More Paradise Poker Paranoia

I have started playing at Paradise. Like most people I am concerned about possible cheating. A friend says I absolutely need a firewall. He says that he has installed a series of programs on his computer that tell him if someone is trying to hack into his computer while he is playing to get screen shots. He says he has had 5 or 6 attempts from people to hack his computer. I don't know much about firewalls, or the software necessary to hack into other people's computers. Is this really a problem at paradise or is my friend just paranoid? Do any of you more computer literate players use protective software, and have you detected hacking attempts?


As far as my online experience has gone so far, I am up (but not enough hours played yet to really tell anything). I have witnessed the "irregularities" at paradise firsthand. I have seen the ridiculous suckouts and the peculiar flops. It seems to me like players are flopping good hands too often. I seems like the number of good hands being made/dealt are non-random. I have seen more sets turned and rivered than I have ever seen in the casino. The game seems skewed against the raisers. The guy raising with AK flops an ace and has his heads-up preflop opponent with 22 flops a set. Obviously PP would benefit from "massaging" the shuffle to generate more action. This type of phenomenon seems randomly distributed, that is to say, everyone gains/loses equally, only the pots are bigger. I don't think it would really affect a good player's expectation much. JMHO.

A firewall will not help you not be cheated at PP. If you are running Windows, anyone attempting to see your cards would need to have already infected your computer with a virus. There isn't anything they can do in Windows because there isn't any ability to run things remotely. Hence, if your computer is not infected with the virus, you do not need a firewall, and if your computer is infected with the virus, as firewall will provide minimal protection at best. But, like I said below, if you have this virus, poker at paradise is not the biggest of your worries.

i'm not the best with computers. actually i know close to nothing. how can i detect and get rid of this virus? thanks.


PG

I don't know any of the specifics about the virus, but getting an updated virus scanner is about the best you can. If you get the latest version of MacAfee it will be able to detect all the viruses which the makers know about. Again, I don't know enough about the screen viewing virus to be sure that it can be detected and destroyed, but if it can, then McAfee can probably do it.

would reformatting my hard drive erase any and all viruses?


PG

uhh, yes, but it would also erase everything else...

Will Norton Antivirus detect this virus? I haven't updated my Norton files for sometime, is this virus a recent one that will need updating to detect?


Thanks.

You probably will have to update Norton, though as I said in my reply to PG, I don't know. If you get the latest version of Norton Antivirus, and it doesn't find anything, you can be reasonably sure that the virus is not on your computer.

Norton Anti-Virus (and I'm sure the other major ones too) have a LiveUpdate feature that will every few days retrive the newest virus definitions so you will have up to date protection against viruses. You should run a virus scanner even if you don't play poker!


About firewalls, there's some good ones like ZoneAlarm, and Norton Internet Security. ZoneAlarm has a free version.


- Tony

Because of the Code Red Worm, all computers on the Internet are regularly getting probed. My home firewall shows around 100 probes in the last 24 hours. Most of these probes are the Code Red Worm looking for a Win2k or NT machines running the Microsoft IIS web server. Since I am running Win98 and do not run a web server, these probes are completely harmless, even without a firewall. A few of the probes are looking for some remote control Trojan virus like Sub7 or BackOrifice. I don't have these Trojans on my machine, so these probes are completely harmless.


These probes of your computer could be described as "attempts to hack into your computer". Unless you have gotten your computer infected with one of the Trojan viruses or are running the Microsoft IIS web server on NT or Win2k and have not installed the security patch, you don't have much to worry about.


As Lenny indicated above good updated anti-virus software is your best security precaution.