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Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

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Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#521

Post by moritonal »

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…

I belive I heard that Ticketmaster let the venue set one of the arbitrary fees and then hide it amongst the rest. So I would agree that the rest of what you said sounds likely.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#522

Post by notpushkin »

OvbiousError wrote: post #513
jyrkesh wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just recently dealt with this for a big Ticketmaster event. The Apple ID has to match the email address on the Ticketmaster account, or the ticket will show as Void in the Apple Wallet. But it does solve the offline issue that the blog author was experiencing.

OP explicitly states he doesn't want to add the ticket to a google account. Fair to assume they wouldn't want apple either.

If it's a standard .pkpass, they could use it with an offline third-party app that can view those, e. g. PassAndroid [1]. Given Ticketmaster verifies Apple ID though, as mentioned in this thread, I'm not really sure it would work.

[1]: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.ligi.passandroid/

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#524

Post by patates »

deamanto wrote: post #409

I'd also like to highlight another bad practice by Ticketmaster. When you purchase a ticket from them and resell it on their marketplace, once someone purchases it, they(Ticketmaster) hold your funds and only give you the money ~7-14 business days after the event is over. They say this is to verify the validity of the ticket. On the buyer side, you purchase the ticket from the marketplace and it gets added to your ac…

Maybe to stop people selling the ticket and still going to the event with a pre-printed one? Solving that would also be easy if they have a central verification system (just invalidate the ticket and issue a new one) but not if it is all p2p.

(disclaimer: I'm a complete outsider, last time I bought anything from Ticketmaster was a really long time ago).

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#525

Post by kornakar »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #523

"besides the fact that I don’t want to install their spyware on my phone." There's no other mention of spyware in the article - does anyone know what this is referring to?

I think it's just usually any 3rd party app is to be considered spyware nowadays.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#526

Post by notpushkin »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #474
mattmaroon wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yeah. I’m just hoping the justice dept breaks them up and ticket sales move to something like the airline model.

Why though? Lord knows I hate Ticketmaster as much as everyone else but “airline model” sounds fucking terrible. I hope I never see the day where I’m removing belts and shoes to get into a concert. To be fair though I always get at least somewhat reasonable concert prices by doing presale. Sign up for the artist’s “presale club” and/or get the credit cards that have presale as a perk. Get in queue ahead of time. You…

Belts and shoes doesn't have much to do with ticket sales, does it?

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#527

Post by notpushkin »

jimbobthrowawy wrote: post #263
NavinF wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Work profile is really neat, yeah. I'm using Shelter for this, it's quite nice: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#528

Post by noahtallen »

philjohn wrote: post #195
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…

I had to use something like this to get into The Killers gig last week at the O2 in London (fantastic gig btw, and Andy Bell from Erasure made a special guest appearance to sing A Little Respect which was the cherry on top, but I digress). The WiFi in the O2 was woeful, and even on "The best network" EE the app wasn't loading. Eventually after stepping aside and letting a load of people go in front of us I managed to…

I mean Ticketmaster’s current best practice seems to be NFC tickets stored in a mobile wallet which do work offline

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#529

Post by fewconspiracies »

cogman10 wrote: post #32
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.

Yup. I have to believe the reason the likes of ticket master isn't fixing this is because they are selling/auctioning/reserving some percentage of tickets to scalpers or "3rd party sellers". Requiring ID is such an obvious solution that I have to believe these convoluted approaches are only there so the secondary market can exist and so ticket master can wash their hands when prices get out of control on that market.

[flagged]

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#530

Post by prmoustache »

fnfjfk wrote: post #464
jmb99 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your argument that people should be unable to attend concerts/etc without presenting ID? I for one am not a fan of that idea

You need to show one to get a drinking wristband anyways (and avoid the hand Xs), or into any 16+, 18+, or 21+ show.

This is not universal.
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