Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by noduerme on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @05:06AM
(#28454769)
It was never legally tested. It was what I felt I had to do such that the randomness didn't take place on the island. And no randomness ever did. I was in touch with a lot of officers of the large casinos operating out of there at the time, who were curious but skeptical about Bitcoin. I think by the time they realized it was a potentially valuable thing, I had already shut down operations, because I wasn't willing to chase the market into legally gray areas.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by carlmr on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @08:52AM
(#28456265)
If you go by technicalities you could have used the argument that you're not generating random numbers, only pseudorandom numbers.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by nephanth on Thursday September 09, 2021 @06:20AM
(#28468158)
Hum if you're running a casino, I hope you are using at least a bit of [entropy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_\(computing\)) . you wouldn't want your shuffles to be predictable...
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by seanalltogether on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:14AM
(#28455150)
Yeah, that's like setting up a casino in one location with a permanent phone line open to switzerland to ask where the ball landed on the roulette wheels. Doesn't seem like it would hold up under scrutiny.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by noduerme on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:32AM
(#28455261)
That's exactly what it was... and it really depends on how a locale defines gambling. In Costa Rica, for instance, you can run the game of chance as long as the money isn't landed onshore, because you're just generating random numbers. IoM was slightly different in that they didn't mind you landing cash, they just wouldn't allow you to generate the numbers. So it seemed natural to co-locate, and then Switzerland was a better backstop than either.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by j1elo on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:42AM
(#28455311)
In any case I must admit that the trick, while we agree wouldn't (probably) hold water in court, it might have actually helped (we'll never know) to keep that casino out of some law enforcement watch list... especially if the officers were too overburdened with more important issues / lazy enough / not looking into that kind of activities at the time.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by amelius on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:58AM
(#28455397)
> in reality it sounds to me like the kind of technicalities that wouldn't really pass the reasoning of a human judge
Yes, only big companies can successfully "hack" the law based on its letter, see e.g. tax evasion.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by mvc on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @05:09AM
(#28454778)
He got an MP on his side which seems to be all it takes these days in the UK.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by madaxe_again on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @05:41AM
(#28454977)
You’d be amazed at how cheap it is. You can usually get an MP to do your bidding or say your piece in Parliament for a donation of £10k or less. I’ve never heard of anyone paying more.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by gnfargbl on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:50AM
(#28455362)
It would be a contempt of Parliament to either request or agree to such an arrangement [1]. If you have definitive evidence of this having happened in the recent past, you really should pass it on to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.
[1] https://erskinemay.parliament.uk/section/5023/corruption-or-...
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by madaxe_again on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @12:04PM
(#28459050)
This is why it’s a donation to the party - not to them or their office - although they can want a campaign contribution, which again doesn’t count as going to them.
I’ve had an MP literally solicit this from me - he emailed a bunch of local businesses basically stating his price list. He’s no longer an MP, or in politics - but you see this stuff everywhere, all the time. Any member’s bill you see has almost certainly been sponsored.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by Grustaf on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:54AM
(#28455383)
Does that include the lobbyist's cut, or would you go directly to the MP? But how much do you really gain from buying a single MP?
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by toyg on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @07:00AM
(#28455407)
MPs typically move in packs ("areas" or "currents", that may or may not be officially organized around a thinktank or club), so buying the right MP you can actually move several of them. And then your representative goes and trades favors with the colleagues in government - "I'll vote for your controversial legislation if you pull that other lever over there". Representative democracy is a big sausage factory: in go blood and guts, out comes "edible" rules that society will live on.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by silverscania on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:31AM
(#28455256)
The IoM isn't in the UK and nor does it have MPs. Probably just semantics but I have to point that out.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by MagnumOpus on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @07:35AM
(#28455621)
IoM has MPs, just not UK MPs. The OP almost certainly meant an MP from the Manx Tynwald parliament.
Re:My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
by silverscania on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @09:13AM
(#28456479)
It doesn't though, that's my point. The Isle of Man has MHKs and ministers, not "MPs": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Keys.
It's like saying a politician in the UK is a "senator" and expecting people think you are an authority on the subject.
What I mean is that this:
> The IoM server would call the Swiss server every time a hand was dealt
might seem like a clever loophole around the laws in IoM, but in reality it sounds to me like the kind of technicalities that wouldn't really pass the reasoning of a human judge, who in their duty of interpreting the law and its intended spirit, would probably consider this an invalid trick and thus that the RNG of the system still resided in IoM, even if technically it didn't.
But of course, none of this matters if the casino never had any legal battle to fight where this idea could be tested in court, which is the equivalent of not being "caught".