naaaa, there is no special agreement. i was just kidding.

funny thing is that PT has troubles getting their zoom HUD working so it is very unlikely that it is as easy as stars suggests. + PT sees no way to make one that reliably works on mac. so actually we are pulling on the same end of the rope. well, kind off, because i would not mind stars putting way more preasure on PT when it comes to security and restricing imports. anyways, i hope it is obvious that i want to see clear rules, clean interfaces and fair treatement by stars, be it open source or closed source programms. the way it is right now everything has to be done in some gray area. again, i agree with APerfect10 on this.

I think it's naive to think that we would share private information on how we support RUSH. The only thing that matters is that it is approved by PokerStars. I also think it's even more naive to think that PokerStars is going to work with or allow any random person/company to do that -- especially considering their recent crackdown on datamining and PTR.

I think the better question that needs answered is why you need this information? What are you attempting to build?

Best regards,

Derek

go ahead, read the thread to get an idea what i am doing. and don't try to bluff me. nothing is approved by stars, they just tolerate it. but there is an interesting connection in your statement that leads me to a serious question:

what measures are you taking to prevent abuse of PT for data mining? try to give me an idea on how effective they are without the usual blah.

I have already read the thread and it does not address what you are attempting to do which I believe is a very valid question. If anyone and everyone had access to the same information/technology that we have access to it would be very bad for the poker community. There are simply too many ways to misuse/abuse it.

You are more than welcome to keep running in circles. However, if by rare chance, you are able to solve this on your own (which I do not believe has been done to date) -- I think it would be extremely irresponsible to be discussing it on a public forum.

Best regards,

Derek

chances are i am using bad english. i am never shure because it is not my mother tongue. so what i am doing is attempting to get reliable information from the client to make a zoom HUD work for an open source project. so the first question that came to my mind is: how is PT doing it? then i started digging around, including contacting stars with pretty meager success. stars made it look like there is just some message snooping required, which is ok by their terms. but i did not buy that given PTs obvious troubles and my own programming experience. i hope this clears my motivation up for you. and yes, we can run in circles for a long time, i have no problems with that.

reading your statement another question comes to my mind:
to make a HUDwork there is actually very little information required from the client, the rest can be taken from the hand histories. so my question is: getting the data required to make the HUD work, does this have the (unwanted) side effect that more data than necessary is exposed?

So you want to build an open source HUD?

1. Where is the existing source code located? Is the project hosted on sourceforge? Github? Somewhere else?

2. What license is being used?

3. Maybe you should create a working HUD for normal tables before you attempt to tackle harder problems such as RUSH tables. You wouldn't attempt to land on Mars if you haven't even made it to the moon.

Once you have a real, open sourced project and a functional HUD on non-RUSH tables then maybe we can talk in private.

Best regards,

Derek

lol, wait ..you're not getting away that easy. i officially disqualify you from the challenge for not showing any effords to contribute.

lol unless there is a grand prize, there can be no "official disqualification" imo.

I don't get a lot of the most recent posts though.

Derek, already mentioned ITT, the open source project FPDB (1: Sourceforge, Free Software Subforum here, 2: AGPLv3, 3: Has a working non-zoom Stars hud). Also as I'm sure you remember, I wrote/posted an open source ahk hud that worked ok, a few hours and it could work again I'm sure but there's been little point other than experimentation for me to do so for a few years at least.

I don't get why it would be so ludicrous for PT3/4 to say the method they use to get names for zoom hud. Surely it's not instant doom to the poker should any nefarious persons find out, and even if it was you think they'd have qualms about studying PT4's behaviour to see what's up? The PokerStars email as posted above - assuming it isn't a fabrication - specifically states not to worry about posting open source zoom-hud code that could be used for nefarious purposes: they will target their enforcement on nefarious users and not the "possible symptom". I can see why obviously you wouldn't want to post actual code, there is competition in the market after all - but to say something like "oh we do ocr on the tables" or "oh we inject a dll that gives us the current player names whenever we call it", can't exactly be devastating for competition to find out - surely it's not that hard to find out, should they not particularly care about breaking your eula (if that's even necessary).

