the amount, the higher and richer one becomes. But becoming top of the game is the suicidal glory of entering an arena where other fighters have free reign to strike, money are just a currency of exchange to a reputation like his一 a quality deathdealer. There is a system this hierarcy is built upon, its signature being that of coins with each individual's symbol engraved on it, a metaphor derived from greek mythology where a person requires coins to be granted passage over the river of Hades's underworld or risk wandering the shores for one hundred years untill they are allowed to cross. 

Those without a coin of their own are low ranked members of the organization, they are easy to replace and disposable. Those who acquire a silver coin represent the ones who are diplomatic and agile, they may have ranked fast but lack solid force. Those who obtain a gold coin are the ones branded as superior specimens of their occupation, suitable for any job, any contract, in any circumstances, and most sought after and expensive above their versatility. Then, there are the ones who possess a black coin, the rarest kind. They are the ones who make the rules and enforce them, the ones who lead.

EX-DEUS is an organization that does not exist to the public for all intents and purposes. Named after the latin phrase "ex deus mortis" which means "from the god of death", its profit results from a simple yet obscure program: contract killing. Founded by Kim Manseok and his second wife, Natasha, the company has an extended base in the USA, South Korea, China and Russia, although its web of operation has spread throughout several countries on the globe. Orphan children are picked off the streets whether willingly or forcibly, while some perhaps even kidnapped from their families without recollection of it, and subjected to a training regiment that steps past the boundaries of human ethics, shaped into the perfect weapons. Emotions are suppressed and nullified, pain becomes numbness and desirable results are reached around the ages sixteen - eighteen on average, a time at which one is permitted to start taking on jobs. Few can form attachments...

Night rain is an irony and an illusion to Yoongi, it reminds him of days he can't erase or unseen. 

It reminds him who he truely is, what he does, and what he might've lost before even having it. 

He inhales sharply and moves, shooting one of his assailants. When he finally leaves his hiding spot and runs for cover again, bullets fly and hit the roof of the station too, sparks from a short-circuit raining like a second gale of fire drops: the male turns at the last moment as a man shoots. Yoongi's faster, only getting a scrape to his arm while the other guy collapses to the floor, a second attacker's gun proving to be out of bullets. He tosses it away and chases after him madly, just as the train barells through the station at blinding speed. The younger has no choice but to engage him in a fight, a knife cutting the air close enough to slash his throat except Yoongi's reflexes aid him in overpowering the man and stabbing his own knife into the side of his neck. Not without a lesser injury though, because he's tired, bleeding and on the run for days. 

He pants out puffs of congealed air, the roar of the trepidation that shakes the train tracks drowning out his fatigue. 

There is only one person left that he can count on.

. . .

THREE YEARS AGO ... 

The corridor of the tightly secured company is one he'd gone through a hundred times. A hundred times it was always like this: grey walls and an ominous weight of guilt that they thought they could ignore forever. But that wasn't his priority right now. 

Yoongi feels it as he halts at the end of the hallway, the male seated on the armchair at the entrance for waiting bearing dissimilar levels of emotion written over his countenance.

He's Jimin, a silver coin owner he'd seen around Y/n quite often, who's mostly unreadable, would it not be for a trace of something akin to anger. 

His fingers tighten on the velvet box inside the pocket of his coat. 

A person who's usually with them when waiting for details on a new contract is missing. 

"Where's Y/n?" 

"She's gone."

Jimin's blunt reply sends a surge of frightening dread through his gut, a foreign feeling. For a second there he forgets that sentence could have one other meaning, his mind going blank. Their occupation's not to be trifled with, death is a perpetual friend but also their fiercest foe.

"What the fuck do you mean she's gone?" 

"Her room's empty, she's gone." the younger continues, clarifying the misunderstanding. 

It's only then that he directs his attention to Kim Manseok's office, where Taehyung has a screaming match with his father. 

"...something was wrong with her the night she came back from her last contract! She would never leave like this!" 

"It isn't your business to demand of me to disclose confidential information!" 

"It is, she isn't just some random member of the organization! I consider her more of a sister than my step-sister is! You should have told me! Where is she?!" 

"Like I said, I can't tell you, Taehyung."

"If you have anything to do with this, or your wife does, I'm done with you. Did you get rid of her to teach me a lesson, huh? Are you going to do the same with Yoongi? Why? Because I'm not like Namjoon? Because I'm not the obedient, responsible son you want? Did you?! Answer me, father!"

"Kim Taehyung, do not talk to me like that! This is not about you!" 

"Then tell me why she's not here!" 

"Y/n requested that I help her disappear. She retired and wishes for none of you to find her."

The EX-DEUS's chairman's verdict stuns all of them, having not expected that. 

Slamming the door on his way out, Taehyung joins them on the hallway, a frown crinkling at his features. He sees Yoongi and since he and Y/n work together as partners, he vows, "I'll find her. I'll find her even if I have to search the entire country. I'll tell you once I get a lead."

Jimin sits up, that undeciphered anger in his orbs more evident. He passes by Yoongi without even sparing him a glance. He knows what is going on with Y/n, why she left, but he keeps it to himself. 

Yoongi's hand tightens around the box in his pocket, nearly crushing it.

. . .

An ordinary, plain life in the Gwangjin district. A small apartment. An elementary P.E teacher's job. A new identity, a fake name. A new look. Y/n tries to go to sleep every night and not remember who she really is, where she comes from. It isn't difficult to pretend, living peacefully day to day and not linger and get stuck in the past, dreaming of people she used to share pain with, or the ones who caused her pain. The ones whom saw her as death's angel before taking their dying breath, the ones that still haunt her nightmares sometimes. Faces, faces she associates with familiarity, and faces that have little to no shape. 

Here, she isn't L/n Y/n. She's just Y/n with a false surname.

The only fault in her existence is the silver coin she still has tucked somewhere into the drawer of her nightstand. 

Rain outside the windows disrupts her thoughts, her bare feet tapping the floors as she walks to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of juice. It's a friday night, she can relax from another day at the school she teaches at, and enjoy the free time of weekend. In the modest, rented apartment, loneliness feels like the luxurious comfort she was not able to afford prior to being this fake person she is. 

However, as if the universe is plotting against her, a sudden knock on the front door causes the girl to put her glass down and wonder who might be so late at night. She surely had no visitors to look forward to. 

Brows knit, Y/n goes to unlatch the door一 and nearly screams when she sees him, his arm leaning on the doorframe, dark eyes piercing through her own. 

"...Yoongi?" she breathes out, both in shock and frustration. 

The reason her heart drops to her stomach has a double edged root. One, he's soaked to the bone, his cheeks are bruised and exhaustion hangs to his hazed lids. Two, he's right here, in front of her, whilst she worked so hard to block him out of her mind. 

"You're in love with him." Jimin declares one fine night as he puts his elbows on the railing, glimpsing the city below with her. 

Y/n laughs, hysterically. It doesn't sound genuine though. "Who? Yoongi?" 

"Don't lie." 

"What do you want me to tell you? That I'm flawed?" 

"You're different, you don't need to be fixed. You managed to feel this even if it's not in our nature. Love."

"What's the point? It's Yoongi. The day he feels something for someone, the world will fall apart. He's among the best EX-DEUS has ever had. Unlike me, there's no error in his code. He fucks, he doesn't love."

