Nat Arem's Blog

‘South Park’: All Online, All for Free

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

I don’t think I have him on AIM anymore, so I don’t have more original convos, but every once in awhile I get a pasted convo that includes gambler2k4.

Credit for this one goes to supernova9/Ansky.

(1:19:38 AM) supernova9: lollllll
(1:19:42 AM) supernova9: want to see a gem
(1:19:45 AM) supernova9: from gambler2k4?
(1:20:11 AM) GIFAFI: sure

gambler2k4 (12:15:24 AM): whose this V_RouNder fool?
gambler2k4 (12:15:42 AM): he looks like a toolbag in his photo avator
supernova9 (1:18:23 AM): yeah i dont kno
supernova9 (1:18:25 AM): he wont play me
gambler2k4 (12:17:47 AM): that’s cause he’s asian
gambler2k4 (12:17:59 AM): asians are scared of jews
gambler2k4 (12:18:15 AM): aren’t you jewish?

(1:20:57 AM) GIFAFI: wtf?
(1:21:11 AM) GIFAFI: that makes zero sense…
(1:21:16 AM) supernova9: hahahaha
(1:21:24 AM) supernova9: of course not, hes kind of a lunatic
(1:21:30 AM) GIFAFI: i mean like, it isn’t even a STEREOTYPE let alone actually true…
(1:21:37 AM) supernova9: haha i kno
(1:21:42 AM) GIFAFI: it would be one thing if he made some “jewish = stingy” joke
(1:21:51 AM) supernova9: lol
(1:21:54 AM) supernova9: im just laughing
(1:21:56 AM) GIFAFI: at least then i’d be like, “lol, sure, good one moron”
(1:21:56 AM) supernova9: i cant stop laughing
(1:22:03 AM) supernova9: cause i can just see his doofy face saying it
(1:22:03 AM) GIFAFI: i have to put this on my blog
(1:22:04 AM) supernova9: hahahaha
(1:22:07 AM) supernova9: lol

(Also, I’m not sure what’s going on with the timestamps in the convo that was pasted to me)

I don’t know why people are still using it. Sure firefox is a memory hog, but so is IE7 and even firefox is fine as long as you keep the tabs under 10, don’t run too many extensions and have enough RAM in your system.

Things like this especially frustrate me. I’ve been using this WordPress theme for weeks and I never saw this until I saw my blog in IE on someone else’s computer. Sure there might be something wrong with the code in the theme to make the sidebar screwed up, but why does it work fine in Firefox if whatever is wrong is that drastically wrong?

Either way, the sidebar looks retarded in IE. Obviously the firefox presentation is correct.

I guess I’ll get to fixing it now…

EDIT: Fixed. IE is dumb though, it still doesn’t look quite right.

I registered this domain (along with my friend Steve Jacobs, aka stevesbets) awhile ago. I’ve made a few attempts to get him to blog but with little success. He typically claims he’s going to blog a ton then proceeds to blog once, blog again two months later when I bug him about it, then he quits claiming all sorts of excuses.

Once again, he is *CLAIMING* that he will blog a lot. He even claimed he will blog almost every day. Obviously that won’t happen, but I would be surprised to see him average 3x per week over the next 4 months. That would be about 50 entries-ish I think.

Anyway, I’ve set up the site at stevesbets.com. Hopefully he’ll actually use it this time. And if he does, it will definitely be a blog that you’ll want to follow because Steve can be very entertaining once you get to know him.

I used to have the old PC5740. I bought it in October 2005 and it was great at the time.

For some reason, I’ve put off upgrading my card — I just don’t follow the EVDO world all that closely even though I use my Verizon card all the time.

So anyway, I finally upgraded to one of these.

It’s like a whole new world browsing on this compared to my old Verizon card. This thing is barely distinguishable from a cable modem for most tasks. I’m sure something like BitTorrent would be slow, but for email, web browsing, messaging, etc, this is much much more functional than the old card. It has something to do with Verizon’s “Rev A” or “Revision A” technology (basically a faster EVDO network), but I haven’t looked into the technical details much.

All I know is that if you’re a poker player, one of these is a TERRIFIC investment as a backup internet connection, road wireless and possibly even complete internet replacement someday (it’s isn’t QUITE there yet, but I could probably get by with this if I had to).

A followup to Part 1 and Part 2.

Things that I am reasonably confident are true, but cannot prove or say for sure:

1. AJ Green is no longer involved with AP, UB or any related company in any way, including ownership interest.

I’m pretty sure the guy is gone. Why? Mainly because the guy probably didn’t have significant ownership interests. Unlike owners, it’s relatively simple to get rid of an employee. Sure, I’ve heard rumors that AJ either got small chunks of equity via work or investment and that’s certainly possible, but who really knows if that is true. What I am pretty sure of is that AJ did not found the company and that he did not put up initial funding money — and logically, those two sets of people are likely to be the owners. From what I’ve been told, AJ met Scott/other Montana guys a little later on and was brought into the AP/related companies mainly as an employee (or maybe consultant, not sure of the legal relationship). The key is that he was not there at Montana in the beginning and is therefore pretty unlikely to have an ownership stake. Also, ex-AP employees told me that they got the feeling that AJ did not own a piece of the pie.

