Monday, March 16, 2009

Curses, foiled again!

Seen on an automated ticket site, right next to the captchas:
You do not have permission to access this website if you are using an automated program.
Oh no! Now I'll have to modify my automated ticket-poaching bot to scrape the page I'm hitting and look for text that says I can't use the site. And it gets worse. It's not safe to just look for those particular words. They might decide to change the message to something really scary, like "TOP SEEKRIT NO BOTS ALLOWED WE MEAN IT!" No, I'll need to put together something that can parse English text and figure out whether or not I'm permitted to poach tickets there. That's even harder than cracking captchas.

Damn you, evil ticket guardians!

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