BotProof Blog

In a blog post by Pollstar, an interesting legal conjecture was made based upon the indictment of the Wiseguys who hacked reCAPTCHA’s CAPTCHA (see earlier news coverage).  Namely, that there wasn’t really a crime committed so much as an exploitation of technology to gain a business advantage.  I.e., Wiseguys merely used technology to rapidly answer Ticketmaster’s (easy-to-crack) CAPTCHAs to buy up tickets.  In other words, Wiseguys followed the rules (”answer a CAPTCHA to buy a ticket”). Thus, say the pundits, there was no crime.

The real problem is the motive for such actions: acquiring an inventory of limited quantities (concert tickets) for resale on a gray market (i.e. Wiseguy’s ticket site) at a significant mark-up.  The motive (suspicious pundits also say) for the indictment: Ticketmaster has undue competition for its subsidiary (TicketsNow).  The end: Ticketmaster rids itself of a competitor.  The corollary: consumers still end up paying too much for their tickets.

That’s a lot of ‘wrongs’ — are we really getting the ‘right’ out of this?

I don’t, in my wildest dreams, beleive we’ll ever find the most definative example of the “worst CAPTCHA ever” — there are just too many to choose from(!).  But I’ve got to believe this has to be considered a candidate:

The Worst CAPTCHA Ever?

What’s worse, it came on an announcement from the Baltimore Sun regarding the introduction of CAPTCHAs to protect one of their blogs from bot-initiated spam posts.  That I found the CAPTCHA above is completely coincidental: I received a notification they were using a CAPTCHA and I went to check out whose they were using and was given the above CAPTCHA to answer.  Methinks they need an easier-to-read, superior CAPTCHA!  I mean really — that’s horrible!