Re: [ba-poker] Online poker Terms of Service

["James Kittock" <james(deleted the rest)>]

> I've read about Party's war with WinHoldem, and its use of pulling 
> screenshots and scanning of process lists to detect it.  Has anyone been 
> curious enough to determine the frequency of non poker information being 
> sent to online poker servers?

No, but I think that the only poker community is facing a sort of restricted 
"Turing Test".  Despite any precautions Party Poker or other sites may take, 
ultimately there's no way to tell for certain if a given player is a bot or 
a human, as long as all that is required is to push onscreen buttons.

Even if they defeat onboard screen-scrapers and whatnot, it would not be 
*too* hard to set up the bot software on separate computer that took the 
video output from the first computer, scraped it, and sent back fake mouse 
signals over the USB connection.

At best, they can make it intolerably difficult to run bots, but given that 
money is involved, I think there will be enough will to find the way.

Whether bots will ultimately make any difference in the online poker economy 
is another question.

Exercise for the reader: prove that I am not actually an A.I. program 
designed to write e-mails. :)

--james