I'm surprised this has picked up a fancy name and full libraries for so many languages. Not to mention the use of "JWT" as the acronym, which is already famous for "Java Web Toolkit". It's just an HMAC token for validating the integrity of the data - it proves the data has not been modified, that's it. People have been using this for years, perhaps most popularly used by Facebook to sign API requests and responses.
A side note for anyone considering the use of timestamps within the payload for expiry: note that if you are going to have multiple machines verifying expiries, they will need to be using NTP to ensure that all machines have the same current timestamp at all times.
This is probably another lesson: if your business isn't worth investing in for two years to look for growth, it's probably not worth investing for one either. Most real businesses start extremely small, and grow over a span of 3-5 years. Expecting a business to boom immediately is yet another symptom of misguided startup expectations.
No. Every single time someone supposes that any piece of technology is approaching its limits, the answer is no. Technology will continue to improve and advance as we make new discoveries. The simple fact is we do not know the future, so pretending like we know what things will be like in 20 or 50 years is just pointless. What's with this obsession of taking today's technological knowledge and assuming that things won't drastically change? Nobody should ever pretend to know what the future holds.
That's a very unreasonable point of view. Sure, it's true that in the past 200 years we've had an explosion of technological progress but there's absolutely no reason to assume that it's possible to continue it for an infinite amount of time. It's rather more likely that over time we'll discover the lines that separate "hard but possible" from "theoretically impossible given the physics of this universe". The only real question is when that will happen for any given area of technology.
Asserting that technology will just continue to improve and advance forever simply makes you sound like a stock-market broker in 2007.
Things will drastically change. But given piece of technology has its limits. Assuming it does not is like expecting horses to run faster than sound some time ago.
Frankly I'm annoyed to see this topic here. Most people who have taken to scraping are low-life scum. They see content that others have spent months or years producing, simply set up a site that aggregates all of that information, and then sit back and collect revenue from ads or reseller links you paste everywhere.
People who put in a few hours of work to take advantage of other people's hard work piss me off. :/
Are you against hyperlinks too? Seriously, computers naturally make content reusable. Try to imagine the next level when we don't depend on hoarding. The semantic web imagined this, though it was too complicated. But the idea still has huge benefits; every web site a linked database, with content precisely described. But I think many orgs are too afraid they don't really have something to offer in the big picture (that's what so much of business is about).
I do a lot of work in scraping, but it's for non profit healthcare, academic, and general knowledge augmentation. It's painful, but the only way to get to the next level without waiting a thousand years for everyone to make their own consistent API and metadata descriptions.
