saabpo bot- How come Party software didn't catch it immediately?

[AA suited]

Party software has caught other players using other bots.

So how come it didnt catch this bot?

[eastbay]

[ QUOTE ]
Party software has caught other players using other bots.

So how come it didnt catch this bot?

[/ QUOTE ]

It is presumably a custom bot, not a commercial bot for which they already have experience how to detect.

eastbay

[elonkra]

Well, here's my admittedly dumb but somewhat related question:

How the F does a bot work (with regards to input of player action on a given hand and registration and the like? And depending on the answer to that, I have the same question as the original poster: Shouldn't these be easy to guard against?

[eastbay]

[ QUOTE ]
Well, here's my admittedly dumb but somewhat related question:

How the F does a bot work (with regards to input of player action on a given hand and registration and the like?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not going to give a tutorial and I hope no one else does either.

[ QUOTE ]

And depending on the answer to that, I have the same question as the original poster: Shouldn't these be easy to guard against?

[/ QUOTE ]

Absolutely not. A sufficiently clever author can make it essentially impossible.

eastbay

[ChrisV]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Well, here's my admittedly dumb but somewhat related question:

How the F does a bot work (with regards to input of player action on a given hand and registration and the like?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not going to give a tutorial and I hope no one else does either.

[/ QUOTE ]

lol - you're afraid that a "Win32 API hooks for dummies" post here will cause a rash of casual programmers here to write world-beating bots? Not likely.

For the original poster: essentially bots use the client the same way you do. Under the Windows OS, a window and its components can be queried for information - for example, i can ask what the text is that is currently being displayed in the chat box of a table window. I can then click an appropriate button by invoking a mouse click in the area of the window where the button appears.

In the long run defeating these kind of programs is pretty difficult because the Party client is not notified by the OS that its windows are being queried. As far as I know all you can do to detect bots in general is look for strange patterns - e.g. the mouse clicking the exact same point on the button every time.

The only way Party caught WinHoldem users en masse was by secretly taking a screenshot of their desktops and uploading it to the Party servers, where it was examined by staff to see whether the WinHoldem application was running.

[Jake (The Snake)]

do we have an update from the guys who emailed party yet?

[Phil Van Sexton]

[ QUOTE ]
for example, i can ask what the text is that is currently being displayed in the chat box of a table window. I can then click an appropriate button by invoking a mouse click in the area of the window where the button appears.

In the long run defeating these kind of programs is pretty difficult because the Party client is not notified by the OS that its windows are being queried.

[/ QUOTE ]

I find it hard to believe that they can't stop this. Why not renderer the whole UI as an image instead of using windows controls?

Seriously, if they know the bots are parsing the text area, why do they keep using a text area to display the status?

Come on, they control the client and can update it at will to break any bot that is looking for certain controls in certain locations. Sure, the bot could be updated, but this can be quite a nuisance to bot developers.

[spentrent]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
for example, i can ask what the text is that is currently being displayed in the chat box of a table window. I can then click an appropriate button by invoking a mouse click in the area of the window where the button appears.

In the long run defeating these kind of programs is pretty difficult because the Party client is not notified by the OS that its windows are being queried.

[/ QUOTE ]

I find it hard to believe that they can't stop this. Why not renderer the whole UI as an image instead of using windows controls?

Seriously, if they know the bots are parsing the text area, why do they keep using a text area to display the status?

Come on, they control the client and can update it at will to break any bot that is looking for certain controls in certain locations. Sure, the bot could be updated, but this can be quite a nuisance to bot developers.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm no expert but I think OCR technology is sufficient technology to read the text from an image.

[eastbay]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
for example, i can ask what the text is that is currently being displayed in the chat box of a table window. I can then click an appropriate button by invoking a mouse click in the area of the window where the button appears.

In the long run defeating these kind of programs is pretty difficult because the Party client is not notified by the OS that its windows are being queried.

[/ QUOTE ]

I find it hard to believe that they can't stop this. Why not renderer the whole UI as an image instead of using windows controls?

Seriously, if they know the bots are parsing the text area, why do they keep using a text area to display the status?

Come on, they control the client and can update it at will to break any bot that is looking for certain controls in certain locations. Sure, the bot could be updated, but this can be quite a nuisance to bot developers.

[/ QUOTE ]

Agree 100%, but updating their client is expensive a big risk for introducing new problems.

