Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
ikesau
cypherpunks01
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.
snotrockets
The underlying issue is that those tickets have a "no resale" provision that doesn't apply when the original seller acts as a broker.
Do other brokers, when they go and work around that limitation break the sales contact? Maybe. The legal system would churn an answer in a few years.
Do AXS et al with their "only we are allowed to engage in a secondary policy" are abusing their monopoly on original sales? The legal system would churn an answer about the legality of this in few years, but I think it's obvious they at least break rules in the spirit.
silexia
Monopoly is the keyword here. Ticketmaster and Boeing and all the other nefarious companies here use PATENTS to prevent competitors from eating their lunch. Patents need to be done away with to allow free competition, don't believe the propaganda about patents helping creators
mattmaroon
I love it when a system has been working for hundreds of years through by far the most prosperous time in human history but people on the internet are sure it is wrong. No proof, no evidence, not even logic, just certainty.
Also, I don’t think any of the issues with Ticketmaster have anything to do with patents.
giovannibonetti
Maybe we could just reduce the patent's duration to compensate for the acceleration of information diffusion caused by the internet in the last few decades. Does that seem reasonable to you?
sharpshadow
Has been working but check out the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict and the sanctions regarding patents[1]. Russia is now allowing their companies to use patents freely.
1. https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2022/04/russian-decree-unde...
some_random
Yeah seriously, what patents are we talking about here? My understanding is that reason Ticketmaster is a monopoly is through deals with venues
Steven420
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?
treyd
This is what patents used to do, but the economic and technological circumstances under which they did have changed dramatically over the last couple hundred years. All they really do now is entrench the power of the massive corporations with the capital to buy them up and sue anyone that they think encroach. It's not promoting innovation anymore, it's stifling it.
TrinaryWorksToo
Patents no longer go to individual people. They go to corporations. Perhaps we should ban corporations from getting patents on behalf of people.
rundev
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.
some_random
What patents does Ticketmaster have that stop competitors from selling tickets?
yard2010
[flagged]
dymk
Not all cryptography is blockchain
jagged-chisel
Hash chains already existed. But someone created blockchain anyway.
undefined
deamanto
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 account immediately. (I think) You get the barcode some time ~1 week before the actual event begins.
The confusion for me? Ticketmaster owned the ticket and all logic relating to the validity of it. The logic to validate this shouldn't be complex at all. They OWN the ticket. They KNOW it's legitimate because it never left their database. Yet they double dip and hold both buyer and seller funds. Events can be close to a year in the future but the seller won't see that until after that event ends.
bonestamp2
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 didn't "deliver" the tickets to my account until the day before the event!
I watched for a month leading up to the event as the ticket prices plummeted while the scalpers were desperate to get at least something for their tickets before my ticket was even delivered to me.
As soon as they take my money, they should update the database to show that the ticket is mine. If I want to sell it, I should be able to do that immediately too.
But, from what I've read, that instant resale ability only belongs to their "partners" who resell a lot of tickets, and you need access to their "TradeDesk" tool to do it: https://tradedesk.ticketmaster.com
Ocha
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.
trustno2
They have an effective monopoly.
Loughla
That's the secret.
If nobody used them, they would go away.
NoahKAndrews
See Tickets seems to be on the rise recently, which I've been glad for
bonestamp2
I did that for several years. I don't really consider it voting though because nobody is counting the votes -- they still sell out of tickets with higher profits each year.
mike503
This began a lot more on third party sites like stubhub due to Covid and the massive amount of cancellations; before most places paid out after the sale, and if the buyer wound up having an issue (due to the seller mistake, selling it multiple times, whatever) they would charge the seller and usually assess a penalty.
But when everything in the world was being cancelled I assume they didn't have all the money just sitting around to reverse and it was a ton of thrash to deal with. As someone who had bought tons of tickets and sold some, it was a mess. I had a ton of credit card refunds back, the third party sites had to reverse payments, etc.
Waiting until after the event is just less overhead. Guarantees the transaction happened without a hitch.
There are some POS and broker sites that still pay on transfer, but none of the "primary" secondary market does.
EGreg
I’ve never dealt much with TicketMaster, despite them being a monopoly. So my questions here may just be out of naiveté:
1) Why would TicketMaster pay event organizers ahead of time, if the event might be shit and attendees may demand their money back? Rather than having to deal with a lot of chargebacks and making it their own problem with the banks, they might prefer to make sure the event goes off without a hitch and refund people while they still can. Rather than subsidizing the refunds they make the event organizer have to get (and pay for) financing instead, backed by their payout. They might also offer such financing.
2) I get that they hold event organizers hostage by making contracts with the venues for years, that might be an antitrust issue but it’s separate from 1.
3) Why would TicketMaster make scalping easy? Middlemen would just buy up all the tickets and then pump and dump the price, much like early crypto investors in a meme token or altcoin do. So they don’t “deliver” the ticket to you until just before the event, exactly for that reason.
With ChatGPT it’s now easier than ever to impersonate thousands of people at scale, with credit cards and everything. But I will admit, showing up to an event at least once confirms there is a human behind the account. But a first-timer buyer? Shouldn’t be able to resell, no.
mhuffman
#1 and #3 are related. They make scalping easy so they get all of their money immediately and can pay event organizers ahead of time. I personally think scalping should be straight-up illegal but business schools loove it and consider it an excellent example of helping with liquidity in a system and finding the true "willingness to pay" price of something.
amarant
Tbf, this does sound like a fairly efficient anti-scalper strategy, so I guess there's at least some upside to this mess.
bonestamp2
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.
cypherpunks01
It's simply 0% financing for their business. No more complex than that.
tesrx
Excellent point. I wonder if Ticketmaster profits by making interest off of holding those funds?
mixmastamyk
Wonder no more—yes.
ipsum2
Do you work at ticketmaster? Otherwise, how do you confirm this?
krger
>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.
