What can a ISP do to stop you from playing online poker (long)

[James Ferguson]

Sorry if this has been asked but even if gambling becomes illegal, wouldn’t it still be legal to visit a site such a party to watch others play or use the play money tables? So how could they legally block the site?

[uphigh_downlow]

Mebbe you have abias from being part of the ISP indutry.

And mebbe I have incomplete information, but i'm pretty pretty sure, the government cannot stop me from going to any site or connecting to any server.

This is not because I'm some super hacker, but only from being well eduvcated about how the internet works.

Its easy to call for enforcing un-enforceable laws. But they jut make a mockery of the system. I understand your point about popularity of a poker VPN service being its death. But there is no reason to assume that these VPN services in question will be exclusively poker VPN's.

And even if they are, I'm pretty sure you highly over-estimate the capability of your IPS. Detection and determination while collating data over several ISP's in itself would take a long time, and lets say the avg detectioon time is 10 days. Simple changing connection IPort or a few protocol thing shud mean ISP's were left on a wild goose chase.

Not to mention that devices that will filter packets at gigs/sec introducing less than 150microsec delay will not be cheap.

Neway I'm not concerned about this particular isue much at all, as it has many simple workarounds

[cottonmather0]

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If it is so easy to block sites deemed illegal, how come they government can not stop kiddie porn?

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Actually, those sites get blocked all the time and when they do the perverts just get a new address and a new server and start up somewhere else. That 'community" is rather closed and insulated so whenever the changes word gets out quickly to a small group of people and the actvity just moves along to the new site. The poker business model probably couldn't work that way.

[Leader]

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while i hope stellar is right it still doesn't seem to change the fact that the majority of the fish will not be willing to go to these steps to link up to a gambling site and the pool of these fish will dry up. i know, i know the sky is falling some will say, but it seems to be a somewhat realistic problem.

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what stellar said has a more common name. Its called VPN, something commonly in use on the internet.

so dun wry a whole lot about connecting to poker sites. We shud be more worried about loss of players who wont go thru the trouble

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The question is: How much trouble will it be? There will certainly be many people and lots of money behind making it as easy as possible.

[Percula]

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Mebbe you have abias from being part of the ISP indutry.

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Nope I am part of the ISP industry.

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And mebbe I have incomplete information, but i'm pretty pretty sure, the government cannot stop me from going to any site or connecting to any server.

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Wrong, if a court orders it, it will happen, and easily too.

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This is not because I'm some super hacker, but only from being well eduvcated about how the internet works.

Its easy to call for enforcing un-enforceable laws. But they jut make a mockery of the system. I understand your point about popularity of a poker VPN service being its death. But there is no reason to assume that these VPN services in question will be exclusively poker VPN's.

[/ QUOTE ]

Doesn't matter, if the court orders it, it will be blocked. Rather a court will or not is outside the topic of this post.

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And even if they are, I'm pretty sure you highly over-estimate the capability of your IPS. Detection and determination while collating data over several ISP's in itself would take a long time, and lets say the avg detectioon time is 10 days. Simple changing connection IPort or a few protocol thing shud mean ISP's were left on a wild goose chase.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are saddly mistaken, very mistaken. The IPS does not collect or corilate data. It simply looks at the packets, and based on the signature of the data, it either filters it or lets it pass. Most P2P applications today use this type of method to avoid issues with firewalls, a good IPS will stop them dead.

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Not to mention that devices that will filter packets at gigs/sec introducing less than 150microsec delay will not be cheap.

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You are quite right, the big ones like a large ISP would use cost's >$100K.

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Neway I'm not concerned about this particular isue much at all, as it has many simple workarounds

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And this why I wrote the post in the first place. You are 100% dead wrong. Too many in the online poker world think is like trading music with a P2P network and in one respect they are right, but they have a false sense of confidence because they get away with trading music, they will not get away with playing online if a court orders the access to be blocked. They are not the same, in the case of online poker, the bill allows for a court to order a blockage, which is something that has not happened with music. The technology is there and evolving daily.

The idea they will not be able to block access to say a VPN service because it offers access to other things, is just plain silly. Look at the bit-torrent sites that have been killed. Why were they killed, because they had links to copywrited matrials along with links to lots of other stuff that was completely in the clear. In the case of a VPN server it is going to be VERY hard to make a case that the primary reason for it existing is not to allow access to poker sites.