They will only do this when they are certain their bottom line is being affected. That's a long way off.

eastbay

[eastbay]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Well, here's my admittedly dumb but somewhat related question:

How the F does a bot work (with regards to input of player action on a given hand and registration and the like?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not going to give a tutorial and I hope no one else does either.

[/ QUOTE ]

lol - you're afraid that a "Win32 API hooks for dummies" post here will cause a rash of casual programmers here to write world-beating bots? Not likely.


[/ QUOTE ]

No. And that's not why I'm staying mum. (and no, I haven't written a bot and won't unless TOS are changed.)

eastbay

[david050173]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
for example, i can ask what the text is that is currently being displayed in the chat box of a table window. I can then click an appropriate button by invoking a mouse click in the area of the window where the button appears.

In the long run defeating these kind of programs is pretty difficult because the Party client is not notified by the OS that its windows are being queried.

[/ QUOTE ]

I find it hard to believe that they can't stop this. Why not renderer the whole UI as an image instead of using windows controls?

Seriously, if they know the bots are parsing the text area, why do they keep using a text area to display the status?

Come on, they control the client and can update it at will to break any bot that is looking for certain controls in certain locations. Sure, the bot could be updated, but this can be quite a nuisance to bot developers.

[/ QUOTE ]

If there is money to be made, the bot writer will always stay one step ahead. Eventually you will end up with the bot running on a seperate computer using a special video and keyboard driver.

If you are really concerned about bots, you should be playing a formulatic game.

[mosch]

[ QUOTE ]

I find it hard to believe that they can't stop this. Why not renderer the whole UI as an image instead of using windows controls?

[/ QUOTE ]

They can't stop it. I'm saying this as somebody with a background in computing and security.

You need to be able to see your cards, the bets that have been made, and then choose an action. This optical recognition task is made easier by the fact that there is a very limited set of information that needs to be detected, and it is extremely predictable for what are valid values.

All that the rooms can do is add some stumbling blocks. The fact remains that any sufficiently motivated programmer can make a bot, and if they're not stupidly greedy, they'll get away with it, too.

The fortunate thing is that the hard part of writing a bot isn't designing an undetectable interface... that's niggly, but not hard. The hard part is making sure it plays well enough to pay back the time investment required to build a high quality bot.

[d1sterbd]

I don't think this can be stopped either. However, I am really not worried about it too much because I mostly play NL, and I think that it would be much more difficult to write a bot for that. Even if it can be done, I don't see why someone would try when they could more easily write one for limit. I am more worried about collusion. I know they can't stop that either. The main problem is that these discussions can scare some people away from internet poker.

[Phil Van Sexton]

[ QUOTE ]
If there is money to be made, the bot writer will always stay one step ahead.

[/ QUOTE ]

My point was that party can continually change their interface to break the bots. There is no way to stay one step ahead. The bot writer will always be 1 step behind.

[ QUOTE ]
Eventually you will end up with the bot running on a seperate computer using a special video and keyboard driver.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is already being done.

[skovsende]

[ QUOTE ]

My point was that party can continually change their interface to break the bots. There is no way to stay one step ahead. The bot writer will always be 1 step behind.


[/ QUOTE ]

And how do you think normal customers would react to that?

If there is something noone likes is it a change in userinterface.

Besides - it wouldnt be THAT big a problem to the botwriter anyway!

[Phil Van Sexton]

[ QUOTE ]
They can't stop it.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's not what I was saying. I just said they could break the current bots by changing how they render the interface. If you read my post, my last line was "Sure, the bot could be updated, but this can be quite a nuisance to bot developers."

[ QUOTE ]
I'm saying this as somebody with a background in computing and security.

[/ QUOTE ]

Half the people on this board could write a bot, so you aren't really saying anything we don't already know.

I'm just saying that it would relatively easy to make the life of a bot developer very difficult. We all know it can't be stopped.

Many pieces of software allow the user to choose the "skin" they want to see as their UI. Once the party client supported this, the interface could be changed quite easily going forward. Changing the skin does not require the user to download a new client, or even to restart. If party support suspected a bot, they could even tell the client to change skins and see if the bot stopped working.

If they use their imagination, they could certain program honeypots to catch bots (ie clicking the same place every time). Again, the bot writer will be able to react, but not before Party has seized their bankroll.


If their bot keeps breaking every day and they periodically get caught and lose their bankroll, I don't think very many people are going to keep writing bots. It wouldn't be impossible, just very impractical.

