Having a non-exfiltratable bearer token is really really hard. In order to present a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of a token you need to have some sort of challenge-response protocol. The simplest one, and the one in most common use (such as this) is a time-based method, where the shared knowledge of the current time represents the challenge.
The other method is to use civil identity as the challenge, and use government-issued IDs as the bearer token that the ticket is tied to. This doesn't scale well to larger events, and presents real challenges involved centralization of ticket exchange.
You can argue whether or not forgery is a significant enough problem to be worth this trouble, but that's a business decision, and as live events like this get more expensive forgery and resale become more and more of a problem, which end up locking out people like this who have legally and legitimately bought tickets but can't gain access to events because someone has stolen and resold their ticket.
In past eras they used holograms and watermarks and special papers in an attempt to prevent forgery but these methods keep getting challenged by an ever more sophisticated criminal element. Moving into cryptographically secure methods is the last barrier here.
They could also rely on the state to match identities to tickets, but this approach does not scale and is frankly undesirable for the majority of people anyway.
Even if we could make them truly unforgeable, people generally want electronically transferrable tickets. How do you propose to do this?
I'd think that having a 2nd factor like presenting ID that matches the ticket would be sufficient there though.
You probably still need a device of some kind though.
EDIT: I know complaining about downvotes is a downvotable offense itself, but I'm genuinely curious as to what is objectionable about this comment.
I don't like that these get submitted either, but unfortunately people do post worthwhile stuff there and only there, and I don't want to just categorically forbid those posts.
Twitter still does have quite a lot of unique content that either appears there first or isnt accessible anywhere else at all, unlike paid article websites, previews without logging in actually work for the most part, and xcancel as you said is a thing. Which extension are you using for redirects?
Being a luddite is not a protected class.
Are Amish and Mennonites religiously protected luddites?
They aren't as isolated these days as they used to be. If you go to Costco, you see them with 3 carts loaded 3 feet high of all the same crap everyone else is buying. A lot of times, they don't even transport it back via buggy but call the "Amish taxi service" which is people who drive them around town in large passenger vans. Even from a work source perspective, a lot have moved on from farm work and work in construction, roofing and other trades. If you go to a gas station in the morning, you'll see work trucks roll up and only Amish rollout to go buy soda and lunches or whatever.
[Source: I live in Lancaster and have for many years.]
That's the price of one meal at a restaurant...
The "poor people don't belong in society?!?" trope is completely different (and kind of boring).
And yes. People need to get on with the times.
In the same way people "need" a power connection in their house. And water plumbing. And used to need a phone line to "participate in society"
And 80-year old person is just as smart as a 20-year old. He's perfectly capable of learning how to use a $50 smartphone to access his $5-200k/yr season tickets, he just doesn't want to. It sounds like he was told years and years ago they were moving this direction, and they've been printing him tickets as an exception, and they've decided to stop the exception. He's had 20 years to get a smart phone and learn how to use it. The fact that he now has to choose is a prison of his own making.
Asserting that individual 'get smart' doesn't actually solve for the actual harms and if it were just simple, we would not be seeing the upward trends in fraud that we are seeing within the elderly.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/older-adults-ftc-frau...
edit: fixed the years
In this case nobody is forcing them to buy a dodgers ticket. It’s a completely optional and absurdly expensive luxury good that is purely for leisure. They can simply not but a ticket if they don't want to accept conditions of sale.
/sarc
Also that is not what luddite means, like come on even in the bastardization of the term, he is not precisely smashing the ticketing machines, he is just an old guy don't be such a redditor with this senior.
Accessibility benefits everyone.
While I can use my phone for a lot of things, some UX with the larger text/display settings is absolutely unusable... so many modal dialogs where the buttons are off-screen and cannot be pressed, for example.
I can understand a small group/org not going through the effort in a lot of places... but for multi-billion dollar organizations, corporations and large govt entities, there's really no excuse.
I was (pleasantly?) surprised when my office parking lot implemented paid parking because it's doable via SMS and webpage (not an installed app). [thankfully my employer is picking up the tab, so I didn't have to do anything beyond providing my license plate numbers]
super frustrating that i needed to sit in my car and download an app and set up an account just to park for an hour in a town i'm never going back to
Congrats, you're an essential part of the problem.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/video/news/local/why-longtime-...
You can still buy paper tickets at the stadium for a single game. But not for season passes anymore.
Apparently they've been making exceptions for him in years past where he was able to pay hundreds of dollars to have them custom printed for him. And this year they've decided to no longer provide that exception.
Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.
If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone. It seems like he just likes the nostalgia of paper tickets. But that's not a reason to add a separate ticketing flow just for him any more, like they had been up till now.
https://www.aol.com/articles/81-old-lifelong-dodgers-fan-012...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dodgers/comments/1s5fkni/la_dodgers...
