AAAAARGHHH! NOOOOOO!

[1eyedjack]

Just read this:

 

http://www.bridgebas...post__p__852735

 

What, pray, was broken with the previous arrangement?

 

This change dramatically reduces my enjoyment of BBO.

 

Using third party app "Double Dummy Solver" by Bridge Captain I have been keeping a complete record of my hands going back years, by downloading a month's records at a time. This is now completely broken.

 

Now, BBO has no mandate to support third party applications, but BBO does not provide its own alternative.

 

The hands on MyHands disappear from view after a couple of months, and now they will disappear for good.

 

Bad, Bad, Bad.

[jandrew]

I agree with Jack.

 

The original message at - http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/71552-my-hands-database-now-requires-login/page__view__findpost__p__852735 does not allow me to reply directly to the message but gives only an email address for comments. This appears to be a novel approach which divorces replies from the original message to the disadvantage of those who disagree with the change. I am sorry about that.

 

What does this mean for tournaments for which I am the host or a TD or a subsequent interested observer - but in which tournaments I have not played.

 

In particular - here at the Acol Players (public) Club we run tournaments (both pairs and individuals) four times a week. Each player is given a score which is accumulated over a 3 month period - I keep those scores and related spread sheets, etc. which are published on our website : Acol Club Tourneys

 

As host or TD it is not appropriate for me to play in the tournament; I may take a holiday for a few days; I may be ill. Does this change mean that I cannot access the tournament record in "My Hands" after the event? How then will I be able to access or keep the scores?

 

Will there be some other "back-door" that I can use to access the tournament 'Leaderboard' or 'Boards'?

 

I publish a link to the 'Leaderboard' and 'Boards' record on the website. Already the 'Boards' record is only accessible to somebody with a user name and password. I suppose the 'Leaderboard' record will also become hard to get.

 

What about those other interested parties who do not have usernames or , worse, who did not play in every tournament in the 3 months but who want to search the record for the whole period. It is unfortunate the 'Boards' record already disappears after only a few weeks. Now, it appears that all open records are to vanish completely except for those who played in the tournament and have a password.

 

Where is the improvement in this change? What problem or difficulty is being overcome?

 

Just a personal thought - I often play with my brother and we both play with other players. I like to follow his scores across all his sessions. Alas - no more?

 

 

Jandrew

[1eyedjack]

I could understand there being a login requirement to a site to which the public could post comments, as a spam prevention measure such as with BBF, but with Myhands it is totally passive All we are doing is extracting data, not posting it. I cannot imagine any motive for someone NOT in possession of a BBO ID even accessing the site, so why go to the effort of requiring them to prove it?

 

Also you tease us with the comment that SOME tournament records will be denied us unless we played in it. But WHICH tournaments, you do not say. Why not?

[Wwchang]

Seconded. I use Double Dummy Solver as well after playing a session's worth of boards to analyze, and this is completely broken now. It would have been much better to restrict access only to the tournament info (if that is truly needed) than to put everything, including boards with no need for protection, behind a login gate.

[scarletv]

Don't like it.

 

What tourneys will be excluded from view and why?

[barmar]

What does this mean for tournaments for which I am the host or a TD or a subsequent interested observer - but in which tournaments I have not played.

Tournaments you host yourself will not be restricted by this.

[Rain]

I updated the lobby news announcement.

 

The only tourneys affected are Robot Duplicates and Instant Tourneys. So for these 2 tourney families, you can see the results only if you've played them.

(Also accessible via mybbo->hands and results)

 

We knew blocking myhands would be unpleasant so this was a very reluctant decision. This is an easy way to improve the security of these tournaments. Cheaters will still find a way to cheat, but at least it will no longer be as easy.

 

I think Bridge Captain may find a way around this, which is good.

 

You'll def still be able to look for JEC, ACOL, IAC, etc hands and results.

[Phil]

 

We knew blocking myhands would be unpleasant so this was a very reluctant decision. This is an easy way to improve the security of these tournaments. Cheaters will still find a way to cheat, but at least it will no longer be as easy.

 

 

Seems like a good reason, but why not just put in a lag in Myhands?

[Rain]

I don't think a lag would help Instant Tourney security even if it may help robot dup. We like to have myhands contain 1-2 months data most of the time (until there's no more space and the hands get moved to archive).

 

We're not blocking everything...you can link handviewer hand records if you like or send a rdup hand to your friend still. They may not have played it, but would still see the hand. We're just trying to block easy access to other players' rdup/IT hands and results.

[Bbradley62]

Seems like a good reason, but why not just put in a lag in Myhands?

They don't want you to see hands from a Robodupe played yesterday that you might play as an Instant Tournament six months from now, because there might be one person out there who bothers to find a way to cheat with this capability.

[Phil]

They don't want you to see hands from a Robodupe played yesterday that you might play as an Instant Tournament six months from now, because there might be one person out there who bothers to find a way to cheat with this capability.

 

So they'd have to somehow scan thousand's of players myhands accounts for the one Instant tournament they happened to be playing in.

[1eyedjack]

Sounds to me like pursuit of perfection being the enemy good. Or in this case, the enemy of what used to be F*CK*NG BRILLIANT.

 

Is the potential (historical) security breach purely theoretical, or is there actually some empirical evidence of exploitation? I assume that none of the money prize events were compromised.

 

Anyway, if DDS can be made to accommodate this, as suggested may be the case, then my whinge largely dissipates.

