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Comment by mos1 | Hacker News Reader

The activity described isn't hacking... it's just creating an alternate, more efficient interface to the website, to increase their ticket purchasing efficacy.

I wish the article had more details, so I could confirm or refute my suspicion that nothing was "hacked".

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Circumventing security measures to make a computer behave in unintended ways sounds pretty close to the definition of hacking, at least the Computer Misuse Act has a definition which is close to that.

"including computer code that was intended to defeat security measures that online ticket vendors put in place to prevent automated ticket purchasing"

That just describes a bot...

It's hacking in the more general sense. While they may not have gotten root access on an internal server, they still circumvented security measures in the ticket-purchase system in order to do something that was forbidden. They're leveraging a design flaw. I think it's a valid use of the term. I do disagree with the preposition in the phrase "... by hacking into online vendor systems such as..." as that's simply inaccurate.

What is and isn't "wire fraud"? If I say, "you may not reply to this comment", and you do, did you hack the system?

IANAL, but if they are agreeing to a contract during purchase posing as individuals, then they are committing fraud using electronic communications.

Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1343.html

I agree.

I don't know why they didn't just charge them for a million counts of scalping, which I'm sure could put them in jail for quite a long time.

Because the prosecutors have to prove every count, and the sentences would likely be served concurrently.

My understanding of "hacking" follows that of Wikipedia's:

"Hacking refers to the re-configuring or re-programming of a system to function in ways not facilitated by the owner, administrator, or designer."

I'd say they came up with a pretty good hack. Mimicking live people, beating captcha's, etc.

What did they re-configure of re-program?

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