[jkoebler]

I wrote this story and am happy to answer any questions you guys might have. Lots of information I ended up not using because the article was already incredibly long or I couldn't corroborate it (but believe it to be true from various interviews), etc.

[metaphorm]

can you explain some more details about the attempt of the prosecutors to argue for "hacking" based on their (apparently wrong) assumption that Wiseguy's system was using OCR to answer a Captcha?

this part just doesn't make any sense to me. you said

> The government argued that OCR-using bots would need to use Ticketmaster's source code to be implemented properly on the site, and would therefore be a "circumvention" of Ticketmaster's software.

I don't understand why they were trying to make this argument. OCR is a sub-domain of computer vision. It involves having a program look at an image and attempt to discern alphabet characters in it. This definitely _does not_ involve accessing the source code of the system. It's interacting only with what is shown publicly to normal users.

So what gives? Why did the prosecutor try to make this argument? It's technically incorrect in a serious way.

[dkersten]

This is the exact question I came here to ask. Surely OCR is more "humanlike" and less "hacks" than the trick of indexing all of the images.

[cb21]

Thanks for the article! I love going to concerts (actually I grabbed pre-sale tickets for Lady Gaga just last week) so I found it all super interesting.