I imagine it's more about discouraging scalping, regardless of what they may say about it.
patates
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).
Phemist
They would need to solve that anyway in case 2 or more friends attempt to get in on the same ticket.
Not at all difficult - simply share screen a third device and display the rotating QR-code through e.g. zoom on individual phones. For additional trickery, try to split the group into joining multiple ticket scanning lines and timing the scan of the ticket to be as close as possible to eachother.
garaetjjte
Possibly it's fraud prevention, in case payment for the original ticket was fraudulent and chargeback occurs after the ticket is resold on marketplace?
LorenPechtel
That does sound like a very reasonable thing to do. Otherwise you have a threat vector of steal card, buy ticket, sell ticket, pocket the cash, card owner disputes, now Ticketmaster has paid a stolen identity who took the money and ran.
Anything that can be used to monetize stolen cards will tend to be used for the purpose even if it's inefficient.
babypuncher
I really, really, really hope Ticketmaster gets broken up. Their shittiness seemingly knows no bounds.
lakerz16
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) is still more secure than a static barcode on a piece of paper.
guhcampos
Piracy here just means you can use it to sell your ticket without using their platform, which is analogous to just sending someone the PDF or handing over the piece of paper as always.
While this has the upside of breaking you free from TM's obnoxious practices, it also obviously opens up for scalpers and all.
IncreasePosts
Scalping is still possible without understanding the tech - you could just stream a video of the bar codes and sell the stream instead of selling the ticket.
firewolf34
The whole point of their system isn't to eliminate the possibility entirely it's to make it impractical to get around for the vast majority of concert-goers, and it clearly succeeds at this.
Recording the ticket with a video is everyone's first thought at defeating their restriction, and is no doubt the first thing they thought of when designing it. Hence, the codes expiring too quickly that you'll need a new video before you get through the line at the entrance of the venue. And messing with videos in a pressured line of people in front of a bouncer, is, as others have said, simply not practical for the vast majority of cases.
So it's kind of irrelevant - practically speaking - that it is possible.
grishka
Good luck getting enough signal to play a video stream in a large crowd.
bjclark
Piracy here means that you can sell 50k tickets to the same seat with a real valid rotating barcode.
csomar
Are you sure you understood the article? The token is supposed to be a secret and the TOTP generation should happen remotely. This is not the case and this suggest a fundamental lack of security practices at the company.
lakerz16
"Should happen remotely" – according to who? What is the security risk for the end-user?
"this suggest a fundamental lack of security practices at the company" – that's a stretch of a conclusion to make. You're being as hyperbolic as the original post.
What didn't I understand about the article? This still offers a slight increase in security over static barcodes, without introducing any new vulnerabilities.
worik
> This still offers a slight increase in security over static barcodes, without introducing any new vulnerabilities
It offers nothing to the user, except taking away their rights, and making it all unreliable
rbits
> the TOTP generation should happen remotely.
It says that it is available offline (if you've viewed it in the last 20 hours), so the TOTP generation can't happen remotely
account42
Well it's more like the "security: they want is fundamentally is incompatible with support for ofline use in this case (as long as we have open computing platforms anyway).
LorenPechtel
Which would increase the problem he described--too many people trying to get in overloading the local bandwidth.
It's enough to defeat screenshotting and the 20 hour bit would defeat large scale malicious use.
Not good security but probably good enough, especially in stopping the resale of stolen tickets.
CYR1X
It's piracy in a way that's analogous to ripping like Netflix content. You are breaking away from DRM which is piracy. They also cite the potential to have multiple tokens valid per one ticket which would let multiple people get in with the same ticket.
Closi
I doubt the second bit is true - they will still be marking the ticket as used in their backend.
They are just trying to prevent scalpers printing off tickets 10 times and selling them outside the venues as a scam, which happened at every large concert I have ever been to until recently (so I assume this is working!).
donalhunt
You would hope... But they often run the scanners in offline mode (e.g. at temporary / seasonal events) so there can be lag in the backends being updated.
Heard from a friend who got straight into two events in the same city recently - they presumed the show was at one outdoor venue but the scanners let them straight in at the first (wrong) venue. Went to the correct venue and got in there without any issue too (this suggests one or both venues were offline or using offline scanners).
orbillius
> they will still be marking the ticket as used in their backend.
I assume that's true, but it makes me wonder how their scanners are connected to the server.
I mean, if 10,000 people showing up to an event with smartphones overwhelms wireless networks, wont that also kick their scanners off the network?
They'd probably like to have a system where, if a scanner loses its connection, it can still validate tickets. It could store a copy of validated tickets locally, and upload it when the network connection is restored - that would mean a copied ticket would have to make sure they go to a different door/scanner. But it would allow copying.
lakerz16
I'd argue that a few extra people sneaking in on the same ticket (assuming this is even possible) is more like sharing your Netflix credentials than ripping Netflix content and having it be shareable with the entire world.
You're also walking into a stadium/concert in plain view of security cameras, so the stakes and deniability are different as well.
giaour
Not a lawyer, but "subverting DRM" (even if it's trivial or really stupidly designed) can be a crime in and of itself in the US under the DMCA. There are a bunch of exceptions to this, so I have no idea if OP's work is actually illegal.