I for one would be super-stunned if Pokerstars, despite the "large size and reputation" of PokerTracker, decided they would implement a secret internal api to give competitive advantage to you or anyone they have no financial stake in. If they did, I'd be even more surprised if they took selective action against other non-large entities for using it once it was discovered.

Yeah, if that was the case then I'd be pretty shocked too.

Juk

You're a knob. He's been working with and discussing this with FPDB for a while now.

http://****************/apps/mediawik...itle=Main_Page

thanks sorrow for jumping in :-)


fpdb does have a HUD for regular poker but not for zoom. they take data exclusively from the hand histories, no screen scraping or other fancy stuff. so out of curiosity i took a look to see if i can find a way to make a HUD work in a reliable way ..that is with data gathered directly from the client, no screen scraping allowed because this is too unreliable in pratice.

he is defending his business advantage, fair duce. but then again he has a point to it: it is pretty hard to think of any ways to abuse data required for a HUD when all you need is position of the players at the table. different story when you actually have to digg deep into the client to make this work. i don't think it is much of an ask to get a statement on how well isotated harmless data is from data that can be abused. but then again, maybe it is..


right to the point but depends on what PT actually does. but then again, this may be interpreted as effectively granting some programms a competitive advantage. not closing a security hole you know is being exploited is just as good as providing an undocumented interface for special competitors. this may be left in a gray area on purpose. or it could simply be that stars is struggeling around with a hopelessly outdated client that is leaking left and right.

an additional point is that PT and others may and likely do open security holes in the client. if the client is not easy to abuse, PT and others may be. there is no information to be found on the subject, no public statements whatsoever at least not to my knowledge.

all in all, imo this is shurely worth one or the other question, no? so the challenge is still open.

Thanks and my apologies to mme. I was not aware that he was involved with this project. If this is specifically related to FPBD then why is it not posted in that thread instead of a new one?

From my perspective, I see a new thread titled "How does PokerTracker Get Data..." -- I'm not sure how I was supposed to correlate that this was related to FPBD when it was never referenced. That is why I asked the questions.

Right now we have a major competitive advantage as no one knows how we support ZOOM (other than some on the PokerStars development team). Why would we voluntarily share that information and allow our competitors to catch up? There is a reason that we were able to have a working ZOOM HUD available the exact day ZOOM was released whereas other competitors either took weeks or still do not have support at all.

I am going to assume that this email reply was either from a lower level PokerStars employee or someone who is unaware of the situation. It simply is not in PokerStars (or the poker communities) best interest for this type of information to be publicly available.

Best regards,

Derek

because this thread is created on my behalf, not on FPDBs. next time get some background info.


care to enlighten us here on the subject apart from obscure statements? other than that i will take this as an abvious attempt to derail this thread and act accordingly.

PM'd with derek, got mail this morning.. again nice try dereck. you are pulling every trick you have, fair duce. but stay away from this thread. i will not tolerate your effords to derail it any longer. final word.

---------------------------------------------------------
hi security,
have been playing around with the client trying to obtain data [for a zoom HUD] required now for some time and could not find a reasonable way to do so from the outside. meanwhile i decided to do the coding and documentation in public as a coding challenge [http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/45...hallenge-how-d
oes-pokertracker-et-al-get-data-their-zoom-huds-1195015/#post32666289].

for being stuck in my approaches i request your permission to apply more serious measures on the client. that is:

a) attatching a debugger to the client at runtime
b) dll injection

again, i do not want to do anything that is against stars ToS, especially when doing this in public, i hope you understand my concerns.

regards, [mme]
---------------------------------------------------------

Hello [mme],

Thank you for your email.

We are fine with your proposed measures, so long as you do not contribute to the development of prohibited software, or involve your work in any unlawful activities.

The goal of the Game Security Department is to prohibit third party tools that offer an unfair advantage. Thus, if you develop software that we deem to be within our rules, that is acceptable. If you develop software that is against our rules, then we will take action.

I wish you all the best in your development efforts.