[Phil Van Sexton]

[ QUOTE ]
And how do you think normal customers would react to that?

If there is something noone likes is it a change in userinterface.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good point. I'm hopeful that they can make relatively minor changes to the UI that break the bots, but are barely noticeable to human users. Alternatively, they could only change the UI for users with suspicious behavior.




[ QUOTE ]
Besides - it wouldnt be THAT big a problem to the botwriter anyway!

[/ QUOTE ]

A bot writer wants to write a bot and let it run while he sleeps. He doesn't want to continually update the UI parsing code. Furthermore, Party could detect bots by changing the interface at runtime and seeing if a suspicious user suddenly stopped playing. Once caught, their bankroll would be confiscated, and this is a big problem.

[Scuba Chuck]

Is it just me, or do other members have this visual of a silver-humanoid looking robot sitting at a computer, with arms reaching forward to the keyboard, and face viewing the monitor? (Battlestar Gallactica style) /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[benfranklin]

[ QUOTE ]
Is it just me, or do other members have this visual of a silver-humanoid looking robot sitting at a computer, with arms reaching forward to the keyboard, and face viewing the monitor? (Battlestar Gallactica style) /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

I was thinking more of R2D2, with a direct cable link into the USB port.

[spentrent]

[ QUOTE ]
Is it just me, or do other members have this visual of a silver-humanoid looking robot sitting at a computer, with arms reaching forward to the keyboard, and face viewing the monitor? (Battlestar Gallactica style) /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

Chuck, my visual is PimpBot5000 from Conan O'Brien... http://www.saabpo.com

I had to make a stupid site to commemorate this important milestone in the history of online poker /images/graemlins/wink.gif. It's a fake ad for an eBook by saabpo, with lame attempts at parodying Sklanksy (be sure to read the sample chapters).

And dammit I spent a lot of time on that fake book cover /images/graemlins/wink.gif.

[Scuba Chuck]

[ QUOTE ]
I was thinking more of R2D2, with a direct cable link into the USB port.

[/ QUOTE ]

OOOhhh. Great idea. Though, we are in the age of wireless, so, per Empire Strikes back on the Jabba the Hut barge, R2D2 is capable of serving drinks too. Yeah, you're idea is better.

[david050173]

Skins would not effect a bot. It also totally ruins the user experience in that you are going to start hitting the wrong button (raise instead of fold) a lot more often since your muscle memory is going to be all screwed up.

Besides the bot could just beep when this happens and have its master reconfigure everything. Sure this means it can't play while you sleep but it can play 16 tables while you watch tv.

This whole thing has played out before in the computer world in things like piracys, chat protocol interoperability and a few others. General the advantage lays in the people attacking the system.

If the bot writer is stupid (ie the bot plays 24/7 for a month straight and is an all in bot) it is going to be easy to spot. Are you going to suspect a player who plays decently post flop, and has great bubble skills, adapts to different situations, plays the same hand slightly differently each time, and enages in limited chat (nh, vnh, ty) of being a bot? What if the owner is there chatting away on 32 different tables while playing winning poker?

I should mention that I think writing a bot that plays good NL sngs is not a weekend project. Those chess programs that crush grandmasters are many man years of dedicate work. If someone spent the same time writing a poker bot I would expect to get somewhat results (tie it will struggles against the top couple percent but crush the rest of the world)

Finally lets say instead of making an automated bot. Instead I just write a program that advises you how to play. How do you stop that program? Sure it can't run unattended but if it makes a random person into Gigabet, will those games still be profitable to play?

[Phil Van Sexton]

Basically, you are saying "we can't stop all bots, so don't even bother trying." This is silly. I can think of dozens of ways to make it really annoying for the bot writer. There are also many ways to catch them (like Party taking screen shots of your desktop).

Don't bother responding that bot writer can just run the bot on another computer and avoid the screenshots and process lists, I already know this. The point is that many people got busted by the screenshots. Sure they can adapt, but how many times are you going to get your bankroll seized before bot building becomes -EV?

[ QUOTE ]
Skins would not effect a bot. It also totally ruins the user experience in that you are going to start hitting the wrong button (raise instead of fold) a lot more often since your muscle memory is going to be all screwed up.

[/ QUOTE ]

First, this would affect the bots. Secondly, it could be done in less invasive ways if you took 10 seconds to think about it. For example, changing the sign-on screen for SnGs (actually they should do that anyway).