Perhaps. But in this case, they've moved to something worse. Digital tickets have their benefits, but paper tickets are still superior because they don't tie you into big tech relationships and don't require supporting infrastructure to work.
Phones, on the other hand, can be charged. And if they're smashed, you can just log into your account on a friend's phone if you haven't replaced yours yet. If you can't even do that, you can go to the ticket window and they can look up your account information and verify your ticket.
It doesn't have any more information than the info you give it to buy the tickets in the first place.
We're talking about an 81 year-old who has never had a smartphone before and you're starting the sentence with "if"? And that's just that app, not the phone itself or anything else that someone brand new to, and ignorant towards, this ecosystem is going to encounter and not know what to do with.
What about the other apps? What about the phone itself?
The guy might not be sufficiently disabled to qualify - but for example if you have a blind person without a smartphone, you can’t tell them they’re out of luck - because you can clearly reasonably accommodate them without causing “undue financial hardship” by giving them tickets at will-call.
If they have already moved away from paper tickets for everyone else, now there is financial hardship, not to mention the loss to the team's economic position from scalping. Also smartphones have supported usage by the blind for years, particularly on iOS.
(Unfortunately it won't as was found when Southwest Airlines was sued over this. Congress hasn't updated the ADA to include web sites since the ADA precedes the web and so it wasn't enumerated explicitly. Also unfortunately, the GOP who have never been huge fans of the ADA have blocked any attempts at patching that hole.)
But check out the settings on your iPhone/iPad or Android device. Whole sections dedicated to accessibility, especially for the visually impaired.
Regardless, maybe there’s a path to legislation forbidding smartphone requirements for huge monopoly businesses like national professional sports leagues. I’d hate for ownership of a consumer device to become codified as a requirement for participation in activities like this.
What is your reasoning for that sentiment? (I don't disagree)
To me it's easy to see how someone over 70 might simply refuse to use an app. Especially if it doesn't support scaling the UI to well.
The failure of the well-intentioned but insufficient currents solutions is well underlined by this case. Sure, you could get this guy an android phone with a custom launcher, or an iPhone on Assistive Access, and he might be able to place a call. But good luck setting him up on Ticketmaster, or the Dodgers website, or wherever they expect him to go to redeem and utilize his tickets.
Swipe down from the top. No, the other top.
Click share, now click "find in page". Wait, that doesn't share at all?
I believe their reasoning is much the same. They have some types of tickets, which can technically be handed over to others and abused. Think weekend ticket, where you hand the tickets to someone else for them to use on Sunday, or tickets that can be converted to season passes, if you do it the same day.
Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable. There are other methods. Especially if you're only issuing paper tickets as an alternative, e.g. yes we will sell you a paper version, but understand that it is absolutely non-transferable and non-refundable.
Some people might not want to bring a phone to these types of events and venues, which I can completely understand, neither do I, but I can live with it. The thing that bugs me is the lack of an alternative, which isn't really that expensive and which most won't even use. Because to some, the app really don't provide value and in those cases they solely exists for the benefit of one company. If you're paying the price of season passes to pretty much anything these days, I think you're entitled to some small level of personalized service and customization.
That's not desirable either. You often can't make it to all the games, so they want you to be able to give some tickets to friends, etc.
They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.
So you really do need data to tell the difference -- are a third of the tickets mostly going to the same 5 other friends (OK, desirable), or are 95% of the tickets going to a different random person each time (scalping)?
Fans can pick the easy option with the app, or if they really want, the expensive option where they need to go pick up the re-registered ticket if they want to give them to a friend. You can do this without the app, it's just more work, which isn't much of a hassle, as most won't pick this option and the passes are expensive enough that you can justify the extra handling cost of maybe 5% of the tickets.
Why do you need a smartphone to do this when a white list checked against ID at the door would suffice? As the other respondent says, you either generate a badge for the passholder, or have an approved list of guests that can use the season pass if the passholder chooses to offer it to others.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/21/1150289272/facial-recognition...
[1] https://stadiumtechreport.com/feature/intuit-dome-leaning-on...
If the tickets come in at less than face value because of the season sale (not unreasonable), that can work OK (particularly for good seats for a team like the Dodgers). Most folks simply won't be able to sell all of the tickets. The goal isn't to make ad hoc ticket sales a necessarily profitable enterprise, the goal is to sell season seats, so you have to be somewhat accommodating. Pretty hard for anyone to go to all 81 homes games.
This can only go so far, unless you make the sold ticket not transferable.
They can also allow some margin to be just outright sold at market. I know several season ticket holders who sell the tickets to the big games (like Dodgers/Yankees) at a premium to help offset the entire season ticket package.