"Taehyung said you guys never had sex."

"That's because to him, I'm a friend, a sidekick, a partner, whatever. Even the girls Taehyung brings in so you guys can have fun with get more attention from him."

"Unrequited love." he leans his head back, glancing to her afterwards. "How are you coping with that?" 

"I undressed in front of him one time when we were at a hotel during an assignment and he didn't even blink. He was that unfazed." 

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing."

They stay silent following her answer, the wind blowing through their hair over the sounds of city traffic. Then Y/n speaks again. 

"Do you know what else I started feeling lately?" 

Jimin grunts, urging her to go on. 

"Guilt."

"What the hell are you doing here? How did you find me?" she scowls as she regains her composure, refusing to let herself crumble at the sight of him. 

Yoongi's lips twist, the ghost of a smirk gracing his rugged appearance. "Hello to you too, Y/n. You haven't changed, you're as pretty as I remember you and twice as bitchy."

She glares, attempting to hit the door shut but failing due to him sliding his foot between it and the wall. 

He pries it open and gets inside, pushing past her without permission. 

"If you bleed on my floor I'll shoot you myself. Get out. I don't want to see your face." the female trails behind him, in the livingroom. 

"Easy." he taunts, unknotting his tie and throwing his soaked suit jacket on the back of the couch; he removes one leather glove using his teeth, and the other with his free hand. His dress shirt is stained red underneath. "You owe me a favour, Y/n. I'm here to get even."

"Fuck you, fuck your favour. I'm not doing this anymore, I have a life here, get out of it, you son of a一" 

Her words cease when he unbuttons and peels his shirt off, his wet torso from the rain exposing the ugly knife cut on his side and the scratch of a bullet to his left arm. Traitorous worry clenches her chest. 

"I saved your pretty little ass, you have to help me. I know you never go back on your word."

"Stop calling me pretty, or anything that concerns me." she fumes, walking over to him and shoving him down to sit on the couch. "Don't touch my things." she warns as she goes to the bathroom, retrieving the first aid kit. 

Returning to the livingroom, Yoongi has one of her framed pictures of Jungkook in his grasp, likely having picked it from the decorative table next to the couch. 

"Your boyfriend?" 

"It's none of your business." Y/n presses a little purposefully on his wound with the cloth she's using to clean it. 

If he wants to hiss at the sting, he doesn't nor shows it. "You changed your style. It looks good on you."

She would say he looks unfairly handsome too but ofcourse she can't. Resorting to not giving him a reaction, she busies herself with his injuries, disinfecting and treating them.

A palpable tension resides between the two of them, with him watching her and the young woman avoiding his gaze. She makes quick work of her task, soon after bandaging his arm. Stitching the one on his waist is trickier, because she has to concentrate despite the feel of Yoongi's lithe, toned muscles under her fingertips, his persistent orbs tracing every slope and curve of her face. 

"Why did you leave?" 

The predictable question earns a pause from her, in which she finishes dressing his second wound, adding medical tape onto the gauze. "I couldn't handle the guilt anymore."

He doesn't quite believe her, someone as competitive as Y/n wouldn't just disappear like that. 

Yoongi has lived with the impression that she's not fond of him because they grew up fighting for the best rank and he ultimately outmatched her. 

The truth is, she left for three particular reasons. The first, yes she did end up feeling the oppressing guilt of their profession. The second, she was in love with him and she wanted to get away from the man who wouldn't reciprocate her feelings一 an affliction she never expected would plague and chase someone like her, specially trained to eliminate and demolish such sentiments. Nobody knew about the third reason other than herself and Jimin, and she certainly wouldn't confess it to him. That was the night her harmless, ambitious annoyance torwards Yoongi turned to hate. 

Catching her by surprise, he grabs her arms as she's about to pull back, dragging her closer instead. The only distance left to separate them is a mere centimeter, forcing her to look him in the eyes. 

"Is there more, isn't it?" 

She forgot how compelling his presence can be, a sliver of nervousness inflicting her otherwise confident traits. She has to swallow, stabilizing her emotions in order to lie effectively. "No. And even if there was, I wouldn't tell you."

She pushes herself off him and snatches the framed photo he dropped on the couch, putting it to its rightful place. 

"Take off the rest of your clothes."

Yoongi regards her blankly. He cocks an eyebrow, as if her demand has another implication.

They're back to their old teasing, bantering, arguing routine. 

"You're freezing cold and all wet from the rain. Just do it." she rolls her eyes. "I'll get you a towel to dry up and clothes to change."

"From your boyfriend?" 

"Yes, from my boyfriend. Do you have a problem with that?" 

"This Jungkook guy, does he know you don't love him?" 

"And how do you know I don't?" she yells back.

"Because you're a heartless bitch who used to kill people."

Y/n comes from the bedroom holding the promised towel, a shirt, a pair of jeans and underwear, throwing them at his face with a vengeance. "Here's the clothes, asshole."

Later, after she treats the bruises on his cheekbones and lip too, they eat at the table of her kitchen, her mind running through her choices; she questions herself why she gave in and helped him. She swore to herself she didn't want to see him again, but her heart wouldn't allow her to just turn her back on him, and besides, she owed him that favour. She isn't the kind of person to break promises or not repay something good done to her. 

"I asked you how you found me."

"Taehyung sent people to search for you, he's been trying to track you down for 2 years. He got your location last year but decided to respect your wishes and not contact you. He said he's fine with atleast knowing you're okay."

"Who else knows about this place?" 

"Jimin."

She nods, addressing their current issue: "So what's going on? What do you need?" 

"Let me stay here a couple days."

"You're not telling me what happened." 

Yoongi tosses his chopsticks on the table, rubbing a hand over his tired eyes. He sighs, his situation none too common. 

"Someone paid multiple contracts to get me killed."

"What?" Y/n frowns. "You mean members of EX-DEUS are going after you? But you're one of their own...how did chairman Kim even approve those contracts?" 

"You're behind with updates, Y/n. Taehyung's father is no longer chairman. He had an accident in january, he passed away."

"Then who is it?" 

"Natasha."

"That snake? Taehyung should've become chairman, or atleast Namjoon."

"Apparently, Kim Manseok signed a document which automatically made his wife chairwoman when he died."

"She's crazy, she's going to ruin the company for money."

"She already did. By order of her authority, members of EX-DEUS are now aloud to target and kill each other if a contract is sent from a client. She's turning the organization in a fucking bloodbath."

. . .

a/n: thanks a lot for all the likes this story got, and all the reblogs, truely!

[mariacallous]

As media companies haggle licensing deals with artificial intelligence powerhouses like OpenAI that are hungry for training data, they’re also throwing up a digital blockade. New data shows that over 88 percent of top-ranked news outlets in the US now block web crawlers used by artificial intelligence companies to collect training data for chatbots and other AI projects. One sector of the news business is a glaring outlier, though: Right-wing media lags far behind their liberal counterparts when it comes to bot-blocking.

