@natalie @Drand @graf He's been hammering the shit out of FSE, also.

aaronsw killed himself because he bulk-scraped some academic papers from MIT and MIT had him arrested and the federal prosecutor wanted 35 years for exceeding authorized access under the CFAA. So, now, MIT faculty member David Rand is exceeding authorized access in order to produce more academic papers for MIT. I wonder: if he produces a paper by scraping and then someone scrapes that paper, what happens?

> seems he's doing research into "misinformation" and "fake news" on social media.

He's a Professor of Marketing in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at Sloan. It is safe to reason that (1) he is a psychopath, (2) he has no idea how any of the technical shit works and has a grad student doing it, the grad student in turn having hired an engineer undergrad.

> is there a process for instance admins to opt out of this activity

I guess, per his faculty page, you could just call him, or perhaps email him. Despite scraping FSE, he has chosen an instance that blocks FSE.