Fergie's Tech Blog

DoJ Blocks MySpace Sex Offender Code

Kevin Poulsen writes on 27B Stroke 6:

The Department of Justice has just rolled out a CAPTCHA in front of its National Sex Offender Public Website, forcing you to prove you're human before you start running searches.

That kills the screen-scraping code we released Friday -- which, no doubt, was the intent. The only explanation on the site reads, "This form is necessary to prevent abuse by automated user agents."

The site seemed pretty abuse-resistant before. Running too many searches too fast got you banned; consequently, the sex-offender-scraping portion of my code performed one transaction every 30-seconds -- slow enough to be replaced by an extremely-patient human.

posted by Fergie @ 10/23/2006 04:16:00 PM