>> There’s no way for a user to simply download its entire database. “So we made a web crawler,” says Mizuno. “It’s a tool that goes to their website, searches for a company, and downloads that one company’s business relationship list.
it's not smart IMO to admit this publicly since almost certainly website TOCs would prohibit it and if the counterparty is sufficiently motivated, they could sue successfully (there was a recent Oracle documentation scraping case IIRC). Japan has laws allowing scraping but likely the jurisdiction of the target doesn't.
> But if his network could reveal the costs of an economic mistake like Brexit, thought Mizuno, what if he applied it to a genuine, humanitarian disaster?
Totally unsubstantiated. I could find no proof in the article that was an economic mistake
The story about an econophysicist who maps crime [sic] networks is intringuing; too bad the article kept changing the topic and offering aggrandizing analogies and never covered it in-depth.
After 15 seconds of reading, "Structure of global buyer-supplier networks and its implications for conflict minerals regulations", "Buyer–Supplier Networks and Aggregate Volatility", "The Structure of Global Inter-firm Networks", and others..., seem relevant.
it's not smart IMO to admit this publicly since almost certainly website TOCs would prohibit it and if the counterparty is sufficiently motivated, they could sue successfully (there was a recent Oracle documentation scraping case IIRC). Japan has laws allowing scraping but likely the jurisdiction of the target doesn't.