93po
It would be DRM if the barcode was copyrighted material, which it isn't.
rzr2000
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.
cbsmith
> 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.
lakerz16
Do you have a source for this? What platform are they selling multiple copies of the ticket through, and what app are the buyers using that allows multiple buyers to receive and show the same animated barcode?
CephalopodMD
This way you can sell and have the ticket completely off of ticketmaster. That is a vulnerability. It lets users do something they explicitly don't want to allow.
withinboredom
He was basically wondering if he could create two tickets each with different tokens. Tokens are valid for 20 hours but it probably doesn’t invalidate the old token (e.g. a request for a new token makes it to the internet but due to congestion, the response never comes back to your phone before timing out) and this could trigger multiple tokens for the same ticket and are all valid.
dncornholio
Thank you for posting this. This article left me super unsatisfied too.
noodlesUK
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.
cogman10
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.
oehpr
I have to presume that the driving impetus of all of this is that they're trying to avoid the actual requirement of checking the ID. Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions.
But I mean, obviously, any kind of system like this strikes me as the same sort of thing as DRM. That you can somehow protect the message from the person you're sharing the message to. How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser? It just seemes ridiculous on its face.
jrockway
Yup exactly. Some events are pretty bad at opening the doors early. The Brooklyn Nets seem to open 30 minutes before the game, so they need to get 20,000 people through 20 metal detectors in 30 minutes. Every second extra they add to the process is a second you don't have to buy a $25 drink, and that's how they make their money.
We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.
cogman10
So even if you don't want to do the ID thing, there are alternatives that you see all over the place (like venmo) Have a rotating QR code seeded with a unique to the user id. Then with ticket master, require a login to buy tickets. Register the tickets to the ID and then do the lookup with a combination of the ticket id, rotating qr code, and the user id.
That requires the admitter device to send the challenge back to HQ, but that shouldn't really be much of a challenge. Tickets then become linked to the user's account (perhaps you allow transfer).
This is effectively what Disney does with their ticketing system, along with at the gate them taking a picture of you so they can confirm "Yes, so and so looks like the photo".
But yeah, all of this is ridiculous on its face as the cheaper and easier solution is ticket plus ID. If you are worried about flow have signs up before check in that say "be sure to have your ID ready before you get to the counter".
The ticketmaster solutions are just bad/half assed.
That is to say, if ticketmater had just done TOPS like the article points out, you'd not need the headache they've created with needing a live internet connection to load your ticket.
crote
> Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions.
But they in turn greatly degraded the flow of traffic by forcing the use of a proprietary always-online app which fails to load when your cellular connection is less-than-ideal. Verifying a photo ID would probably be faster.
carlosjobim
> How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser?
A ticket scalper cannot know the names of the people that will later purchase his tickets. So connecting each ticket to a name prevents scalpers.
makestuff
Yeah I agree, they are not incentivized to fix scaling/bots because they get a fee every time a ticket is sold. It is in their best interest for the ticket to be sold as many times as possible.
fewconspiracies
[flagged]
storyinmemo
But also, the hell with this. I'm still sour enough about the TSA without the concept of, "I'll buy tickets for me and three of my friends then see who wants to go," becoming impossible or gated by ticket transfer fees.
toomuchtodo
Airlines are preventing a secondary market. Unfavorable for your use case, but also prevents scalping airline tickets (while allowing airlines to attempt to maximize revenue). There are always tradeoffs and compromise.
To hack around this, I've used Southwest Airlines; I can buy tickets for folks and if they can't travel, we cancel the ticket(s) and keep the travel funds banked for another time. I hope this is potentially helpful information.
https://simpleflying.com/why-airlines-dont-allow-name-change...
pxx
except Southwest is easily the most expensive carrier these days and other carriers have also adopted flexibility
hopefully their new changes such as allowing their fares to be indexed will make them close to being competitive at some point. but today you really only get near-competitiveness (it's still bad) if you're going to check both pieces of luggage and have no way of getting free luggage on any other carrier.
even buying and throwing away tickets, depending on your probability of travel, might pay for itself in one trip.
swores
Even allowing that but requiring your valid ID must be taken into the venue by yourself (or by your friends eg if you get sick and can't go) would be a big improvement, meaning ticket scalps would have to actually go or have someone on their team go along with every ticket they resell.
lilyball
Flying requires an ID. Attending a concert should not. Any solution that is solved by "simple, just require an ID" is not a solution.
noirscape
Depends a lot on the country you live in. In most European countries "carrying an ID" is legally required if the police stops you anyway (they do need a reason to see it though), so "show an ID at the entrance" is no big deal.
It's to my understanding mainly the US where ID requirements are often side eyed because many people don't have them and there's no national standard (and due to a variety of political reasons there probably won't ever be any.)
rangestransform
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)
627467
that's really just an opinion. and I'd argue that if people really care about a fair and sustainable concert going, given how ridiculous the live event situation is, you'd support pretty common and standard requirements like ID to be shown. as others said: ID is already required to validate age in many events/venues
mixmastamyk
Recent changes are anything but fair and sustainable. Front section tickets have gone from $120 to auction at $400+ at our local venue.
Can no longer pay cash, have a paper ticket, be anonymous. Those are much more important to me than preventing scalping.
Scalpers out front have provided a valuable service to me a dozen times over the years, when I didn’t plan well.
Any solution (I didn’t ask for) that turns concerts in an international flight experience means they are dead to me.
