Nah, it's the same sort of thing stamps.com is doing with postage - although
their patterns are significantly more detailed due to the huge consequences if
the system were cracked. (free postage, anyone? Everyone?)
I think all they would need is to encode a GUID - something like
"S-1-5-21-1095262474-1390808676-310601177-500" (taken from regedit), or smaller
even. The scanner onsite would simply query either the venue's local server or
the mobile-tix server to make sure a ticket with that GUID was sold for use at
that venue. I think the possibiliy of someone randomly coming up with a
pattern that's recognized as valid would be very, very small.
To increase the security, they may encrypt (part or all of) the mobile phone's
number in the pattern as well. Then if there's a problem, they ask the
customer for the number to see if it matches. This is similar to what the
online postage ppl are doing. The digital stamps encode the sender's
name/address, as well as the recipient's.
I think the tech is sound. The hard bit for the mobile-tix folks is going to
be:
1 - Getting the scanners everywhere tickets are accepted.
2 - Getting the billing so it comes out of the user's phone bill, or at least a
mobile-tix bill. I didn't read the site that closely, so I don't know if
they're going that route. If they expect users to buy tickets online, i.e.
fill out a form w/ name, addr, cc#, etc. in order to get the ticket, I think it
would bomb. If the user can just navigate via phone browser, click, click,
with a charge to show up on the phone bill, I think it could be a huge success.
--jason
--- Nick May <nick@kyushu.com> wrote:
>
> >The mobile TIX system recognizes the validity of a ticket on the mobile
> >phone via a unique and encrypted picture message, allowing entry to the
> >events
>
> ... sez the webpage - but the 2d pattern they show hardly seems to contain
> enough information for proper "encrypting"....
>
> (not that I have a real grasp on how much would be needed - it just seems
> a bit "low" - that's all....)
>
> Nick
> >
>
>
>
>
> keitai-l@appelsiini.net writes:
> >
> >Hey kids.
> >
> >here is a nice new toy to play with.....
> >
> > http://www.mobile-tix.com/static/int/eng/html/start.htm
> >
> >Timbo
> >
>
>
>
> This mail was sent to address jasonpollard@yahoo.com
> Need archives? How to unsubscribe? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/
>
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Received on Mon Oct 28 15:18:19 2002