Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes • Hacker News Board

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#291

Post by jrockway » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:46 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #288

jrockway wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night. Business travelers go home on Friday night. (SFO-NYC on Friday night was always a tough flight to book. I usually stayed the extra night so I could fly 1st or Business for less money.)

If you could buy someone else's ticket on the secondary market, then you could do a split ticket thing where you both stay Saturday night but neither of you actually do.

Everyone should change their name to Pat Smith and end this scam once and for all.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#292

Post by drowntoge » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:47 PM UTC

> If you take a closer look at your ticket, you may notice that it has a gliding movement, making it in a sense, alive. That movement is our ticket technology actively working to safeguard you every second.

This part made me want to throw up, preferably a couple of buckets full, right onto the heads of the marketing team who came up with it.

Kudos to the author of the article. Great work and a great read to go with it.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#293

Post by Jensson » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:48 PM UTC

pfisherman wrote: post #149

NavinF wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have never seen a social media site ask for consent for A/B testing their new things. Everyone does this, I am pretty sure even the big news sites that wrote those headlines also does this without asking. The only thing facebook did differently was calling it research rather than A/B testing.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#294

Post by ReliantGuyZ » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:50 PM UTC

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.

> Tho nowadays that means a trip to a FedEx store for me

I've really appreciated my local library for allowing 20ish pages of printing per day, which has allowed me to limp through the no-printer lifestyle. Plus I usually grab a DVD movie while I'm there.

Life's good in the mid-2000s.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#295

Post by ryandrake » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:52 PM UTC

mattmaroon wrote: post #289

jgeada wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess I'd turn it around and ask those developers: Are there any projects you wouldn't do, no matter how much you needed the money, because you found them ethically unacceptable? If the answer is yes, then they actually agree with me, and we're maybe just discussing where the evilness threshold line should be drawn. I don't know many actual people who would say "No, I would willingly work on absolutely any project, no matter how harmful or depraved it is, as long as I get paid," but then again maybe I don't know enough truly desperate people.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#296

Post by mschuster91 » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:55 PM UTC

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?

Easy if you're government (every random cop on a traffic stop must be able to do that after all) but really REALLY hard for private entities.

The exception is anything that is accepted by airports for international travel aka, for you Americans, only a passport - ICAO 9303 is very detailed on how you can access the data stored on them. The specs and a basic understanding on how to communicate with smartcards are decent enough to get you to a readout in maybe a weekend worth of work. The authentication is either via a code derived from the MRZ or a dedicated access code printed on the document.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#297

Post by yellowapple » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:55 PM UTC

drewg123 wrote: post #187

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…

Last minute / next day fares have traditionally been far more expensive than 3 week advance, and that was intended to impact business travel more than leisure. If there was a 3rd party marketplace for airline tickets, last minute tickets would not be nearly as expensive and the airlines would make far less money. Consider an example where we have a business traveler "Bob" and a leisure traveler "Larry". Bob needs to…

Okay, but how many business flights are actually last-minute like that? Whenever I've flown for work reasons the tickets were bought at least a week in advance, and usually 3+ weeks in advance.

Likewise, there are plenty of non-business flights booked last-minute like that, too - like, as a personal example, needing to book a same-night flight to help a family member drive cross-country with her kids and personal belongings so she could get out of a dangerous personal situation.

All this being to say: if price differentiation between in-advance v. last-minute bookings is actually intended to make business travel cost more than leisure travel, I'm thoroughly skeptical of that intent being fulfilled in practice. Seems more likely that it's simply a matter of things costing more when they're more scarce (as seats on an airplane would become as it gets closer and closer to the departure time), and that just so happens to impact business travelers more than leisure travelers.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#298

Post by GuB-42 » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:56 PM UTC

Does anyone knows how Ticketmaster works, really?

I have been to Ticketmaster events that use reasonably priced, printable tickets, you could even buy a printed ticket with cash. In fact, even though there are so many Ticketmaster events, they are not all working the same way. And Ticketmaster doesn't have the monopoly on shitty practices, the article gives a good example in the beginning.

What I suspect is that Ticketmaster is nothing more than a service provider. The venue/event organizer/... looks at the Ticketmaster catalogue and pick the product they want. There are "evil" products in that catalogue, and they are probably the ones with the best returns, but I am sure people have a choice.

I'd even go as far as calling Ticketmaster "Evil as a Service". So people can say "fuck Ticketmaster" instead of saying "fuck Taylor Swift". I would be very surprised if artists (and their agents) at the level of Taylor Swift didn't have a say regarding ticket sale practices, even with Ticketmaster.

Of course, the monopolistic practices of Ticketmaster are a problem, people are most likely paying more than they should because of it, but all the crap with apps, resale platforms, etc... I am pretty sure the event organizers, maybe the artists themselves are as much to blame.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#299

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:58 PM UTC

rangerelf wrote: post #173

fmbb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't know where you came by such a notion; Shamans, "Wizards", witches, "wise women/men", are usually shunned from society such that they tend to live near…

> and not as at risk of getting tied to a post and lit on fire because the bishop believes we commune with unclean spirits

We're on our way to get there, though, with that "can't solve social problems with technology" infectious meme, and the other one that makes the public blame programmers for socially-problematic tech, while ignoring or praising the business people who imagined, commissioned, and decided to deploy those technologies.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#300

Post by efitz » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 8:59 PM UTC

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…

There should be more choices rather than "find another company". The problem is that it is an economically valid argument to say "if I don't, someone else will".

I believe that professions should have codes of ethics, and people should be expected to adhere to those codes of ethics. Right now there is no licensing or apprenticeship or registration associated with the profession of "software developer". There are some organizations that issue professional certifications in adjacent areas (MCSE, CISSP, etc.) that have codes of ethics associated with them, but I rarely see disciplinary action associated with them, and in any case employability is not linked to these certifications.

Conversely, lawyers have bar associations that evaluate complaints and can withdraw permission to practice.

Doctors have the Hippocratic Oath, but I'm not sure that it's enforced for medical licensure. However doctors do have medical licensing boards and licenses can be revoked.

Pilots have revocable licenses but I'm not sure they have a code of ethics.

Civil engineers have codes of ethics and licensure, but licensure revocation appears associated with legal malpractice, not ethical malpractice.

In any case, there are societal mechanisms that could be used to associate codes of ethics with software developers, if we as a profession and a society chose to, which I'm not optimistic will happen.