I think there's a non-zero chance that scalpers are watching the list of available ticket blocks, comparing frequently to find when a block becomes unavailable (because it's in a cart), and then monitoring and automatically buying any "missing" ticket blocks as soon as they reappear. That's what I would do, anyways.
That said, I would not be surprised in the least if this was being aided by ticketmaster or they were straight up doing it themselves. I just think there is a possible explanation where they are ignorant rather than malicious.
That was my impression, also. I'm not opposed to it though, as this will probably get picked up by the mainstream media which would do a lot more good than another mirror, IMO.
From my understanding of smart cards, I don't see how this is possible.
Communication between the card and the reader is typically done using encryption with a Diffie-Hellman key exchange with a man-in-the-middle resistant protocol. You would need to attack whatever encryption algorithm is being used, which is non-trivial even with physical access. You would need to either perform differential power analysis attack or a timing attack or attack a weakness in the algorithm.
Seeing as how one of the primary purposes of smart cards was to eliminate skimming and similar attacks, I can't fathom why any reader would ever be created that didn't support session encryption. Why use a chip if it's basically the same as a magnetic stripe? I'll plead ignorance on the workings of the European debit system as I'm Canadian and we're just getting smart cards now.
Does anyone have a better source than the linked article?
EDIT: Nevermind, apparently the security was broken a while ago:
That said, I would not be surprised in the least if this was being aided by ticketmaster or they were straight up doing it themselves. I just think there is a possible explanation where they are ignorant rather than malicious.