simulate browser with php curl not working in ebay - php

Question

I am trying to read the following ebay webpage to PHP variable for processing:
http://offer.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBidsLogin&_trksid=p2047675.l2564&rt=nc&item=321069150620
It shows fine in any modern browser without need to log in.
When I am trying to read the page to PHP variable with the following code:
$url="http://offer.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBidsLogin&_trksid=p2047675.l2564&rt=nc&item=321069150620";
$header = array();
$header[] = 'Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5';
$header[] = 'Cache-Control: max-age=0';
$header[] = 'Connection: keep-alive';
$header[] = 'Keep-Alive: 300';
$header[] = 'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7';
$header[] = 'Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5';
$header[] = 'Pragma: ';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $header);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
$string = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
echo $string;
I am getting the following page http://www.talumets.com/tmp/error.jpg that asks me to enter numbers from photos to continue. Sometimes my code works, but 95% time it asks me to enter numbers. I have also tried $string= file_get_contents( $url ), but the same problem. Any idea how to bypass this?
Thanks,
Tom

Answer 1

What you are seeing is ebay`s captcha protection against script such as yours. I dont think there is good way to bypass that.
You could try to limit your requests per second ratio and hope you will not trigger captcha
Ideal solution (if you dont want to use api) would be use of multiple servers with only few requests per second each.