Data collected in mid-January on 44 top news sites by Ontario-based AI detection startup Originality AI shows that almost all of them block AI web crawlers, including newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, general-interest magazines like The Atlantic, and special-interest sites like Bleacher Report. OpenAI’s GPTBot is the most widely-blocked crawler. But none of the top right-wing news outlets surveyed, including Fox News, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart, block any of the most prominent AI web scrapers, which also include Google’s AI data collection bot. Pundit Bari Weiss’ new website The Free Press also does not block AI scraping bots.

Most of the right-wing sites didn’t respond to requests for comment on their AI crawler strategy, but researchers contacted by WIRED had a few different guesses to explain the discrepancy. The most intriguing: Could this be a strategy to combat perceived political bias? “AI models reflect the biases of their training data,” says Originality AI founder and CEO Jon Gillham. “If the entire left-leaning side is blocking, you could say, come on over here and eat up all of our right-leaning content.”

Originality tallied which sites block GPTbot and other AI scrapers by surveying the robots.txt files that websites use to inform automated web crawlers which pages they are welcome to visit or barred from. The startup used Internet Archive data to establish when each website started blocking AI crawlers; many did so soon after OpenAI announced its crawler would respect robots.txt flags in August 2023. Originality’s initial analysis focused on the top news sites in the US, according to estimated web traffic. Only one of those sites had a significantly right-wing perspective, so Originality also looked at nine of the most well-known right-leaning outlets. Out of the nine right-wing sites, none were blocking GPTBot.

Bot Biases

Conservative leaders in the US (and also Elon Musk) have expressed concern that ChatGPT and other leading AI tools exhibit liberal or left-leaning political biases. At a recent hearing on AI, Senator Marsha Blackburn recited an AI-generated poem praising President Biden as evidence, claiming that generating a similar ode to Trump was impossible with ChatGPT. Right-leaning outlets might see their ideological foes’ decisions to block AI web crawlers as a unique opportunity to redress the balance.

David Rozado, a data scientist based in New Zealand who developed an AI model called RightWingGPT to explore bias he perceived in ChatGPT, says that’s a plausible-sounding strategy. “From a technical point of view, yes, a media company allowing its content to be included in AI training data should have some impact on the model parameters,” he says.

However, Jeremy Baum, an AI ethics researcher at UCLA, says he’s skeptical that right-wing sites declining to block AI scraping would have a measurable effect on the outputs of finished AI systems such as chatbots. That’s in part because of the sheer volume of older material AI companies have already collected from mainstream news outlets before they started blocking AI crawlers, and also because AI companies tend to hire liberal-leaning employees.

“A process called reinforcement learning from human feedback is used right now in every state-of-the-art model,” to fine-tune its responses, Baum says. Most AI companies aim to create systems that appear neutral. If the humans steering the AI see an uptick of right-wing content but judge it to be unsafe or wrong, they could undo any attempt to feed the machine a certain perspective.

OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood says that in pursuit of AI models that “deeply represent all cultures, industries, ideologies, and languages” the company uses broad collections of training data. “Any one sector—including news—and any single news site is a tiny slice of the overall training data, and does not have a measurable effect on the model’s intended learning and output,” she says.

Rights Fights

The disconnect in which news sites block AI crawlers could also reflect an ideological divide on copyright. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, arguing that the AI upstart’s data collection is illegal. Other leaders in mainstream media also view this scraping as theft. Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch recently said at a Senate hearing that many AI tools have been built with “stolen goods.” (WIRED is owned by Condé Nast.) Right-wing media bosses have been largely absent from the debate. Perhaps they quietly allow data scraping because they endorse the argument that data scraping to build AI tools is protected by the fair use doctrine?

For a couple of the nine right-wing outlets contacted by WIRED to ask why they permitted AI scrapers, their responses pointed to a different, less ideological reason. The Washington Examiner did not respond to questions about its intentions but began blocking OpenAI’s GPTBot within 48 hours of WIRED’s request, suggesting that it may not have previously known about or prioritized the option to block web crawlers.

Meanwhile, the Daily Caller admitted that its permissiveness toward AI crawlers had been a simple mistake. “We do not endorse bots stealing our property. This must have been an oversight, but it's being fixed now,” says Daily Caller cofounder and publisher Neil Patel.

Right-wing media is influential, and notably savvy at leveraging social media platforms like Facebook to share articles. But outlets like the Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller are small and lean compared to establishment media behemoths like The New York Times, which have extensive technical teams.

Data journalist Ben Welsh keeps a running tally of news websites blocking AI crawlers from OpenAI, Google, and the nonprofit Common Crawl project whose data is widely used in AI. His results found that approximately 53 percent of the 1,156 media publishers surveyed block one of those three bots. His sample size is much larger than Originality AI’s and includes smaller and less popular news sites, suggesting outlets with larger staffs and higher traffic are more likely to block AI bots, perhaps because of better resourcing or technical knowledge.

At least one right-leaning news site is considering how it might leverage the way its mainstream competitors are trying to stonewall AI projects to counter perceived political biases. “Our legal terms prohibit scraping, and we are exploring new tools to protect our IP. That said, we are also exploring ways to help ensure AI doesn’t end up with all of the same biases as the establishment press,” Daily Wire spokesperson Jen Smith says. As of today, GPTBot and other AI bots were still free to scrape content from the Daily Wire.

[lensnure-solutions]

Lensnure Solutions is a passionate web scraping and data extraction company that makes every possible effort to add value to their customer and make the process easy and quick. The company has been acknowledged as a prime web crawler for its quality services in various top industries such as Travel, eCommerce, Real Estate, Finance, Business, social media, and many more.

We wish to deliver the best to our customers as that is the priority. we are always ready to take on challenges and grab the right opportunity.

[azikarue]

Life in Color : Chapter 26 : Pirate

King, Queen | FFN Rating: K+ | FFN Link ❖ “It’s a shame you have a moral compass now; we could be making a killing off of these parts.”

King rolled his eyes at his sister’s rueful remark. He shot a look her way, but she wasn’t paying attention, too busy running her fingers along a tray of attack rings like they were precious jewels. King recognized them at once as her personal collection of favorites from their parts-hunting days, all carefully packed in a custom case. They were one of the last things they’d placed in the storage unit before closing it up. King hadn’t thought he’d see them again so soon.

Though, he hadn’t thought a company like BEGA would come along and lock away all beyblading parts and components behind a membership, either.

“Pack a box and come on,” he ordered, already feeling agitated from the cramped space and his own intentions hanging over his head.

Ever since their stint with Dr. K and their loss against the Bladebreakers, King and Queen had done their best to give up their old ways and battle fairly. King, especially, found himself exhausted by all the dishonesty and the tangled web of lies and half-truths they’d been fed to further Dr. K’s agenda.

In retrospect, he realized that he’d lost sight of the reason he began beyblading in the first place when he started focusing on the parts he had, instead of how far he could push himself in battle. He knew it came from the days when he and Queen used to gamble their own parts in an effort to build the beyblades of their dreams.

Back then, that was the only access they had to top of the line parts. By the time they could buy them on their own, they’d gotten too greedy and preferred to steal what they wanted. It took battling Tyson to make him realize that the parts weren’t what made them good – it was all the battles they fought as they built their collection and the opponents who forced them to level up.

With that realization, the whole BEGA takeover immediately rubbed him the wrong way.

