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Scalpers Earned $25M Gaming Online Ticket Sellers
SeattleGameboy writes "An indictment has been issued for online ticket brokers known as 'Wiseguy Tickets and Seats of San Francisco.' From 2002 to 2009, they used bots, server farms, and CAPTCHA hacking to buy vast number of premium tickets (Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, NFL, MLB playoffs, etc.) and made $25 million in profits. 'They wrote a script that impersonated users trying to access Facebook, and downloaded hundreds of thousands of possible CAPTCHA challenges from reCAPTCHA. They identified the file ID of each CAPTCHA challenge and created a database of CAPTCHA "answers" to correspond to each ID. The bot would then identify the file ID of a challenge at Ticketmaster and feed back the corresponding answer. The bot also mimicked human behavior by occasionally making mistakes in typing the answer, the authorities said.' I guess you can break any system like CAPTCHA if you want it badly enough."
Just like millions of people every year pay more for computers than they should have needed to, if resellers didn't buy cheap and sell high at every step of the computers' way from the Chinese factory to the consumers home.
That's simply the way the market works.
ROFL. You're talking about the same government that poisoned it's own citizens during prohibition? The same government that spies on its citizens? Just checking.
No one is arguing for zero government. That would simply be anarchy. What people argue for is that we need much much less government than we have now.