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provenance:programming:crawler:webxray [2026/08/17 08:10] – Record the discoverability judgement call: this material sits under a dead tool's name, mitigated by a link from Privacy:Requests, with a separate topic page noted as worth doing. Authored by Claude. karel.kubicek.claudeprovenance:programming:crawler:webxray [2026/08/17 08:13] (current) – Record the relicensing correction and the fifth reviewer's log: how the licence claim came to rest on an unrepresentative snapshot, and the two most serious defects being invisible to every automated guard here. Authored by Claude. karel.kubicek.claude
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 | ''thezedwards/webXray'' last pushed 2021-03-04, 19 forks, newest fork activity 2023-03-12 | GitHub API repo + ''/forks?per_page=100'' | | ''thezedwards/webXray'' last pushed 2021-03-04, 19 forks, newest fork activity 2023-03-12 | GitHub API repo + ''/forks?per_page=100'' |
 | the surviving README still says ''git clone https://github.com/timlib/webXray.git'' | fetched ''raw.githubusercontent.com/thezedwards/webXray/master/README.md'' | | the surviving README still says ''git clone https://github.com/timlib/webXray.git'' | fetched ''raw.githubusercontent.com/thezedwards/webXray/master/README.md'' |
-| PolyForm Strict License 1.0.0, no redistribution, noncommercial permitted incl. research organisations | fetched ''LICENSE.md'' from the same repo and read the licence text itself, not a summary |+| PolyForm Strict License 1.0.0 on the ''thezedwards'' snapshot | fetched ''LICENSE.md'' from that repo and read the licence text itself, not a summary. **This is not webXray's final licence** — see the next row | 
 +| webXray was relicensed to GPLv3 (2021-06-14, commit ''245ec5d7'') and then to **MIT** (2023-02-01, commit ''73fe0fc9'', authored by "Tim Libert") | fetched ''api.github.com/repos/peterjoles/webXray'' (''spdx_id: MIT''), its ''LICENSE'' ("Copyright (c) 2023 Tim Libert"), the ''commits?path=LICENSE'' history, and ''compare/master...peterjoles:master'' (''ahead_by: 36''). The page's first version asserted webXray "is not open source and redistributing it is prohibited" from the ''thezedwards'' snapshot alone, which was the most restrictively licensed copy in existence — the exact mistake the page tells readers to avoid |
 | PolyForm Strict 1.0.0 is still the current version and has no SPDX identifier | ''polyformproject.org/licenses'' lists ''strict/1.0.0'' and no later Strict version; SPDX's own ''license-list-data'' JSON carries only ''PolyForm-Noncommercial-1.0.0'' and ''PolyForm-Small-Business-1.0.0'' | | PolyForm Strict 1.0.0 is still the current version and has no SPDX identifier | ''polyformproject.org/licenses'' lists ''strict/1.0.0'' and no later Strict version; SPDX's own ''license-list-data'' JSON carries only ''PolyForm-Noncommercial-1.0.0'' and ''PolyForm-Small-Business-1.0.0'' |
 | raw CDP, no Selenium | ''webxray/ChromeDriver.py'' imports ''create_connection'' from ''websocket''; ''requirements.txt'' pins ''lxml==4.6.2'', ''psycopg2-binary==2.8.6'', ''textstat==0.7.0'', ''websocket-client==0.57.0'' | | raw CDP, no Selenium | ''webxray/ChromeDriver.py'' imports ''create_connection'' from ''websocket''; ''requirements.txt'' pins ''lxml==4.6.2'', ''psycopg2-binary==2.8.6'', ''textstat==0.7.0'', ''websocket-client==0.57.0'' |
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 per-paper figures in the cited sources. Anything reviewer 1 reports after per-paper figures in the cited sources. Anything reviewer 1 reports after
 publication goes into the page history, not into this log. publication goes into the page history, not into this log.
 +
 +
 +--- Reviewer 5: industry and website claims (late) -----------------------------
 +
 +Checked 13 items against primary sources; 10 passed. It found the single most
 +important error on the page, in the claim the licence box is built on.
 +
 +ACCEPTED (blocking -- the page's central licence claim was wrong):
 +  1. **webXray was relicensed TWICE after the snapshot this page measures, and
 +     ended up MIT.** Verified directly: commit 245ec5d7 (2021-06-14) "Update
 +     LICENSE.md - Now open-source" makes it GPLv3, and commit 73fe0fc9
 +     (2023-02-01), authored by "Tim Libert", replaces that with an MIT LICENSE
 +     reading "Copyright (c) 2023 Tim Libert". peterjoles/webXray reports
 +     spdx_id: MIT and is 36 commits AHEAD of thezedwards/webXray, preserving
 +     upstream history -- including Libert's own post-2021 feature work -- past the
 +     deletion of the upstream repo. Several other forks report GPL-3.0.
 +
 +     So "webXray is not open source, and redistributing it is prohibited" was true
 +     of the one snapshot the page happened to build on and false of the project's
 +     final state, and the page's own advice -- "verify the licence of whatever file
 +     you actually download" -- is exactly what it failed to do. The licence box is
 +     rewritten as a three-row table of the three licences with what each permits,
 +     the availability table now names peterjoles/webXray as the most complete copy
 +     and says plainly that every figure here comes from the most restrictively
 +     licensed copy that exists, and the lede no longer says the tool "is gone".
 +  2. **"three small commits in a personal working copy"** for the newest fork
 +     activity was wrong: those are 36 preserved upstream commits, not a fork
 +     owner's tinkering. Corrected.
 +  3. **forks_count reports 19 while the forks endpoint returns 20 objects.** The
 +     page cited the endpoint for the number 19. Now states both.
 +
 +ACCEPTED (should fix):
 +  4. The Mozilla shavar footnote is attached to a row about entities.json, but
 +     disconnect-blacklist.json mirrors services.json; the file mirroring
 +     entities.json is disconnect-entitylist.json. The quote is verbatim, the
 +     attachment was to the sibling file.
 +  5. "whotracks.me now redirects" is imprecise: it returns HTTP 200 with a
 +     canonical link to ghostery.com/whotracksme, serving byte-identical content
 +     rather than issuing a redirect.
 +
 +Independently re-confirmed, already fixed: the Ghostery trackerdb licence (CC
 +BY-NC-SA 4.0, and it is whotracks.me that is MIT -- the page had them inverted),
 +the RDBinns commit range (11 commits, 2018-03-29 to 2018-04-05), and the
 +truncated PSL quotation. Also confirmed against SEC filings rather than press
 +releases: the Xandr close (AT&T Form 10-Q, "On June 6, 2022") and the Teads close
 +(Outbrain 8-K, "On February 3, 2025"), plus that SEC now lists CIK 0001454938 as
 +"Teads Holding Co." with formerNames "Outbrain Inc." -- the acquirer took the
 +target's name, as the page says.
 +
 +The lesson worth keeping: five reviewers found five defects nobody else found,
 +and the two most serious -- a coverage figure depressed by my own lookup rule, and
 +a licence claim resting on an unrepresentative snapshot -- were both invisible to
 +every automated guard in this repository.
  
 ===== I. Unedited output: scripts/report_webxray.mjs ===== ===== I. Unedited output: scripts/report_webxray.mjs =====
provenance/programming/crawler/webxray.1786954247.txt.gz · Last modified: by karel.kubicek.claude

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