Wow, fuck ebay!

Ebay wants you arrested for playing poker online.


eBay Wants You Arrested For Playing Online Poker

Ebayofc_1In a "what the fuck" move but it all makes sense for an inept, greedy monopoly, online auction behemoth eBay has thrown its support behind Chairman Mao Goodlatte's bill (H.R.4411) to ban Internet gambling, which passed yesterday in the House by a vote of 317 to 93.

Even more shocking though is that eBay wants to go further than Kim Jong-bob's legislation and have online gamblers prosecuted. Yes, eBay apparently wants you arrested for playing online poker.

Why would an online site which owns PayPal support congressional regulation of online activity and go as far as wanting law enforcement officials to monitor everyone's online activity, including tracking IP addresses?

Well, according to policy analyst Radley Balko of Washington think tank, the Cato Institute, it's all about protectionism. In an article posted over at Cato.org, Balko details the rise and demise of the original vision for PayPal, which eBay bought, ruined and now wants to, as Balko notes, "shield...from foreign competitors" like Neteller and FirePay, who aren't subject to U.S. law.

You see, when eBay purchased PayPal, PayPal was feeling the heat from politicians, regulators and lawsuits at the time so eBay caved in and no longer allowed customers to use PayPal accounts for online gambling. That move opened the doors for foreign companies like Neteller and Firepay, who could cater to the needs of American online gamblers while not having to fear the wrath of Eliot Spitzer and his cronies.

Now it looks like eBay is sucking up to Fidel Goodlatte because he's the chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus and because, if his bill becomes law, your bank will likely ban you from dealing with the likes of Neteller and Firepay, therefore effectively shutting PayPal's competition out of the U.S. market while trampling over our freedom to do what the hell we want with our own money.

And consider this: PayPal has recently signed agreements with two online gambling sites in Europe to allow its services to be used by Europeans who want to gamble online.

So basically eBay wants the business of European gamblers while its wants U.S. online gamblers to be prosecuted.

Bastards.

Definitely give Balko's article a full read as he does a much better job than the above of laying it all out. And after you read it, sign up for the Poker Player Alliance, if you haven't already.

Random poker blog

From online poker rooms to the bedroom, bots are taking over.

In what may be the most ridiculously overstated story we've seen yet in the "sky is falling on online poker" category, or since the Flight of the Conchords predicted the death of humans by the year 2000, Dallas Observer tech blogger Andrew Smith argues that "online poker sites seem doomed" because of poker bots that he claims "can beat any human player."

Smith says:

"Why? Because there's no real way to tell a program from a person. Crooks will enter programs -- or poker bots --as people. Human players will consistently lose. Eventually, all but the stupidest humans will just stop playing."

To support his claim that bots "can beat any human player" Smith points to the recent Man-Machine Poker Competition in which Polaris, a poker bot created by the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group, beat a few of the guys from Stoxpoker.com in a series of heads-up matches at the WSOP.

Yep, win one tournament and that's proof you can beat 'em all (eg. Jerry Yang, Jamie Gold, Chris Moneymaker, Robert Varkonyi)

Interestingly enough, one of the guys who helped develop Polaris, Dr. Darse Billings, responded to Smith's article calling his conclusion "ridiculous." Says Billings:

"[T]his is not a catastrophe for online poker . . . Modern programs are not strong at No Limit or multi-player games. Secondly, it is not difficult to identify a known program. If you use the Fritz chess program to play chess on an online server, it will be obvious to everyone. The same applies for poker. Since using programs is against the poker site's terms of use, if you do it you will have your account closed permanently. I started the research into poker AI in 1992, and we have had a very large team of excellent researchers working on the problem for many years. We have made a lot of progress over the past 16 years, but i can assure you, the sky is not falling."

Okay, that wasn't really as interesting as much as it was long and didn't include any pictures to keep our attention but Billings seems really smart--he juggles rubiks cubes for crying out loud--so we'll take his word for it that bots aren't going to bring down online poker anytime soon.