They were putting too much weight on the pro title, handing kids membership cards and telling them that was all they needed when, in reality, it took years of hard work and discipline to reach the top. Refusing to sell parts to anyone without a BEGA ID made things even worse because it made buying parts feel like a luxury. Kids were waving their BEGA cards around and stripping entire shelves of blading gear because they could, but most of them hadn’t fully mastered their beginner blades yet.

Not only that, but it happened too fast. King had learned the hard way what happened when you blindly trusted a loser with an ego making big promises. The ‘moral compass’ Queen made fun of hated seeing a bunch of kids taken advantage of.

And if Tyson wasn’t backing BEGA…

Well, King didn’t consider it a good sign.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Queen sighed. She had a cardboard box in her arms and a bored expression on her face. King knew she thought he was blowing the BEGA thing out of proportion, but at least she agreed to help. Even if part of the reason she did was because she’d get a suped up blade out of the deal; her own case of parts was on top of the box she was carrying.

King sifted through a few more boxes until he was able to put one together that had a decent variety of parts. He closed it up, wincing at the grating sound of cardboard scraping, and hoisted it onto his shoulder. With a nod of his head, Queen followed him out of their storage unit. Her foot only tapped a little bit waiting for him to lock it up.

Back out on the streets, they turned in unison and headed towards the nearest subway station. When they’d gotten the storage unit, King purposefully chose one a handful of stops away from their apartment. He didn’t want it to be inconvenient, but it felt less tempting to pore through their stash of amassed parts if they weren’t right down the street. And, with the reputation they’d garnered for themselves, it was safer to keep most of their parts away from home.

Over the past year of walking the straight and narrow, they hadn’t made a single trip out to the unit, though they paid for it monthly. Instead, they honed their skills with the beyblades they had, replacing parts as needed with the handful they kept laying around.

Carrying the boxes through the city, now, felt illicit.

Queen didn’t seem bothered. When they took their seats on the train, she plucked a lethal-looking attack ring from her collection and twirled it around in her fingers.

“Stop frowning, King,” she said without taking her eyes off the attack ring. “We’re not doing anything illegal and BEGA isn’t combing the streets of Tokyo for unaccounted-for parts.”

King’s frown, ever-present these days, deepened as the doors hissed shut. “Technically, we’re in possession of stolen property,” he said, keeping his voice low even though the only other people in their car had headphones on. “In case you forgot how we have so many parts in the first place.”

Queen just laughed and said, “If you want to get technical about it, they’re winnings. We didn’t steal anything.”

“Tell that to all the kids who ever begged us to let them keep their beyblades,” he shot back, angry at her flippancy. To Queen this might be an amusing jaunt into their past habits, but King felt like they were taking steps backward on a slippery slope. “If all you’re looking to do is get your kicks on a power trip and make other bladers miserable again, then I can do this without you.”

Anger flashed in Queen’s eyes.

King balled his hands into fists on top of the box in his lap and leveled her with a fixed stare.

“I mean it,” he said. “If you want to face off against somebody, make it the cocky bladers who hold their precious BEGA memberships over other people’s heads. I don’t even care if you ask them to put their parts on the line once our stores run low. But these—,” he paused to rap on the top of the box and make sure he had Queen’s attention, “—are for anybody who needs parts but doesn’t have access to them.

“The sport of beyblading isn’t something some company can buy and sell as it pleases. If BEGA wants to limit parts sales to its members, I’ll sell them to everyone else myself at a fraction of the cost.”

Queen sat in stunned silence for a minute. “A fraction?” she asked and raised both of her eyebrows.

“We got them for free,” King reminded her with a halfhearted glare. If there weren’t going to be certain risks and costs involved, he wouldn’t charge at all.

His sister laughed and sat back in her seat.

“You had me at ‘put their parts on the line’,” she said, tossing the attack ring in the air and catching it in her fist. “There are plenty of gullible losers out there buying parts because they have a magic card that lets them. I’d love to take them down a peg.”

King sighed. At least she had spirit. Maybe her own moral compass would come with time. In the meanwhile, there were just as many struggling beybladers out there as there were gullible losers, and he would do whatever he could to get them the parts that they needed.

[travelscrape]

Travel Data Intelligence - Extract Travel, Hotel and Flights Price Data

Travel Data Intelligence – Extract Travel, Hotel and Flights Price Data

Utilize Travel Data Intelligence for Hotel, Flight, and Travel Price Insights and Elevate Your Journey!

Online Travel Industry

In today's rapidly evolving online travel industry, competition is fiercer than ever. One of the challenges businesses across various sectors, such as airlines, rail services, car rental agencies, hotels, and travel companies, face is the constant price fluctuation in their offerings. Staying on top of these price changes is crucial to maximize revenue and remain competitive in this dynamic market. The ability to efficiently track and adapt to these fluctuations can make a significant difference in the success of businesses in these sectors.

However, access to real-time data is essential to stay ahead in the fiercely competitive online travel industry. It is where web scraping for travel data emerges as the perfect solution. Many hotel, travel, and airline businesses seek professional assistance from specialized hotel, travel, and airline data scraping services to ensure accuracy and efficiency. These services provide valuable data insights that empower businesses to make informed decisions and maintain their competitive edge.

Pick A Tour Type

Flight & Airline

Car Rental

Hotel & OTAs

Vacation Rental

Travel Intelligence Solution

Data Extraction

Travel Data Extraction

Scrape hotel, travel & flight data to provide a strategic advantage to Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), car rental agencies, airlines, and rail companies by furnishing them with valuable insights to optimize pricing strategies, enhance customer experiences, and gain a competitive edge in the dynamic travel industry.

Our Travel Intelligence services empower businesses in the travel and hospitality sector with comprehensive data analysis and insights. It allows them to make data-driven decisions, optimize pricing, improve customer service, and better understand market trends. Whether you're an Online Travel Agency (OTA), a hotel, a car rental agency, or an airline, Travel Data Scrape can provide the essential tools to thrive in a highly competitive and rapidly evolving industry.

Business Insights

Travel Business Insights (Dashboard)

Travel Business Insights offers a comprehensive and interactive perspective on the reports generated through travel data extraction. These dashboard insights allow businesses in the travel industry to gain a deeper understanding of their operations, market trends, and customer behavior. By leveraging the data extraction process, businesses can access valuable information and statistics that can be pivotal in making informed decisions, optimizing services, and enhancing customer experiences.

Online Travel Intelligence Process

Data Collection

Data Cleaning

Data Analysis

Insight Generation

Decision Implementation

Airlines Data Extraction

Comprehensive Data Collection: Our airline data Extraction service gathers a wide range of data, including flight schedules, pricing, seat availability, and passenger reviews, providing airlines with a holistic view of their operations.

Competitive Analysis: Airlines can use this data to conduct in-depth competitive analysis, comparing their pricing and services against competitors to stay competitive and make data-driven decisions.

Demand Forecasting: Airlines can predict future demand patterns by analyzing historical data, enabling better capacity planning and optimized pricing strategies.

Price Monitoring: Real-time price monitoring helps airlines stay agile in a rapidly changing market, adjusting fares in response to market conditions and customer demand.

Customer Insights: Passenger reviews and feedback data allow airlines to understand customer preferences and pain points, leading to improved customer service and experience.