[barmar]

This is being done to support another widely-desired change: Instant Tourneys should use hands from more recent tournaments, so that they use the same version of GIB.

 

And here's another hint: We need to get all these changes done before the next ACBL BoD meeting.

[ArtK78]

I suppose it is theoretically possible to pull up the hands being used in the instant tournaments, but the effort involved must be immense. One would have to create a database of all of the hands previously played in tournaments on BBO to have access to the hands. Seems like a lot of work for little reward. It is much easier to just win the instant tourneys.

 

As for someone raising this as a reason for not awarding ACBL masterpoints in these events, those persons have an agenda and they will come up with reasons to support their agenda.

 

 

 

[barmar]

As for someone raising this as a reason for not awarding ACBL masterpoints in these events, those persons have an agenda and they will come up with reasons to support their agenda.

Unfortunately, we're stuck trying to take away as much of their ammunition as possible.

[Wayne_LV]

Just read this:

 

http://www.bridgebas...post__p__852735

 

What, pray, was broken with the previous arrangement?

 

This change dramatically reduces my enjoyment of BBO.

 

Using third party app "Double Dummy Solver" by Bridge Captain I have been keeping a complete record of my hands going back years, by downloading a month's records at a time. This is now completely broken.

 

Now, BBO has no mandate to support third party applications, but BBO does not provide its own alternative.

 

The hands on MyHands disappear from view after a couple of months, and now they will disappear for good.

 

Bad, Bad, Bad.

 

I agree wholeheartedly with the above - may be the only time in history 1eyedjack and I have ever agreed on anything.

 

Why not allow DD Solver to access MyHands when the user is logged on to MyHands or allow DD Solver to log into myhands and access the records. Before DD Solver I used to cut and paste MyHands into an elaborate Excel Sheet to do some analysis, but the data availabile in Myhands is sparse and does not include such things as who opened the bidding, the opening bid, etc, etc, etc. -- all necessary data for detailed analysis. Some of this information can be computed using extremely complex parsing formulas but not enough to find long term trends and there is no capability of doing Double Dummy Analysis. Using DD Solver, I get more data in a fraction of the time required using an Excel Sheet.

[1eyedjack]

I think perhaps we just need to watch this space and let things settle down for a bit. I hear on the grapevine that DDS interaction with BBO may yet be restored but it may take a few weeks. As I have no connection with either I may be out of line saying anything.

[diana_eva]

I think perhaps we just need to watch this space and let things settle down for a bit. I hear on the grapevine that DDS interaction with BBO may yet be restored but it may take a few weeks. As I have no connection with either I may be out of line saying anything.

 

We sent a heads-up to Bridge Captain that this change is coming, before it was done. Hopefully there will be a solution, but programmers have a lot on their plate, they can't just drop everything to make sure 3rd party software is safe every time there's a change to BBO.

[johnu]

I suppose it is theoretically possible to pull up the hands being used in the instant tournaments, but the effort involved must be immense. One would have to create a database of all of the hands previously played in tournaments on BBO to have access to the hands. Seems like a lot of work for little reward. It is much easier to just win the instant tourneys.

 

Not a 20 minute job, but the concepts are well known. BBOSkill.com was pulling all the hands for a username so you just need to filter for tournaments. Totally disagree about it being easier to just win the instant tournaments for most people. They may play so bad that a 50% game is a very rare accomplishment. Computer cheating is basically a 1 time setup and then you can play double dummy every single hand of every tournament.

[johnu]

This is being done to support another widely-desired change: Instant Tourneys should use hands from more recent tournaments, so that they use the same version of GIB.

 

I was one of the ones who wanted the change. It seemed inherently unfair that you could be the only player in the tournament to randomly get different GIB actions after the same sequence of events. I'll start playing instant tournaments again when the changes are published.

[ThymePuns]

How about this implementation?

 

1) No log required to do the main search (as before)

2) Instant and Robot Dupe show don't show the contract, result, or percentage.

3) Instead, it has a link to log in.

4) When logged in, it then shows everything filled in if it's your tournament, otherwise a note.

 

This might make things a bit better, though doesn't address all the concerns above. General principle here is to only protect what needs to be protected. Right now, it's authorizing too early and authenticating on a bit more than needed.

 

Also, another improvement would be to use longer cookies for authorization. For something as low risk as this, there's no reason to require logging back in frequently. Having it last a month would be quite sufficient and much more usable.

[Bbradley62]

2) Instant and Robot Dupe show don't show the contract, result, or percentage.

Then what would they show? It sounds like the point of this exercise is to prevent people from knowing "if I hold this exact hand in an Instant Dupe, I will know where all the other cards are".

[Rain]

We plan on making some improvements to this, hopefully next week.

 

Longer session cookies is certainly important. Original plan was once you login, you won't notice much difference in your myhands experience (except the robot dup/IT results change).

 

And definitely plan on helping Bridge Captain too if he needs help modifying his script.

[42krunner]

So if 99% of my games are IT's and acbl robodups, my BBO skill will slowly go away?

I'm fine with that.

[lycier]

But sometimes I think It seems to be not so.I have a question.

Assume that a player own 2 usernames - A and B, while A is playing at bbo,he use B logging in MyHands,Likewise, he might get what he want. So even cheating,it seems A can have nothing to do with anything,how about ?similarly, you have no evidence to show his cheating.