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Computerized Betting System Proves Vulnerable
count3r writes "A front page article in today's New York Times reports that an employee of Autotote has been fired for (allegedly) hacking the system responsible for 65% of all horseracing bets in North America. The caper, if it is indeed a caper, resulted in a series of six bets that paid a total of $3,000,000 in last Saturday's Breeders' Cup."
WHy not just hit them up for several thou a week? Like theyre not gonna notice a 3,000,000 blip.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
If they hadn't tried to hoover it all at once they could have kept it going for years... but then, criminals are by definition stupid, so there ya go.
DRM will be our savior.....
Oh wait, he required that kind of access to do his job? So DRM wouldn't have helped. What do you mean that most hacks are inside jobs?
I guess he was to stupid to understand the odds on normal betting, so what do you expect?
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
when people used to give horses steroids so that they would win their bets. All this new technology is confusing!
Or why don't we look at one of the many articles that don't require registration. Darn NYTimes.
I will never understand how people come up with good, well thought out crime plans, and then totally screw up the execution by rushing things or bring too much attention to the project. Just dumb.
Would this guy have been praised as a hero if he'd gotten away with it?
if people win, it means they cheat.
if cd sales are down, it means piracy.
if something is wrong, blame someone else.
maybe we should BLAME CANADA! for EVERYTHING!
Buttloads of $ vs. determined individual: vulnerability.
Someone will always find a way to steal and no matter how good your security, when you have the human element on the inside, you are vulnerable. That's why auditing to detect theft is as important as securing against it.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
see what happens when you legalize it??? all these crooks get in and screw it over.
Nah, it can't be vulnerable. Online betting is trustworthy. Why, as soon as I get my bonus back from the Nigerian Petroleum Company, I'm going online to bet on the ponies!
Some posts seem to be some confused about what they did. The scheme was simply to change one guy's (electronically registered) bettings after the race was over, with the help of an insider.
Tor
Until a little over a year ago, I was employed at a company that wrote gambling software for sports betting houses. It is big business, let me tell you. :) If anyone has any questions, fire away and I'll answer them.
I never put any backdoor code into anything I submitted but it would have been very easy to do so. We had well over 300,000 lines of code and very little of it was audited. The only problem would have been getting the backdoor in without other programmers noticing as everyone was responsible for different areas. Still, I know it could have been done, I can picture exactly what it would have taken to do so.
Would it have been noticed? Possibly eventually, though I have my doubts. Apparently, there was a bug in our code for one of the complex bet types. It ended up _always_ overpaying a specific complex winning bet type by $1. That is, it always rounded up to the next dollar instead of down and this bug went undetected for YEARS.
All the code was written in VB and we worked crazy amounts of overtime ALL the time. Additionally, the 'business experts' could never get their act in gear and agree to how things should work. I ended up resigning my position.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
What if a hacker steals from someones children?
:)
We are all someones child after all
no sig.
"I'll burn the place down, that'll show them...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
wont somebody please think of the children.
You obviously know nothing about the horse racing industry. While there may be some shady characters out there, most people in the scene are just your average blokes who are hoping to win a couple bets while at the racetrack. Those are the guys who eventually end up losing because of people who cheat the system.
face it, you're a reactionary fascist blinded by propoganda
If it turns out to be cheating, it just goes to show what happens when you want too much too soon. You know, just winning $1,000 or $10,000 probably wouldn't have raised an eyebrow.
And, I wonder how often this bet hits? Technically, the bet was really picking the winner or 4 straight races, plus betting on every horse in next 2. I won a trifecta once that paid a cool grand. To think, if I'd only tried for one more......
If they're guilty, they're idiots.
A lot of people make a lot of money on internet gambling sites without breaking a single law. The people who play online poker suck so bad compared to professional poker players that it is like printing money for anyone who plays the game seriously. I suck which is why I don't play, but a lot of people are willing to give up there hard earned money to a redneck who has played poker since before he could write.
