

Hacking Ticketmaster - KC8ZKF
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/hacking-ticketmaster

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lars512
Part of me feels like this is a natural phenomenon since ticket prices are
artificially deflated, so as to be accessible to the broadest range of fans.
This creates a gap between what people are willing to pay and the price they
are offered, and the gap creates services like this.

Perhaps ticket sellers should keep the very best seats and auction them off,
uncapping their price. The rest could be put in a lottery, and kept open for
two weeks or so. Then, only fans who win tickets pay money for them, for a low
and accessible price. That would be far fairer than the current first-come
first-served, overload the server system. You could also introduce a delay
between closing the lottery and announcing the results, giving you time to
scan for bot submissions.

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teaspoon
I'm curious, is there a lottery-based alternative to TicketMaster? Or an
option to use lottery rather than FCFS within TicketMaster?

If not, I think that would be a great project for a handful of enterprising
engineers. There would be some legal and payment-related related problems to
solve, I'm sure, as well as whatever barriers are supporting TicketMaster's
current monopoly. But if there were ever a foothold for a new contender to
take them on, this seems like it.

~~~
kgrin
a) The barriers supporting Ticketmaster's current monopoly are pretty
significant - mainly, exclusivity deals with venues. Ironically, the most
successful challenge thus far has come from LiveNation... which managed to
one-up Ticketmaster in some markets by owning both venues _and_ artists. (And
is now trying to merge with Ticketmaster, pending fairly blatant antitrust
issues).

b) Interesting sidenote: in its day, Ticketmaster was the tech-savvy upstart,
aggressively competing on both the business and tech side with the then-
dominant Ticketron. (That's not to say that they're not a monopolist ripe for
the picking...)

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redstripe
I don't understand how this counts as fraud. Ticket master got paid for their
tickets by the purchasers right?

Today at Old Navy they were offering 20% off my jeans if I gave them my email
address. Should I go to jail for giving them an invalid one?

~~~
henrikschroder
That's exactly the rub, proving that this is fraud, or creating new
legislation that make it fraud, is very difficult.

I hope you at least agree that they do not provide a service of any kind? They
grab a limited resource and resell it, while adding no value whatsoever. They
just grab it first and capitalize on the difference between the long-term and
short-term best market prices for tickets.

I'd say the best solution to the problem is simply to take the thing partially
offline again. Botnets can always out-crowd users, but you can't outcrowd
actual people.

~~~
mainland
OK, I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but aren't they providing value by making
the market more efficient? ;) That is, they're providing a service to the
music industry and the artists it represents by enabling ticket prices to
reflect their true value rather than some artificially-capped value.

I don't really believe this of course, but from a 10,000 ft view, it's not
such a different argument from the one hedge fund folks would make to justify
the "value" they create. Yes, I realize the two situations are different, but
there's still a point to be made somewhere in there.

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paulbaumgart
I have the same question as when this story:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648578> was posted.

Why would anyone ever do this while operating from the United States? There
are countries with much laxer law enforcement. And, as a bonus, $6
million/person will go a lot farther in most of those countries.

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kgrin
Stuff like this was part of the reason some artists (including Springsteen)
started experimenting with "paperless ticketing" (i.e. they check the
purchaser's ID at the gate, so it's basically impossible, or at least
significantly harder, to resell tickets).

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1amzave
Jeeze...sleazebags hacking sleazebags.

I saw the headline and thought "cool!", but then read the article and was
disappointed -- I'd been hoping for some kind of stick-it-to-the-man, fight-
the-monopoly sort of thing...sigh.

Personally, I've just got ticketmaster.com mapped to an invalid IP address in
/etc/hosts -- reminds me not to give them any money (or traffic, for that
matter).

