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"Of the 10% remaining, it only takes .1% of them with programming knowledge to decide to sniff the IP packets and write a program that mines on a and displays status on a separate system."
if this is actually possible I'm never playing online poker again. It almost certainly isn't..
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Possible? Yea anything is possible. Doable in our lifetime, yea probably. Worth the effort, not likely.
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Christ, it's trivial for anyone with IP traffic knowledge (and there's plenty). There are packet sniffers freely available.
You simply have a system A watch traffic on the network and datamine. You play on system B on the same network. You know the reason your boss could track EVERY thing you do on the web at work? Because all that info flies over the network. It's not like you have some sort of private line for your data.
God awful trivial. Again, you just need ONE motivated engineer to figure out the packet structure. He then just sells/gives the app to everyone else just like the guy that made PokerTracker did.
Then you get the arms race of Party encrypting packets, rotating keys, etc, and we'll see if the datamining engineers want to try to keep up with it.
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You guys realize that the network traffic between the poker clients and their servers is encrypted right? It's not as "trivial" as you might think.
There's a reason why your credit card information is safe when you submit it over a secure connection. This stuff isn't easy to crack, even if you have access to the network packets.
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It's not really difficult either, just time consuming. But just as you state, that's not why your credit card is secure. In a routed network you only have access to your own packets anyway. In order to packet sniff the masses for credit cards you have to hack your way into a router on an ISP's network (or something similar) before you can even start trying to decrypt anything. And most ISP's worth doing this to are pretty good at preventing it. Good enough to send hackers looking somewhere easier - like some 2nd or 3rd tier ecom site's customer database for instance.
You have all the access to your OWN packets you could possibly want or need which is what the poster who started this all really meant IMO - not sniffing OTHER people's packets, but the ones that were legitimately sent to you.
In any event, image recognition would be easier anyway, particularly since you can replace the images of the cards with something easy to recognize as someone else already pointed out.
And a second system is hardly necessary. Virtual PC software is
readily available.