Gazing Into Sam Altman's Orb Could Solve Ticket Scalping (wired.com) 57
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sam Altman's iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they're a real human, provided they've already stared into one of World's glossy white Orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a pilot project for Tinder verification that World previously conducted in Japan.
[...] In addition to the Tinder global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind World, announced a number of other consumer and enterprise partnerships on Friday at its Lift Off event in San Francisco. The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World ID will receive five free "boosts," typically a paid feature that increases the number of users who see a profile by up to 10 times for 30 minutes. The videoconferencing platform Zoom also says that users can now require other participants to verify their identity with World before joining a call. Docusign, the contract signing software, will allow users to require World's identity verification technology.
Tiago Sada, Tools for Humanity's chief product officer, tells WIRED the company sees major platform partnerships as key to helping World become a mainstream identity-verification technology. Sada said he's especially interested in working with social media companies in the future, and was encouraged to see that Reddit has started testing World as a solution to help users distinguish bots from real people. [...] World is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which lets artists reserve concert tickets for verified humans, a pitch aimed squarely at the bot-driven scalping problem that critics say has plagued sites like TicketMaster. World will test the feature on the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour featuring Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to play a verified-humans-only show under his alias DJ Pee .Wee in San Francisco on Friday night. "The idea that World ID is not just private, but it's one of the most private things you've ever used, that's not obvious," says Sada. "We're just not used to this kind of technology. Many people used to tape their [iPhone's sensor used to enable] Face ID when it came out, then we got used to it."
[...] In addition to the Tinder global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind World, announced a number of other consumer and enterprise partnerships on Friday at its Lift Off event in San Francisco. The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World ID will receive five free "boosts," typically a paid feature that increases the number of users who see a profile by up to 10 times for 30 minutes. The videoconferencing platform Zoom also says that users can now require other participants to verify their identity with World before joining a call. Docusign, the contract signing software, will allow users to require World's identity verification technology.
Tiago Sada, Tools for Humanity's chief product officer, tells WIRED the company sees major platform partnerships as key to helping World become a mainstream identity-verification technology. Sada said he's especially interested in working with social media companies in the future, and was encouraged to see that Reddit has started testing World as a solution to help users distinguish bots from real people. [...] World is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which lets artists reserve concert tickets for verified humans, a pitch aimed squarely at the bot-driven scalping problem that critics say has plagued sites like TicketMaster. World will test the feature on the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour featuring Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to play a verified-humans-only show under his alias DJ Pee .Wee in San Francisco on Friday night. "The idea that World ID is not just private, but it's one of the most private things you've ever used, that's not obvious," says Sada. "We're just not used to this kind of technology. Many people used to tape their [iPhone's sensor used to enable] Face ID when it came out, then we got used to it."
Nope! (Score:5, Interesting)
Just another means to control people that can be turned around and sold to governments. Getting used to it my ass. It was foisted on people without consent and those who know don't use it.
Re: (Score:2)
Prohibition doesn't work, never has (Score:2)
Or one could just let the market handle it. You can't stop scalping any more than Custer could. Prohibition doesn't work, it just creates black markets.
Re: (Score:2)
If tickets were an auction, the problem would instantly solve itself. You could even still have a secondary market for last minute buyers. And the extra revenue would go to the venue/artists, rather than a random scalper.... if those even exist anymore. I expect it's more likely Ticketmaster themselves selling them as resell at a 3x markup.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would concert tickets need an auction any more than almost everything else? No auction for beans, none for gasoline, or haircuts. If they price them too high, they don't sell enough. If they price them too low, they sell out fast and learn to charge more next time, just as any other limited commodity does. If they can get more, they do, and raise the price next time. If they can't, well, that's life.
I don't think TicketMaster is making a fortune, because if they were, competitors would want some of
Re: Prohibition doesn't work, never has (Score:2)
No auction for beans, none for gasoline, or haircuts.
the fact that you're unaware of the auctions doesn't mean they don't happen.
