Decoding Douglas April 20, 2006 by riscphree, riscphree@gmail.com, http://riscit.info ===================Contents=================== 1. Intro 2. Background on the Tickets 3. Security Features 4. Ticket Deciphering 5. Conclusion ============================================== 1. Intro I'll spare you with the "fancy" ASCII art everyone usually has, I most definately cannot do any of that stuff, and frankly its really annoying. I do hope you enjoyed my last text file, WiFi: Your Guide to Getting Free. Albeit it was a long time ago, I did get some good feedback on it. Anywho, this article is about the Douglas Theatre company. As far as I know, its just local to Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska. This first started as a simple experiment for me to get more information how how the systems worked and not for any way to get into movies without paying. I still have not yet used this for illegal purposes and will not use it for illegal purposes. Please do not use this information for uses other than educational and informational. I cannot be held responsible for your actions, use your head. 2. Background on the Tickets The tickets themselves are made by a company called Worldwide Ticket & Label. Their website is: http://www.wwticket.com and are located in Deerfield Beach, Florida. If you wondering how thermal tickets work, heat from the printer causes a chemical reaction within the coating on the paper of the ticket, thus changing its transparency to black. The biggest theater in Lincoln uses the Small Generic Ticket 2" x 3.25" Cinema Bar type ticket. These tickets are used with a thermal printer and are perforated for easy tearing. These tickets cost $15 for one thousand. You can download the spec sheet here: http://www.wwticket.com/pdf/generics/smgeneric_2x325_cinemabar.pdf Without doing some snooping or social engineering to find out which printers they use, you can sucessfully narrow it down to: - Only Boca printers specifically formatted for cinema applications - Datamax ST3210 or SV3306 - Practical Automation ETX, ITX specifically formatted for cinema applications Those are the only printers that are compatible with these types of tickets according to Worldwide Ticket's website. From there you can proceed to do some social enginnering to find out the certain printer that they use. I have not done it yet, but I can see myself doing it soon. 3. Security Features There are plenty of security features implemented into these tickets. Worldwide Tickets offers TONS of security features and I will not list them all. Some of the features are; thermocromatic ink (this ink reacts when you rub the image with your fingers, it disappears when its warm and reappears when its cold), hidden images (images viewable only through a special decoder lens), coin activated ink (reacts when rubbed with a coin), holograms and foils, black light ink, taggant paper (particles can only been seen using a UV black light), and a host of other things. I have tested the tickets the best I could and so far it has turned up negative. I do not have a black light to test, however. I would not be suprised if there were no security features anyway, if there was, I would assume it would be a black light since you could test that quite easy in a theater setting. 4. Ticket Deciphering The ticket itself looks like this (not to scale): ----------------------------------- |Theater | Theater Name | | Date |Rated: Theater| | Time | R 1 | | Adult | | | $8.00 | $8.00 Adult | |Jarhead | | | R | Jarhead | | | Date/Time | |numbers*| numbers* | | | | ----------------------------------- *these numbers are the same. However, the ones on the left are just the ending numbers in the first series of numbers but underneath those are the same ones as the right hand side. Under the date and time are a bunch of numbers, at first glance they seem random. One such series of numbers is: 200511122148-6082 and printed under that is: 582342 The first series of numbers is quite easily recognized, actually. The date of this particular movie was November 12, 2005, 9:40PM. We now see that in the numbers: 2005(year) - 11 (November)- 12(day). The next numbers 2148 is the ticket sale time, being 2148, is in 24 hour time. 2148 hours is 9:48PM. Yes, I'm always late if I want to see a movie at a theater, people usually have to drag me, since I see no point in paying that much money. Now that we have the first few numbers figured out what about the rest? The ending few (6048), looks to be an employee ID from looking at other tickets. The bottom numbers (582342) looks to be a ticket number. I did some comparison between all the movie tickets I have and if its correct (which I'm fairly sure it is) you can tell how many tickets the theater is selling. The figures I came out with, is the theater is selling ~2,000 tickets a day. Obviosely, this varies witha factors such as cold weather and the season. In the summer months (April, May, June, July) you can see ticket sales were much higher than compared to the rest of the year. This information is probably worth something to a competitor, I would assume. However, Lincoln has a bill that says only Douglas Theater Company can build a cinema here and no one else. So, there isn't much competition :P 5. Conclusion With the information provided, it is now possible to replicate movie tickets from the Douglas Theater company. I do suggest you do not do this, since it is illegal and you will get in trouble. If you do, I cannot be held responsible for your lame actions.