*sigh*
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet."
It is important, in constructing a logical argument, or even in the interests of communicating accurately, to have a clear understanding of the meaning of the terms being used.
Thoughout the coverage of the AP scandal on this forum, there has been a lot of confusion around the use of the term "account". Usually this word has been preceded by another qualifying word, such as "superuser", "player", and now, "observer".
What is an "account"? Generally speaking, an "account" is a record of (most often financial) data, usually pertaining to a specific person or thing.
There are many distinct types of accounts involved in this story. There are player accounts. There are computer access accounts on AP's internal computer systems. There are bank accounts and e-wallets belonging to the cheaters and the cheated. Confusion occurs when people don't understand the definition of each type of account, and when people try to take a concept that applies to one type of account and apply it to a different type of account, and when people attribute to an account some capability which is really an atrribute of something else, such as a piece of software.
A player account is what you get when you sign up to play at AP. A player account is what is used to authorise access by an instance of AP's poker client software to its server software. A player account records a username, a password, an email address, banking or e-wallet information for money transfer purposes, balances in real and play money, (and points?), bonus information, etc. A player account may relate to a real person, or to a fictional entity created for test or other purposes.
A computer access account is a set of information which identifies a user who can access the services of the operating system of a computer. It is what one uses to "log on" to a computer. A player account is not a computer access account.
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There is no player account in the AP system with the ability to see other players’ hole cards.
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Note here: "no player account". Nobody ever said there was. We claimed there was/is an "observer account" with the ability to see players' hole card.
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Account #363 is a player account. It is used to allow an instance of the AP client software to connect to the server. I have no idea if it is, or ever was, associated with any real person.
It has been, at least, suggested, but I think "claimed" is an accurate term, that account #363 is a "superuser account" by which what was meant was that a person could use account #363 to view hole cards. I'll get back to the confusion over the term "superuser account" in a moment.
You seem to suggest that an observer account is not a player account. For your suggestion to be true, the term "player account" has to mean something different than what AP means and what I mean and what most reasonable people mean when they use the term in this context.
That is not to say that "observer account" is a term with no meaning or usefulness. A player account that is used soley or primarily for the purpose of observing rather than playing in games could usefully be called an "observer account". Similarly we could call some player accounts "recreational accounts", and others "professional accounts"; some "real person accounts" and some "test accounts". However, all of these, including "observer accounts" are player accounts.
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Just to shut me and others up, next time you issue a release can you amend the statement to "no player or observer account" or even better "no account"?
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No, they can not and should not do that. Once they have said that no player account can see other players' hole cards, they have covered off observer accounts. Adding "or observer account" would erroneously imply that there is some separate sort of account which just does not exist. Saying just "any account" would also not be true. There are no player accounts that can see other players' hole cards, but there certainly are AP internal computer system access accounts that can (or at least could) see hole cards. AP's press release says so:
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The breach was exploitable only by an authorized AP person
that manipulated the internal reporting software...
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There is no evidence of the current or past existence of a “super-user” account.
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Technically you can get away with stating: "There is no super-user account" or "The evidence indicating a super-account has been investigated and found lacking". But you can't state there is no evidence. We have seen it. It led to the whole pandora box being opened in the first place.
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No. What we have seen was evidence of cheating, of hole cards being viewed, but it may not have been evidence of a superuser account. Claiming that there was a "superuser account" may have been a misinterpretation of the evidence.
So what was account #363 being used for if it wasn't a "superuser account"? We don't know for certain, but see
this post.
Please don't say "that internal AP computer access account that was used to view the hole cards in the database - that's what we meant by 'superuser account'". That's just BS. If you trace the history of the term in this forum, you will see that what is first envisaged is a player account that had been assigned special access privileges. When it was pointed out that this would mean that the client software would have to be able to receive hole cards for all players some people took this to mean that all instances of the client software had the ability built in, and that you just had to log on with the correct account to enable the ability.
It was reported that a reverse engineering exercise showed that the standard client did not have the abiity to receive hole card information for multiple players. This lead some people to think "superuser account = special client software". That ofc was a misuse of the term "account". "Superclient" would have been a better label for such a scenario than "superuser account", but once the latter term had been coined , it stuck around, with its presumed meaning changing to fit people's changing understanding of the facts.
AP have stated that no player account can or could see hole cards, and that hole cards were viewed by AP internal computer access accounts. Hence there was no superuser player account. That there are AP internal user accounts that can read the database of hand stories should come as a surprise to nobody. The key information seems to be that the timing of writing of hole card records to the database was such that the database could reveal this data while the hand was still being played.