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Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

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Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#451

Post by ihumanable »

jjmarr wrote: post #381
ihumanable wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

If you have 10,000 people willing to pay $X to see a concert, but you only have 5000 seats to sell at $X, not everyone is going to get a ticket. Our economic system (arbitrage!) increases the price of the apple by $N until only one person is willing to buy that apple at $X+N. If you make arbitrage illegal and implement a price ceiling at $X, one of two things will happen. If $N is greater than the cost of breaking th…

Thanks for the thoughts they are also interesting.

Sorry I saw your comment after I wrote this reply to someone else, I’d be interested to hear your take on this hypothetical situation too if you don’t mind. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40911779

I agree with you though about the idea that the market works well when those that receive the most value spend the most money. While we have very high rates of wealth inequality, which also seems to be something of an emergent property of this system, once you have even medium amounts of inequality the system becomes interesting. I think expanding on your thoughts it comes down to the relative value of money being different for different people. If I have $100 then $10 is a LOT of money, it’s 10% of all my money. If I have $1000 then $10 is probably not a lot of money to me, not trivial but it’s only 1%.

Now this is an order of magnitude but if you asked someone if a system where the wealthy had 10x as much money as the poor they’d probably say that the inequality wasn’t so bad. But even in that case the guy with $1000 would probably be willing to spend $11 on some good that the other guy wants maybe infinitely more, just because that guy can’t really afford it.

It’s a fascinating way of looking at things I hadn’t quite ever thought about in terms of relative value of money itself. I don’t have any real point I’m making here, just thanks for contributing I found your reply interesting and it made me think.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#452

Post by orangecat »

ihumanable wrote: post #442
orangecat wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scalper provides no value to the market The scalper allows the devoted fan who is gladly willing to pay $X+N to actually get a ticket rather than having to wake up at 6am and repeatedly refresh the site and probably still not get one. I find market failures like this fascinating because it really shows the limits of how "free" markets operate. How would central planning handle this better? There are more people w…

Well just to be clear, I didn’t say central planning would solve this problem. A careful reading of my post would show a distinct lack of the term “central planning” You can be interested in market failures without proposing an alternative. Complex systems are fascinating and their boundaries and failure conditions are fascinating. That’s all I’m talking about.

Fair enough!

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#453

Post by mixmastamyk »

627467 wrote: post #410
llsf wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is most likely about throughput. You want to let fans enter the venue as quick as possible. Most venues have lots of gates, but still the latency at each gate has to be a handful of seconds per ticket. Having to validate both ticket and ID would easily double or triple that time.

I keep reading about this argument but Olympics and World Cup matches are arguably as large events (if not larger) and they place name on ticket and check ID at entrance. people complain at ticketmaster yet seem to bend over backwards to justify the state of affairs

You can rely on TM to do whatever makes the most money, and they probably know better than us. Also those you list are typically higher security events.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#454

Post by devilbunny »

bagels wrote: post #317
Zopieux wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often has this been a problem though? How about not keeping your boarding pass, or ticket, or credit card for that matter, visible for the world? Just put it in your wallet, I don't know. This is security FUD. Stop solving problems that do not exist to the point where it makes the news when they do happen, once a century. This DRM scheme concretely creates millions of small annoyances to millions of people and wa…

It also happens that pranksters can cancel your travel if your boarding passes make it on to Twitter or other social media. It's not a non-problem like you make it out to be. Sure, it won't happen to you or me, because we know it is a risk to expose these documents, but that is not true of most people. Maybe the DRM is not worth it. I actually think it's obnoxious for concert tickets (I recently had to deal with this…

I’d call that a feature, not a bug, since you can’t get a boarding pass until 24 hours before the first leg of a trip. Expensive education, but education nonetheless.

I only use paper boarding passes if they insist on giving them to me when I check my bags or if I’m flying internationally and am worried about connectivity in one of the transfer airports. They go straight into my travel wallet (full-length, large enough for letter or A4 paper folded, with enough space for two passports, several credit cards, a pen, and plenty of cash or other documents). The company that made mine is unfortunately out of business, but https://www.leatherology.com/zip-around-travel-wallet is similar.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#456

Post by NoahKAndrews »

Ocha wrote: post #434
bonestamp2 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another good point in here. Why do they hold the ticket until just before the event? I bought tickets to a concert for my wife's favorite band. Then, my wife's work scheduled an event for that same week and she had to leave town. So, what I really wanted was a refund so someone else could buy the tickets. They don't do that of course. So, then I wanted to sell the tickets for face value... but ticketmaster di…

Just vote with your pocket and don’t buy tickets from them. I do that - yes I don’t get to go to major concerts but there are still so much more that is not on ticket master. I found a lot of new entertainment and was happy to pay $4 fee instead of whatever TM charges nowadays.

See Tickets seems to be on the rise recently, which I've been glad for

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#457

Post by cypherpunks01 »

ikesau wrote: post #14

Really good post! I also found this quote which distilled their position in the 404media coverage of the situation. > “What I can say for sure is that TicketMaster and AXS have had every opportunity to support scam-free third party ticket resale and delivery platforms if they wished: By documenting their ticket QR code cryptography, and by exposing apps and APIs which would allow verification and rotation of ticket s…

I dug up the court docs referenced in that article, it's pretty interesting-

AXS Group LLC v. Internet Referral Services LLC (2:24-cv-00377) District Court, C.D. California

Amended complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.91...

Docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68163191/axs-group-llc-...

One item of the complaint is regarding the "secure.tickets" site, which I wrote about in an earlier comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906148#40910690).

Basically, brokers are using the "secure.tickets" and similar websites to proxy ticket barcodes to buyers, without going through the actual ticket transfer mechanisms on the primary ticketer AXS/TM, (similar to how this blogger does). Then resellers are delivering these ticket URLs, hosted on random websites, to Seatgeek and Stubhub customers, and those platforms are supporting their delivery by telling their customers that the tickets are legit. Sounds like AXS is fighting back against this practice.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#458

Post by mixmastamyk »

cbsmith wrote: post #367
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.

Where has rules prohibiting it? Maybe will move. :D

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#459

Post by dzhiurgis »

Arrath wrote: post #431
dzhiurgis wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

900mhz networks like halow or even lorawan should do Even at huge venues i dont expect requests would be over 5 rps

5 RPS, per scanner, surely?

Can you imagine 5 people moving thru scanner in 1 second?

Even at 1 rps that's if we assume 1 meter distance that's 3.6 km/h or a normal walking pace. Do you ever see crowd at ticketing move at walking pace?

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#460

Post by ihumanable »

orangecat wrote: post #452
ihumanable wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well just to be clear, I didn’t say central planning would solve this problem. A careful reading of my post would show a distinct lack of the term “central planning” You can be interested in market failures without proposing an alternative. Complex systems are fascinating and their boundaries and failure conditions are fascinating. That’s all I’m talking about.

Fair enough!

I also wanted to say that I appreciate your original reply and your civility. Sadly a rare thing these days.
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