Age was traditionally checked separately and manually. Not put into a database to be bought and sold and breached.
itishappy
> 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-country or intra-state flights where this isn't an issue.
Ticketmaster sells unverified access to crowded venues.
jasomill
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...
rangestransform
Because we ought to do everything in our power to stop the aggressive onslaught of the surveillance state. We already know TSA is security theatre at best, and the time they’ve wasted already justifies more lives lost to terrorism instead.
Practically, I don’t want Ticketmaster having access to the information on my ID, they already leaked lot of my other PII.
jmb99
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
fnfjfk
How are you getting into shows without presenting ID for age? Every (well, every legal...) venue I've been to in NYC cards to see if you are 21.
ssl-3
I've been to many [big, small] well-known, legit shows in the US as a kid who was not yet an adult.
I did not have an ID, and none was required to get in.
All-ages shows are definitely things that exist.
plorkyeran
I have never had to show ID to get into a concert other than tiny shows at bars. Every larger venue around here (SF) I’ve been to checks IDs to get a wrist band which lets you buy drinks, but you can just skip that if you aren’t drinking.
reddalo
Italy solved this. Five years ago, a new law enforced ID-checking when you enter any big events (like concerts with an audience larger than 5000 people).
Tickets have your name on it, and you can only change the name or resell them through the official seller (so, third party resellers are out of the game). Also, every reselling transaction is registered and can be inspected by the Italian Rightsholder Agency (SIAE).
rangestransform
I’d rather not solve it than let the state have more information about my transactions
cyberbolt23
Because this, and more very strange rules it is very hard for ticketing systems to get into the Italian market. Some examples:
- not allowed to change to time or name of the event after the 1st ticket is sold
- only allowed section names in halls from a know list
- free tickets on events... can only do this under strange conditions
- smart card application, for encryption, must run on a physical server in Italy. You should not be able to log into the ticketing box office if that smart card application is not running.
reddalo
You know many details about Italian ticketing systems, are you working in the industry?
tqi
People often buy tickets without knowing exactly which of their friends are going to attend with them. This is not true of airplane tickets.
mattmaroon
One ID for the entire order would be fine. You can buy 4 tickets, and go into the concert with your 3 friends. It often works this way even with no ID involved, I buy two tickets, add them both to my wallet, scan them both when my GF and I go to the show.
You COULD still scalp tickets if the person who bought them from you is going to walk in with you. But the scalper would have to eat the cost of one ticket to do it, and it's probably onerous enough to severly reduce the impact of scalping.
miki123211
That's how trains work (here).
Every ticket must have one name and surname on it, no matter how many passengers it covers. That person must be traveling on the ticket.
You're usually asked for some kind of photo anyway because of discounts, which a very significant percentage of train riders are entitled to.
I think this is because tickets must be both printable and verifiable offline in case the train gets into a spot with no connectivity when the inspector is inspecting tickets.
0cf8612b2e1e
What if you need to arrive separately? Especially for a big event with tens of thousands of people, can be easier to meet up inside the venue on everyone’s timeline.
dbbk
Yes this exists, it's called lead booker tickets
actionfromafar
Would be awesome if it were true for airplane tickets
__MatrixMan__
That requires a single source of truth for which names go with which tickets. Which is going to be a problem if tickets need to be transferred in contexts where users don't have internet access (but they do have local connectivity between devices) or in contexts where the venue doesn't have internet access. Or in cases where the single source of truth might be vulnerable to attack or doesn't have the resources to handle the load at certain times.
I don't have the solution explicitly, but it seems like it ought to be possible to do this such that PII need not be collected. Tickets could be cryptographic proofs that a chain of custody exists and meets certain criteria. The proofs could be constructed at transfer time and verified at admission, no servers in the loop anywhere. Yeah, we'll come up against the CAP theorem eventually, but we might find that the imposed constraints are workable.
immibis
> Which is going to be a problem if tickets need to be transferred in contexts where users don't have internet access (but they do have local connectivity between devices) or in contexts where the venue doesn't have internet access.
You know as well as I do that TicketMaster won't allow any of that, because it means they miss out on selling another ticket.
__MatrixMan__
I was operating under the assumption that the goal was to replace TicketMaster with an open protocol.
throwaway2037
I agree, mostly. What do you do for people without an ID (and without a parent)? Think of the number of people at a Taylor Swift concert who are under 18 -- a lot. Also, checking the name between ticket and ID will slow down entrance by 2-5 times, I guess.
otherme123
I was recently at a Festival that requires ticket + ID (https://www.resurrectionfest.es). The key to success was to put a little more personal at the gates, maybe 15 people instead of 10. But it is also true that we have the ID document issued in our early teens it not before. Each ticket verification takes 3 more seconds extra to verify the ID matches, no big deal.
Said festival does their own ticket re-sale to avoid scalping but mainly to avoid shady sites that are known to allow the selling of counterfeits. You can only cede your ticket, not sell it. It is not perfect (e.g. if you don't find a buyer for the same price, you can't sell it at a lost to recoup some money. You get your ticket back) but at least is not as bad as the one from Ticketmaster.
muppetman
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.
627467
how is this not the same as 8 people trying to find airline tickets for everyone? you can buy tickets for different passengers. some airlines/travel agencies even allow for name change for a fee.
condiment
This is trivial and solutions exist in the wild already. If you buy tix for the Paris Olympics, you can transfer them to your friends or you can assign their names to the tickets directly.