Regards,

XYZ
PokerStars Game Security

just as an addendum ..i will not continue this thread because:

a) all questions i had on the subject where answered, thanks stars
b) fpdb settled on aiming for cross platform / universal theme support for HUDs

thanks as well to derek. be on your toes when a scare card hits when playing him ;-)

So wait, did you get it or not? I am totally about to develop some highly prohibited software and would be interested in misuse/abusing it. I am aware that this would be very bad for the poker community but this does not deter me!

..yawn*

As mme stated, this is his own thing. He was interested specifically in coding an open source implementation that could potentially be used by many project not just FPDB.

I've been told that PT is doing something different to other HUDs, as it seems to be able to reliably update users while the table window is obscured.

From what i've been told PT is the only HUD able to do this at the moment, hence the thread title.

It strikes me as very odd that Stars would provide a competitive advantage to anyone in this area.

The options (at least superficially) would appear to be:
a) There is an open, but hidden API provided by the Stars client that all projects could potentially use
b) PT is doing something clever that we haven't thought of yet
c) PT is doing something that actually violates the ToS of Stars
...
...
d) Stars is actually providing a competitive advantage to a commercial product they haven no affiliation with.

If it is a) or b) then it would be nice to come up with a solution. If c) or d) no-one should be happy with the current status-quo.

Please do continue mme!

You are aware of gimicks work in the area, and its limitations at the moment. I think a combination of your efforts and his are most likely to produce the result we are looking for.

Sorrow

very interesting and difficult subject and absolutely worth being discussed in public. say there is an open implementation at some point. this would be pretty close to something resembling a public interface provided by the sites. what about bum hunting? say stars drops a line for each table/hand in some file:

"tableIdentifier (playerSeat1 .., playerSeatN) buttonPlayer"

this is enough as a basis to make HUDs work. but it is enough as well to scrape tables for targets. but what different is this from the current situation where you have many ways to get this information anyways? be it via the client, via PT, HEM or others (by whatever means) or from some service? i think i am save to assume stars knows this and their policy is to keep things under control as good as possible.

but from a programmers point of view there are many problems that go along with this approach and it even opens a up new problem:
a) security through obscurity never holds up too long
b) a players anonymity can not be guaranteed, there are always ways around restrictions
c) you can control the environment to a certain extend, but every tool you allow opens the door new ways of abuse
d) what to do with open source projects? on one hand they are leaks by very definition, on the other hand you can not put them to a disadvantage without running into troubles sooner or later.

i guess this is enough material to make an interesting discussion apart from "the sky is falling" which is not very helpful. so here goes another attempt to start a fruitful discussion. disclaimer again: this is in no way my field of expertise.

how to identify a programm that interfaces with the client?

i guess this is a problem especially when open source programms are involved. one can use some sort of authentification mechanism but this won't work along with them because you have to have a key of some sort stored in your programm. so the only way seems to be to let the user authentificate himself through the programm as legitimate. correct so far?

i could continue ..but there is an imporant question to be cleared first (pointed at stars, derek, whoevs): is there willingness to put things on a solid basis (given that this is technically possible) and work on a solution that satisfies all participants?

An interesting subject and thread.

Screen scraping, log file examination, OCR, and (to a very limited extent) windows message queue hooking (i.e. hooking the Windows message queue with PeekMessage, and watching messages flow by) would not be considered reverse engineering. Everything that a Zoom HUD does can be accomplished without trying to figure out the innards of the PokerStars client.

I don't believe that there is a secret API.

Holdem Manager Support wrote this:

(the surprise is, our ZOOM HUD is not using OCR,.. which means it can accurately grab the list of playernames, from a DLL file that PokerStars supplies)

now that is indeed a surprise...

http://forums.holdemmanager.com/mana...ml#post1019521


It is time to play "Name that DLL". Our contestants are now entering the studio.

lol 'secret API' you gotta be kidding me.

its pretty obvious that PT must've figured out a way to do it, and doesnt want HEM to steal the idea. and mme is trying to pressure them to give it away. how much sense does that make?

They are just using API hooks into the site. This has been being done for years.

IMO let this $hit die. 99% of the time just used for bots.