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Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

At least you can still almost always get a normal old PDF that you can print or open on your phone. Somehow these methods even work without sending gigabytes of data to 300 random services, requiring access to every sensor and going through the most botched workflows and UX choices you can imagine. A technological miracle if you ask me.

I'm enjoying the time before it gets really bad, because so far it's usually just the extremely large and centralized companies who let themselves engage this kind of abuse. Small venues, movie theaters, rewards programs or hotel reservations still find complex digital tickets to be too weird, and let us do things the boring old way.

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I don't go to many events, but the last one I went to was a concert, and the tickets required the app and could not be screenshotted or PDFed because there was some motion thing on the QR code to ensure that it wasn't a screenshot. It really pissed me off, but there's not much I can do about it other than boycott the show.

Someday, I'd like to try capturing an animated gif or short MP4 or something of the motion, and see if that works, but the pragmatic part of me overwhelmed the hacker side of me. I would hate to lose my money on the ticket and not be able to see the show because I tried to hack the process

The ones I've seen pretty clearly had some of the motion/change defined by the time. We're so fucked.

> [...] there was some motion thing on the QR code

Yep, same happened to me with some baseball game tickets. So incredibly dumb.

Even worse, we split into two groups and I had to ask the other group to download the app... create an account... and finally be able to "transfer" the tickets to them. It took like ten minutes, and thank god we weren't at the park yet trying to do all that. Ugh.

I'm wondering what the motion thing is even meant to address. Either a ticket is valid and used / not used or it's not a valid ticket. What about that requires a real-time motion thing?

I wonder if they want to prevent reselling or at least require that it goes through their app? (I think this is a bad thing for them to do, just trying to think of the motivation).

My guess is, you're right, it's to force your use of their app. for data harvesting reasons?

Could be that too.

The code is rolling so you can't use a screenshot to enter the show. This is to stop ticket transfers outside the system.

The ticket stub is animated so you can't use a simple screenshot to move to a better location once inside the show.

Human beings are checking those tickets, and movement is proof of liveness (and not a screenshot you and 25 friends are sharing). Many ticket checking systems are not connected to the internet and cannot/will not check if it's already been used. Many of the motion enabled codes are also basically working in the same way as 2FA codes: your ticket is given with a public key, usually unique to your device, and rotates every minute. Allows them to ensure that the ticket is up to date, not forged and signed properly.

You do understand it there because people have been trying to pass of screenshots as the app right? This happened during Covid as well. The Danish Covid passport initially just had QR code, then people started selling screenshots on Facebook. Same with the drivers license, people tried to pass off screenshots as the actual drivers license app.

It's not hard to imagine that people would sell screenshots of QR code ticket online. So rather than accepting that we've created a system that is fundamentally flawed, companies try to pave over it with more and more features, instead of just providing physical tickets.

Haha. I bought tickets to an event at the ticket window. They required sending it to my phone and wouldn’t print me a ticket! (They used ticket master). I have heard if you complain enough, they’ll have a security person escort you, but they will not just print you tickets!

These small operators are increasing their usage of the Technical Abomination Solutions, the simple QR code ticket is on the way out

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