Enhanced Revenue Generation: With access to accurate and up-to-date data, airlines can make informed decisions that enhance revenue generation, streamline operations, and ultimately improve their overall performance in the industry.

Cruise and Ferry Data Extraction

Strategic Pricing: Cruise and ferry operators can utilize extracted data to implement dynamic pricing strategies, adjusting ticket fares based on demand, occupancy, and competitive pricing, thereby maximizing revenue.

Route Optimization: Cruise and Ferry data extraction enables companies to analyze historical travel patterns and passenger preferences, optimizing routes to provide the most attractive and efficient itineraries.

Competitive Intelligence: By monitoring competitors' pricing and offerings, cruise and ferry companies can gain valuable insights into market dynamics, allowing them to remain competitive and adapt their services accordingly.

Customer Experience Enhancement: Extracted passenger reviews and feedback data provide essential insights for improving onboard amenities, services, and overall customer satisfaction, fostering loyalty and positive reviews.

Operational Efficiency: Access to cabin availability and occupancy rates data allows operators to manage resources more effectively, ensuring efficient use of onboard facilities.

Market Expansion: With a deep understanding of market trends and traveler preferences, cruise and ferry companies can identify opportunities for expansion, new routes, and target demographics, facilitating business growth.

Car Rental Data Extraction

Optimize Pricing Strategies: Car rental companies can use the extracted data to adjust pricing dynamically, considering factors like demand, seasonal variations, and competitor pricing, resulting in increased revenue.

Route Planning: Access to historical data allows for better route planning, optimizing schedules and stops to cater to passenger needs and streamline operations.

Competitor Analysis: By monitoring competitors' pricing and services, car rental sector businesses can gain valuable insights into market trends and customer preferences, staying competitive and making data-driven decisions.

Fleet Management: Real-time data on car availability and occupancy rates helps car rental agencies manage their fleets efficiently, ensuring vehicle usage to its full potential.

Customer Satisfaction: Passenger reviews and feedback data provide essential insights for enhancing customer service and overall passenger satisfaction, which can lead to improved customer loyalty and positive reviews.

Expansion Opportunities: A deep understanding of market dynamics and traveler behavior allows businesses to identify opportunities for expanding services to new locations and target demographics, ultimately fostering business growth.

Hotel Data Scraping

Pricing and Availability: Extract data on room rates, availability, and special offers from the hotel's website or online booking platforms for hotels to stay competitive in their pricing strategies.

Guest Reviews and Ratings: Collecting guest reviews and ratings from websites of online travel agencies to gauge customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.

Competitor Analysis: Gathering data on nearby hotels, including their pricing, occupancy rates, and amenities, to benchmark against the competition and adjust strategies accordingly.

Online Reputation Management: Monitoring online mentions of the hotel across social media, blogs, and review sites to manage the hotel's reputation and respond to customer feedback.

Customer Demographics: Extracting data on guest demographics, including their age, nationality, and booking preferences, can tailor marketing and services to the specific needs and preferences of different customer segments.

Occupancy and Revenue Forecasting: Collect historical occupancy and revenue data to make predictions and optimize pricing, staffing, and marketing strategies for future bookings.

OTAS and Metas

Comprehensive Price Comparison: Scraping OTAs and Metasearch sites allows travelers to compare prices from various sources in one place, enabling them to find the best deals quickly and easily.

Time and Cost Savings: By automating the process of gathering travel information, users can save time and find cost-effective travel options they might have missed through manual searches.

Real-time Updates: Scraping provides access to real-time data on pricing and availability, ensuring that travelers receive the most up-to-date information and can take advantage of time-sensitive promotions.

Customization and Alerts: Configure scraping tools to send notifications when desired travel deals or promotions become available, making it easier for travelers to stay informed and act swiftly.

Hidden Discounts: OTAs and Metasearch engines may offer unadvertised exclusive deals or discounts. Scraping helps uncover these hidden gems, allowing travelers to access unique savings.

Market Insights: Scraped data helps businesses in the travel industry to gain insights into market trends, competitive pricing strategies, and customer preferences, facilitating informed decision-making and strategy development.

Vacation Rentals

Broad Search Capability: Vacation rental scraping tools can search multiple websites, aggregating a wide range of rental listings from different sources, giving users access to a more comprehensive selection.

Time and Cost Efficiency: It saves users time and effort by automating finding vacation rentals, allowing them to compare options and prices more efficiently.

Real-Time Availability: Users can access real-time information on the availability and pricing of vacation rentals, ensuring they secure the most up-to-date and accurate information.

Price Comparison: Scraping tools enable users to compare prices for similar vacation rentals across different platforms, helping them find the best deals and potentially saving money.

Customization and Alerts: Users can set up alerts for specific criteria or price changes to inform price drops or new listings that match their preferences.

Informed Decision Making: By collecting and presenting data on various vacation rental options, scraping tools empower travelers to make informed decisions about where to stay based on location, price, amenities, and user reviews.

Package Providers

Cost Savings: Scraping enables users to compare prices and packages from multiple travel providers, helping them find the most affordable travel packages that suit their budget and preferences.

Comprehensive Information: Users can access detailed information about travel packages, including itineraries, inclusions, and terms and conditions, allowing them to make informed decisions.

Customization Opportunities: Scraped data can highlight package components, enabling travelers to customize their trips by selecting specific accommodations, activities, or add-ons that match their preferences.

Real-time Updates: Users can receive real-time package availability and pricing updates, ensuring they take advantage of limited-time promotions or deals.

Streamlined Booking: Scraping simplifies the booking process by consolidating travel package information in one place, reducing the time and effort required to book a complete vacation.

User Reviews and Ratings: Access to reviews and ratings for travel packages and providers allows users to make informed decisions based on the experiences of previous travelers, increasing confidence in their choices.

[circular-time]

Unsolicited Rec: My webhost of 20 years — I owe them my soul

Hey if anyone is looking for a webhost for their websites, blogs, a shop front, public or password-protected file storage, mailing lists, or would just like to have their email in reasonable privacy where Google can't scrape it, I just noticed my old webhost ICDSoft is having a 75% off sale so your first year is $2/mo, renewing at $80/year, + (last time I checked?) $5 for domain name registration.  I think they were $60 per year when I started 20 years ago, and they just keep adding more storage space and tools (eg social media backup & sync)

Their dashboard has oodles of tools for setting up various types of websites and things with acronyms somebody more techy than me would appreciate, Their online documentation and tips blog and 24/7 tech support are great and — no really, they are GOOD. I foisted my mom on them decades ago after she asked me about starting her business website, and they've been her tech support ever since.

Which is where the soul-iou comes in.

ANYWAY, ICDsoft has never let me down in 20+ years, they protect their servers from attacks so I've never been hacked or had downtime that I know of (knock wood), and they are literally the only company I trust.

[Above: screencap of the top of their order page listing some features of basic account.]

This is not a paid shill. I've just been thinking about renovating my old websites and dormant blogs because of recent Tumblr posts talking about the good old days when the web wasn't consolidated, owned, sandboxed and mined by social media companies and Google.

Think of it as a community garden, where you pay a fee for your plot and do the gardening yourself, but there's a couple on-duty gardeners to keep out pests, maintain the hoses and fences, and advise you on projects or even help you set up your beds.

