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Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

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Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#601

Post by garaetjjte »

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…

Possibly it's fraud prevention, in case payment for the original ticket was fraudulent and chargeback occurs after the ticket is resold on marketplace?

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#602

Post by bonestamp2 »

amarant wrote: post #562
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…

Tbf, this does sound like a fairly efficient anti-scalper strategy, so I guess there's at least some upside to this mess.

I guess it depends on your definition of scalper. It prevents mom and pop from reselling their unwanted tickets. If they stopped there and prevented all reselling I'd be fine with that even though I'd lose out on some money in this one case.

But then they literally built a whole platform (link in my last comment) for actual scalpers to resell tickets in bulk. So, they're not trying to prevent scalping, they're just ensuring that only their "partners" can scalp.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#603

Post by elcomet »

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…

Because you could just print the ticket, then sell it, and still enter the show with it ?

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#604

Post by itsoktocry »

rundev wrote: post #589
Steven420 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have a patent on an invention then how do you protect it from people who will just steal what you have spent time/money creating?

1. If you are first to market and still can't make money off your amazing invention, that might be a skill issue. 2. Patents wouldn't be as forceful if they didn't last that long. A decade or more is basically forever in a fast-moving field like tech.

>If you are first to market and still can't make money off your amazing invention, that might be a skill issue.

Sounds like something a VC would say.

Have you considered that inventing things and selling them are two different skill sets?

The patent system needs reform, not elimination.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#605

Post by mmmlinux »

elcomet wrote: post #603
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…

Because you could just print the ticket, then sell it, and still enter the show with it ?

This is literally what the rolling codes prevent.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#606

Post by wackget »

lisper wrote: post #164

> They can’t have robust DRM on their tickets if those tickets can still be viewed offline. Of course they can. All they need is a secret key embedded somewhere that the app can access but you can't. It's just a happy circumstance that they used a simple protocol in which the key is easily extracted. But they could have used a proper PKI protocol instead, which would have made it much harder, if not impossible, to ha…

If the app can access it (offline, on your device), then what stops a developer from using tools to extract the token from the device, either from wherever it's stored in memory or using an interactive debugger to extract it as the app requests it?

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#607

Post by lisper »

wackget wrote: post #606
lisper wrote: post #164

> They can’t have robust DRM on their tickets if those tickets can still be viewed offline. Of course they can. All they need is a secret key embedded somewhere that the app can access but you can't. It's just a happy circumstance that they used a simple protocol in which the key is easily extracted. But they could have used a proper PKI protocol instead, which would have made it much harder, if not impossible, to ha…

If the app can access it (offline, on your device), then what stops a developer from using tools to extract the token from the device, either from wherever it's stored in memory or using an interactive debugger to extract it as the app requests it?

Nothing stops a (sufficiently motivated) developer from doing that. But it will stop a muggle.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#608

Post by garaetjjte »

martijnarts wrote: post #576
rangestransform wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell kind of draconian country forces you to always have an id on you? What if I go running with only my watch on (I’ve regularly done this with no malicious intent)

Lots of nations require carrying some form of ID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_card... In the US, permanent residents are required to carry their green card at all times. Here's a description of the law for the Netherlands, where I live: https://www.government.nl/topics/identification-documents/co...

There's difference between mandatory possession of ID, and requirement to carry it all the time. This list doesn't distinguish between that.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#609

Post by withinboredom »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #509
dfadsadsf wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost always book tickets for business travel 1-3 day before the trip. I am completely price insensitive (I do not care if my employer pays $100 or $400 for the ticket), my schedule is hard to predict ahead of time (if there are no important meetings on Monday, I will fly on Monday. If something important pops up I may fly on Sunday or on Tuesday). Downside is smaller seat selection (I mitigate by always checking…

My employer does some kind of credit system so we get cash credits for future trips which we can use for nicer hotels next time. Something like that. I don't fly often/ever. I should clarify the credit is the difference of the expected price vs what we paid. So if flight is normally 300 and we pay 200 we get 100 towards future travel. And then there are upper limits to what we can expense and the credits offset that.

That sounds pretty easy to game. But I think in these cases, they take what they can get and can’t really game it.

Re: Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes

#610

Post by dylan604 »

jen20 wrote: post #516
dylan604 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do not need to know my address, my phone number, credit card number or any of the other BS that "they need" including my name. Their website has a ton of trackers uBlock blocks, so their website is trying to collect even more data than what their "forms" request.

How would an iPhone app (I don’t know about android) collect any of that?

I mean...they tell you they do in the listing in the AppStore. Like, how are you not realizing this?
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