It may not get you $3M, but they won't have to work anymore, and they don't get put in FPMA prison.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
This is, just as the article said, a misuse of power, rather than a skillful hack. If I remember, isn't hacking usually prosecuted over the fact that the person obtained illegal access by knowingly circumventing security measures? He was given clearance as part of his job; he misused his security clearance, he didn't gain unauthorized access.
In any case, I'm surprised that ANYONE has the access to modify bets. Shouldn't that info be encrypted or protected or something, kind of like how your Bank's customer service rep can't look up your pin, but can only reset it to a new pin?
$8.95/mo web hosting
Well, they do want some registration stuff, but nothing identifiable to you.
Best Slashdot Co
See that, someone wins a tough bet with a huge payout and they immediately call foul play so they dont have to pay.
Gee i *bet* online casinos work the same way...
Is it a new business model?
1. Have a randomly bad day in the gambling biz.
2. Blame it on some sap and refuse to pay up.
3. PROFIT!!!
Here in Alberta, Canada we have VLTs (Video Lottery Terminals) that let you play a number of different card games and other assorted forms of gambling on a touch-screen terminal. They're a HUGE profit center for the pubs and bars that host them, and for the provincial government. If I were a VLT programmer of questionable moral character, it would be awfully tempting to code a backdoor triggered by some easter egg-type series of screen touches that would let me score a couple hundred dollars at each terminal.
Anybody ever heard of anything like this happening in real life? As an earlier poster said, if you kept your take down to a couple thousand a week, I think it would be pretty unlikely you'd get caught.
I have to believe you're kidding (Think about the children. THE CHILDREN!!!!).
However, I wanted to point out that if it turns out to be a scam, the $3M is going to be redistributed to other winners (like people who only hit on 5 races). If this was theft, it was theft from other folk who made bets.
If I could consistently (more than 50%) pick the winner of any race I'd be a wealthy man!
To pick 4 winners in a row, either damn lucky or I took a peek into the future!
They want us to vote online?
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
Fortunately, all of those systems are closed, so I'm sure that security was motto number 1.
Of course, motto number 2 was "Ignore motto number 1".
Speaking of gambling, won't it be great when elections are turned over to computers. People honestly think things like online voting will deliver them from human vices like cheating in or just disrupting elections, by hackers or insiders.
Beware!
resulted in a series of six bets
Was was reading this yesterday, it's actually interesting. It wasn't six bets, it was one bet on six consecutive races (called a Pick 6, apparently). The ticket cost over a grand just to purchase.
Apparently, the winning ticket including the first 4 race winners, followed by picking every horse in the field for the 5th and 6th races. This was suspicious because the betting management company allows the bets to be submitted during simulcasting through the end of the 4th race to prevent system congestion, according to the article.
The theory is that the employee submitted a fixed bet at the end of the 4th race. The ticketholder himself, apparently unrelated to the employee who is under investigation for fraud, claims that he is innocent, and is telling the company to put up some evidence or give him his 3 mils.
I dunno about you, but I do detect a strong odor of fish. On the other hand, if the lottery hit for this guy and he is legit, more power to him.
Fortunately, such a thing could never happen with electronic voting machines.
Right?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Tug on Superman's cape.
Spit into the wind.
Rip off the NY mafia to the tune of $3,000,000.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
The same thing happenes when the mob runs things. Its just instead of it making it into the paper as a "hacker" story, it would wind up in the paper as "Headless Body Found in East River".
Worker Dismissed as Inquiry Widens Into Big Racing Bet
By JOE DRAPE
As the authorities investigated whether an exotic bet worth $3 million on last Saturday's Breeders' Cup horse races was rigged, the company that processed the wager said yesterday that it had fired a "rogue software engineer" who exploited a weakness in its system.
The company, Scientific Games Corporation of New York, said it had turned over the employee's name and evidence of potential wrongdoing to the state police and state wagering officials.
The employee attended Drexel University in Philadelphia with the winner of the bet, racing officials and a state investigator said.
The head of the company, Lorne Weil, said the worker had the access and know-how to breach the system run by the company's subsidiary Autotote, which processes 65 percent of racing wagers in North America.
