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Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

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Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#251

Post by jofla_net »

I know the discussion has drifted into the larger realm of ethics and civic responsibility. But with respect to the original title, I always thought that it would be trivial to create a software 'tumbler' the logic of which was based on primitive examples, such as this. Edit: each user could have thier own initial state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_step_generator granted you'd need to ramp up the bits to make them less crackable. Then all you'd need is some translation to 2-d QR scancode graphics and a silly sliding bar and voila! Ticketmaster hegemony.

But yes, its disgusting that i've needed a phone for events...

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#252

Post by rty32 »

blincoln wrote: post #50
londons_explore wrote: post #31

Isn't this vulnerable to ticket 'selling' by simply sharing the username and password of the ticketmaster account? it's not like a ticketmaster account is 'worth' anything, so the seller can simply set up a new one for their next purchase.

Setting up separate accounts for every ticket purchase seems like a LOT of overhead (especially scalpers buying many tickets at once and piecemealing them out), and is easy to defeat, e.g. require out of band auth via the phone number associated with the account before logging in for the first time on a new device.

Based on the highly questionable PS/Xbox accounts sold on eBay, I think that's just what scalpers could do as part of their everyday job.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#253

Post by dawnerd »

noodlesUK wrote: post #27

This sort of ticketing thing is a trivially solvable problem. It is solved at every airport in the entire world millions of times per day. You provide the name of each concertgoer when you buy a ticket, and they show up with their ticket and ID. You often need to show your ID at these kinds of venues to prove you're old enough to drink beer anyway.

Airlines are starting to use rotating barcodes as well. Heck some are even switching to purely facial recognition.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#254

Post by dawnerd »

wombat-man wrote: post #35
noodlesUK wrote: post #27

This sort of ticketing thing is a trivially solvable problem. It is solved at every airport in the entire world millions of times per day. You provide the name of each concertgoer when you buy a ticket, and they show up with their ticket and ID. You often need to show your ID at these kinds of venues to prove you're old enough to drink beer anyway.

Hell, you just scan your ID at TSA nowadays. They don't need your ticket.

Or just scan your face with the new Digital ID rolling out. It's actually quite nice.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#255

Post by joquarky »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #189
rozap wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard if you remove the self delusion. Removing the self delusion is maybe tricky for the individual, but it's easy for people around the individual to see. Societal tools like shame are generally used to encourage people in the right direction, but we don't do a great job of this in America, because money tends to override everything else and I don't think we have good structures around expressing non-moneta…

Yup. I was just discussing this in another comment that Facebook's emotional manipulation of users without consent is ethical wrong. Some people are replying with eh, everybody does it and for 20,000 dollars people will jump to Facebook. I think the Leetcode grinding, TC optimizing crowd with no real moral judgment which is the majority in tech right now is another reason why things are falling apart. They will happi…

Postmodernism has stripped away fulfillment with the promise of higher pay if you just grind harder.

If you no longer feel pride in your work, then money takes over. In my search, no employer cares about this anymore because the newer generations are only here to grind for gold.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#256

Post by donalhunt »

lesuorac wrote: post #201
BobaFloutist wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 star…

Yeah, I don't think that's right either. They don't check your ID at the gate, it's just TSA that checks your id (if you have one).

Depends on the departure and arrival city. It is common for ID to be checked at the gate for international flights because airlines are held responsible for transporting passengers that don't have the correct paperwork / visitor permits for the destination country.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#257

Post by donalhunt »

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…

Recent experience for a large stadiums event suggests they have fixed the notifications. I got a lot of notifications encouraging me to a) charge my phone and b) download the ticket before arrival.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#258

Post by grishka »

Impressive. I had no idea mobile-only tickets are a thing. For me it's always been the other way around because sometimes some events would insist on a printed ticket even if it comes as a PDF with a barcode. This sort of thing became annoying enough to me that I bought a printer.

But then ticket resale online marketplaces aren't a thing around here either. When people resell event tickets, it's usually an entirely DIY affair.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#259

Post by joquarky »

immibis wrote: post #176
digging wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And pretty much every company is bad. But this is a wrong answer because the question is actually nonsense. The answer to "What happens when you move faster than light" is not "nothing", it is undefined because the question is invalid. Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values. To get more speci…

> Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values. Counterexample: Was Hitler bad?

Due to chaotic effects of causality, most of us would not exist if any significant event from that long ago had happened differently.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#260

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

joquarky wrote: post #255
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I was just discussing this in another comment that Facebook's emotional manipulation of users without consent is ethical wrong. Some people are replying with eh, everybody does it and for 20,000 dollars people will jump to Facebook. I think the Leetcode grinding, TC optimizing crowd with no real moral judgment which is the majority in tech right now is another reason why things are falling apart. They will happi…

Postmodernism has stripped away fulfillment with the promise of higher pay if you just grind harder. If you no longer feel pride in your work, then money takes over. In my search, no employer cares about this anymore because the newer generations are only here to grind for gold.

I won't try to define postmodernism, but I'm pretty sure a significant part of it has to do with abandoning traditional modes of operation and freestyling a bit with your worldview.

I don't question that the problems you're describing are problematic, but what do they have to do with postmodernism? It seems like in the cases you're describing, the postmodern approach would be to call into question whether the abstractions in use ("value" in this case) are applicable, and to instead march to the beat of your own drum in some way.

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