Obviously super cool and kudos like everyone else in here.
Feel like you could make a pared down version of this with commodity parts outside of the chassis if you aren't going for a flagship competitor. I guess you could also just buy a $20 chromebook, too. Maybe...you could fit a nice rockchip SOM inside a chromebook??
> I've never, ever clicked on short videos with girls in skimpy clothing doing something "based" and yet it keeps trying to hook me up on those. Even after clicking around very different videos (infosec, low level code, workshop). It's like it refuses to learn what I want to watch.
This has made me realize that YouTube is like the leading platform for piracy and porn. If you have any interest in sports the frontpage will be littered with pirated livestreams from channels like ESPN, and while they may not be explicitly pornography, the skimpy girl content is basically that.
My hope is that doesn't mean you can still digitize media that's on a dying format and that can still be used in CDL. Like if you owned a legitimate copy of a movie on betamax that format has been dead for years you can't buy a new betamax player you can digitize that before the tape becomes unreadable. That's been explicitly in copyright law last I looked and it's just a matter of defining what media is "dying" enough to count under this.
Might just be the level of support they’re interested in offering.
I’ve definitely used similar language as a kinder way to say “I have no interest in maintaining this to a degree where I think Joe Schmoe can use it, and I don’t want support tickets from people who can’t install Postgres on their own”.
Looking at the install instructions, it seems like something where you’d need to be familiar with Postgres, object storage, enough Linux to install dependencies, and enough networking to be able to do at least a cursory check for whether a stuttering or delayed stream was due to your network, the servers network, Tigris or something else entirely. That’s pretty much just gonna be IT folks
I was wondering the same, maybe the goal is more features specific to gamers? But I could see this being useful to more than just programmer streamers.
Yes you could sit in the third seat, the jumper seat, with this. I feel like one could already sneak something malicious through TSA (this already happens and if you attempt it enough times eventually you'll get through), but being able to sit in the freaking cockpit behind the pilots who assume you're another pilot is CRAZY.
It'd be an entertaining sketch to watch, these two airline pilots trying to suss out if the rando weirdo behind them with the ticking suitcase and nervous glances is actually a terrorist... or maybe just afraid of flying?
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.
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!).
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).
Hm. So I guess at a small venue that has 3 door people with offline scanners, you have a 2/3 chance of success if you're the second of two people sharing a barcode. Combined with the obvious 3/3 success being the first person, that averages out to 5/6 chance if both of you (oblivious to each other) schedule your arrival similarly.
not really offline but someone who works in industry here once detailed out that each scanner has it's own copy of a SQLite database that is being updated as fast as possible based on inserts of other scanners since any downtime is a big deal at these venues
i.e., theoretically duplicate tickets would be identified but not instantly but still pretty quickly
> 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.
It's all off-the-shelf electronics and standard protocols. Venue provides some wifi with a "Ticketbastard" SSID (or whatever) at entry points, and the COTS-built barcode-validating devices use that. Easy-peasy.
They might also provide other wireless networks for other purposes (definitely for vendors [$$$], but perhaps also for regular house staff, touring staff, and maybe even the guests who pay for it all!), but they'll all be under the venue's control and coordination: Other than the odd personal hotspot that wanders in, there's not necessarily any meaningful outside interference on 2.4/5GHz wifi bands in a big venue.
It's pretty easy to make short-range wifi work reliably in that kind of RF environment, such as the chokepoints where tickets are validated. (Modern apartment dwellers will have worse interference problems than that.)
There’s actually a ton of interference in the 2.4 GHz space, especially at venues like outdoor festivals. However your solution does work. I work at a festival that provides a WiFi network and an Ethernet drop for the ticket scanners. We have to use multiple APs to cover the main entrance area, but it’s feasible.
I was thinking more along the lines of a stadium crowd than an outdoor festival, but yes: I agree. I've had miserable luck with 2.4GHz stuff in festival environments where people camp out for a few days. :)
I don't pay very much attention to the ticket-scanning devices while I'm getting into a big show (which is generally a rather unpleasant experience on my side), but:
Don't they allow usage of 5GHz bands? Unlike 2.4GHz, I've had tremendous success with 5GHz bands in all kinds of environments -- including outdoor festivals.
I have no idea what connectivity options are available in current scanners, but it sounds like a viable solution could be to use an RF band that customers don't overwhelm, similar to wireless microphones perhaps, with a little hub situated nearby that consolidates the list of already-scanned tickets, possibly standalone or possibly on a wired network that includes other far-away entrances.
Was going to say it shouldn't be hard to run a wire around an entire stadium, but maybe some popup outdoor venues that might be complicated. Could use line of sight towers for fun.
No way, scanning tickets is slow because it rarely works seamlessly. It's pretty standard to stand there for a few seconds moving your phone back and forth and/or rotating it. Or when one person has all the tickets for their party and has to scroll to the next one between scans.
I think maybe 4-15 seconds between scans per scanner, at best.
Not at all, I was imagining over speccing the system.
E.g. this weekend I went to a show at a 70,000 seat arena. Knowing from experience, there are 4 entrances. This time there were 10 people scanning tickets at the gates I entered. Friends reported the same at the one they came in.
5 RPS per scanner is obviously overkill, but if those 10 at one gate were linked to a hub that could issue 5 RPS I would call that adequate, if barely.
If all 4 gate areas were linked centrally to a system that could do 5 RPS, well, actually, that might explain the throughput I experienced getting through lol
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.
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.
The telemetry bungie used to popular stats on their website is better than pretty much any modern game today outside of like CS2. I will caveat that by saying modern practices require you put things behind an api with a paywall of some sort, but they had freaking action heatmaps in 2004.
One thing that halo and some other games do is let you thumb through the last matchs stats while the next map loads. Valve games just throw you a map loading screen you’ve seen a thousand times.
That last one was in other xbox live games before it, but Halo 2's Xbox Live brought online gaming to everyone's television room whereas before it was only on the computer.
To be fair you have to realize how much more dependent the global economy is on software nowadays. Halo was a Bungie product, and when Bungie left as Microsoft took it over yeah, the product had loftier business goals that needed to be protected. Smaller devs can't really reach critical market saturation anymore like they used to.
You can criticize where things has gone with MTX but I don't think that was a choice by the game developers. I also think it's a generational thing as you and I are now too old to spend all day fucking around with some game we played a ton. I'm sure the kids of today are tinkering with minecraft/fortnite/whatever replaced those games.
Also to me it's a bit of wanting to try and put the tooth paste back in the tube. When we were teenagers modding Halo we maybe didn't fully understand the impacts it had on the game's community and the overall experience. As an adult I just see how games like Call of Duty appear to be constantly losing the fight against hackers, and using over engineered matchmaking algos with SSBM to try and maximize the typical user's gameplay experience. But I can't regain my naivety and be one of the many younger adults who probably don't even really notice these issues, the way I didn't when I played Halo 3 on Xbox Live which had boosting, standby, and stealth servers.
The author has racked up significant debt hoarding other archival materials over the years so yeah he's a little disappointed someone else just threw stuff he spent good money on saving
Feel like you could make a pared down version of this with commodity parts outside of the chassis if you aren't going for a flagship competitor. I guess you could also just buy a $20 chromebook, too. Maybe...you could fit a nice rockchip SOM inside a chromebook??
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