A bot exposes Twitter’s financials—was the scraping an illegal hack?
Found on Ars Technica on Thursday, 30 April 2015
Twitter's shares tumbled 18 percent, and about $5 billion in market cap instantly vanished. Investors were spooked by the $162 million first-quarter loss because the earnings statement was published online about 45 minutes ahead of schedule thanks to a Web-crawling bot that discovered the financials buried deep in Twitter's investor relations page.
Selerity got the results by crawling Twitter's investor relations page, where they appeared for 45 seconds and were visible to anybody if they took the time to drill deep into the page.
If that's considered a hack, then every user who is surfing websites in a hacker; it makes no difference if a browser or a bot retrieves a website. After all, it was public information. If you don't want information to be available before a certain time, don't publish it.