Poker Stars Slams Hammer on 3rd party software industry.

As reported earlier in the week on this blog, the most recent Poker Stars software update targeted at securing itself once and for all from malicious data-mining and hand history exchanging programs has also effected software programs that are actually included in Poker Stars approved list.

The targeted programs include the likes of Poker-Edge, Poker Sherlock, Poker Tracker, iHH Harvester, Poker Bot+ and POKERobot. These 3rd party software designers have long been on the hit list of Poker Star's security team as each side has been busy trying to one-up the other countering access against security.

With this latest update however, Poker Stars has overhauled their chat-box technology which 3rd party software designers rely upon to extract table information ranging from stacks, player ID's, betting activity, and table position. Poker Stars has now switched to an in-house proprietary solution that displays limited table action (you won't be able to "read" how much a player bets, you will have to gauge by the look of the chips) and information while avoiding commonly understood draw text completely.

If you have Poker Stars and another poker site you can do this test for yourself: Right click your mouse in the text area and select whatever portion of that text you can and "copy". Then paste what you copied into a word editor or simple notepad. When you do this on any poker site other than Poker Stars, that text will be pasted into the new file, but on Poker Stars, you will paste nothing. It will be completely blank, because the text in the chat box only appears as text, but isn't really at all.

Therein lies the problem for 3rd party software designers - good and bad in Poker Stars view - in that they all rely on that same information, which is now encoded or non-existent. Most of the software that is currently on Poker Stars list of approved software that requires odds calculations, reading the displayed cards, and profiling data are now left out in the cold, even though Poker Stars says this kind of software is acceptable to use.

Below is a response from the Poker Stars security staff in regards to this issue:

 I regret to be the bearer of bad tidings, but this was the purpose and
intent of the change -- to deny malicious third party developers access to
hooking 'DrawText' to extract data from the dealer chat window.  We have
completely avoided the use of 'DrawText' and 'ExtTextOut' in favor of a
proprietary internal solution, and as such the contents of the chat cannot
be extracted any longer.

While we recognize that there are many third party odds calculators and
other real time tools that are absolutely not malicious and in fact are
permitted on PokerStars, malicious tools such as bots and dataminers also
retrieve their data in the same manner, and it is against those developers
that such measures are designed.

While unfortunate, some permitted apps are likely to be hobbled by the
changes intended to prevent cheating, and there's little that we can offer
you in way of a solution or a way around this.  We can't offer you an API
to the data (or malicious developers would hack it), and we can't go back
to using DrawText.  We believe it more important to keep the malicious
programs out than it is to allow permitted programs to continue to
function.

I wish I had a solution for you, but the truth is that additional changes
will be forthcoming to make it even more difficult to gather "real time
data" from the client as well.  If a cheating program manages to find a
way to code around these changes, we'll plug whatever hole they exploit as
well (which may well break any solution you come up with for your
applications as well).

I wish I had better news for you, but that is PokerStars' position on the
gathering of real time data from the client.    All I can offer is
apologies that your application had to be caught up as "collateral damage"
in the war on cheating applications.

Is this now a situation of a few bad eggs spoiling it for everyone? What remains to be seen is if clever 3rd party programmers can figure a way around this, and if regular player on Poker Stars that use harmless, but helpful software will simply just play elsewhere.