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Comment by dandermotj | Hacker News Reader

The open source library simply helps a programmer put together HTTP requests. If an API crashes because it receives an unexpected HTTP request its certainly not the requesters fault.

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At Delft University of Technology we're working on this also for about 2 years. Currently 8 (big) banks reverse-engineered, the smartphone way (no scraping).

Besides universities there are not many non-profits that will have the legal and financial means to publish an open source lib. The legal landscape for managing a complete library with numerous banks is complex. As we see in this discussion thread, there are some fragmented solutions with limited coverage.

https://github.com/Internet-of-Money (empty placeholder)

What's the best way to contact you guys? :)

That is reasonable technical approach to the problem, but not how the courts work. On the other hand in court also should ask and answer the question of whether you triggered such behavior intentionally or not.

Also, if it's their public API used by their mobile/web apps, it would likely be crashing all the time anyway from normal user interaction (if some OSS were able to crash it via HTTP).

Nah, you can totally walk a tightrope where one's app is never crashes the API, but only because it has no input fields that allow you to try to transfer currency in the amount of "spaghetti" from one account to another.

You make it sound silly. But the "unexpected HTTP request" may in fact be a SYN flood (yes, that has happened), or looping some non-trivial request for an ad-hoc DoS. That is indeed the requesters "fault", even if there is clearly no intent and hopefully no legal ramifications.

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