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Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

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Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#261

Post by akira2501 »

survirtual wrote: post #210
akira2501 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sooner we can agree to behave accordingly People don't code out of a sense of duty, they do so to earn money, so there is no mechanism to enforce "behavior." > our prospects for ripping the reigns of society There are too many industries that take the mantle of improving society on their back. This is a mistake. There is no natural representative mechanism that ensures your actions are aligned to required outco…

Congress is useless, along with the rest of the planetary corporate-fascist oligarch facsimiles of democracy. If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom, we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society. Open source implementations of: Universal cryptographic identification Decentralized voluntary anonymous voting, verifiable by every voter Sovereign algorithmic moneta…

> If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom

You'd have better luck trying to remove jealousy from the human heart. If you can suggest a mechanism for actually making this happen, enforcing it in the face of economic incentives, and measuring it's actual impact then I'll take the ride with you. Until then it is an absolute fools errand.

> we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society.

Autonomous societies have been tried before. They have no mechanism to correctly align their long term objectives so none of them have ever lasted. Planning to build another one based on nothing other than assumption is flawed.

> with freedom unalienably encoded into the fabric of the social machine.

Guns exist. The social machine is secondary to force. You have no plan for this.

> This mindset can extend into a multi-planetary society and beyond.

Older people sell younger people pure unadulterated fantasies in order to extract cheap labor from them.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#262

Post by hunter2_ »

donalhunt wrote: post #246
Closi wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the second bit is true - they will still be marking the ticket as used in their backend. They are just trying to prevent scalpers printing off tickets 10 times and selling them outside the venues as a scam, which happened at every large concert I have ever been to until recently (so I assume this is working!).

You would hope... But they often run the scanners in offline mode (e.g. at temporary / seasonal events) so there can be lag in the backends being updated. Heard from a friend who got straight into two events in the same city recently - they presumed the show was at one outdoor venue but the scanners let them straight in at the first (wrong) venue. Went to the correct venue and got in there without any issue too (this…

Hm. So I guess at a small venue that has 3 door people with offline scanners, you have a 2/3 chance of success if you're the second of two people sharing a barcode. Combined with the obvious 3/3 success being the first person, that averages out to 5/6 chance if both of you (oblivious to each other) schedule your arrival similarly.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#263

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

NavinF wrote: post #127
dylan604 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way that I trust the developers of a company like Ticketmaster to install their app on my device.

You don't trust your OS to sandbox it? With a threat model like that, I wouldn't use any apps other than the browser

If anyone is in the situation that they need to put an untrustworthy app on their android device, the "work profile" feature can segment it off further.

Insular is an app that lets you create and manage one of these profiles on the device itself: https://gitlab.com/secure-system/Insular

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#264

Post by _puk »

NavinF wrote: post #127
dylan604 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way that I trust the developers of a company like Ticketmaster to install their app on my device.

You don't trust your OS to sandbox it? With a threat model like that, I wouldn't use any apps other than the browser

I mean, that horse has already bolted..

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hac...

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#265

Post by 999900000999 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #227
999900000999 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find a bar with a band playing. I suggest Kingston Mines if you're in the Chicago area. Ticketmaster doesn't own have a monopoly on music. You can vote with your wallet.

"Fed up with high prices and long lines and ticketing SNAFUs for big shows with your favorite artists?" "Clearly, the best answer to this is to forget about all of the music you think you like. Just forget all about it." "Instead, go to the bar and see a band. It doesn't matter if you like the music or not; after all, we know that every live music performance is exactly the same as any other!"

Honestly you might even have a better time vs paying for seats where you can't even see the act.

https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/articles/978498452737....

I go to a lot of concerts. Ticketmaster covers half of the shows I go to. They're not that much worse than others who also tack on fees amounting to 20% of the purchase price.

I'm not opposed to basic regulation, but let's not act like Ticketmaster is some uniquely evil company.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#266

Post by hunter2_ »

orbillius wrote: post #236
Closi wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the second bit is true - they will still be marking the ticket as used in their backend. They are just trying to prevent scalpers printing off tickets 10 times and selling them outside the venues as a scam, which happened at every large concert I have ever been to until recently (so I assume this is working!).

> they will still be marking the ticket as used in their backend. I assume that's true, but it makes me wonder how their scanners are connected to the server. I mean, if 10,000 people showing up to an event with smartphones overwhelms wireless networks, wont that also kick their scanners off the network? They'd probably like to have a system where, if a scanner loses its connection, it can still validate tickets. It…

I have no idea what connectivity options are available in current scanners, but it sounds like a viable solution could be to use an RF band that customers don't overwhelm, similar to wireless microphones perhaps, with a little hub situated nearby that consolidates the list of already-scanned tickets, possibly standalone or possibly on a wired network that includes other far-away entrances.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#267

Post by IncreasePosts »

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?

That really depends if you ask a neo nazi or not.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#268

Post by digging »

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?

If the answer is yes, does that mean a junior web dev who implements user tracking on a shopping portal is equivalent to Hitler? Or is every who does less evil than Hitler "not a bad person"?

I don't think it's useful to say "Hitler was bad." Hitler did a lot of specific evil acts that are more useful to analyze. If anything, it's counterproductive to say "Hitler was bad," because lots of people do bad things and then say "well, at least I'm not Hitler."

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#269

Post by lifeisstillgood »

I am sure this is pointed out elsewhere, but ticketmasters business model is based on lying to the public so that the artists and venues don’t have to.

Taylor Swift is a nice-ish person and wants her fans to think they can buy tickets for her shows at about 25 bucks because that’s a lot of money for a 12 year old and she does not want to alienate her fans.

Her manager is an evil cackling bastard and wants to get as much as he can.

He knows if he sells all the tickets for 25 bucks he will lose money in the tour and the people who resell the tickets for 2000 will make 1975 dollars profit.

So he does a deal with ticketmaster.

They will sell 100 seats at 25 bucks, then announce “wow that sold out quickly” and then pretend that the other 5000 tickets they have are sold, and then resell them on secondary sites (ie ticket master is actually selling you orignal tickets through secondary markets).

Then they give the cash to the evil manager who twirls his moustache.

All the rest, the adding extra charges at end of sales process, the ridiculous rush to buy at a given moment in time instead of some auction or lottery, the whole thing of backhanders to venues, all that is secondary to enabling Taylor swift to take a huge cut without seeming like a evil moustache twirling money grabbing manager.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#270

Post by toolz »

reddalo wrote: post #214
mattmaroon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't blame the developers, I blame government. It's not the job of rank and file workers to police companies. I wouldn't work for LN, but I'm not going to blame someone else for doing so. We've all gotta feed our families. (I realize there's a line somewhere, you wouldn't excuse a prison guard at Auschwitz the same way, but I can't get too worked up about a developer making a ticketing app even if I hate the…

> I still don't blame the developers, I blame government. Yes, but I think they still have some responsibility, even if they say "I was just following orders!" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

Everyone bears some responsibility if you've ever interacted with any entity that profits off of TM or helps TM make profit. I don't find it's particularly useful to spend any thought on what people with minuscule responsibility should do differently. It's just bike-shedding when there are important problems to solve.
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