"CAPTCHA" & BRIS or any free info

[lsosa54]

Can someone explain to me why after checking a few cards on BRISnet, I always get the "type in the following characters" to continue dialog? The instant entries, programs, and results are free of charge so my assumption is they use "CAPTCHA" to prevent overloading the servers if it truly is a bot? Is it more to prevent a denial of service attack?

Is there any way around it as it becomes annoying?

I have BRIS cookies enabled as I do use their pay data files. I normally use Firefox.

My question would pertain to any website that has free info. Thanks for any ideas.

[GameTheory]

They give it away for free, but with the intention that each user is only using a "reasonable" amount, i.e. they don't want you harvesting the data en masse.

[wilderness]

The reason that webmasters implement "CAPTCHA" on data pages is to prevent the hordes and hordes of website harvesters from using bandwidth, as well as the intent of the webmaster to protect the data (many of these harvesters are simply "spidering" for email addresses and the data itself is of no use).

I'm not aware of any software, which will act as human and circumvent "CAPTCHA".

The most likely reason for the supplementary "CAPTCHA" request is either a session-id or page count, both of which require a refresh (resigning in).

[serp]

You can generally get around this type of thing by changing your User-Agent string (they use ip and user-agent to identify you where session id's are not required) with each fetch if you are scripting it but like I've said before... The captchas are there for a reason.

I do think they have the captcha protection set to too low of a number as you can get them when you are actually doing it manually at a reasonable pace. But that's up to them to decide I guess.

[lsosa54]

Thanks for the info. I am actually doing it manually at a reasonable pace. Guess I'll need to live with it.

[wilderness]

(they use ip and user-agent to identify you where session id's are not required)

serp,
"Generally speaking", a webmaster whom implements "CAPTCHA" does not wish to be bothered with the time and effort required to stay abreast of either "white-listing" or "black-listing" (i. e., UA's, IP's, headers and other various methods related to page requests).

[serp]

serp,
"Generally speaking", a webmaster whom implements "CAPTCHA" does not wish to be bothered with the time and effort required to stay abreast of either "white-listing" or "black-listing" (i. e., UA's, IP's, headers and other various methods related to page requests).

A captcha that only shows up after a few requests (like mentioned by the original post) is keeping track of the user's requests by some means. In the case of Bris it looks like they require cookies/session id's (even for free data) to access so this is how they keep track. Equibase doesn't require this for free data and they keep track by IP/User-Agent.

[lsosa54]

Just tried Equibase summary results and CAPTCHA came up after the 10th view. I did move faster through the results than I usually do at BRIS as I just clicking on each BEL date, hitting the "back" button, and then clicking on the next date. I don't have an account with Equibase and was not logged in to their site. Came up the same on IE and Firefox so I guess they are tracking my IP.