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CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

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Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#91

Post by abetusk »

cedws wrote: post #86

I don’t get it - why not just tie the ticket to a name and address at time of purchase? Then verify that matches the person using government issued ID upon entry?

How would you handle the following conditions?

* I buy a ticket for a friend (maybe as a present) but don't actually want to go to the concert

* I buy more than one ticket for a group of people (I'll be attending the concert)

* I buy a ticket but have to cancel at the last minute and want to give it to a friend

* I don't have an easily available government ID (maybe I never got a drivers license, maybe my drivers license expired, etc.)

* People attending the event aren't American. They will have their passports from other countries. How will you verify each passport is valid?

* The event draws of people from a majority of the 50 states in the USA, with each state having different government IDs (driver's license) with different versions of the IDs within each state. What are the logistics of validating the IDs presented?

In the base case of one ticket per individual that has a valid government ID that has their current address printed on the ID, what service are you using to validate this ID and to validate that the presenter of the ID is associated with the ID? What is the cost and how many transactions can it handle per second?

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#92

Post by spoonsort »

Tunnel-visioned article, honestly. I mean, why does he gloss over the fact that scalpers don't care about captchas - they can just outsource solving them to other humans. Giving your driver's license or passport to some entertainment company's security-unaware sysadmins doesn't seem like a good idea either. Maybe just accept the fact that you gotta be lucky to see most famous band in the world in person. There are only x hundred seats for 10 million people...

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#93

Post by tptacek »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #85
koch wrote: post #83

What I don't quite understand is why we haven't merely come to the conclusion that, like everything else, the internet costs money. Running servers and services costs money, and by giving it away for "free" from the get-go encases certain types of problems in the platform itself. I'm not talking about paying your ISP, I'm talking about accessing websites. I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cost to making…

From TFA: > If a spammer needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to access the site only to gain a marginal profit of 0.00005 €, they are losing money with every site access. However, if a ticket scalper needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to buy a ticket that they will later sell at a 200 € profit, this will not stop them.

And, long before the proof-of-work thing was popularized, people were already farming out high-margin captcha solves to cube farms full of people in Asia.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#94

Post by const_cast »

landl0rd wrote: post #90
koch wrote: post #83

What I don't quite understand is why we haven't merely come to the conclusion that, like everything else, the internet costs money. Running servers and services costs money, and by giving it away for "free" from the get-go encases certain types of problems in the platform itself. I'm not talking about paying your ISP, I'm talking about accessing websites. I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cost to making…

This fixes indians in boilerrooms and nigerian spam emailers but specifically not ticket scalpers. The profit is too large. Also because users don't actually control the number of HTTP requests they make. Think of sites that load individual icons rather than sprite sheets. Think of sites that fire off 1,000 tracking calls per minute. So respectfully screw that.

Maybe if we do this then those sites will be disincentivized from doing all the tracking. Because consumer's will get their bill, say "what the fuck", and go to a competitor.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#95

Post by tptacek »

teeray wrote: post #57
markasoftware wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does this prevent the scalper communicating with the buyer to demand an out-of-band payment?

If all tickets are the same price, then any buyer-seller combination will do. I believe the seller doesn’t get to choose the buyer and both are anonymous. No way to coordinate such an out-of-band payment.

They're not all the same price. They have the same list price, but once the show (or the desirable floor section of the show) sells out, the real price floats.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#96

Post by structural »

lurk2 wrote: post #70
londons_explore wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual cash income the moment the tickets go on sale. Removes all the uncertainty and risk and puts it on the scalpers.

This was my theory but there is a problem with it: Unless there is a constant churn of scalpers failing to turn a profit, the scalpers are presumably selling off their tickets at a profit. This means the market demand from individual purchasers exists, and the ticket sellers are just leaving money on the table by not raising their prices.

1. The initial price of the ticket serves as advertisement to get more people interested in the event than if it was advertised at the scalped price. Some fraction of the people will end up paying the higher price anyways, even if it was more than they intended to spend. The chance of "getting lucky" and getting a ticket at the low initial price is a powerful draw, especially if each buyer gets lucky a few times.

