Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

I made a really stupid mistake with one of my datafeed sites that i’d like to share with you in hopes that you don’t make the same mistake.

I’m using wordpress for the site and downloaded the datafeed from Shareasale.  The datafeed has about 2,000 records in it.  When I made the site I cleaned up the file, got rid of columns I didn’t need and then went ahead and used a datafeed importer to set the site up.  The mistake I made was that I used the image URL’s supplied in the datafeed.  Recently I went to the site and noticed there were no pictures.  After some investigation I realized that the merchant changed all of their URLs which broke all of my images.  Unfortunately, I can’t think of an easy way to fix this but a lesson learned is that I should actually figure out a way to host all of the images locally so that a change to their URLs doesn’t screw up my entire site.

I may just add a button to each of the posts saying click here for pictures.  That should garner more clicks to the affiliate links and solve the issue of the listings not having any pictures.

Take a mental note and don’t make this mistake yourself.

Ad Hustler | Subscribe To Ad Hustler

CAPTCHA also known as “The Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (what nerd came up with that name?) is now at the center of a controversy involving Ticketmaster and a bunch of ticket scalpers called Wiseguy Tickets.  You can read the article here.  Wiseguy Tickets allegedly used multiple servers and computers to bulk order tickets from Ticketmaster and cracked the CAPTCHA using an automated process to bypass the human element normally needed to order tickets.  The Wired article claims that “This violated the sites’ terms of service, and according to prosecutors constituted unauthorized computer access under the anti-hacking Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA.”

I admittedly don’t know much about the CFAA but my own common sense dictates that if this is any kind of issue it would have to be a civil one.  Wiseguy Tickets allegedly did something that goes against Ticketmasters TOS but is it really fraud or abuse?  They didn’t hack into Ticketmasters system. I don’t believe that they effected Ticketmasters profits in any way.  What if they didn’t use an automated system but instead hired hundreds of employees to buy the tickets?  Would that change whether the process was legal or not?

Regardless of who is right and who is wrong in this case, one thing proves to be clear.  We are at a point where the actual laws and who has jurisdiction over complaints on the internet is extremely fuzzy.

Should CAPTCHA cracking be illegal?

Ad Hustler | Subscribe To Ad Hustler