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CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

behind.pretix.eu

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Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#221

Post by vasco »

dbspin wrote: post #216
vasco wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artists charge what they get told to charge. And ticketmaster owns all the venues so if you want to play anywhere, you're going to list at whatever prices the venue lists artists of your level. Humans are all statistically similar for large cohorts. Artists want money as much as other people, specially the ones playing big venues. First thing to help would be to break up the venue monopoly that ticketmaster created.

The vast majority, hard to quantify, but I'd guess well over 99% of professional musicians (certainly outside the US) never play a ticketmaster venue. They're not operating at that scale. When they tour it's at smaller venues - there are orders of magnitude more small bars and dedicated venues not owned by ticket master. > Artists want money as much as other people, specially the ones playing big venues. This is exac…

>> Artists want money as much as other people, specially the ones playing big venues.

> This is exactly the kind of projection I'm referring to. What makes you believe that most humans want as much money as possible

You'll notice the following sentences don't mean the same thing:

> As much as other people

> as much money as possible

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#223

Post by azan_ »

1propionyl wrote: post #31

A lot of overwrought digital solutions here and not the obvious one: Stop selling online. Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue, with cashiers empowered to deny suspicious transactions. Could someone put together a small army of smurfs to buy up all the tickets in major cities? Sure. Could someone have someone on the inside sell them a block of tickets against policy? Sure. We c…

People propose overwrought digital solutions because not selling online is worse in almost every aspect.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#224

Post by avastel »

Yeah, not (too) surprising after a few years in the anti-bot industry. Last week I looked into a Binance CAPTCHA solver that didn’t use a browser at all, just a basic HTTP client. The attacker had reverse engineered the entire signal collection and response flow, including how the CAPTCHA was marked as solved. They were able to forge the expected telemetry despite some obfuscation. https://blog.castle.io/what-a-binance-captcha-solver-tells-u...

This is pretty standard now in bot-heavy spaces like ticketing or sneaker drops. CAPTCHA often just ends up being a protocol to collect signals, and if those aren’t tightly bound to the browser/runtime, they get spoofed.

Also not surprised PoW isn’t holding up. Someone reverse engineered the PerimeterX PoW and converted it to CUDA to accelerate solving: https://github.com/re-jevi/PerimiterXCudaSolver/blob/main/po... At some point, it’s hard to make PoW slow enough for bots without also killing UX for humans on low-end devices.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#225

Post by EGreg »

rwmj wrote: post #211
EGreg wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s put busting the ticketmaster monopoly to the side for a second, and look at the issue regardless of players If you want to remove scalpers, just make sure tickets are non-transferrable and run an auction for price discovery. I built it on the blockchain years ago.

Ticket sellers can easily run their operations using a standard relational database. A blockchain solves no problem they have.

That’s not true. The problem of whether the person actually has the money for the ticket. If it’s done by credit card then you have the problem of refunding so many people and getting a bad reputation with the middleman processor. See, unlike a blockchain, that middleman has policies that penalize legitimate price discovery mechanisms like auctions. So you have to take risks for no reason other than to appease a middleman’s risk department, or get deplatformed… ah the joy of depending on a third party walled garden. In other types of walled gardens, you get why open protocols are better, but on HN it is like, a requirement, to say “blockchain solves no problem”. Just like with capitalism you must say “there is nothing wrong with capitalism but..” and with AI you must say “whatever problem you are describing already existed before so AI didnt introduce any new ones…”

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#226

Post by EGreg »

Brybry wrote: post #169
EGreg wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked why are school vouchers bad since it’s a single payer system. The “progressives” told me it would starve public schools of funds and students since private schools would admit only the best and brightest So I said — don’t let the schools choose. Let the people choose. If the school is filled then you use a lottery for who can actually get in, M of N people. Simple.

Decades ago a local popular public magnet high school near me had a lottery system like that. Students would apply for the school and M of N applicants would be picked randomly. It turns out the administrators running the lottery would run the randomization program until it gave them the student distribution they wanted (read: the best and brightest, and since it's the south... somehow whiter than expected).

So maybe the lottery shouldn’t be run by the school :)

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#227

Post by majani »

lentil_soup wrote: post #217
johnisgood wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am unsympathetic to people who insist on reducing everything to its market value. What is wrong with market price?

that it reduces everything including culture to just one metric, money. Are you a fan of a band? can't go because you got outsold by some rich person that maybe cares or maybe not, it doesn't matter, they just have more money that you. The space at a concert is limited so some form filtering will have to happen, but if the only metric is market price that's a pretty sad society specially when we're talking about cult…

Two big leaps in your answer: 1. that the person paying more is rich and 2. that the person paying more likely doesn't care about the band

The way I see it, it is also highly likely that the person paying more is of average income and just convinced themselves to pay more because they are superfans

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#230

Post by jppittma »

lentil_soup wrote: post #215
red_admiral wrote: post #214

If they really want to solve the problem, how about this - kind of like the ESTA for travel: Individuals must register an account with government issued ID and the same level of KYC security as to open a bank account. This must be done a certain time in advance before the tickets for an event open. You can only buy tickets for yourself or other already registered users whose username (or similar) you know - and only…

that's addressed in the article. It's the privacy unfriendly solution of venn diagram

The government needs to support OAuth2.
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