Forcing the app is almost certainly for tracking purposes and justifying the decision for whatever braindead higher-up decided it was a good idea, therefore it must be made to work.
This is not abuse. If they sell a ticket for days worth of resources and you use two days of resources it's not abuse at all. That is a very consumer hostile attitude. If their business model relies on you not using what you paid for then they need a new business model.
It’s like the “free as in beer” explanation, I can’t pull up to my local bar running a promotion and fill up a tanker truck. Maybe they’re being hostile to me, a would-be customer, for that, but it’s simply not what’s being offered up.
Would you allow doing the same for gym memberships?
Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone. Maybe he has dexterity issues that make using a smartphone difficult. Maybe he doesn't want to install their invasive app. Maybe he finds that paper tickets are easier to manage. Maybe he recognizes that the vendor made this change to benefit themselves at the expense of the fans, as it allows them greater control of the resale market.
I own a smartphone but prefer paper tickets. Luckily I can (and do) still get them at my team's stadium, although I have to pick them up in person.
As long as the technologies you move to are equally freedom- and privacy-respecting. If I have to use a non-free spyware app to buy your tickets I'm not buying. Now, if you let me pay for and download a PKPASS that I can use on my fully-libre GrapheneOS smartphone then sure.
Right, but he is wanting to choose the season pass over the smartphone. If he buys a smartphone then he won't have the money for a season pass anymore. It turns out you only get to spend x units of currency once.
It’s hard to argue that having to manage a smartphone and its ever-changing apps and UI flows for purchasing and handling tickets, is simpler than buying a paper ticket with paper money. Is it really better?
Are we supposed to always jump at the first "solution", consequences be damned?
This misses the point.
The question is: why would a smartphone be required, to watch a local game?
It is required to satisfy the desires of a vendor wanting to sell something. They make a smartphone a part of satisfying their desires because it makes their life a whole lot simpler. Same reason they won't give you season tickets in exchange for 12,000 bushels of wheat. They could, but why would they? If you don't want to play ball, so to speak, they are happy to sell their product to someone else who will.
Someone at the soulless corporation fucked up, and there will be no consequences, even though there should be.
But it fits with the general trend of MLB being openly hostile to their fans for a while now.
The problem is, in the end it leads to a society where you NEED a smartphone to enjoy basic human existence - and yes, access to cultural and sports events is a fundamental part of being a human.
That in turn almost always means: your smartphone must be either Apple or a blessed Google device. And that in turn means: no rooting (because most apps employ anti-root SDKs these days), no cheap AOSP phones, no AOSP forks like Graphene OS. And that is, frankly, dystopian when your existence as a human being depends on one of two far too rich American mega corporations. Oh and it needs to be a recent model too, because app developers just love to go the easy route and only support recent devices on recent OS versions.
And that's before we get into account bans (which particularly Google is infamous for), international sanctions like the one against the ICC justices, or pervasive 24/7 surveillance by advertising SDKs or operating systems themselves.
I don't agree that it's better. Why should I have to worry about my ticket running out of battery power or being such a high-value pickpocket target once I'm already in the venue?
The latter is a huge issue at music festivals for example:
- https://old.reddit.com/r/OutsideLands/search/?q=phone+stolen...
- https://old.reddit.com/r/electricdaisycarnival/search/?q=pho...
- https://old.reddit.com/r/coachella/search/?q=phone+stolen&in...
Can't just leave it at home if you need it to get in to the thing.
8 trackers, 49 permissions. Whatever reason they gave for requiring the application, evidently they couldn't resist selling out their users in the end. Disgusting.
He recently missed several notifications from his truck’s dealership that the part they ordered was in and ready for installation, because they sent text messages that he didn’t read, instead of ever calling and leaving a message when no one responded to the texts. I’m terrified that there’s going to be a doctor’s office sometime that does the same, with more serious consequences.
He’s fine flying as long as one of us can buy the ticket for him and he just needs his ID at the airport; I dread the day airlines start requiring their stupid apps.
She could still go to her bank counter but service there degraded considerably for everyday things, and she was always told to do things online.
In the end the bank rep was kind enough to give her an old smartphone. But, for her, it sucked because it was much more complicated, had to be charged constantly and so on...
As a technologist, it is eye opening to do the tech support of loved ones...
Next step is to re-use the body parts, just as in Soylent Green.
Or if they really wanted him to go digital, just buy him a smart phone and install the app for him!
recursive•1h ago
Ucalegon•1h ago
There you go!
toomuchtodo•1h ago
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/dodgers-fan-printed...
cwillu•1h ago
kjkjadksj•1h ago
throwaway27448•1h ago
masfuerte•1h ago
[1]: https://www.zuora.com/products/zephr/
nxtbl•1h ago
Someone1234•1h ago