I did the same thing to find available camping spots in Hawaii because they are super difficult to get. Wrote a script that would query their "API" every 5 minutes and alert me if a spot became available anywhere.
Have you considered whether doing this might be...wrong?
Presumably those campsites are permitted by some government agency (NPS, BLM, the state of Hawaii, etc.), and presumably that agency designed permitting system with the assumption that people with limited time and attention would be vying for the permits by having to visit the site themselves to get one.
This encodes a particular definition of fairness: that those who register early, or are very motivated, or simply those with a lot of free time to refresh the site, will get permits.
I can also whip up a quick script to replace refreshing an unprotected HTTP API with a notification email. Does that make me more deserving of the camping spot?
> presumably that agency designed permitting system with the assumption that people with limited time and attention would be vying for the permits by having to visit the site themselves to get one.
That's quite a very large assumption that I don't think we can accept as fact.
> that those who register early, or are very motivated, or simply those with a lot of free time to refresh the site, will get permits.
Perhaps someone who writes a script would count as "very motivated"?
> Does that make me more deserving of the camping spot?
"Deserving" has nothing to do with this in the first place. The only way that works is if you define "those who register early", "motivated", "a lot of free time" as "deserving". I could maybe see an argument for the first two classes of people as being "deserving", but I don't think you can justify "I have a lot of free time" as a reason for deserving anything, really.
Doing first-come, first-served based on availability and the random possibility of a cancellation isn't ever going to be a "fair" system. This sort of system is put into place because it requires very little coordination and work on the part of the agency that maintains the reservations. Holding that up as some sort of standard for fairness, and suggesting that anyone who thinks outside the process is wrong... is a little much.
I think you're right the agency probably didn't sit down, write down definition of fairness, then design a permitting system around it. They probably implemented the cheapest/easiest digital analog they could find to a traditional fax-in/walk-up first-come/first-served permitting system.
However, the intentionality of the implementers was not central to my argument.
The system was created by (probably) non-technical people under a certain set of assumptions: namely, that this digital first-come first-served system would function approximately like the old paper one, but with fewer dead trees and toil. The old one was rate-limited by having to call an office and probably talk to a human, and the assumption that if you call every 5 minutes that human will probably get annoyed with you and stop answering your calls. The new one is rate-limited by the assumption that most campers simply can't spend all day refreshing a website.
The traditional first-come first-served system isn't intrinsically "ethical" or "fair" for some classes of people (as you've astutely pointed out), at best it's a crude approximation of some version of fairness. While crude, it was established by a democratically-elected government tasked with allocating a shared resource. "People who can automate HTTP API calls" and the nearby "people who can hire people to automate HTTP API calls" (as has actually happened with some outdoor permits) were almost certainly not in the groups of people the government was seeking to advantage by choosing this system, and I think most engineers are smart enough to be able to intuit that.
So the root of my comment was this: GP is using special knowledge they have (and probably worked hard for) to extract more of a public good than the public really intended to have access to.
* Is that fair to everyone who doesn't have GP's knowledge? Do people like the GP deserve more camping spots than others? This is a public resource, not sneakers, so fairness is important.
* If everyone with programming knowledge acted the way GP acts, would that maximize the public good?
* If everyone with programming knowledge acted the way GP acts, would the system even function at all?
My answers are basically:
* No. Everyone who wants deserves an equal chance at the spots. If there's more demand than spots, it's the government's job to decide. Random programmers on the internet intentionally subverting the government's intentions is wrong regardless fairness (or lack thereof) of the original system).
It would nearly-minimize the public good. Only programmers and people who can hire them would get popular camping spots. This is a real problem is popular outdoors areas around tech hubs. There's a reason NPS will only accept old-fashioned faxes provably not sent from a free online relay for the most popular Sierras routes in CA (e.g. the JMT and much of Yosemite), and it's not because they want to rock like it's the 80's or because the government is backwards. It's because assholes tried to spam the process with automation. I think some (like Half Dome) were migrated to a new lottery system on outdoor.gov this year.
* The system would completely collapse, and most smart programmers could predict that. The government would have to spend more money on servers just to serve bots pinging the registration system constantly, or it would crash. Even if they did that, the people who gots slots would be a vanishingly small subset of the population (programmers) or people who can hire them. Likely, a grey market for "scalped" permits would arise.
If you want to see a world governed by a non-human understanding of fairness and one in which a highly technical cohort was entrusted to make these sorts of judgment calls, look no further than the domain industry in the early 2000s.
Specifically, consider Snapnames -- a company born out of the notion that snapping up a domain name coming up for renewal was something that was legitimately fairly awarded to the automated process that was fastest.
Unfortunately, I found this wholly unconvincing. I sincerely doubt it is a grand ideal, carefully thought-out, or well-funded. Expecting an idealized set of well-crafted axioms for accessing public spaces with demand outstripping supply at an accelerated pace will almost certainly lead to disappointment. "Special knowledge" can be as simple as knowing the right person to befriend to add your name to a list. The example of regressing to ancient non-internet fax instead of even straightforward USPS snail mail tells me they don't have the correct answer either.
You make an interesting point but I don't think that system was ever made to be ethically fair.
Without a script it relies on your free time and refreshing the script every 15 minutes. What if you have a full time job far away from a computer, are you less deserving than anyone with a lot of free time to refresh the page?
>This encodes a particular definition of fairness: that those who register early, or are very motivated, or simply those with a lot of free time to refresh the site, will get permits.
Why is this definition changing with knowledge something that should be considered wrong? The ability to do this work isn't gated to certain people except by knowledge, and the knowledge itself isn't gated. For the longest time this has been considered a fair way of doing things to get an item in limited supply.
This is a cat-and-mouse game. The assumption that people are time-limited and that UI design could be designed to ensure fairness on that assumption is along the same lines of security through obscurity.
the definition for "wrong" in this case is "what would be the social impact if everyone acted like me". In this case, I think the answer is "nothing", and that it passes the moral test (for me personally, at least).
I did the same thing to find available camping spots in Hawaii because they are super difficult to get. Wrote a script that would query their "API" every 5 minutes and alert me if a spot became available anywhere.