Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

conduition.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 737 posts

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#361

Post by cbsmith »

MarketingJason wrote: post #323
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…

I'm not sure this is true. Most (~80%) large venues are owned and operated by Live Nation, who also owns Ticketmaster. They also have exclusivity agreements with hundreds of others. It's, in effect, a shell operating as a scalper and a customer service disruptor. This has very little to do with the artist beyond selecting venues.

It's about 60% of large venues. The 80% is Ticketmaster's share of the ticketing marketplace.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#362

Post by cbsmith »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #322
financetechbro wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can't confirm what they said, but TicketMaster does have a "partner" reseller program for scalpers where they have tools to help scalpers list and manage resale tickets in bulk. They also have events where they help teach scalpers how to make more money, which is good for TicketMaster since it makes even more money on secondary sales. Ticket scalping used to be illegal, and now TicketMaster is helping facilitate it…

> Scalping aside, TicketMaster is taking massive fees each time the same ticket is sold. For example, I went to an event last year and the fee was $50 on each ticket, and these were reseller tickets so TicketMaster had already taken a fee on each of those tickets at least once already (perhaps more than once).

So your evidence is that you were charged a $50 fee on a separate transaction that didn't involve TicketMaster?

This is not the compelling evidence that you think it is.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#363

Post by muppetman »

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.

No, it's not. At my work here we'll all go online to try and get tickets to a big gig. One of us might get in, so that person will get ~8 tickets or whatever the maximum is. And then we split them between us, transfering over cash etc. If we have a few left over we'll sell them to friends for the ticket value.

But none of us have any intention of lining up with the others to get in. We want to go with our partners, our own friends etc.

I want Bob, Terry or Bazzy to by able to buy tickets for me (or me for Bob, Terry or Bazza) but I do not want to have to meet up with Bob, Terry and Bazza and stand in line with them all to get in.

So yea, it's not trivial. I wish it was, I farkin' hate scalpers.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#364

Post by jasomill »

itishappy wrote: post #190
lilyball wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying requires an ID. Attending a concert should not. Any solution that is solved by "simple, just require an ID" is not a solution.

> Flying requires an ID. Attending a concert should not. Why though? Not disagreeing per say because I'd have thought so too, but upon reflection... I assume the main reason airlines require an ID is safety and security. We maintain a denied parties list and use identity verification to make it as difficult as possible to fly a plane into a crowded venue. Border control is another issue, but there's plenty of intra-c…

I assume the main reason airlines require ID (for domestic flights) is to prevent ticket resale, and that "security" is just a convenient scapegoat. And I'm not alone[1].

[1] https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2003/0815.html...

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#365

Post by xp84 »

jcranmer wrote: post #172
chuckadams wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I refuse to keep buying inkjets I only use a couple times a year. Laser printers are the solution, and Brother laser printers seem to remain the most highly-regarded.

Another printer lifehack: Goodwill (which has a 'computer' store near me, they send all the best tech stuff there) sells laser printers of all kinds for like $20-40 and that plus a $20 Amazon non-official cartridge will basically have you set for life for the occasional print job. Since they're heavy, the Goodwill route saves most of the cost compared to eBay, though I did get mine on eBay.

I actually recommend HP but Brother is great too. My current HP is at least 10 years old, and it's the second I've owned. My first was a 2000 vintage which I used from 2005-2017. (Its rubber rollers eventually got dried out and I wasn't as skilled a refurbisher as I fancied myself)

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#366

Post by cbsmith »

rzr2000 wrote: post #360
lakerz16 wrote: post #94

I hate TM and ridiculous fees as much as anyone, but this article is overly hyperbolic. There's a section named "Pirating Tickets", that just explains how to re-create a barcode that you already paid for. You're not using this to rob anyone of anything. And at the end, "Have fun refactoring your ticket verification system". Why? There are no vulnerabilities here. A rotating barcode (even if following a known pattern)…

The way this is already being exploited in the wild is that a scalper/scammer buys 1 ticket, then resells the same ticket multiple times. Multiple people believe they have a valid ticket, show up at the event, but only the 1st ticket works. The other people who try to use the ticket are turned away saying that their ticket has already been used.

> The way this is already being exploited in the wild is that a scalper/scammer buys 1 ticket, then resells the same ticket multiple times. Multiple people believe they have a valid ticket, show up at the event, but only the 1st ticket works. The other people who try to use the ticket are turned away saying that their ticket has already been used.

That is one of many ways this is already exploited in the wild.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#367

Post by cbsmith »

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.

Yeah, except NO.

A lot of people think live event ticketing is the same problem as airplane tickets, but they really aren't. As an example, there are rules about requiring identification for commercial flight. There are rules against requiring identification for live events.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#368

Post by BobaFloutist »

its_ethan wrote: post #290
BobaFloutist wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a database you can trawl for your own uses, just something that if you scan an ID pops up validating(/rejecting) it and lists the associated name.

I guess you could abuse that to turn partial IDs into more realistic ones? But that feels like a stretch. I can't see it being that useful for much more than confirming that an ID isn't a fake, which seems hard to abuse.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#369

Post by xp84 »

drowntoge wrote: post #292

> 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 i…

Those little blue bars are some hard workers. They don't even sleep! Just moving back and forth all day, protecting me. <3

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#370

Post by cbsmith »

GuB-42 wrote: post #298

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 Tick…

> Does anyone knows how Ticketmaster works, really?

For the most part, no. I'm actually shocked by how much understanding you are demonstrating in this post. I did not expect to find that on Hacker News.

Post reply on HN