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Scalpers Work With Hackers to Liberate Ticketmaster's ‘Non-Transferable’ Tickets (www.404media.co)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A lawsuit filed in California by concert giant AXS has revealed a legal and technological battle between ticket scalpers and platforms like Ticketmaster and AXS, in which scalpers have figured out how to extract “untransferable” tickets from their accounts by generating entry barcodes on parallel infrastructure that the scalpers control and which can then be sold and transferred to customers.

By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS.

So Ticketmaster and AXS are suing to maintain their monopoly on scalping?

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And there are technical details from the reverse-engineering of Ticketmaster’s ticket format here. tl;dr: it’s two of the TOTP authentication codes you use for 2-factor authentication rolled into a barcode, along with some additional data.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is equal parts informative and hilarious. Ticketmaster sucks.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 months ago

The conclusion says it best:

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.