Industry and law enforcement officials said that the F.B.I. had joined the police and the New York State Racing and Wagering Board in the inquiry of the wager, known as a pick six, which requires bettors to pick winners in six straight races. Payoff on the bet, made through the Catskill Off-Track Betting hub by telephone from Baltimore, has been held up.
Investigators are also looking into whether there have been questionable payoffs at other tracks. "This goes beyond one afternoon and the East Coast," said an investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Though Mr. Weil tried to calm investors in his conference call yesterday, his disclosures pointed up the vulnerability of the $14.5 billion-a-year betting industry for which consumer confidence is crucial.
As racing has become more reliant on off-track and telephone betting, it is also depending more on a network of computers that link tracks and off-track sites. If the systems are proved flawed, or susceptible to manipulation, it could scare off bettors worried about the integrity of the process.
"There needs to be total review of the system so everyone can feel good and see that these things are not widespread," said Bill Nader, a New York Racing Association vice president. "Without integrity in the way a wager is processed, we don't have a sport."
The case in question involves the pick six bet on the last six races of the Breeders' Cup, horse racing's season-ending championship. The entire winning pool was held by Derrick Davis, a 29-year-old Maryland man who made the bets by phone.
Investigators are looking into whether the computer system was manipulated so that a bet made after several races had been run would appear to have been made beforehand.
Though Mr. Weil did not name the dismissed employee, the state investigator and racing officials identified him as Chris Harn, 29, who worked in Autotote's offices in Newark, Del.
Mr. Davis owns a Baltimore-based computer networking business, Utopian Networks Inc., but said yesterday that he was a knowledgeable bettor whose winning tickets were legitimate. "I didn't do anything wrong here," he said, refusing to elaborate and referring questions to his Baltimore lawyer, Steven A. Allen. Mr. Allen said his client was cooperating with the authorities and had nothing to hide.
"He is caught in the middle of a maelstrom," Mr. Allen said. "As far as he's concerned, he made a legitimate bet. The race was run, and he won, and he should have received his payoff. And that should have been the end of it. Now, instead, there's an investigation, people are making a variety of wild accusations, and his reputation is being sullied for no good reason."
Thomas Davis, Derrick's father, said his son grew up in Baltimore and attended engineering school in Pennsylvania, but would not be more specific. "I just think it's like the equivalent of his hitting the lottery," the father said. "I know in the bottom of my heart that it's a legitimate bet."
Stacy Clifford, a spokeswoman for the state wagering board, would not comment on the personnel involved in the investigation or its progress.
"The board routinely involves other organizations in its investigations and will involve law enforcement if it feels appropriate," she said. "They fired this person in connection with what happened Saturday, and since we're investigating what happened Saturday, we're certainly looking into it."
What started the investigation last Sunday was the configuration of the winning tickets and that they belonged to one bettor, Mr. Davis, who called his bets in by phone to the Catskill OTB hub, one of five regional corporations that, with New York City OTB, handle off-track bets in New York.
The winning tickets featured "singles," or races with only one horse selected, in the first four legs of the ticket, and then every horse in the final two races. On a $2 ticket, those combinations and strategy cost $192.
Mr. Davis bet a $12 pick-six ticket, or played that exact combination six separate times, costing him $1,152. It was a highly unusual strategy for betting the pick six -- horseplayers like to cover as many combinations as possible -- and the configuration raised suspicions of New York Racing Association officials, who alerted Breeders' Cup Ltd. and the state wagering board.
Mr. Davis had opened the Catskill OTB account within two weeks of the Breeders' Cup, had deposited money on five occasions -- four increments of $500 and one of $250 -- but had not made a bet until that pick six, according to investigative sources.
The six winning tickets were each worth $428,392. In addition, by including every horse in the last two races, the bettor collected 108 of the 186 consolation payoffs for hitting five of six winners; each consolation ticket was worth $4,606.20.
After an initial review on Monday, officials for Autotote and Catskill OTB said the tickets were recorded about 20 minutes before the first leg and appeared legitimate. But after further review, Mr. Weil said, the company determined that the fired employee had taken advantage of a weakness in the processing of bets.