[number01data-entry-expert]

Welcome to my Virtual Assistant Data Entry Gig!

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[productdata]

Scrape Nykaa & Minimalist Data for Skincare Trends

Introduction

With millions of product listings and consumer reviews, India’s top beauty e-commerce platforms like Nykaa and Minimalist have become goldmines for real-time skincare market insights. For brands aiming to launch new products or track customer preferences, the need to Scrape Nykaa & Minimalist Data for Skincare Trend Analysis has never been stronger. From ingredient popularity to consumer sentiment, modern beauty brands rely on accurate, timely data to guide innovation and marketing strategies. Actowiz Solutions helps brands extract high-quality data such as the Nykaa Product and Review Dataset and Minimalist Product Price Dataset, delivering the foundation for data-backed product development. Our expertise in Beauty & Personal Care Data Scraping, Web Scraping E-commerce Websites, and advanced real-time pipelines ensures brands always stay ahead. This case study shows how Actowiz empowered a leading skincare brand to Scrape Nykaa & Minimalist Data for Skincare Trend Analysis and turn raw data into actionable insights.

The Client

Our client is a fast-growing premium skincare company with a strong presence in India’s digital-first market. As demand for clean, science-backed ingredients soared, they wanted a data-driven way to map market shifts. Their internal team needed help to Scrape Nykaa & Minimalist Data for Skincare Trend Analysis but lacked the tools and compliance know-how to extract reliable insights. They wanted to leverage Nykaa & Minimalist Product Data Extraction for Skincare Brands to analyze real-time product launches, pricing, and customer sentiment. By using Web Scraping Health & Beauty Websites, the brand planned to optimize pricing, source trending ingredients, and refine their product lineup. The goal was to monitor Skincare Product Listings & Reviews Data from Minimalist and the Skincare Product Price Dataset from Nykaa to benchmark against competitors. To make this possible, they turned to Actowiz Solutions for robust scraping workflows that could deliver clean, compliant data at scale.

Key Challenges

Extracting clean skincare product data across large, dynamic platforms posed big challenges. Nykaa’s catalog updates daily, with thousands of products and frequent changes in prices, discounts, and availability. The client needed to Extract Skincare Product Data from Nykaa along with competitor reviews without missing fresh launches or promotions. Similarly, the Minimalist website had dynamic elements, JavaScript-heavy content, and customer reviews embedded in interactive sections. This made Web Scraping Minimalist & Nykaa for Skincare Market Trends complex, requiring advanced rendering and CAPTCHA solving. Another challenge was ensuring all pipelines met platform policies and local data compliance. Large volumes of unstructured reviews needed to be cleaned, de-duplicated, and mapped to the right products to form a usable Nykaa Product and Review Dataset and Minimalist Product Price Dataset. Moreover, the client’s team wanted daily updates to benchmark product pricing — a must for maintaining an accurate Skincare Product Price Dataset . Handling proxies, automating jobs, and integrating this into their BI dashboards added to the complexity.

Key Solutions

Actowiz Solutions deployed a powerful custom pipeline to Scrape Nykaa & Minimalist Data for Skincare Trend Analysis with precision. Using our robust Web Scraping E-commerce Websites framework, we built a scalable engine to collect product names, SKUs, descriptions, prices, offers, and stock availability from Nykaa daily. Our automated crawler also captured ratings and verified user comments to build a rich Nykaa Product and Review Dataset for sentiment analysis. For Minimalist, we used advanced headless browsers and rendering techniques to bypass JavaScript barriers and extract Skincare Product Listings & Reviews Data from Minimalist seamlessly. Our Beauty & Personal Care Data Scraping solution used rotating proxies, dynamic user agents, and CAPTCHA solvers for smooth sessions without interruptions. To ensure the Minimalist Product Price Dataset stayed current, we scheduled daily runs and pushed clean data directly to the client’s cloud database. Our team designed data mapping scripts to standardize fields like ingredient tags, prices, and volume for easy comparison. The output helped the client spot underpriced or overpriced SKUs and respond with accurate promotions. By combining Nykaa & Minimalist Product Data Extraction for Skincare Brands with clear visual dashboards, the brand unlocked real-time Web Scraping Minimalist & Nykaa for Skincare Market Trends to track demand, pricing changes, and customer preferences effortlessly.

Our unified pipelines handled spikes in data volume with auto-scaling crawlers, smart retries, and robust IP rotation. Using the Blinkit Quick Commerce Scraper and Blinkit Grocery Data Scraping API , the client now benchmarks competitor prices city-wise. They can instantly run Grocery Price Comparison Using Web Scraping to make agile pricing decisions. By integrating these feeds with their ERP, they gained a real-time view of market shifts. The Zomato and Blinkit Data Scraping API India has since become the backbone of their pricing operations.

Client’s Testimonial

"Partnering with Actowiz Solutions completely transformed how we track market trends. Their expertise in Web Scraping Health & Beauty Websites and robust solutions for Skincare Product Listings & Reviews Data from Minimalist gave us the daily insights we needed to stay competitive. We now get real-time Skincare Product Price Dataset updates, clean product data, and clear reports for our BI teams. This has made a huge difference to our pricing, marketing, and product strategy."

— Head of Digital Insights, Leading Skincare Brand

Conclusion

This project proves that brands who invest in advanced scraping and reliable pipelines gain a clear edge. By partnering with Actowiz Solutions, the client unlocked daily insights from India’s biggest beauty platforms using Nykaa & Minimalist Product Data Extraction for Skincare Brands and smart Beauty & Personal Care Data Scraping. With ready access to verified data, they now adapt faster to trends, price shifts, and competitor moves. Our trusted methods for Web Scraping E-commerce Websites help brands make confident, data-backed choices. If you want to Scrape Nykaa & Minimalist Data for Skincare Trend Analysis and power your growth, talk to Actowiz Solutions today — your data advantage starts here.

📩 Email: info@productdatascrape.com 📞 Call or WhatsApp: +1 (424) 377-7584

🔗 Read More: https://www.productdatascrape.com/beauty-brands-scrape-nykaa-minimalist-skincare-trends.php

🌐 Get Expert Support in Web Scraping & Datasets — Fast, Reliable & Scalable! 🚀📊

[fooddatascrape998]

Benefits of Web Scraping Weekly Grocery Prices from Carrefour UAE

How Do Businesses Benefit from Web Scraping Weekly Grocery Prices from Carrefour UAE?

Introduction

With the digitization of retail and the rapid changes in grocery retail pricing, tracking weekly pricing changes has become mandatory for consumers and businesses alike. With many online portals now serving as the go-to shopping method, capturing pricing data in real-time provides insights that are actionable. Carrefour is a sizable grocery retailer with an extensive online presence, and is one of the top places in the UAE to use data from for analyzing trends. Web Scraping Weekly Grocery Prices from Carrefour UAE now enables businesses, researchers, and data analysts to have clarity into the dynamic changes in grocery pricing based on promotional offers and consumer behavior.

Companies can Scrape Weekly Grocery Prices from Carrefour UAE in order to leverage insights to develop better inventory strategies, pricing models and promotional offers. Weekly grocery price insights can also be valuable for comparative benchmarking. With the availability of APIs and robust scraping tools, Carrefour Grocery Price Trends Scraping UAE no longer being as complex as a project of the past but a very achievable data driven opportunity for organizations and decision makers.