The interesting mechanism there is that you can buy a lot of seats at once, but you don’t get to choose where they are exactly, only the section. So in every case you’re going to have people buying big lots of tickets and distributing them to friends and family after the fact.
phoronixrly
With regards to the end of the article.
> Can I work for a bad company and still be a good person?
> No.
probably_wrong
I'm glad we cleared that up. Now all that remains is a good, measurable definition of what a bad company is.
__MatrixMan__
It's like porn. You know it when you see it and also there's quite a lot of it.
joquarky
As one grows older, they may find that not everything in reality can be quantified or put into words.
And trying to objectify value judgements is another whole area of contention that inevitably leads to itself.
deathanatos
I realize that.
But the point of reading a blog post would be to learn something insightful, to see the reasoning or argument by which the poster came to this particular conclusion. Hopefully with some consideration that I'd not thought of before.
This boils a complicated question with nuance and problems and facets of debate into a rather vapid "I like this answer." of a post. It's not worth anything: I come away from it no richer than when I came.
Like, trivially, someone could write the opposite answer on another blog. And whose answer is right? (They of course need not even bother actually writing it out. A "right" answer is created by argument, not spilled ink.)
pompino
> Now all that remains is a good, measurable definition of what a bad company is.
Lets re-invent religion.
munk-a
You're trying to get quantitative about a qualitative problem.
probably_wrong
The problem is that "bad company" is such a nebulous concept as to be useless, as the JSON license showed with their "shall not use this software for evil" clause.
No matter which company you choose, someone somewhere will find a justification for why they are actually not bad. Weapons dealer? Protecting your nation. Destroying local businesses? "They are just adding efficiency to the market". Kill someone with bad practices? "Still safer than the alternative". Ticketmaster? "The scalpers are giving a subvention for those who cannot afford the real price".
Setting up a straw "bad company" and knocking it down doesn't help anyone on the real problem of people working for unethical companies.
its_ethan
That's their point. They're poking fun at how the OP is speaking in absolutes about something subjective/ opinion based.
blowski
So if you think a company is bad you shouldn’t work for them. Perhaps many of the people working for TicketMaster don’t think they’re a bad company.
TremendousJudge
If you're asking the above question, it means you already think the company is bad according to your own morals.
__MatrixMan__
I ask myself if my company is bad all the time. They don't get a perfect score, but I feel better about this one than any of the previous ones (that's why I'm here and not there). If the answer is ever a resounding yes, I'll leave this one too.
When most of the relevant work around you is in some way related to ICBM's, you either sell your soul early, or you end up with habits like this. By my reckoning, about 80% of technology companies are bad.
rozap
It's not hard if you remove the self delusion. Removing the self delusion is maybe tricky for the individual, but it's easy for people around the individual to see. Societal tools like shame are generally used to encourage people in the right direction, but we don't do a great job of this in America, because money tends to override everything else and I don't think we have good structures around expressing non-monetary values like honor.
Especially on the west coast, we're so passive in our shaming of people that it probably doesn't translate to action. There are people who work at Evil companies like Facebook, etc, who are otherwise nice, but I find myself not including them or turned off to them as friends because this sort of contradiction is hard to square in my brain. Of course I wouldn't communicate to this, being a passive PNW raised wimp, and it's not even super explicit in my mind, it's really more of a bad vibe than anything else. I imagine over time if enough people act like I do, it doesn't actually translate to different decisions from the individual in question, but instead translates to them waking up one day feeling distant and unfulfilled, which is probably the worst of all outcomes. They still work for Bad Company, but are also sad about it, and there's a general sense of malaise pervading life that's hard to pinpoint.
*Obviously this all ignores the people who don't have a choice of employment. But here I'm generally referring to software people who have high pay and career mobility. Things get murkier when the conversation is opened up to people who are just trying to survive.
ilrwbwrkhv
Yup. I was just discussing this in another comment that Facebook's emotional manipulation of users without consent is ethical wrong. Some people are replying with eh, everybody does it and for 20,000 dollars people will jump to Facebook.
I think the Leetcode grinding, TC optimizing crowd with no real moral judgment which is the majority in tech right now is another reason why things are falling apart. They will happily work for the KKK if they get a larger RSU package.
Your point about them being at least "sad" about it, is a start I guess.
sethammons
Does this extend to where you live and pay taxes?
__MatrixMan__
I think we should make an exception for saboteurs.
hinkley
And whistle blowers. And double agents.
undefined
gitgud
All company's are "bad" in some way... does that mean all employees are bad?
> No.
digging
And pretty much every company is bad. But this is a wrong answer because the question is actually nonsense.
The answer to "What happens when you move faster than light" is not "nothing", it is undefined because the question is invalid. Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values. To get more specific, not all of us have a huge amount of choice in who we work for.
If apenwarr believes I want to be a good person they should hire me at Tailscale. What's that, they won't? They don't have openings, or I'm not qualified? I guess they're the bad person because now I have to work for a bad company or lose my income. And if I lose my income, my co-habitants lose their housing, and my donations to good causes dry up. Do I just not do enough good for apenwarr? They must be a paragon of virtue. Surely they don't eat meat, or even associate with meat-eaters. Surely they don't fly in airplanes.
__MatrixMan__
It doesn't need a well defined evaluation scheme. You're the one asking the question, you can provide your own scheme, and come up with your own answer. Whether you're honest with yourself in this process is up to you.
It's still useful to point out that IF you think your company is bad THEN you should do something about that. It establishes that "I was just following orders that I know are wrong" isn't a valid excuse (e.g. like if you end up in court for something you did on the job).
digging
> You're the one asking the question, you can provide your own scheme
Well, I'm responding to someone else providing their scheme for everyone else to use.