2. Are you sure the scalpers and the agency selling the original tickets are independent? Even if they are on paper, in many locations there is evidence of a local cartel.

3. The initial sales provide revenue up front to pay for the costs of the event, vendors, etc. This reduces the amount of cash reserves the seller needs, sometimes very dramatically.

4. Many scalped sales (used to be, not as much anymore) were cash transactions. This used to be used as a pretty significant tax dodge: Sell tickets for $50 face value to your affiliated scalper, pay tax on this sale, scalper sells tickets for $200 and does not pay tax on this secondary sale, or underreports the number of secondary tickets sold. Lots of shenanigans here to make your profitable scalping business look like it's making a small loss on paper.

5. Especially in the context of a local or regional cartel, each ticket sale represents the opportunity to move capital between entities. Physical tickets can be an effective vehicle for small-medium scale money laundering: Dirty money/entity buys the tickets, clean entity resells them.

Basically as soon as you drop the assumption that the ticket sellers and scalpers aren't related in some way, there are a lot more profitable reasons for the ticket sellers to "leave money on the table".

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#97

Post by const_cast »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #82
sokoloff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely selling concessions, parking, and merch is a significant source of income for someone associated with the concert, game, or other event.

Not the ticketing company's problem.

We should make it their problem, by artists not selling tickets on those websites but instead using their own resources. Essentially vertical integration, so then you have to care about the end-product and user experience. And, cherry on top, you might be able to charge more aggressive prices if you're not paying the profit of the middle-man.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#98

Post by mc32 »

harrall wrote: post #88
hackingonempty wrote: post #25

The reality now is the ticket sellers and bands are the main scalpers and everyone else are now secondary scalpers. Now that tickets are all electronic and the ticket sellers operate secondary markets there is no "face value" anymore and pricing is dynamic. Not all tickets are released at once and many are offered at "platinum" prices at first. All through the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's concert tickets were arou…

Most of my concert tickets are still priced around $40 inclusive, after taxes and fees, and from the likes of LiveNation, Etix, DICE, AXS, and so on. All my friends that complain about the rising cost of concerts tickets don’t realize that they just see the same old bands year over year. These scrappy up and coming bands that they saw as a kid aren’t scrappy anymore. That’s why blink-182 can charge $700 for the pleas…

In some cases, but in most cases even well known bands that had been around had tickets that highschoolers could afford. Only a handful of bands were like triple the average and would have been the likes of Rolling Stones Springsteen and such, but aside from them, no, most well known bands were not selling tickets at ludicrous prices.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#99

Post by LadyCailin »

const_cast wrote: post #94
landl0rd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fixes indians in boilerrooms and nigerian spam emailers but specifically not ticket scalpers. The profit is too large. Also because users don't actually control the number of HTTP requests they make. Think of sites that load individual icons rather than sprite sheets. Think of sites that fire off 1,000 tracking calls per minute. So respectfully screw that.

Maybe if we do this then those sites will be disincentivized from doing all the tracking. Because consumer's will get their bill, say "what the fuck", and go to a competitor.

That didn’t work at all for cookie banners. People just accept enshittification when it’s just a minor inconvenience. $0.00001 http requests would solidly fall into that category, and then it would just be marginally worse across the board.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#100

Post by harrall »

mc32 wrote: post #98
harrall wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my concert tickets are still priced around $40 inclusive, after taxes and fees, and from the likes of LiveNation, Etix, DICE, AXS, and so on. All my friends that complain about the rising cost of concerts tickets don’t realize that they just see the same old bands year over year. These scrappy up and coming bands that they saw as a kid aren’t scrappy anymore. That’s why blink-182 can charge $700 for the pleas…

In some cases, but in most cases even well known bands that had been around had tickets that highschoolers could afford. Only a handful of bands were like triple the average and would have been the likes of Rolling Stones Springsteen and such, but aside from them, no, most well known bands were not selling tickets at ludicrous prices.

I might have given blink-182 as an extreme example but $80 for tickets is still selling for a lot more than the $7 cash at the door that I paid when I saw them in a tiny skate shop 10 years ago.

Many bands don’t make it all of course, but I can still pay $7 cash for shows today at that shop and some of them are going to be able to charge $80 in a few years.

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