How do I convince my boss that it's OK to use an application to access an outside website?
- by Cyberherbalist
That is, if you agree that it's OK.
We have a need to maintain an accurate internal record of bank routing numbers, and my boss wants me to set up a process where once a week someone goes to the Federal Reserve's website, clicks on the link to get the list of routing numbers (or the link giving the updates since a particular date), and then manually uploads the resultant text file to an application that will make the update to our data.
I told him that a manual process was not at all necessary, and that I could write a routine that would access the FED's routing numbers in the application that keeps our data updated, and put it on whatever schedule was appropriate. But he is greatly opposed to doing this, and calls it "hacking the Federal Reserve website." I think he's afraid that the FED is going to get after us.
I showed him the FED's robot.txt file, and the only thing it forbids is an automated indexing of pages with extension .cf*:
User-agent: * # applies to all robots
Disallow: CF # disallow indexing of all CF* directories and pages
This says nothing about accessing the same data automatically that you could access manually.
Anyone have a good counterargument to the idea that we'd be "hacking" the FED?