While the tickets were logged and totaled at satellite sites such as Catskill OTB, they were not transferred to the host site, Arlington Park outside Chicago, until after the fifth race when the exact bets were verified. In this state of limbo, Mr. Weil said, the employee, who had the password to the data system, was able to alter the ticket after the results of the first four races of the pick six were known.
When Scientific Games announced the firing, trading in its stock was suspended on Nasdaq for more than 20 minutes. The stock closed at $7.62, down 57 cents. Mr. Weil maintained he was confident Autotote's systems were impenetrable to outside hackers.
"I think people see this for what it is -- a rogue individual bound and determined to exploit the only weak link we see in the system so far," he said.
What were the odds of that?
.
.
.
Ok, really bad, I know....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have several friends who work for Autotote (as well as some who work for Amtote) and they're all laughing their asses off over this whole thing; especially the media coverage.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
There simply must be a partial cents scam available for this application
The fact is that implementing a gaming system is a nightmare, be it on the ground or in the air. IMHO, quite a bit more difficult than point of sale or banking systems. In addition to being secure, it's gotta be completely fail safe (so if a passenger's terminal goes down seconds after a jackpot he won't loose his winnings and take it out on the cabin crew). Also, it's going to be transaction heavy - hundreds of smaller, individual bets over a gambling session as opposed to, say, a higher end credit card transaction every minute at a department store cash register. If you add in the fact that gambling is a potentially addictive activity that piques the interest of organized crime, you have a recipe for any disaffected insider to slip in hacks and back doors.
On the whole, I'm not surprised that someone corrupted a gambling system. I'm just surprised that this doesn't make the newspaper more often.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Also, the ocean is wet, and there is porn on the internet.
Just so you know.
Come on, you know you want to do it!
Good point and all.
Scott.
-B
I'm trying to figure out why people think computerized betting is any more vulnerable to fraud than the non-computerized variety.
The Breeder's Cup incident was an inside job! There have been numerous Casino incidents where employees have tried to scam their employers. A security system is only as good as the people with whom the system is entrusted. This is true for physical security as well as computer security.
Lastly, criminals are not, inherently, stupid. It only seems like that as the stupid ones are the ones that usually get caught. Borrowing from Kaiser Sousay (Kevin Spacey) in Usual Suspects : the greatest trick a master criminal has ever pulled is convincing the world that a crime has not been committed.
This guy had better be very careful in the next few years, no matter what happens in court - the sort of folks who are involved in gambling are not known for taking such matters lying down.
He may very well wake up one morning with a horse's head in his bed.
Or more probably, wake up to that particular clammy feeling one gets from freshly mixed cement around one's body....
www.eFax.com are spammers
I currently go to Drexel.
Drexel recently merged their CS major with the engineering school. I didn't know what to think. For all of you who don't know, Drexel university is a very business oriented school. It seems then that the desire for money simply becomes more and more.
Anyone who posts about bad moderation are themselves off-topic and should be moderated accordingly.
If you register (no verification), you can hear the Scientific Games CEO do damage control: Conference Call
?sp
In other news, shortly after being dismissed the former employee had an unfortunate accident resulting in the breaking of both his kneecaps.
I bet the average geek would think a lot harder about crossing Vinnie, and risking death, than just risking a little jail time.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Two relavent bits of info:
1) They fired the QA department due to cutbacks over a year ago.
2) There is no "Production Control" group. The same people who develop the apps support them (with little to no oversight). They have never had a way of preventing this type of fix.
the employee was found floating in the East River.
One time I found santa lying dead in the living room. I asked my dad why santa was dead and he said: "Son... Sometimes.. Santa gotta get whacked."
It's organized crime that's going to get him. Revenge.
I see evidence that this guy is pretty lame - he's dumb enough to screw up a good scam his first time out by shooting for the moon. We can't assume that a novice is the first person to find this scam, but AutoTote indicates he's the first to be caught.
I'll wager dollars to doughnuts that he's just closed the loop on a lucrative betting system being utilized by any number of "organized" gamblers, and will be hearing from a guy named Vito in the near future.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
It was not a matter of just getting one lucky bet right.
