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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Am I understanding this right that the scalper buys a legit ticket to extract the token, then it can be used any number of times to get in a venue? I thought their system should be able to identify a token/ticket has already been scanned after it’s first used? That’s why there are no re-entry rules at most venues.

    I don’t think the intent of the scalpers is to allow ticket reuse. Like you say, there are likely additional checks at the gate when a bar code is scanned. If a rotating barcode is cloned, only the first person to scan is going to get in. Everyone else who tries to use a clone of that now-used barcode is going to get denied entry because the door staff’s scanner is going to throw a “ticket already used” error of some kind. So while it’s technically possible to clone one of these rotating barcodes, just like it’s possible to have multiple authenticators producing the same OTPs, there’s no point in doing so.

    What the scalpers are after is a platform that allows them to resell tickets without giving TicketMaster a cut. TicketMaster allows their rotating-bardcode tickets to be transferred to a wallet app like Google Wallet. Wallet apps like Google Wallet have features to allow you to transfer tickets to another user’s wallet, but the wallet specification also includes a flag for whether wallet-to-wallet transfers are allowed. TicketMaster sets that flag so you cannot give (or sell) your ticket to someone else using your own wallet, instead you have to go through something that TicketMaster controls. For transfers to friends and family, TicketMaster forces you to use their app. For reselling tickets, TicketMaster forces you to use their reselling site. TicketMaster’s primary motive is obvious: they want to take a cut of ticket resales, and this is how they do that.

    The whole thing is a legal fight between two utterly shitty groups, TicketMaster and scalpers. Here’s hoping they somehow both lose.




  • CountVon@sh.itjust.workstoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlPunch cards ftw
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    1 month ago

    One of my grandfathers worked for a telephone company before he passed. That man was an absolute pack rat, he wouldn’t throw anything away. So naturally he had boxes and boxes of punch cards in this basement. I guess they were being thrown out when his employer upgraded to machines that didn’t need punch cards, so he snagged those to use as note paper. I will say, they were great for taking notes. Nice sturdy card stock, and the perfect dimensions for making a shopping list or the like.














  • Any increase in accuracy would not be worth the tradeoff. The current system in Canada is very simple and very visible. Scrutineers for every candidate can watch the votes being counted and immediately understand what is happening. No amount of trust is required for the system to work.

    A machine that counts votes would be a black box to observers of the election. Most would need to trust that the machines are operating correctly. When machine counts and manual counts disagree, even slightly, it sows confusion and discord. The mere existence of voting machines and machine counts in the US has been sufficient to give rise to numerous conspiracy theories. In my view they are part of the rot besetting American democracy, and I don’t want them where I live.


  • Hey, don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sunshine and roses up here in the north. We have huge problems with cost of living, especially housing, which our current government is failing to address. We have a multi-party system but in my lifetime the national power only ever oscillated between two parties, Liberal (roughly equivalent to US Democrats) and Conservative (roughly equivalent to US Republicans pre-MAGA, or maybe even pre-Reagan). Based on current polling, Canadian discontent looks set to sweep out the incumbent Liberals and sweep in the opposition Conservatives sometime between now and Oct. 2025. I don’t think the Conservatives are going to do any better at addressing cost of living, but fear that they’ll bring in a bunch of regressive crap while they continue to fail in the same way the Liberals have failed. There are lots of other areas where Canada has room for improvement, but within the very narrow scope of how Canada runs its elections, that I will claim we got right.



  • It only “costs little” because you have a ton of people willing to do it.

    First off you say that like it’s a bad thing. For the record, it is not. Second, many of the people counting votes are paid, i.e. Elections Canada employees. Scrutineers could be volunteers or paid employees of the party/candidate they represent.

    What if there’s something that prevents people from volunteering?

    That would equally inhibit people from voting. Besides which, elections can and have been postponed in cases of severe weather, and wildfires have been considered in cases where they’ve been occurring around an election. No politician or Elections Canada supervisor is going to send voters, employees and volunteers out to die for an election.

    Or maybe a worldwide pandemic?

    We had one, it went fine. Anyone who didn’t like the thought of voting in public had the option of voting by mail, something that every Canadian has been allowed to do since 1993.

    There’s really no reason to not machine count with a matching hand count.

    Yes there fucking is. Machines add completely unnecessary complexity to a simple system that works.