Dylan16807
> the answers we give are rounded according to our own values
I agree with this entirely.
And rounding does not change the answer in most situations.
Something that isn't well-defined can still be mostly-defined.
I have no idea what the point of that strawman is in your last paragraph. It doesn't make sense with or without rounding. Maybe if you round every single value to infinity, but that's not what "rounding" normally means...
digging
I honestly don't know how to respond to this, it's too vague.
immibis
> Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values.
Counterexample:
Was Hitler bad?
pompino
Good/Bad are consensus votes. Its hard to escape their use just because of how deeply ingrained the programming is. We just think it makes "sense" and is "obvious" because its a meme that is already in our head. There is nothing inherently evil or good about any past/present/future animal on this planet.
IncreasePosts
That really depends if you ask a neo nazi or not.
joquarky
Due to chaotic effects of causality, most of us would not exist if any significant event from that long ago had happened differently.
digging
If the answer is yes, does that mean a junior web dev who implements user tracking on a shopping portal is equivalent to Hitler? Or is every who does less evil than Hitler "not a bad person"?
I don't think it's useful to say "Hitler was bad." Hitler did a lot of specific evil acts that are more useful to analyze. If anything, it's counterproductive to say "Hitler was bad," because lots of people do bad things and then say "well, at least I'm not Hitler."
undefined
liendolucas
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 no other effective way to prevent them from doing what they want.
philjohn
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 get it to load, but it was a dreadful experience.
Contrast that with seeing the Pet Shop Boys last month in Birmingham where the ticket was on my phone in Apple Wallet was night and day (and you could print the ticket if you didn't have an iPhone, or wanted a physical version).
noahtallen
I mean Ticketmaster’s current best practice seems to be NFC tickets stored in a mobile wallet which do work offline
chuckadams
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.
jcranmer
> 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.
bonestamp2
Yep, I've bought 3 laser printers over the past 30 years... 1 about every 10 years, and not because I needed to... because I wanted more features. I've passed the old models down to others and they're still running. Toner never dries out, heads don't need cleaning. I would never buy another inkjet. The only use I can see for inkjet is photo printing, and even then I'd rather get them done at CVS or walgreens unless it is a special size or printing material that they can't handle.
A brother laser can often be had for $100 these days.
xp84
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)
davkan
Yup, I use my brother laser printer to print probably 20 pages a year and it’s been going strong for 5 years now on the cartridge that it came with when I bought it on eBay.
sambf
You should consider thermal printers like the Brother PJ line. A bit expensive but so small you can put it in a drawer, and no cartridge or toner at all. Just thermal paper, which I run off the same pack since I bought the printer 3 years ago.
1_1xdev1
No, you actually can’t for the tickets the article is talking about. This is increasingly common. It’s insane
ReliantGuyZ
> Tho nowadays that means a trip to a FedEx store for me
I've really appreciated my local library for allowing 20ish pages of printing per day, which has allowed me to limp through the no-printer lifestyle. Plus I usually grab a DVD movie while I'm there.
Life's good in the mid-2000s.
bonestamp2
For sure. Additional info... many libraries also let you stream movies through kanopy.com, and read/listen to e-books through the app Libby.
omega3
Laser printers have solved this - I don’t expect to change the toner for a decade.
lnxg33k1
I bought a laser printer, I think something around 19 years ago, and it broke before I could finish the toner
8n4vidtmkvmk
Stop buying overpriced ink jets. I get knock off laser cartridges for cheap and they last a couple years each. I did have to push a few random buttons on my Brother to let me do it, but it works now
radsquirrel
I worked a summer job in a Ticketmaster box office ten years ago and had access to the whole of their UK customer database in order to print off ticket collections. I’d type in a customer’s post code and up came all of the data Ticketmaster held on them… including their password in plaintext.
poet123432
I had to create an account just to reply to this; as much as TM has it's faults this is just false, it does not store passwords in any reversible way or at least hasn't for more than 2 years and all evidence removed.
Source: I am an engineer within TM that has worked on integration between various booking products in the UK market.
dehugger
Well there is an 8 year delta between your timeline and the OPs... so I don't see any contradictions here.
radsquirrel
Glad to hear their security has improved since then! This was the 2014 Commonwealth Games and I had only recently learned about password hashing so I was particularly shocked that they were exposing passwords to thin clients used by front line employees.
dml2135
As an engineer within Ticketmaster, I'd be curious to hear your take on the conclusion of the article.
> I think we can all agree: Fuck TicketMaster. I hope their sleazy product managers and business majors read this and throw a tantrum. I hope their devs read this and feel embarrassed. It’s rare that I feel genuine malice towards other developers, but to those who designed this system, I say: Shame.
> Shame on you for abusing your talent to exclude the technologically-disadvantaged.
> Shame on you for letting the marketing team dress this dark-pattern as a safety measure.
> Shame on you for supporting a company with such cruel business practices.
> Software developers are the wizards and shamans of the modern age. We ought to use our powers with the austerity and integrity such power implies. You’re using them to exclude people from entertainment events.
> Have fun refactoring your ticket verification system.
y-c-o-m-b
As a dev working in big tech, I'm sure they do feel embarrassed, and I'm sure there is jack shit they can do about it. Is that how you feel?