In the Pick-6 scheme, you get a jumbo prize if you pick all 6 winners correctly.
What this guy did was buy a number of bets - each for $12 (that's probably all he had available). In each of the bets, the winners of the first 4 races were the same and he chose every possible combination for the winners of the last 2 races. Sounds like he knew who was winning the first 4 races and bet on every possible outcome for the last 2.
Mmmm.. Donuts
It was a relatively expensive and complicated bet based on the cumulative outcome of six separate races... and he placed the exact same bet six times.
Once you've done that, putting a flashing marquee on your front lawn that reads "cheating the OTB out of millions of dollars is my very smart, infallible plan" is officially redundant.
So from the article we can deduce there is a disconnect between the actual placing of the bet to the actual determination of a payoff. What they need is a chain-of-evidence system, so that bet's are placed (stored securely), once the race is closed for betting, the records should be posted to a new server (stored securely), then finally at payoff, the two records should be verified to have have been tampered with. Of course, this Engineer could have known both databases, but in this case you could insure no one person has rights to both databases. Of course a conspiracy of two is possible. My final problem with this is what about a one-way hash on these things: hasn't Kumar in India ever read about database encryption, why should an Engineer be allowed to see the plain-text record anyway? Otherwise you set HORSE_NBR = 5 (High Chapperal).
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
What I can't figure out is how he would know all 4 of the winners in the first four. Everyone has just glanced over this detail. Saying "he knew the outcome ahead of time" is absurd! Unless the computer they had access to contained a script (this horse wins in the first...) and horse racing is as fake as WWE I'm still left in shock. Now if the guy had someone modify the bets AFTER the races that's another thing all together.
I am sure you are perfectly right in that it is a royal pain in the butt to get an inflight gambling sytstem to work properly.
That being said, I am sure it is just a matter of time before it is commonplace. The payoff is just too high, and the airlines are just too hard pressed to let go of a profit opportunity like this.
Tor
handicapping is a lot like the game of Go. Its all about pattern recognition. What the patterns translate to.Computers have a hell of a time being good at it.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Is there some development methodology or practice a company can implement to protect itself from "rogue" programmers like this? The NSA / CIA / FBI / Pentagon must have software that they want to guarantee is uncompromised. How do they do it?
I'm looking for a HEPA media filter for my TV. I'm alergic to reality shows.
Charge the company that programmed the betting system too, why don't you!
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
How about mangling that line a little bit more, felchboy?
"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." 'Didn't exist'. Not 'didn't do stuff'.
And get the fucking name right. It's Keyser Soze.
Well, this isn't exactly a mundane detail, MICHAEL!@#!
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
"The programmer "had a password into the system and the ability to do what he did. He could have altered the ticket internally," Weil said, ...,
and
"The vulnerability in the system still exists, Weil acknowledged, but he said that his company will be watching future races closely until a fix can be found."
So did someone with a lame password have his access hacked to the tune of 3+ MegaDollars?
win one one?
Samir: Is, is there a way to just give the money back?
Peter: What? We just hand them a check with the exact amount they're missing? I, I think they'd figure that out.
Samir: Well, we have to do something.
Michael: May-maybe we launder the money.
Peter: That's a great idea. Ok, how do we do that?
Michael: I don't know, I don't know. I don't even know what it means. It's something I think, I think coke dealers do.
Peter: Ok. Do we know any coke dealers?
Michael: My, my cousin's a cokehead...... We're in deep shit.
Samir: Yes. We are in very, very deep shit.
Sure, although it's strange you want me to trim your sack and not just the hairs. But oh well!
*thwack!*
Here's your balls, sir.
"ha-ha!"
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
I love my country! You are just jealous of The Land Of Liberty And Freedom! You are probably an arabic!
Actually, it [b]was[/b] six bets--six Pick 6 bets, each bet with the same set of Picks for the first six races (the first four races picked one horse, and picked the field for the last two races).
