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by Doug Thews.
Original Post: Ticketless Travel
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I've been doing a lot of flying these days and have noticed something about ticketless travel (where you can print your own boarding pass from your computer before you go to the airport). When the system generates the HTML page you print that shows your name, flight and date (as well as a barcode that's scanned at the gate), it would be pretty easy to save this page and just edit the text to change the date - thereby allowing you to gain access to the gates through airport security any time you want (because they don't scan the barcode).
My suggestion is to either have airport security scan the barcode for validity, or make sure that airline vendors print all of their information as graphics (possibly embossed with something making it hard to duplicate).
Sure, it's not fool-proof, but it makes it harder to get unauthorized access to the gates.
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