I don't know how many times I've reasonably pointed out why our product is extremely user-unfriendly - backed by evidence from user feedback and endless reddit complaints - but I still get shot down, badly. "Disagree and commit" they say, which is just short for "do what we tell you and shut the fuck up". If you bring up issues too many times, you end being treated like an agitator and they make your life hell. This has remained true for the many different industries I've worked in over the last 17+ years. Software developers are effectively powerless in many organizations.
CobrastanJorji
Everybody has their own personal lines in the sand. People need to work for a living because we're not in a magical, post-need society. Every company has its flaws. Each company has some subjective amount of flaws/sins/evil, and everybody makes their own decision about what they're willing to do for money.
Helping a company use some sleazy dark patterns to make some extra money off of Taylor Swift tickets is honestly pretty mild on the scale of evil software engineering jobs, so I imagine their answer is "I built a system to sell entertainment, now my kids get to go to private school, and I sleep great at night."
Ticketmaster sucks, but it's not like he's working for Palantir, Lockheed Martin, or TikTok.
GuB-42
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 Ticketmaster is nothing more than a service provider. The venue/event organizer/... looks at the Ticketmaster catalogue and pick the product they want. There are "evil" products in that catalogue, and they are probably the ones with the best returns, but I am sure people have a choice.
I'd even go as far as calling Ticketmaster "Evil as a Service". So people can say "fuck Ticketmaster" instead of saying "fuck Taylor Swift". I would be very surprised if artists (and their agents) at the level of Taylor Swift didn't have a say regarding ticket sale practices, even with Ticketmaster.
Of course, the monopolistic practices of Ticketmaster are a problem, people are most likely paying more than they should because of it, but all the crap with apps, resale platforms, etc... I am pretty sure the event organizers, maybe the artists themselves are as much to blame.
bonestamp2
> but I am sure people have a choice
Often, they do not. The DOJ is currently suing TicketMaster because they have exclusive agreements with nearly all of the large venues and that prevents those venues from using other ticket providers. To be fair to TicketMaster, they argue they are not a monopoly because there are many smaller venues that they are not exclusive with.
But, TicketMaster even requires that artists use TicketMaster's promotional agency if they want access to these large venues.
And more evil stuff! Details here...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-live-...
GuB-42
I wasn't talking about having the choice of using another agency, Ticketmaster is predatory and this is a problem.
I was talking about using Ticketmaster (for the lack of other choice) but using one of the more consumer friendly services Ticketmaster appear to provide. I am sure Ticketmaster won't mind, they get their share anyways.
What I wanted to say is that Ticketmaster may be responsible for your ticket costing $70 and not $60, but for all the other bullshit, they just do what is asked of them (by the artists, venue, event organizers, etc... maybe even the fans themselves). Or at least, that's how I think it is.
sirsinsalot
You're missing that Ticketmaster (Live Nation) control and own a substantial portion of the venues, the catering, logistics, tour buses, security and so on.
The venue "choosing" the Ticketmaster product is owned by Live Nation.
cbsmith
> 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.
mixmastamyk
Tours have some choices, yes. See the Cure tour last year. But no, paper tickets and non-auction prices (for front section) have been phased out quickly.
Some tiny stragglers perhaps. Went to a tiny venue recently but was goldenvoice.
orangecat
I'd even go as far as calling Ticketmaster "Evil as a Service".
Correct, except rather than "evil" it's "market-clearing pricing". Of course many people see no distinction there.
moritonal
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.
drowntoge
> 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 it.
xp84
Those little blue bars are some hard workers. They don't even sleep! Just moving back and forth all day, protecting me. <3
frizlab
How about the “Add to Apple Wallet” option? He did not talk about that at all, but AFAIK the ticket would be fully available offline and not in Ticketmaster app, no? It’s actually an elegant solution IMHO.
divbzero
Yes, it is available offline if you “Add to Apple Wallet”.
The ticket in Apple Wallet is still revocable if you transfer the ticket to someone else using Ticketmaster’s website, probably through an update that Ticketmaster pushes to the wallet [1].
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us...
jyrkesh
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.
nedt
This sucks because obviously I‘d give them a different email address - just like everyone else. For example with the „login with apple“
OvbiousError
OP explicitly states he doesn't want to add the ticket to a google account. Fair to assume they wouldn't want apple either.
tkems
I just added a ticket to my Google Wallet for a concert last night and it was very similar to the Ticketmaster/LiveNation app. The PDF417 barcode changed and had an animation around it. My guess is that it is the same or very similar on Apple devices.
undefined
rareitem
So items inside google/apple wallet don't need to be 'static'?
padthai
No, I have flight tickets autoupdate when there is a delay.
tkems
With Google Wallet (the only one I have at the moment), it is not static for the ticket. It has a NFC and barcode option. The barcode changes every 15 seconds for me.
abofh
They mentioned avoiding google wallet, so we can assume android, and that apple wallet wasn't considered for not being an option for them.
TeeWEE
The barcode in apple wallet also auto-updates.
725686
A few months ago I went to Las Vegas to watch U2 at the Sphere. When I learned that I needed to open the app or website in order to get in I panicked in fear of the shitty internet that is common in massive events, so I opened my tickets since I left the hotel. Unless this stuff works completely offline, it is a terrible idea.
swozey
I used to work or a mobile event app company that made a lot of the big festival/conference apps. Everything was built to function locally from a sqlite file on your phone that was constantly updated when you did have coverage.
It was 100% expected that you would have no cell signal the entire event and we built in as many mitigations as we could think of.
This was 2013ish, I think there are a lot more mesh network devices that can relay signal nowadays but I'm not involved anymore in that stuff.
