War Against the Bots

[Grasshopp3r]

Also, there should be other penalties assessed to the botters, such as permabanned from all of the sites and b&m tournies. Plus, they should be identified publicly and turned over to the feds. Those should be easy prosecutions.

[Artsemis]

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Further more, how is it done in a way that cannot be easily detected?

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Simply put without details... don't use memory access, send keyboard and mouse movements to obtained screen coordinates.

[BluffTHIS!]

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The problem is the best bots aren't going to be published as they are basically priceless. This is targeting bots, yes, but it's targeting the weakest breed -- the average idiot that just downloads winholdem and tries to throw it together as a winning bot.

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That's probably the lion's share though. So targeting them is not only a good first step with the greatest impact, but also likely discourages others who would be commercial bot software providers.

[MasterLJ]

Programmers aren't really known for rolling their own stuff from scratch. There has to be a screen scraper resource that these people are using.

[Bobo Fett]

Careful when going to these sites. I'm pretty sure last time there was a bot uproar in this forum (back in Aug/Sep last year), at least one person had their account locked, and it seemed to trace back to cookies from the bot site. Just an FYI that you might want to clear history/cookies/etc. after you check out any of these sites.

[LeapFrog]

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LF,
I discussed the negatives of taking it to the media.

Going to the media is a last resort, ...


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I really can't think of much that would currently be more damaging to the playerbase/legislative issues then a lot of negative media attention regarding bots. I'm not sure 'double edged sword' is the most appropriate metaphor.

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...and I'm actually more interested in getting some serious responses to screwing with the websites of the bot sellers/promoters.

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I understand that and would like to see bots squashed, but I think you are overreacting here.

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b) DOS attacks on their domains & zero day trojans to all their email accounts;


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Both of these are 'shotgun' attacks that could end up causing potentially serious collateral damage. Cmon man I want to preserve and protect poker as my previous posts indicate but this is not the way.

[BluffTHIS!]

LF and others,

Forget the "media" thing then and focus on the things the sites can do to detect/prevent botting, or that the players can do to attack the bot sites.

And as to "shotgun" attacks, if they had the desired effect, they're better than the current situation. I am not advocating anyone doing anything that would get them in trouble with either the law or their IP provider. But if some more technically knowledgeable posters can come up with means that even only a hanful of players can use to be sucessful in such measures, then again that is better than nothing, and also better than trusting the sites as they have clearly shown they don't place a big enough priority on combatting botting.

[TheScientist]

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Programmers aren't really known for rolling their own stuff from scratch. There has to be a screen scraper resource that these people are using.

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This is very easy to do, and can be done in an afternoon.

[KurtSF]

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Further more, how is it done in a way that cannot be easily detected?

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Simply put without details... don't use memory access, send keyboard and mouse movements to obtained screen coordinates.

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[censored]one popular bot[/censored] is commonly run on a second computer so that when the poker computer is scanned by the site no "bot" processes or files are found.

[MasterLJ]

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Further more, how is it done in a way that cannot be easily detected?

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Simply put without details... don't use memory access, send keyboard and mouse movements to obtained screen coordinates.

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[censored]one popular bot[/censored] is commonly run on a second computer so that when the poker computer is scanned by the site no "bot" processes or files are found.

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What I was getting at was input specifically.

According to my research, the only way to "create input" (as in mouse clicks, typing in amounts, etc) would be to wrap DirectInput so that you could modify it with your own functions that yield desired results. You could possibly hijack the DLLs for some of the chat functions in FTP... but either way you can check for both very easily.