Comment by 725686

2 years ago

A few months ago I went to Las Vegas to watch U2 at the Sphere. When I learned that I needed to open the app or website in order to get in I panicked in fear of the shitty internet that is common in massive events, so I opened my tickets since I left the hotel. Unless this stuff works completely offline, it is a terrible idea.

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725686

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swozey  2 years ago

I used to work or a mobile event app company that made a lot of the big festival/conference apps. Everything was built to function locally from a sqlite file on your phone that was constantly updated when you did have coverage.

It was 100% expected that you would have no cell signal the entire event and we built in as many mitigations as we could think of.

This was 2013ish, I think there are a lot more mesh network devices that can relay signal nowadays but I'm not involved anymore in that stuff.

It was the best on-call I've ever had because.. nobody had cell signal while the event was on to complain about something.

This person complains that people didn't have network access on their phones when they were at the gate. I can only assume that they waited till they were at the gate to install/use the app so it never got its offline data.

Always open your event apps before getting to the event. Sometimes they're completely bare bones and have to reach out and pull that apps specific database so its sure you have the latest. Most of the event apps are a template that is modified for each event and just has different assets/sqlite.

dylan604  2 years ago

There's no way that I trust the developers of a company like Ticketmaster to install their app on my device.

  • jen20  2 years ago

    What is the worst that can happen? I have it installed on my iPhone and deny whatever permissions it asks for.

    I have enough confidence in the sandbox that "installing an app" is basically never an issue (though I don't out of the principle that most things companies have apps for just shouldn't be apps).

    • dylan604  2 years ago

      > What is the worst that can happen?

      I don't know the worst, but juice is not worth the squeeze in my opinion. If you recall, Ticketmaster was just recently hacked, so the worst pretty much happened in that any data they had collected on their users is potentially been leaked. So if they can't protect that data, then I'm not participating in giving them data.

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  • NavinF  2 years ago

    You don't trust your OS to sandbox it? With a threat model like that, I wouldn't use any apps other than the browser

tptacek  2 years ago

As the article notes, this ticket system does in fact work offline.

  • mattmaroon  2 years ago

    Well, as it also notes, it works offline if you remember to open the ticket before you get there, and they don't (or at least didn't used to) give you sufficient warning. I found out that's how it works the hard way when it was new by having to walk a half mile back from the venue to get service to load the tickets.

    There's also the chance the ticketmaster app won't work properly later even if you did do it. I've had other apps shit the bed for no apparent reason in offline mode before. I add them to my wallet now just in case.

    • tptacek  2 years ago

      Sure, I'm just reacting because TOTP is like the textbook example of a system designed to work without interactive access to a networked resource. The whole as TM designed it has crappy affordances, but you could fix that without breaking the design.

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    • donalhunt  2 years ago

      Recent experience for a large stadiums event suggests they have fixed the notifications. I got a lot of notifications encouraging me to a) charge my phone and b) download the ticket before arrival.

      1 reply →