I believe when the mention the series of six bets they're refering to the fact that he placed a single $12 bet, which is equivalent to 6 (six) $2 bets ($2 being the minimum you can bet on a ticket).
There are too many sources of information in the world to necessitate the use of a password/login provider. If the NY Times wants our attention, they should open up their info to anyone, not just those willing to sign up for their spam.
I always mess up some mundane detail!!
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I wouldn't say it was vulnerable to attack. If you read the article, it says this was an employee of the company that developed the software, (alledgedly) using his password to get into the system and mess around. This makes the system "vulnerable" in the same way that your servers are "vulnerable" to attack by the network administrator.
I am alone, yet I also surf the universal backwash of undifferentiated Being, which is LOVE.
By the way, "Rosebud" was Citizen Kane's sled.
And that girl in "The Crying Game" is really a guy.
For people who haven't seen the movie yet, the attribution wouldn't mean anything -- until you pointed it out, and now it might stick. Oh well.
(And the grandparent's spelling of "Keyser Soze" is the worst I've ever seen. King Sousa? I don't remember the part where Kobayashi was a tuba player in a high school marching band...)
Is there some development methodology or practice a company can implement to protect itself from "rogue" programmers like this? The NSA / CIA / FBI / Pentagon must have software that they want to guarantee is uncompromised. How do they do it?
Yes, there is. Here is a story about the software engineers (these people actually deserve the title) who design the inflight systems for the Space Shuttles.
The product is the process , moreso than the actual code. It is a fascinating read.
I can say that the events as described (the pattern of deposits with no gaming followed by a BIG win) smells very stronly of fraud.
Yes, it's possible that it's innocent, and the guy deserves his 3 million bucks....
But if you've ever seen how people defraud online wagering systems, there is a definite pattern they follow that normal punters simply do not do.
People often seem to think that becuase you found a glitch in the software to make it pay, you deserve the money; on the contrary, an online system being tricked into doing something contrary to the posted rules is no differetn than your bank accidentally posting extra money to your account; you don't get to keep the cash.
Because your perception of the gambling business seems to ring true to what you see in the movies, and not what happens in reality.
IT's not all organized crime; many gambling operations make very high profits, and dealing with fraud is a cost of doing business, not a major deal. It is doubtful anyone would kill the guy; he is no threat.
Computerized gambling works as follows: A human invents a game and then publishes documentaion describing what he did. The inventor has 100% over all factors Regular gambling works as follows: Find a supposedly unpredicatable (or at least unreliably predicatable) event. Develop and and publish rules for betting on it. Ways to cheat on Regular gambling: Find a method of predicting the event. Trick the system so as to change your bet or change/disguise the event after the game is over. Ways to cheat at computerized gambling: Everything above Plus: lie about what you documented. and most importantly, the human in real life is SELECTING the unpredicatable event as opposed to CREATING it. By definition, he has control over about 5% compared to 100% Chances are the Casinos are not also manufacturing: the Cards used in poker let alone the die in the ink used on the cards, or the wax used, or the back design. They SELECT from what is available, instead of making to their own order. This forces them to give up a lot of the control.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What about the sentient Bank of America ATM ?
We all know the payouts are based on the pool (kitty) divided up by the number of winning tickets (roughly). Since there are far fewer winning pick-6 tickets now that this has been exposed, what happens to the $3 million that should be divided among the legitimate winners?
Someone is getting rich off of this. And it isn't the Amtote hacker(s).
As I understand, they are live before, but of course don't change afterward, unless the bet is still open.. Is the bet still open?
I've seen a betting site, a chess one for Kramnik
versus Deep Fritz. They had odds listed for each person to view before they could place their bets. This is a web site, so it's not unusual for there to be live updates. Most people betting on Fritz? Okay, so if I bet the same $1 dollar on Kramnik and win, my take would be larger than if I won with $1 dollar on Fritz (as I understand.) I can see how live updates could work, allowing gamblers to 'set' their risk.
However, do they have live odds updates on location in race tracks? Remembering old movies, I thought no... but now with the internet accessible everywhere, it must be easily possible if it's possible online (same exact thing.)
