Is Breaking CAPTCHA a Crime? (Wired article)

I used to think it would never change. I mean, your only violating a sites TOS. and In MANY cases (Such as creating a forum profile automatically) you arent even doing that. Your simply automating that process.

But after the U.S. gov started seizing domains early last year for anything from selling knockoff nikes, using copywritten images (like a site about mickey mouse), and the typical torrent/streaming sites, I more or less accepted that in the next ten years or so we are going to start seeing much heavier regulation of the internet.

Another solid example of things changing, is acia berry. That was the death of most rebills - and its crazy illegal to do it now (Without making it very clear to consumers.)

It might take a little longer, since something like SEO spam is pretty much near the bottom of the long list of things that (Really do) need regulated. But evantually its going to happen. Website spam will get stuck in the same kind of boat as email spam.
 


SEO spam is nothing that needs to be regulated. Being on some search engine result page is a very private deal between google and whoever owns the site that gets ranked. You accept that google can rank your site whichever way they want and they do just that. If you go overboard they boot you. Thats a prime example of something where the government doesnt need to be involved at all. Its a very private issue. Google has built in mechanisms which you can use should you decide that you dont want to rank and thats it.

If google breaks some law in the process you can sue them, they pay a tiny amount that they hardly care about, take your name off the list of people they want to rank and that is again all there is to it. No regulation necessary. Stop calling for regulation. On one hand you guys are up ron pauls ass, on the other hand you want stuff being regulated.


On the other hand, if some site explicitly states that CAPTCHAs are used to prevented automated access to a page, they should be entitled to that in some way. After all its their property. Just like you should be able to decide who enters your house and who doesnt. And its not always about putting people in jail for prolonged periods of time. Stuff that revolves around TOS is usually just subject to common law and ends up with people paying for damages caused.
 
The article no longer exists on Wired, since 2009, unfortunately. Yet if I don't mistake services like 2catpcha.com where you can order humans to recognize captchas are doing good things like solivng images for documents and so on. Besides, if you're checking your website ranks with any appropriate tool, you will need to sovle captcha or else how will you do. And of course it ok, to my mind.
 
FatalError, do I have to read something that I'm interested in or only new posts? Fuck you too, love btw ^___^
 
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