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BGonline.org Forums
USBGF GG Ts
Posted By: Michael Petch In Response To: USBGF GG Ts (Stick)
Date: Friday, 23 September 2011, at 8:12 p.m.
The problem is that a determined cheater with just a bit of knowledge can thwart this. As you have already pointed out separate machines would make it difficult to detect. For a cheater with some limited knowledge, doing it is very easy. You might catch the "Casual" cheater but not the one who spent a bit of time.
Seemless display of remote windows application provides the best integration for a cheater. In the windows world Terminal server with Seemless RDP clients, or a Citrix client accessing remote applications can provide a display of XG on a windows box and processing done elsewhere. XG will appear to be just another window on the desktop. In GNUBG's case running it from a Unix box as a backend with an Xwindows display(ie CygwinX/ or MingX) on Windows as a front end works great. Xwindows inherently can display an App Window seemlessly on one desktop while running from another computer.
The windows method might cost a bit of money for the cheater for software. The GNUBG/Xwindows can be done for free and is very easy to get going.
If the cheater can work without seemless applications then you can of course go straight to stock Remote Desktop Clients using normal RDP or VNC (or any similar software). I find this a bit more cumbersome, but a proficient cheater can probably get use to it.
I think people may be underestimating just how easy it is to setup a more sophisticated environment. You don't need to be a guru to get it going. People of normal intelligence, and a bit of time is all that is needed.
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Back about 13 years ago when iPlay.net started it had an "anti-cheat" mechanism that was simple but a novel approach at the time. This was back in the day when average joe blow may not have had networked computers and virtual machines, skype etc. In the game of Spades they were concerned about people using instant message clients while playing. So to deter the casual cheater they wrote a routine into their client application for Spades that tracked where your mouse went. If the mouse left the Spades table it would send a message in the chat area to the opponents that the mouse was moved out of a players table window and would tell you the name of the destination window that received the focus.
Sure there are ways around this, but for a while it was a deterrent that did discourage some forms of cheating. Players could use Roger Wilco(at the time) to do what Skype does now, or simply call your partner on the phone.
Over the years software technology has become easier to use, more prolific and with resource like Google - solutions for even people with limited IT knowledge become easier to find and implement.
If you build a bigger mouse trap, the people who REALLY want to cheat will find a way around it. You could expend a large amount of time and resources to *attempt* to find a solution to "online cheating" in backgammon but there will always be a segment of the population that you may not be able to detect. The question is finding the balance between the two.
History does show that using BOTS as a benchmark to determine who is a cheater has ended with some false positives. The question for me is - How many innocent people accused of being cheaters is acceptable in the quest to find the REAL cheaters?
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