from my nonexistent post count you'll see I'm coming in from the DCist side of this argument, but it does seem to me like keeping the information secret is an imperfect sytem. I agree completely that releasing passwords would be in poor form, but I don't see this tickets.com exploit as a deliberate plan by anyone to ensure that tickets get into the hands of the worthy.
And that's the problem: hanging out in a particular online forum or knowing a particular circle of the city's hipsters may correlate fairly well with being a hardcore fan, but it's far from perfect. If somebody lives out in Reston, works construction and cries themselves to sleep listening to Belle & Sebastian every night, are they being served by the current system of online cliquey-ness? Hell, the whole notion of one fan deserving tickets more than another is problematic.
I'm all for discouraging scalping, and making sure that as much rabid fan devotion as possible is packed onto the 9:30 floor for every show. But it seems like there would be better ways to go about it -- like, say, not letting people order 10 tickets, limiting purchases to noncommercial credit cards, checking addresses against credit cards and limiting purchases by address... etc.
Not to get impossibly nerdy, but "security through obscurity" is a popular punchline in the internet business. This is no way to prevent scalping.