Re: (Score:2)
The fact that you don't list them doesn't prove their existence.
I'm aware of wholesale auctions and small exceptions. If you want, consider TicketMaster as a wholesaler.
Re: Prohibition doesn't work, never has (Score:2)
The auctions are in the Futures and Options trading. Beans, gasoline, everything is in there.
Re: (Score:2)
That ain't retail. It's the futures wholesale market.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I was responding to saloomy, who said "just make a law...".
Re: Prohibition doesn't work, never has (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Airlines can add more flights and bigger planes for more seats. Try doing that with a pop star.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Nope! (Score:2)
Re:Nope! (Score:4)
An iris scan is still just data. It can be copied or forged. How is it any more reliable than any other data that can be copied or forged?
I think this whole notion of "prove you are a human from the other side of the Internet" is misguided. I understand why people would want this, but given the nature of the tech, it is too easy to fake it. We are going to need to adapt differently.
Re: (Score:2)
Remember: This isn't your bedroom at home completely devoid of those who would stop you, this is a planned centralized gathering where physical security is already required.
Re: (Score:2)
I have a better one for you: People don't respect their own privacy and their own data, but they do tend to respect not getting scammed.
You want to end scalping? Do a test charge on people's credit card to verify its the same card which purchased the ticket at the gate. The number of people who will hand over a functioning credit card to a complete stranger buying a ticket is smaller than the number of people who will stare into an orb for the nebulous reason of "privacy".
Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Nope.
Absolutely not.
Go fuck yourselves.
I could probably count on my hand the number of companies that I would trust with my iris scan. OpenAI isn't one of them.
Re: (Score:2)
Rubbing Salt in the Snapper. (Score:2)
We all saw it coming, but fucking Tinder?
That dogshit wasn't even on the same table with my EyesRUs Bingo card.
It'll be a hell of an eye-opener when the retinal scan database gets cross-referenced with all the whores uniquely confirmed to have 7 accounts, 9 aliases, 4 rosters, and a pair of perpetual born-again-virgin claims.
Re: (Score:2)
Who would you trust?
Re: (Score:2)
Pulling a Capone. (Score:2)
These guys are just amateurs. Everyone knows that when you want to introduce some new Orwellian technology its use is to catch pedophiles and stop terrorists and drug dealers. Ticket scalpers? Give me a break!
After years of Al Capone running violent bootlegging operations out of Chicago during Prohibition, they finally arrested him on tax evasion.
Heard the IRS documented the case on a 1069FU form, under the category of whatever the fuck works.
Sam Altman really wants people- (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
> Sam Altman really wants people ... to gaze at his balls.
If you gaze too long at his balls, do the balls gaze back at you?
Fakeable (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, I was in a lab yesterday and met a PhD student whose thesis was largely about using LLMs to fake fingerprints and retinal scans.
Re:Fakeable (Score:4, Funny)
“There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant-a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying. Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.”
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I was going to suggest a Polymarket on when the Iris scan database was hacked into. I didn't realise that it's not even necessary to hack into it - just fake it - and I am only shocked that I didn't think of your student's project, already.
Apropos of nothing, I worked at a place where they manually censored all incoming emails and blocked all websites apart from a tiny whitelist. It took 6 months to get our dev software & database provider whitelisted. Anyway we had a lass working with us who knew about
Tinders Fuzzy Bits. (Score:2)
Interestingly, I was in a lab yesterday and met a PhD student whose thesis was largely about using LLMs to fake fingerprints and retinal scans.
Are you saying a thesis titillatingly re-titled as Tickling Tinders Fuzzy Bits, would likely qualify as a speedrun invite to a final boss DEFCON talk?
who are they kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The idea that World ID is not just private, but it's one of the most private things you've ever used, that's not obvious,"
It's not obvious, and it's not true. More importantly, what is obvious is that NOT using World ID is MORE private than using it.