Does anybody know if it's true that odds are live on real race tracks (betting on location), and how did they use to do it before the internet (like in Rocky 1 - 17 and earlier boxing movies?)
Cover your eyes and click this link!
VB was a very bad choice, in my opinion, for this.
;)--then it will fail. Treat VB like a hyperdevelopment process for prototyping (as in, jumbled code just to see a button display a MsgBox "IT WORKS!"), and it will fail.
:) You want to convert old code to VB.NET spec? Much a re-write, and the conversion tool is only available in Visual STUDIO.NET Professional and above (even though it's for VB), and won't change all MUHAHAHA! ;) HAPPY HALLOWEEEN!
and
The user interface was too complex and we had far too many lines of code.
Excuse me, but languages don't make bad interfaces, people do. Languages don't force you to write far too many lines of code, people do.
They key with visual basic is to treat the interface part of the application SEPARATE from the code. Keep the actual code in modules... Much code, many modules (just like C++ or Java). Or if you want, use classes (just like C++ or Java), except remember that classes in VB before VB.NET couldn't do the fancy pancy. You should probably pretty much have just ONE LINE in your Form_Load()s, Button_Click(), etc.--a Call User_Did_This() to a sub in the appropriate module. Let the right functions do the tricks, and you won't have "far too many lines of code." (Of course, it is very tempting in ALL languages to mix and match things between modules to make them "fit", thus making modular subs not entirely modular.;)
As for interfaces, it's not VB that's the problem. Search for "interface" in slashdot's topics, they have done many a-Ask Slashdot for creating GUI's.
But anyway, if you write in Visual Basic like it's a real language, you'll get real stuff. If you write in Visual Basic like a Business Major might--don't comment, don't plan ahead, don't have a design plan, don't be modular, don't stick to your design plan once you do have it, you get the picture
Instead, remember programming is more than word-processing, there's a design plan and problem solving involved, and you will hopefully succeed....
That is, until Microsoft Gouls and Goblins change the COMPLETE LANGUAGE SPECIFICATION for the next (current) version of VB (VB.NET), and your code isn't compatible anymore! Look who's laughing, now!
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Here is an interesting spark for a topic on 'Ask Slashdot?'
Computer Science is one of the most popular fields of study and research nationally.
That's scary! I know that at a pretty good CS school like Umass Amherst, only about 30 or 60 students receive a Bachelors Degree in CS a year! And that MANY students choose CS and MOST change their major after the first year. But if there are so many students majoring, is CS devalued now? Is the pay worse, the jobs less, too much work for pay? If you or someone you know started as CS and switched, why did you switch, to what did you switch, and what is your stage in your life right now, having taken the path to switch?
Cover your eyes and click this link!
True story: A guy I work with in NY is from Texas. He had a meeting with someone from the database group last week, and when he came back, he was telling us about the things "That Russian guy" told him. Well, the DB group doesn't have any Russians in it, so we asked him who he was talking about. His answer: "You know, the Russian guy with the beard. Vito." Once you've been to Texas things like this don't really surprise you anymore.
One, which is the one you get by default if you bet with the off-track betting agencies, is the one described where the odds change *after* you have placed the bet. The agency takes their cut, and the rest is distributed to people who placed winning bets in proportion to the amount they bet. An Australian developed an early analog computer, the totalizer, to automate this process in the 1920s(?), thus continuing Australia's long history of being a world leader in gambling technology ;)
Bookmakers at the track instead offer fixed-odds betting - any individual bet is at known odds, though they can and do adjust them nearly continuously.
As to your question as to how bookmakers offering fixed-odds bets know how to judge the odds, they follow the patterns of bets very closely (nowdays often with the aid of computers) and keep track of information about the horses they are offering bets on. However, bookmakers can and do lose money on a race. Some very rich men (notably a guy called Kerry Packer) make a habit of screwing bookmakers each year at Melbourne Cup day.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Something the articles don't mention is that the autotote system is ancient. The software runs on old Vax systems. The way autotote is installed is by duplicating a hard drive and putting it into a "new" vax.