It was the best on-call I've ever had because.. nobody had cell signal while the event was on to complain about something.
This person complains that people didn't have network access on their phones when they were at the gate. I can only assume that they waited till they were at the gate to install/use the app so it never got its offline data.
Always open your event apps before getting to the event. Sometimes they're completely bare bones and have to reach out and pull that apps specific database so its sure you have the latest. Most of the event apps are a template that is modified for each event and just has different assets/sqlite.
rkagerer
...or just let us print g*d@mn paper tickets.
dylan604
There's no way that I trust the developers of a company like Ticketmaster to install their app on my device.
jen20
What is the worst that can happen? I have it installed on my iPhone and deny whatever permissions it asks for.
I have enough confidence in the sandbox that "installing an app" is basically never an issue (though I don't out of the principle that most things companies have apps for just shouldn't be apps).
dylan604
> What is the worst that can happen?
I don't know the worst, but juice is not worth the squeeze in my opinion. If you recall, Ticketmaster was just recently hacked, so the worst pretty much happened in that any data they had collected on their users is potentially been leaked. So if they can't protect that data, then I'm not participating in giving them data.
NavinF
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
jimbobthrowawy
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
immibis
Maybe you are using a fully open phone, but mine has an OS made by Google and almost every app tracks my location without my consent.
dylan604
From the AppStore:
Data Linked To You:
Purchases, Location, Search History, Usage Data, Financial Info, Contact Info, Identifiers, Sensitive Info.
Nope Nope Nope.
_puk
I mean, that horse has already bolted..
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hac...
tptacek
As the article notes, this ticket system does in fact work offline.
mattmaroon
Well, as it also notes, it works offline if you remember to open the ticket before you get there, and they don't (or at least didn't used to) give you sufficient warning. I found out that's how it works the hard way when it was new by having to walk a half mile back from the venue to get service to load the tickets.
There's also the chance the ticketmaster app won't work properly later even if you did do it. I've had other apps shit the bed for no apparent reason in offline mode before. I add them to my wallet now just in case.
tptacek
Sure, I'm just reacting because TOTP is like the textbook example of a system designed to work without interactive access to a networked resource. The whole as TM designed it has crappy affordances, but you could fix that without breaking the design.
donalhunt
Recent experience for a large stadiums event suggests they have fixed the notifications. I got a lot of notifications encouraging me to a) charge my phone and b) download the ticket before arrival.
725686
Pleas notice the "completely" in my comment.
hinkley
There's a faire this week in Oregon that draws people in from 500 miles away.
I've been a couple times, and what I've learned that was still not common knowledge to faire vendors as recently as last year is that T-Mobile brings out a mobile cell tower to support the faire, and no other cellular network does.
So if you're trying to accept electronic payments, the whole thing tends to fall over and you only get to sell to people who brought loads of cash and prioritized hitting your booth first. Only the vendors on T-Mobile are able to take purchases for a big part of the day, and a few other people who use the rare billing system that is fine queuing up Visa transactions until after the bulk of people leave. The line for the cash machine sucks up a substantial part of your time budget for the faire, meaning you probably miss out on some things altogether.
acureau
That's a pretty smart business move by T-Mobile, I didn't know mobile cell towers were a thing
hinkley
I’ve never been clear what the main purpose of these things is but they do seem to get deployed for trade shows and such. Maybe for natural disasters?
Then there are microcells, which can be privately owned. I worked at a place that had one when I was in mobile. There was a period of time when one of the carriers would sell you one if you were having connectivity issues. It’s possible for instance, living on a hill, to have a cell signal on your roof but not in the rest of the house and they can work as a repeater.
ssl-3
I first heard of CoWs (cell towers on wheels) from Woodstock '99, when they tried to repeat the debacle of Woodstock '94. (AFAIK, the CoW did not work.)
The idea of cellular networks is simple: Put the "source" of the bandwidth near where the people need it.
The idea of CoWs is also simple: It's the same thing, but it's dynamic and flexible.
---
There was a time in my life when I was using AT&T as an all-you-can-eat LTE provider through a third party as my home Internet access, because reasons (and hear you me, if DOCSIS had been an option then none of this would have happened).
Armed with a hotspot device that had external antenna connectors, band selection, and a Yagi antenna, I found a cell tower that I thought to be about 14 miles away that had consistently good Internet bandwidth. It was a ton better than several other much-closer towers (some only 1 or two miles away), presumably because it had better backhaul(s).
I made quite a study of things to get that dialed in and working reliably. And it was reliable for months. But then: One day, the signal had turned to shit.
So I did the right thing and I drove over to where I thought that tower was, 14 miles out, to have a peek. And the tower was right where I expected it to be.
But there were men actively working on the tower (with ropes and stuff), and a CoW of much-smaller stature was parked there and providing (rather lesser) backup service.
Which, you know: That explained that.
---
They additionally get used some for natural disasters if a tower fails, and also sometimes for other dynamic events like festivals and concerts and such. They're pretty useful when they work, in that a tiny sliver of bandwidth is superior to zero bandwidth. When properly-managed they can reduce contention on neighboring towers so that regular people doing their regular things are less-affected by whatever dynamic event is happening nearby.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
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 secrets,” Conduition told me in an email. “But they intentionally choose not to do so, and then they act all surprised-pikachu when 3rd party resale scams proliferate. They're opting to play legal whack-a-mole with scammers instead of fixing the problem directly with better technology, because they make more money as a resale monopoly than as an open and secure ecosystem.”
from https://www.404media.co/scalpers-are-working-with-hackers-to...