Why Weekly Grocery Price Tracking Matters?

Weekly price tracking helps identify subtle changes in pricing that may not be apparent in monthly or quarterly overviews. Retailers frequently adjust their prices to reflect seasonal demands, promotional events, supply chain dynamics, and competitor actions. Carrefour UAE, known for frequent flash sales, bundle deals, and weekday-specific promotions, is an ideal candidate for granular price monitoring.

Monitoring grocery prices weekly allows for:

Accurate trend detection

Understanding discount frequency and depth

Planning restocking or reselling based on low-price periods

Tracking inflation at a micro level

Comparing competitor pricing on a near-real-time basis

With the ability to Extract Weekly Grocery Product Details from Carrefour UAE, businesses are equipped to plan better, compete, and serve customers effectively.

Weekly Price Tracking Table (July 2025)

Let’s look at a snapshot of prices for commonly purchased grocery items from Carrefour UAE during the week of July 8 to July 14, 2025:

Al Ain Water (6x1.5L)

Category: Beverages

Unit Size: 9L

Price on Jul 8: AED 6.75

Price on Jul 14: AED 7.25

Price Change: +AED 0.50

Sadia Chicken Breast

Category: Frozen Foods

Unit Size: 1kg

Price on Jul 8: AED 18.90

Price on Jul 14: AED 17.50

Price Change: -AED 1.40

Sunwhite Basmati Rice

Category: Grains

Unit Size: 5kg

Price on Jul 8: AED 27.95

Price on Jul 14: AED 27.95

Price Change: AED 0.00

Lurpak Butter Unsalted

Category: Dairy

Unit Size: 400g

Price on Jul 8: AED 19.50

Price on Jul 14: AED 21.00

Price Change: +AED 1.50

Kellogg’s Corn Flakes

Category: Breakfast

Unit Size: 750g

Price on Jul 8: AED 14.95

Price on Jul 14: AED 12.95

Price Change: -AED 2.00

Persil Liquid Detergent

Category: Household Care

Unit Size: 3L

Price on Jul 8: AED 33.95

Price on Jul 14: AED 33.95

Price Change: AED 0.00

Dettol Handwash Refill

Category: Hygiene

Unit Size: 500ml

Price on Jul 8: AED 9.25

Price on Jul 14: AED 8.75

Price Change: -AED 0.50

This data, when tracked over several weeks, can form the foundation of a Carrefour Grocery Price Tracker Dataset UAE—useful for inflation monitoring, supply chain planning, and e-commerce pricing strategies.

Benefits of Weekly Grocery Price Monitoring from Carrefour

When businesses invest in Weekly Grocery Price Monitoring from Carrefour, they gain more than just numbers—they obtain a competitive advantage. Here’s how:

Retailers & Distributors: Gain insights into competitor promotions and optimize procurement.

CPG Brands: Evaluate how their SKUs are priced and promoted.

Consumers & Price Comparison Portals: Provide real-time price alerts and savings suggestions.

Analysts & Economists: Use weekly data to understand short-term price fluctuations and inflation signals.

Logistics & Warehouse Managers: Schedule deliveries and manage inventory based on lowest price windows.

For example, a brand tracking its products across various Carrefour listings can use Web Scraping Carrefour for Weekly Grocery Rates to understand which locations and products are promoted most aggressively, thereby optimizing advertising spend.

Tools and Technologies Used for Carrefour Data Scraping

To gather weekly grocery pricing data effectively, data teams use a combination of technologies:

Scraping Bots: Built with Python (BeautifulSoup, Scrapy) or JavaScript (Puppeteer) for structured page scraping.

Headless Browsers: For dynamic pages that require rendering before data extraction.

Cloud Infrastructure: For running scheduled scraping jobs.

Databases: Such as PostgreSQL or MongoDB to store parsed data.

Visualization Tools: For building dashboards and reports.

Businesses also integrate scraping services into existing infrastructure using Carrefour Grocery Delivery Scraping API, ensuring that data is collected and processed automatically without manual intervention.

Types of Data Extracted from Carrefour UAE

When you Scrape Carrefour Grocery Data, a wide array of valuable data points becomes available:

Product names & SKUs

Price (original and discounted)

Quantity/size

Brand

Category

Product image URLs

Availability status

Promotion tags (e.g., "Buy 1 Get 1")

Customer ratings and reviews

This information can be repurposed for several applications, from trend forecasting to competitor intelligence and consumer behavior analysis.

Applications of Grocery App Data Scraping Services

Grocery App Data Scraping Services help power platforms such as:

Price Comparison Websites: By feeding real-time grocery prices

Retail Analytics Tools: To monitor pricing strategy effectiveness

E-commerce Intelligence Software: Tracking changes in grocery prices across platforms

Consumer Savings Apps: Recommending optimal shopping times and store choices

Wholesale Suppliers: Understanding retail trends to tailor their B2B offerings

Web Scraping Quick Commerce Data also provides insight into express delivery helping stakeholders understand rapid fulfillment trends.

Ethical and Legal Considerations

While data scraping offers significant strategic value, it’s important to practice ethical data collection:

Focus on publicly available data

Respect robots.txt files

Avoid overloading servers

Comply with data privacy regulations (GDPR, etc.)

Use rate-limiting and delay mechanisms to avoid being flagged

Responsible scraping practices ensure that data collection efforts don’t disrupt service availability or breach any legal boundaries. When implemented with care, Grocery Delivery Scraping API Services can offer rich insights while maintaining platform integrity.

Forecasting and Visualization

Once data is scraped and stored, teams can use analytics tools such as Power BI, Tableau, or even Excel to create compelling dashboards and reports. You can:

Visualize price fluctuations

Detect trends in seasonal pricing

Compare product categories

Monitor weekly savings and promotions

Generate automated weekly reports

Challenges in Scraping Carrefour UAE

While scraping is a powerful tool, there are challenges:

CAPTCHAs and Bot Detection: Carrefour may use anti-bot tools.

JavaScript-heavy Content: Requires advanced scraping tools.

Dynamic Pricing: Prices may vary based on user location or cart behavior.

Frequent Layout Changes: Can break scraper scripts unless regularly maintained.

Overcoming these challenges involves continuous monitoring, adaptive scraping strategies, and a reliable scraping service provider.

Conclusion

Weekly grocery data is a goldmine of insight, especially when extracted systematically from platforms like Carrefour UAE. Businesses that utilize Web Scraping Weekly Grocery Prices from Carrefour UAE gain a clear edge in trend analysis, pricing strategy, and demand forecasting. From consumers to corporations, everyone stands to benefit when real-time data becomes accessible, clean, and actionable.

By integrating scraping workflows and analytics, brands can build a powerful Grocery Price Tracking Dashboard, backed by rich and structured Grocery Store Datasets. These dashboards empower teams with the ability to spot price anomalies, analyze promotions, and make data-backed business decisions with speed and accuracy

As the demand for express delivery, pricing transparency, and retail optimization continues to grow, leveraging Quick Commerce Data Intelligence Services is not just a technical advantage—it’s a strategic imperative. With the right tools, ethics, and expertise, Carrefour UAE’s weekly grocery pricing data becomes a catalyst for smarter commerce and deeper customer understanding.