"We're just not used to this kind of technology. Many people used to tape their [iPhone's sensor used to enable] Face ID when it came out, then we got used to it."
In other words, you'll forget about the massive invasion of your privacy, even if you don't accept our lies about it.
Re: (Score:2)
I used to have a workstation that had a sliding cover for the camera. Maybe it was an SGI Indy? I forget. I think only some linux laptops have hardware covers / kill switches for camera and mic? I would *really* like such for MacBook Pro, how about a physical low-profile sideways cover / toggle switch that disables camera and mic together? As for biometrics, I was always against it. But then.. iPhone Face ID, so useful. And kind of necessary with the default settings though maybe we should just keep them un
Voting (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Bets on how long it takes some Republican congressperson to suggest this is the only way we can be sure that illegals aren't voting?
Bets on how quickly a 1990s Democrat would file a class action against Republicans for threatening to take their patented idea for curbing illegal immigration.
Hey, doesn't Obama own that patent? Pretty sure the Deporter in Chief would have earned that.
Not a single word can explain the American who believed an Open Border Czar operating freely for four years, would result in zero consequences for that delusional stance. And let's not forget what could avoid your theory; Democrats could simply understand th
Re: (Score:2)
You do realize that no normal person understands what point your post is trying to make, right?
I'd rather die (Score:2)
Fuck that, I guess I'm not human then.
Oh brave new world that has such people in it... (Score:2)
Cold water (Score:3)
"The water isn't hot, in fact it's the coldest it will ever be. Frogs used to complain about the water being hot, then they got used to it."
Re: (Score:2)
That's really good. Big tech summarized in two sentences.
Use a sledge hammer to open a walnut? (Score:2)
No thanks.
Hi Sam (Score:3)
Enforce antitrust law (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They like selling the same ticket twice, go figure.
Re: (Score:3)
That is just not the case. Ticket scalping has existed for all eternity even in places in the world where there aren't anti-trust issues. Having 100 different venues each with their own ticketing system does precisely nothing to stop the practice when ${popular_artists} comes to ${venue} and someone rushes and buys up all the tickets to scalp them online.
Even back before the days of ticket master a typical venue offered you possibly one... maybe a maximum of two places you could source the tickets. Anti-tru
We should moderate these (Score:2)
Sam Altman adverts, off of /.
Stupidly easy to stop ticket scalping (Score:2)
You buy a ticket with a credit card, you get a receipt. No one can buy more than 4 tickets on a single credit card. The machine to let you in has to run the physical credit card to let upto those 4 people through the gate.
You buy a ticket with cash, your photo gets printed on the ticket. That face can buy upto 4 people. Gets checked at the door by a person.
Not that hard to do. They keep the current system because they use ticket scalping as an excuse to raise prices. Oh, sorry all of the 'premium' ti
On the other hand... (Score:2)
"Gazing into Sam Altman's Orb" could be the modern-day equivalent of a tattoo inked in a Nazi concentration camp.
What's that Sam? Your iris-print isn't in your database? I'm shocked! /sarc
It's astonishing to me how the plebs of the world are being treated more and more like cattle, and how they're increasingly eager to comply.
On a side note, what are the chances of hackers messing with the database? Having a major criminal swap identities with you would be... inconvenient? Deadly? But they're taking all pru
Another risk of world size (Score:2)
Iris-scanning needed to buy a ticket (Score:3)
ClippyAI: The "digital panopticon" is described as a sinister evolution of Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century prison design, where the ability to be constantly watched—or to believe one is being watched—leads to self-regulation and loss of autonomy. In the modern digital context, this refers to surveillance systems, AI, and data mining that are often invisible, continuous, and all-encompassing.
Registration is a key vulnerability. (Score:2)
Per https://world.org/blog/world/w... [world.org] the registration process requires photos of eyes and face. It promises to delete these after using them to generate a crypto based ID. How do we know the photos were really deleted?
You're doing it wrong (Score:2)