[UPHPU] Breaking Captchas

[Joseph Scott]

On Mar 11, 2009, at 12:26 AM, Kirk Ouimet wrote:

> @Lonnie:
>
> My host sells personal servers by stating that a benefit of the  
> service is
> that you can change your resources real-time. In fact, they  
> specifically
> state: "your goal is to keep the load as low as possible." Here's a  
> pic:
>
> http://www.kirkouimet.com/files/images/auto-scaler.gif
>
> I checked the ToS and couldn't find anything stating using a script to
> automate this task as breaking my agreement with my host. By  
> implementing a
> CAPTCHA it is very apparent that they want to make it difficult for  
> their
> users to automate the changing of allocated resources, but they  
> haven't
> explicitly stated that they will cancel my account or take action  
> against
> me. However; I would turn it off if they asked me to.



I think this still ignores the best way forward, ask for a direct  
authenticated API to make the changes.  Other wise you'll end up  
playing cat and mouse trying to keep up with every change then make to  
the form.  Scraping web pages because they lack an API for their  
service is sooooo 1996 :-)

--
Joseph Scott
joseph at josephscott.org
http://josephscott.org/