Originally Posted by
angatol
My guess is that KVS is paying for the data. As such, it seems reasonable to set limits on access. After all, you wouldn't want someone to run up huge bills by scraping KVS would you? That would be completely unethical.
There is a basic tenet in psychology that states: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. All the previous "methods" for availability and fares were screen scraped from websites were what was being scraped was shut down. The mobile tool's old availability source was no different. It came from
http://1a.com.tw/tk/ which as you can see is now disabled.
Since the new availability source has a weird POS that no one can seem to figure out, and KVS is unwilling to tell us where it is, it's logical that this new source is being screen scraped as well. After all, if someone found out where this new availability data was being screen scraped from, it might be shut down too. This is consistent with the new fare search that is being scraped from a website that can't even show North American fares because he had no better website option to scrape from.
The access limits are equally as likely to prevent the owner of the website from finding out they are being scraped.
Either way, as others have shown the new availability data is inconsistent with both a US and UK POS, the bigger question is if the data is actually accurate vs if it is paid for.