Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

conduition.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 737 posts

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#141

Post by criddell »

magnetowasright wrote: post #101
criddell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for a lot of performers and venue operators. Ticketmaster is paid well to be the bad guy. They often share the fees with both the performer and the venue.

I'm sorry to be that guy but do you have literally any source for this? Might just be the musicians I like, or the fact that negativity is better for clicks, but I've never seen an artist saying they get any benefit from ticketmaster's fees and other such shenanigans; I've only seen artists and venues saying that they don't get any money or benefits at all from ticketmaster's racketeering.

From the Ticketmaster website:

> ticket fees (which can include a service fee, order processing fee, and the occasional delivery fee) are determined by and shared between the parties who have a hand in making live events happen including venues, Ticketmaster, sports teams, leagues and promoters

When the artist doesn't want their fans to be charged big fees - they have some say in it. Robert Smith of The Cure made a stand on this last year and got Ticketmaster to refund a bunch of money.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#142

Post by pfisherman »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #125
NavinF wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...by doing what? FB is one of the largest employers of people on this site. If you ran a poll, I'd expect the majority to answer "no" to your question. Of the people who answered "yes", I bet the majority would still accept an offer from FB if it was just 20k more than the next best offer.

One small example: In 2012 Facebook emotionally manipulated people in the name of science without anybody's consent by controlling positive / negative posts on their news feed. Right? Wrong? Discuss.

Textbook case of unethical conduct of research. The key here is lack of informed consent by the study participants.

The APA put out a press release about this study violated their code of ethics.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/06/informed-con...

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#143

Post by guhcampos »

lakerz16 wrote: post #94

I hate TM and ridiculous fees as much as anyone, but this article is overly hyperbolic. There's a section named "Pirating Tickets", that just explains how to re-create a barcode that you already paid for. You're not using this to rob anyone of anything. And at the end, "Have fun refactoring your ticket verification system". Why? There are no vulnerabilities here. A rotating barcode (even if following a known pattern)…

Piracy here just means you can use it to sell your ticket without using their platform, which is analogous to just sending someone the PDF or handing over the piece of paper as always.

While this has the upside of breaking you free from TM's obnoxious practices, it also obviously opens up for scalpers and all.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#144

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

NavinF wrote: post #133
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One small example: In 2012 Facebook emotionally manipulated people in the name of science without anybody's consent by controlling positive / negative posts on their news feed. Right? Wrong? Discuss.

https://xkcd.com/1390/ I don't see the issue. Every social media site does this, FB was just naive enough to share their research

And this just proved my point. During the Nazi regime, everyone was hating the jews. And everyone was doing fascism.

Now to bring this to a close, people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000 and have lost the ability to see a clear ethical violation will be holding the guns and guarding the gas chambers when the next Hitler comes along. Meditate on this.

Also this XKCD is dumb. Previously the feed was chronological post of friends which was definitely more ethical. But of course that didn't make people addicted enough.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#145

Post by BobaFloutist »

jrockway wrote: post #76
oehpr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to presume that the driving impetus of all of this is that they're trying to avoid the actual requirement of checking the ID. Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions. But I mean, obviously, any kind of system like this strikes me as the same sort of thing as DRM. That you can somehow protect the message from the person you're sharing the message to. How can you avoid reselling if you…

Yup exactly. Some events are pretty bad at opening the doors early. The Brooklyn Nets seem to open 30 minutes before the game, so they need to get 20,000 people through 20 metal detectors in 30 minutes. Every second extra they add to the process is a second you don't have to buy a $25 drink, and that's how they make their money. We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale…

>We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.

Sorry, what? Surely business travelers pay more just by virtue of traveling by business class? Or, if travel through business portals was consistently significantly more expensive than just buying the ticket directly on the airline's website, businesses would just start buying tickets directly from the airline's website?

Is there something about how ticket fares are calculated and paid that I don't understand?

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#146

Post by sethammons »

fmbb wrote: post #106
RScholar wrote: post #55

> Software developers are the wizards and shamans of the modern age. We ought to use our powers with the austerity and integrity such power implies. This is one of the most powerful truths underlying the world we currently inhabit. The sooner we can agree to behave accordingly, the better our prospects for ripping the reigns of society from the hands of those whose only animating principles are avarice and exploitati…

I dont think it’s a truth. Shamans and wizards (never heard this used to describe anyone in history but let’s assume it’s just any kind of supposed magic user) were people at the top tier of their societies in terms of political power. Not kings or chieftains, but above everyone else. Programmers are just making a living selling their labor power like every other office drone in the world. We’re one of the most commo…

I think you don't know what you think you know. My mom is a shaman type. These types often live at the outskirts of society where no well-to-do person would like to be seen. Zero political power but enough utility to keep at an arm's distance -- further if possible while not needed.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#147

Post by liendolucas »

It's baffling that you have to carry a mobile phone to access a show. What if you run out of battery? Or if you accidentally break the screen just before entering the venue? The more the technology evolves the more we find horrible uses for it. People should fight back by refraining from purchasing tickets from them, I know is not easy for people to miss their favorite artist but until a monopoly is broken there is no other effective way to prevent them from doing what they want.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#148

Post by sandworm101 »

What I find really interesting is that there are so many scams that that the rejection of tickets is common enough to go unnoticed. Someone testing out their new "F-ticketmaster" ticket generation tool is free to test it in the real world. If it doesn't work they will simply be turned away the door like so many others who have been scammed. Nobody would notice the test.

But if each ticket is for a particular seat, would ticketmaster notice if too people came with tickets for the same seat? I bet not. I bet they just trust their ticketing system to be foolproof. If anything they might just reject the second ticket without any way to know which was authentic.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#149

Post by pfisherman »

NavinF wrote: post #133
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One small example: In 2012 Facebook emotionally manipulated people in the name of science without anybody's consent by controlling positive / negative posts on their news feed. Right? Wrong? Discuss.

https://xkcd.com/1390/ I don't see the issue. Every social media site does this, FB was just naive enough to share their research

The issue is the lack of informed consent. This is pretty basic ethical conduct of research stuff.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#150

Post by tptacek »

mattmaroon wrote: post #110
tptacek wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article notes, this ticket system does in fact work offline.

Well, as it also notes, it works offline if you remember to open the ticket before you get there, and they don't (or at least didn't used to) give you sufficient warning. I found out that's how it works the hard way when it was new by having to walk a half mile back from the venue to get service to load the tickets. There's also the chance the ticketmaster app won't work properly later even if you did do it. I've had…

Sure, I'm just reacting because TOTP is like the textbook example of a system designed to work without interactive access to a networked resource. The whole as TM designed it has crappy affordances, but you could fix that without breaking the design.
Post reply on HN