Therefore, assuming my theory that AJ was not a significant owner of AP, it’s pretty easy for them to get rid of him. Also, I don’t know why they would remain loyal to someone who put them in a spot like this. In addition, there are a bunch of eyes still focused on AP and people know what AJ looks like. How would it look publicly if in May 2008 pictures surfaced of AJ walking into the AP offices in Costa Rica or Panama? It would obviously be an enormous controversy and press/forum coverage would undoubtedly be huge. AP simply cannot afford to have themselves tied to someone who they’ve basically claimed to have gotten rid of and someone who they’ve basically admitted either perpetrated or led this whole episode. It’s way too big a risk for them to have AJ communicating via email, phone, in person, etc with the known AP executives and decision-makers and I believe they are aware of that.

2. The cheating was perpetrated via a backend access tool called “Servman” that wrote hand histories to the page before hands were completed.

For all of the discussion of user #363 being some sort of superuser who was watching the table and relaying cards to POTRIPPER, I doubt that was the case. User #363 was another one of the four cheating accounts named, although I cannot publicly identify which one. On a side note, assuming that the #363 name was not changed in recent weeks, the name on the account was not a name that I recognized (note that AP did not show me the name, I found out via another method while in CR). Anyway, if #363 was another cheating account, it does not really make sense within the context of the theory that there was one superuser account that never played while the cheaters used a bunch of other names to stay anonymous. After all, the #363 account did play and did cheat and did win. Therefore, it’s pretty clear there was another method of seeing the holecards.

As has been described to me by a few ex-employees, AP uses a tool called “Servman” to manage a number of things. Servman is a web browser-based backend interface where you can do things like type in a player name and view that player’s deposits/withdrawals/rake/etc. All sites use Servman or something similar in their customer support dept. In addition, Servman had a tab called “Game Log” and, as I understand it, you could click on the tab and put in some information and bring up hand histories. According to an ex-employee of AP, the game log would typically write to Servman 20-25 seconds after the hand was completed. Therefore, during this ex-employee’s time at AP, viewing real-time admin level (ie, with all hole cards) hand histories at the customer service level was impossible. However, this employee was able to look up hands in such a manner pretty soon after hands were over. In addition, I was told that Servman had IP-restricted logins for most people. So the typical employee could not login to Servman outside of the AP offices. However, there were a number of admin level logins to Servman for the people who were running the company — and many of those logins did not have IP restrictions on them. According to someone at AP, there were probably about 20 such admin level Servman accounts and I suspect that the cheating was perpetrated via one or more of those accounts.

4. The reason Servman could see hole cards was due to a code change made by AP programmers in mid-June 2007

I don’t believe it’s really a problem for the software to let certain individuals access Servman or other backend tools outside of the office. After all, if an executive travels a lot, it may be necessary. The problem was that the software was writing hands in real time. I don’t really know if the problem existed in all Servman accounts, but I was told that in mid-June there was a software change that altered when hands in progress were written to the database. After the aforementioned change, hands were written in real-time, allowing Servman to query for partial hand histories. Why do I believe this is true?

1. Because of what ex-employees told me about how Servman used to work
2. AP was making code changes in mid-June 2007. According to this post, Scott Tom or someone using Scott Tom’s email address was looking for beta testers for the AP 8.0 software in the June timeframe. Also, another person told me that he started using AP 8.0 beta on June 15th, 2007. In addition, given the timeframe of the AP 8.0 release this past summer, it seems obvious that AP would have been beta testing it in June.
3. If AP was testing a new client, it’s very possible that they needed to make changes on their production game server. The production game server is the software that is (hopefully) running 24×7 serving games, tournaments, etc to the AP clientèle. I am far from a software expert so I really can’t tell you what goes into making a client work smoothly with a game server, but obviously a completely new client might require some changes to the game server in order to roll it out for testing. Therefore, if the code was open and being edited, it stands to reason that a database-writing change could have been made either by accident or, possibly, on purpose.

I don’t know why the change was made, but I do believe that it happened in June 2007 and I believe this change was responsible for providing real-time hand history access to whoever was in the Servman backend during the cheating incidents in August and September.

3. The aforementioned backend access software can no longer access hole cards before a hand is completed.

I don’t have any real proof of this. But, obviously, people at AP told me that it was closed and they couldn’t really “prove” it was closed because showing me around the backend doesn’t conclusively prove that it doesn’t exist somewhere else in the system. More than anything, it was a read of mine that they were telling me the truth. I didn’t believe a number of things that I was told or shown, but I did believe this one. And, logically, it seems like they could have just switched their code back over to the old system of writing hands pretty easily assuming my early theories are correct.