Hacker News Reader

Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

Another option would be to make tickets nontransferrable and make venues require photo ID before accepting anyone's tickets.

View on HN

Thanks to lobbying from the ticket industry, this isn't allowed in some states including NY: https://www.stubhubconcourse.com/en/learn-more/blog/virginia...

Also, thanks to lobbying from me. If I buy tickets to something and later find out I can't attend, I want to be able to give or sell those tickets to a friend.

In such a system (it's typical in Germany for example) you can sell it back to the ticket site which resells it for face value

I've been to a few shows that have done something like this. The credit card I used to buy the ticket was used as my "ticket" to get in to the show.

Scalpers can just buy tickets with prepaid credit cards and send those to the buyers

Then require the purchaser to provide high-resolution scans of identity documents (both sides, and all pages for multi-page documents) with nothing blocked out at the time of purchase. If the scans don't match your physical documents, you are made to leave the premises.

If they are a US citizen, they must scan both driver's license/state ID/passport/military ID and social security card. If not a US citizen, they must scan their home country's passport and if they come from a country that requires one, their visa.

Also, require the purchaser to type in (not check a box, but actually type the words and disable the browser's paste function) "I swear under penalty of perjury that I will not transfer this ticket to anyone else and that I will do everything I am physically capable of to not let anyone do so on my behalf".

And what happens when that database leaks?

And this is why you should have good IT security policies from the start. If your database leaks, you done fucked up.

Uh...no.

You could use the same logic to excuse storing passwords in plain text instead of hashes.

You say "good IT security policies", but you really mean "perfect IT security policies"?

Welcome to a totalitarian state

Shall we send in a stool sample as well?

> Also, require the purchaser to type in (not check a box, but actually type the words and disable the browser's paste function) "I swear under penalty of perjury that I will not transfer this ticket to anyone else and that I will do everything I am physically capable of to not let anyone do so on my behalf".

I don't understand what this is meant to accomplish.

> Shall we send in a stool sample as well?

No, I think a cheek swab should be sufficient.

> and disable the browser's paste function

This is evil. Browsers should not even permit basic UI functions like paste or context menu to be overridden by arbitrary sites. Fortunately, it's not difficult to put together a script that simulates typing in the contents of the clipboard, which is my go-to solution for sites that disable paste. (Ctrl-V doesn't work? Just press Ctrl-Shift-V instead. It takes a few milliseconds longer but gets the same result.)

> If they are a US citizen, they must scan both driver's license/state ID/passport/military ID and social security card. If not a US citizen, they must scan their home country's passport and if they come from a country that requires one, their visa.

A single decent image of an official photo ID, checked at the gate, should be more than sufficient to prevent unauthorized ticket transfers. However, I would only apply this system to a small minority of discounted promotional tickets; non-promotional tickets should be sold at the fair market-clearing price, freely transferable, and usable by any bearer with no ID verification required.

Airlines don't have a scalping problem. There's no reason why venues couldn't end the practice for concert tickets as well.

of course the problem is the largest venue owner in the US is live nation who owns ticketmaster.

Well that's a pretty good point.

I wonder if this might be an anti-trust issue?

There was definitely an anti-trust investigation when the merger was proposed, but the deal somehow went through.

Which would translate to queues that make airport security feel like a breeze.

let's use face recognition for it, maybe we can put it to use for something that isn't policing

Maybe you are joking, but there are several companies trying this, like https://zenus-biometrics.com/

I wasn't joking at all. Tokyo is gearing up to use face recognition to process people at the 2020 Olympics as well.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17659746/tokyo-2020-olympi...

Also you made a python face recognition library right? I like it a lot, so thanks for making it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com