[ QUOTE ]
This whole thing has played out before in the computer world in things like piracys, chat protocol interoperability and a few others. General the advantage lays in the people attacking the system.

[/ QUOTE ]

Did these people have money on deposit at the servers they were attacking?

[ QUOTE ]
Finally lets say instead of making an automated bot. Instead I just write a program that advises you how to play. How do you stop that program? Sure it can't run unattended but if it makes a random person into Gigabet, will those games still be profitable to play?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes. By making it hard to create and maintain a bot, fewer people will do it. By catching and bankrupting a couple cheaters, even fewer will want to try it. Finally, by forcing a person to sit and play themselves, the hours and number of tables that they play at will be limited compared to automated bots.

At this point, you are talking about a couple of really bored programmers playing a couple hours a day. This will hardly have an impact in the party ocean, IMO.

[The Yugoslavian]

[ QUOTE ]
if it makes a random person into Gigabet, will those games still be profitable to play?

[/ QUOTE ]

Ummm yeah. Good luck with that. Gigabet's code is propreitary and guarded more heavily than our nuclear weapon launch codes.

/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Yugoslav
(who has been *this* close to finding out the hard way)

[david050173]

[ QUOTE ]

Yes. By making it hard to create and maintain a bot, fewer people will do it. By catching and bankrupting a couple cheaters, even fewer will want to try it. Finally, by forcing a person to sit and play themselves, the hours and number of tables that they play at will be limited compared to automated bots.

At this point, you are talking about a couple of really bored programmers playing a couple hours a day. This will hardly have an impact in the party ocean, IMO.

[/ QUOTE ]


No I am talking about a bot writer selling a 50 dollar package and 10000 people buying it so they can make 500 bucks an hour playing poker. Hell, maybe I give the program away for free as long as they sign up as an affliate of mine (ok this would be too easy to party to detect but imagine the cash flow). If all I had to do was enter actions, I am sure I could play 32 tables at once.

I expect party and others to do basic bot detection. I don't expect them to go to super extremes. I expect they are going to count on customers to be the bot detection layer. Cheaper for them.

Bots are sort of like collusion and team playing. It is something you should worry about, but it should keep you up at night right now.

[Scuba Chuck]

Well, I had no intention of posting on this thread because I don't fear bots, and I don't intend on building one (cos I don't know how, and I don't care to.)

but then I came across this on google today, when I typed in party poker

http://www.pokerbot-pro.com/

From what I can tell, this ad pays google to make sure it appears at the top right corner of the page.

Who is this David Glazen guy?

[waffle]

I saw this site a few weeks ago.

[ QUOTE ]
That is why I am going to take down this web site on March 3, 2005 and never offer the PokerBot Pro to the public again.

[/ QUOTE ]

When I saw it, it said the exact same thing except it said he was taking the website down sometime in February. Shrewd.

[skovsende]

[ QUOTE ]

Good point. I'm hopeful that they can make relatively minor changes to the UI that break the bots, but are barely noticeable to human users.


[/ QUOTE ]

As long as the bot uses screen scraping, that would be hard(impossible?) to accomplice, i would think.

[ QUOTE ]

A bot writer wants to write a bot and let it run while he sleeps. He doesn't want to continually update the UI parsing code. Furthermore, Party could detect bots by changing the interface at runtime and seeing if a suspicious user suddenly stopped playing. Once caught, their bankroll would be confiscated, and this is a big problem.

[/ QUOTE ]

If one REALLY wants to do something untraceable - reverse engineer the protocol, and partypoker could do pretty much everything without being able to catch you.

And let the bot run through a socks proxy and change proxy every week(lots of open proxies out there).

Bottomline - if you really wants to make a bot - its possible. The hard thing in my eyes is to make one that any 2+2'er wouldnt notice, and find its weaknesses.

[skovsende]

[ QUOTE ]

http://www.pokerbot-pro.com/


[/ QUOTE ]

Looks more like a scam than a pokerbot to me /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Its a lot harder to write a good pokerbot than to scam stupid people /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[Scuba Chuck]

[ QUOTE ]
Bottomline - if you really wants to make a bot - its possible. The hard thing in my eyes is to make one that any 2+2'er wouldnt notice, and find its weaknesses.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think you give us too much respect. How about some 2+2ers...