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Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

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Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#281

Post by financetechbro »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #269

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 m…

As much as I dislike Ticketmaster this is pure conspiracy unless you provide sources

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#282

Post by 1_1xdev1 »

chuckadams wrote: post #160
liendolucas wrote: post #147

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 n…

You can still print the ticket on paper. Tho nowadays that means a trip to a FedEx store for me, since I refuse to keep buying inkjets I only use a couple times a year.

No, you actually can’t for the tickets the article is talking about. This is increasingly common. It’s insane

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#283

Post by mattmaroon »

NavinF wrote: post #212
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chronol…

> people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000 ??? I said I don't find A/B tests unethical. Literally every tech company runs A/B tests just like that one. Why would I ask for 20k more? > Previously the feed was chronological post of friends Yeah, before they measured the impact of a good recommendation algorithm.

And back when you could log into Facebook and see a feed of all of your friends’ posts quickly. Facebook eventually got to the point where for most people the feed would have been much longer than the time they wanted to spend on site, and so showing them just the most recent few is somewhat random. Much better for engagement to show them posts they like.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#284

Post by jgeada »

ryandrake wrote: post #228
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…

"Developers are blameless" is a uniquely HN take, for obvious site demographic reasons. I see a worthwhile product as a stool with at least three legs: Technical feasibility, business viability, and ethical acceptability. Take one leg away and the stool should fail. Yet, HN commenters endlessly discuss/debate the first two and largely ignore the third. I think we all have a duty to work on projects that are ethically…

Yeah, but only one of those legs controls the money. At least in the US, no money means no food, no shelter, no healthcare, etc, so it is not a viable choice for most. So rightfully most of the blame should be assigned to those that control the money: management and executives. Rarely hear of required ethics guidelines and handwringing about ethics from the MBA types.

I'll accept a share of developer blame in places with strong unions and the ability for workers to strike.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#285

Post by ihumanable »

jjmarr wrote: post #53
irjustin wrote: post #38

I agree with the bad implement but the opening complaining that "old way of printable tickets was great why change it" have so many problems. Scalpers are the problem that you have to accept. At the time of purchase, there's no way to tell the difference between a legit purchaser and a scalper or even someone who bought it and simply can't go and needs to resell. IDs, ticket limiters, CCs, etc, etc. All methods can b…

Buying something at a low price and selling it at a high price is arbitrage 101 and is free money. The "true solution" is to sell tickets at their actual market price instead of pretending that the face value of concert tickets isn't increasing due to a larger population and greater demand.

It's interesting how the real problem here is that our economic system has no way to sell a product at what the seller will bear, only what the buyer will bear.

I think this is a fascinating feature, a lot of artists would be more than happy to make $X for a show so that their fans can come see them. The problem ends up that a free market has no mechanism for that, the artist can sell the tickets such that they end up with $X but then you get things like scalpers who don't want to see the show but do want money and act like artificial demand. They know that regardless of what the seller wants there are buyers that will pay $X+N and want to capture that $N.

The scalper provides no value to the market, but they get $N, which seems like a market failure to me. The fans lose $N, the artist still only gets $X and they also get reputation damage because fans are upset that things cost $X+N.

And that's just the end of it. The artist literally can not perform for their fans at a venue for $X even if that's what they want, there's just no mechanism in the free market to make that function correctly. I find market failures like this fascinating because it really shows the limits of how "free" markets operate. The only person that isn't free to do what they'd like is the producer of the good being sold, they literally can't sell it for less than the market will bear.

And I suppose this plays out for every part of the market, if I can produce apples and make a profit for $1 a bushel and that's plenty of money for me, I don't want any more, tough shit. Arbitrage will make sure that people pay more for those apples. If people are willing to pay $5 a bushel then someone will snap up my cheap apples, mark them up and make a bunch of money for doing nothing. Even if I were willing to do all the distribution myself, if the person conducting arbitrage adds no value to the system (the common argument being that they deserve the money for finding cheap apples and connecting people that demand apples with a supply of apples), it just can't happen. The incentive to make that free money means everyone loses, I don't get to give people cheap apples, people don't get to enjoy cheap apples, everyone is worse off except for the person doing arbitrage.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#286

Post by mattmaroon »

ryandrake wrote: post #228
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…

"Developers are blameless" is a uniquely HN take, for obvious site demographic reasons. I see a worthwhile product as a stool with at least three legs: Technical feasibility, business viability, and ethical acceptability. Take one leg away and the stool should fail. Yet, HN commenters endlessly discuss/debate the first two and largely ignore the third. I think we all have a duty to work on projects that are ethically…

Sure, but the issue is, someone might not think ticket master is evil. And I’d argue the things they do that should at least be illegal (in my view) have nothing to do with developers.

Take away their exclusive rights (on both sides of the business) to 80+% of large live music venues and they’re just another ticket platform.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#287

Post by xhkkffbf »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #276
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #269

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 m…

Can you provide a source for artists getting a cut of the greater-than-MSRP resale market?

Why shouldn't the artists get a cut of the greater-than-MSRP resale? Yeah, I realize that some pretend that the MSRP is the real price, but if anyone should get a cut of the jacked up fees, it should the people on the stage or producing the show.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#288

Post by yellowapple »

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…

> or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.

Don't they already do that anyway? Every time I've gotten on a plane for work purposes, there was no differentiation between "business traveler" v. "leisure traveler" as far as the ticket purchasing process was concerned. Hell, in the most recent case it was even with my own credit card (for which I submitted an expense report to be reimbursed) - so for all the airline knew, I was just taking a week-long vacation to Colorado Springs (in that case) instead of being there for work.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#289

Post by mattmaroon »

jgeada wrote: post #284
ryandrake wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Developers are blameless" is a uniquely HN take, for obvious site demographic reasons. I see a worthwhile product as a stool with at least three legs: Technical feasibility, business viability, and ethical acceptability. Take one leg away and the stool should fail. Yet, HN commenters endlessly discuss/debate the first two and largely ignore the third. I think we all have a duty to work on projects that are ethically…

Yeah, but only one of those legs controls the money. At least in the US, no money means no food, no shelter, no healthcare, etc, so it is not a viable choice for most. So rightfully most of the blame should be assigned to those that control the money: management and executives. Rarely hear of required ethics guidelines and handwringing about ethics from the MBA types. I'll accept a share of developer blame in places…

And the developer job market has changed. We can act like everyone can just go get a job that pays well somewhere else, but I’ve got friends who are very senior developers who’ve been laid off and had a hard time finding a good job in recent years.

The market isn’t what it once was and while overall still good, we do all have bills to pay.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#290

Post by its_ethan »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #166
mschuster91 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, unlike most of Europe, the US doesn't have a legal mandate for anyone to possess an ID card, and so in practice you got 50 states worth of driver's licenses, library cards, military or government employment IDs that can be used (or faked)... so you can't really use these for legitimately verifying anything unless you want to spend a lot of time and money to train your staff to spot fakes. Banks can do t…

How hard is it to get access to a database to confirm that a scanned ID is valid, and corresponds to the name written on it?

Hopefully pretty hard.
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