[Percula]

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Sorry if this has been asked but even if gambling becomes illegal, wouldn’t it still be legal to visit a site such a party to watch others play or use the play money tables? So how could they legally block the site?

[/ QUOTE ]

Good question, one that will set with the law makers and the poker sites.

Let's say that when you logon to the PartyPoker game server you are allowed to play for real money and play money. I would guess that all access to the site would be blocked.

So places like PartyPoker would have to modify their software to only allow access to play money games, basically seperating out their game severs so that play money players connect to one server farm and real money players connect to another server farm.

Depending on how they manage their farms, this could be a very expensive thing for them to do and they dont exactly have a great incentive to spend the money to provide a free service they can not have a real prospect of getting money in the future in the form of converting a play money player to a real money player.

[MrBrightside]

Look, I'm a programmer, not a network engineer, but I just don't see it. I can pay for access to an encrypted proxy server.. this took five seconds with google: http://www.secure-tunnel.com/ A quick search of pokerstar's web site, at least, shows that the client works through a proxy server: http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/download/faq/

So .. this traffic is encyrpted.. they know I'm connecting to a proxy server, right? I understand your point about them shutting access to the proxy server off, but there's a LOT of proxy servers (and I think their will be a lot more of them in the future if this law passes). It would be an endless race. Every day. Heck, I could get some guys up in twoplustwo who don't live in this country to set one up for just a few individuals. Small groups would definitely be undetected.

Look at what a failure the "great internet wall of china" has been.

I understand what you are saying, they could block access to proxy servers, but frankly, I think more laws like this will prompt a big boom in foreign pay proxy servers (thus driving the cost down -- not that they are expensive as the plans at that site start at $2.95 and go up to $10 a month).

[JPFisher55]

This is the whole point. Blocking access to a website that offers real and fake money play deprives those who legally desire to play with fake money their right to do so without due process.
Since poker websites are offshore, the US government cannot require them to operate completely different sites for real and fake money play.
The same is true about services like Neteller. If the US government forces banks to not accept deposits from Neteller, then it is depriving the user whose transactions are legal the right to use Neteller without due process.

[uphigh_downlow]

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while i hope stellar is right it still doesn't seem to change the fact that the majority of the fish will not be willing to go to these steps to link up to a gambling site and the pool of these fish will dry up. i know, i know the sky is falling some will say, but it seems to be a somewhat realistic problem.

[/ QUOTE ]

what stellar said has a more common name. Its called VPN, something commonly in use on the internet.

so dun wry a whole lot about connecting to poker sites. We shud be more worried about loss of players who wont go thru the trouble

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The question is: How much trouble will it be? There will certainly be many people and lots of money behind making it as easy as possible.

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not much harder than simply signing up for a simple service like

MEGAPROXY® ADVANCED WEB SSL VPN: PRICE: ONLY $9.95 FOR 3 MONTH ACCESS

[uphigh_downlow]

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Mebbe you have abias from being part of the ISP indutry.

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Nope I am part of the ISP industry.


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My point exactly. You are biased. (or cud be)

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And mebbe I have incomplete information, but i'm pretty pretty sure, the government cannot stop me from going to any site or connecting to any server.

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Wrong, if a court orders it, it will happen, and easily too.

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This is not because I'm some super hacker, but only from being well eduvcated about how the internet works.


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Doesn't matter, if the court orders it, it will be blocked. Rather a court will or not is outside the topic of this post.

You are saddly mistaken, very mistaken. The IPS does not collect or corilate data. It simply looks at the packets, and based on the signature of the data, it either filters it or lets it pass. Most P2P applications today use this type of method to avoid issues with firewalls, a good IPS will stop them dead.


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I'm well versed with network protocols. I'm currently pursuing my PhD at UCLA. I dont mean to be antagonistic.

I think you ignored what i was really trying to say. IPS is a rules based system. How do you come up with the rules?? You do research outside of IPS and feed the rules/signatures into IPS. And it will be near impossible to come up with a consistent set of rules/signatures to block access. You use the word fingerprint, but its grossly exaggerated. Sure it can be a cat and mouse game but I think the cats got a lotta catching up to do and limited resources.

So it will go hungry [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]