There are so many of those boxes floating around the country that this must happen all the time. As most people probably know banks are scammed on a daily basis, but they don't report it to papers because it would cause public relations problem. The stolen money is funneled off into operating costs in quarterly reports. With a decent amount of social engineering one could probably rip one out of any of the off-track facilities in the country. Because of the nature of the business, which is shady in the first place, gambling does not usually attract, on the lower levels, the brightest and most capable people. On the highest level it is always a matter of fighting against the laws, whether it be slot machines, online gambling or horseracing.
Take for example the state lotteries. It's gambling, pure and simple, except casino's must guarantee a certain percentage of payouts.
In California:
This weeks lottery is worth $17 million. If you choose the cash payout, you divide $17 million in half to make $8.5 million.
So now you have an $8.5 million prize awarded to you by the state, correct? No. Because that $8.5 million payout is income according to the state you've put yourself into a tax bracket that is nearly 50% in income tax. So divide that $8.5 million by 2 again. You now have roughly $4.25 million. But wait.. there's more. Take the income that you made for the rest of that year. Say you make $90K per annum, you've just raised your tax on that income as well. Now you owe bak taxes on all the other income you've made that year.
I'm not saying I wouldn't like to win the lottery. If you look at the details, it's more than obvious it's the dealers game no matter what you do. $3 million is merely a drop in the bucket for these companies. The only difference is that the press got a hold of a police report this time.
-- -- A truly great man never puts away the simplicity of a child
I worked for this end of the horse racing industry for a number of years. We contracted with both Amtote and Autotote.
It was a matter of time before someone pulled something like this. There were times when people were forging the barcodes on winning tickets with just a pencil and eraser.
Often people throw away winning tickets by accident or never return to the track to cash it in. These uncashed tickets are called "outs". Outs are required to be turned over to the state after 180 days. The amount of time may vary from state to state.
At any one time racetracks around the world are holding hundreds of thousands of dollars in "outs". I often thought that it would be a perfect heist to reprint some of the bigger winning tickets and cash them in. It would have to be an inside job though as you would need the serial numbers of the winning tickets in the outs database. The tickets themselves are not hard to forge and even if poor, they could be cashed in at automated tote machines.
Not advocating anyone go and do this. Just some thoughts from someone that was on the inside of that industry.
On the other hand there was no such press and no one was ever arrested when ~$350,000 in cash walked out of the Los Alamitos money room one night. So the perfect crime is usually low tech.
I thought they meant Nasdaq got hacked.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
Not in any useful matter.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
did anyone see the headline as
"Computerized Beating System Proves Vulnerable"??
that would indeed be one crappy beating system..
It's common practice to transfer the matrix of a pick 6 after the 5th race is official. The is because of the size of the matrix otherwise.
My question is "where was the state supervisor during this?"
I'll refrain from saying more here, but beleive me, there is a whole lot more to this story than's been said, and a lot of things that will tell the tale if anyone looks.
I can tell you that during my time with AmTote, the tote operator couldn't change bets at all, only place a bet (just like everyone else did, at a ticket machine), or he could cancel them. And big muddy footprints all over when he did. I don't know that this is still the case, but I would think so.
In all honesty, I have an axe to grid with AutoTote, because of something one of their operators did to me during a race. Doesn't matter now, I guess.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I'm from Florida, where it's already been proven we can't run elections. So, what do the geniuses do? They go to touchscreen voting machines with closed source software--now, we can have rigged elections, and no way to check up on it because of copyright laws. ooh great, I'm proud to be a Floridian.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
They were handling huge amounts of money and making BIG profits, but:
They were a large, respectable company and are still around, to my surprise. Someone could easily steal from them by messing with their IT systems, because the technical people were assmonkeys.
However, some of the 'business' people were very smart, and would have noticed suspicious bets. That's what happened in the Autotote case too, it seems.
If he once again pushes up his sleeves in order to compute for 3 days
and 3 nights in a row, he will spend a quarter of an hour before to
think which principles of computation shall be most appropriate.
-- Voltaire, "Diatribe du docteur Akakia"
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