Are you in need of high-class scraping services? Food Data Scrape should be your first point of call. We are undoubtedly the best in Food Data Aggregator and Mobile Grocery App Scraping service and we render impeccable data insights and analytics for strategic decision-making. With a legacy of excellence as our backbone, we help companies become data-driven, fueling their development. Please take advantage of our tailored solutions that will add value to your business. Contact us today to unlock the value of your data. Read More >> https://www.fooddatascrape.com/grocery-mobile-app-data-scraping.php

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Python: The Beginner-Friendly Powerhouse of Programming

When it comes to programming languages that balance simplicity, power, and versatility, Python leads the pack. From building websites to analyzing data, from automating tasks to developing artificial intelligence, Python is the go-to language for developers and learners alike.

In this microblog, we’ll explore the history, features, applications, advantages, learning path, and career opportunities in Python—making it your one-stop read to fall in love with this beautiful language.

🌟 What is Python?

Python is a high-level, interpreted, and general-purpose programming language created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991. It emphasizes readability and simplicity, which makes it perfect for beginners and professionals alike.

Its design philosophy is captured in the Zen of Python:

“Beautiful is better than ugly. Simple is better than complex.”

Python’s syntax resembles English, reducing the learning curve for new programmers.

🧠 Why Learn Python?

Here’s why Python is dominating the tech world:

✅ Easy to Learn & Read: Python syntax is clean and understandable.

⚙️ Versatile: Works for web development, data science, machine learning, automation, and more.

🔧 Extensive Libraries: Includes powerful tools like NumPy, Pandas, Django, Flask, TensorFlow, etc.

🌐 Massive Community Support: A huge global community means lots of help, tutorials, and forums.

🧪 Beginner Friendly, Yet Advanced: Whether you’re automating Excel or building AI—Python has you covered.

📜 History of Python

1980s: Guido van Rossum starts developing Python as a hobby project.

1991: Python 0.9.0 is released with classes, functions, and exceptions.

2000: Python 2.0 introduces list comprehensions and garbage collection.

2008: Python 3.0 is released, not backward-compatible, but modernized the language.

Today: Python is one of the top 3 programming languages globally.

🚀 Features That Make Python Special

1. Readable and Clean Syntax

Python code is elegant and easy to understand. Example:

pythonCopy

Edit

for i in range(5): print("Hello, World!")

2. Dynamically Typed

You don’t need to declare variable types.

pythonCopy

Edit

x = 5 # x is an integer x = "Hello" # now it's a string

3. Interpreted Language

Python runs line by line, making it easy to debug.

4. Object-Oriented

Python supports OOP principles like inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism.

5. Cross-platform Compatibility

Write once, run anywhere—Python runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, etc.

🧰 Python Libraries & Frameworks You Should Know

Python’s strength lies in its rich ecosystem:

🔬 For Data Science & ML:

NumPy – Arrays and numerical operations

Pandas – Data manipulation

Matplotlib – Data visualization

Scikit-learn – Machine learning

TensorFlow / PyTorch – Deep learning

🕸️ For Web Development:

Flask – Lightweight web framework

Django – Full-stack web framework

FastAPI – High-performance APIs

🤖 For Automation:

Selenium – Browser automation

BeautifulSoup – Web scraping

OpenPyXL – Excel automation

PyAutoGUI – Keyboard/mouse automation

🛠️ Real-World Applications of Python

1. Web Development

Python is used to build server-side web applications using frameworks like Django and Flask.

2. Data Analysis & Visualization

Data scientists rely on Python for analyzing large data sets and creating visual reports.

3. Machine Learning & AI

Python powers intelligent applications using libraries like Scikit-learn, Keras, and TensorFlow.

4. Automation / Scripting

Python automates boring, repetitive tasks—like renaming files or sending bulk emails.

5. Cybersecurity & Hacking

Ethical hackers use Python for penetration testing, scanning, and scripting.

6. Game Development

Libraries like Pygame help in developing simple 2D games.

7. Desktop GUI Applications

With tools like Tkinter and PyQt, Python can build cross-platform desktop applications.

📈 Who is Using Python?

Python is used by top companies globally:

🏢 Google – Core systems, AI, and internal tools

📺 Netflix – Content recommendation algorithms

🧪 NASA – Data processing and research

🚕 Uber – Demand prediction and dynamic pricing

💳 PayPal – Fraud detection

🐦 Instagram – Backend powered by Django (Python)

👨‍🎓 Learning Path to Master Python

Here's a step-by-step guide for absolute beginners:

✅ Step 1: Learn the Basics

Variables, data types, loops, functions

Conditional statements and exception handling

✅ Step 2: Data Structures

Lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets

✅ Step 3: Object-Oriented Programming

Classes, objects, inheritance, encapsulation

✅ Step 4: Work With Modules and Packages

Importing built-in and custom modules

✅ Step 5: Learn Libraries

Use NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Flask, etc.

✅ Step 6: Build Projects

Automate tasks

Create websites or data dashboards

✅ Step 7: Learn Advanced Concepts

Decorators, generators, threading

Work with APIs, databases, and testing tools

💼 Career Opportunities in Python

With Python in your toolkit, you can become:

1. Python Developer

Build websites, APIs, and applications.

2. Data Analyst / Data Scientist

Extract insights and build models using data.

3. Machine Learning Engineer

Design AI-powered systems and predictive models.

4. DevOps Engineer

Use Python for automation, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines.

5. Cybersecurity Analyst

Write scripts to detect vulnerabilities and analyze threats.

6. Game or App Developer

Create 2D games or GUI-based desktop apps.

📚 Top Resources to Learn Python

Here are some top learning platforms:

Books:

“Python Crash Course” by Eric Matthes

“Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” by Al Sweigart

Websites:

Real Python

W3Schools

GeeksforGeeks

Python.org

YouTube Channels:

FreeCodeCamp

Tech With Tim

Corey Schafer

Courses:

Udemy, Coursera, edX, and Codecademy

🔄 Python vs Other Languages

FeaturePythonJavaC++JavaScriptSyntax Simplicity✅ Very Easy❌ Verbose❌ Complex✅ ModerateSpeed⚠️ Slower✅ Faster✅ Very Fast✅ FastUse Cases✅ Versatile✅ Enterprise✅ System-level✅ Web-basedCommunity Support✅ Huge✅ Huge✅ Large✅ HugeLearning Curve✅ Easy❌ Steep❌ Steep✅ Moderate

🧩 Fun Python Code Snippet

Here’s a cool one-liner:

pythonCopy

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print("".join(reversed("Python"))) # Output: nohtyP

Or a simple palindrome checker:

pythonCopy

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word = "radar" print("Palindrome" if word == word[::-1] else "Not Palindrome")

🔚 Conclusion

Python isn’t just a programming language; it’s a gateway into the world of software development, data science, and automation. Whether you are a student, job seeker, entrepreneur, or hobbyist—learning Python can unlock countless possibilities.

Its beginner-friendly nature, wide-ranging applications, and industry demand make it one of the most rewarding skills you can acquire today.

So, why wait?

Start learning Python now—and future-proof your tech career! 🐍💻