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NASA schedules walloped, Cynus launches, and Owen Garriott's final voyage

Roundup It has been an eventful past seven days in space what with SpaceX making a big cloud o' orange smoke, Cygnus docking, and veteran astronaut Owen Garriott taking his final journey into the black.…

Ministers can't tell Ofcom to ignore the law after all

UK comms regulator Ofcom can't be ordered to ignore its legal duties, the High Court has ruled, paving the way for GSM gateway operators to claim compensation after Home Office ministers and mandarins destroyed their businesses.…

The 'E' is for 'Ersatz'

US network operators Sprint and AT&T remain coy about the details of a 5G ceasefire they have just agreed.…

Residents' scheme flags up scourge of lazy dog owners

Is there anything more triumphantly British than fields strewn with dog toffee? Well, there is now: fields strewn with dog toffee with Union Jacks proudly planted in them.…

iPhone maker set to feed competitor even more dollars over the next five years

Apple has been identified as the largest customer of Amazon Web Services, splashing tens of millions of dollars each month on public cloud infrastructure supplied by its rival.…

Plus: Windows 10 May 2019 Update on MSDN, Surface Hub 2S has a trolley

Roundup Last week was all about Windows as Surface Hub 2 crept closer to availability and Windows 10 arrived on MSDN. But the Easter Bunny didn't deliver Sets this year.…

Giffgaff tops satisfaction ratings, Vodafone brings up the rear

Cheapo MVNOs have again scored far higher than the UK's big four mobile networks in Which? magazine's customer satisfaction ratings.…

3 variants become 2 with lower latency and just the one format

Micron has replaced its U.2 and AIC-format 9200 SSDs with an U.2-only 9300 line, beefing up capacities from 11TB to up to 15.36TB.…

One-day event promises to cover all angles

Promo Whether you are an experienced techie or a newbie still mulling over the prospect of venturing onto the cloud, there will be plenty to sink your teeth into at the Amazon Web Services Summit taking place on 8 May at London’s ExCel.…

Platinum-class MRAM exchange bias is the key

Taiwanese spintronics boffins have made an important finding in magnetic random access memory (MRAM) tech: a faster way to switch MRAM states by using a nanometre scale layer of platinum.…

...and here's a quick summary of what's been going down in infosec land

Roundup Welcome back, Brits, from your Easter break – assuming you weren't working or on-call over the four-day weekend.…

Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a software factory!

A protest by tech employees in China over the expectation of 72-hour work weeks has this week attracted the support of 30 workers from Microsoft and its GitHub subsidiary.…

Uncle Sam wants to run fliers' fizogs through photo databases by 2023

Water cooler Hey El Reg, help me out with this. I saw someone on Twitter complaining that she had to have her face scanned by US airline JetBlue before flying overseas from America. Why would they be doing this?…

Good bye to Nvidia, hello to the Samsung-fabbed FSD

Tesla claims to have built a "fully self driving" (FSD) system using custom-designed math processors, allowing its vehicles to potentially drive themselves completely autonomously.…

Gun held to dot-com owner's head in take-over gone wrong

A 26-year-old internet entrepreneur faces up to 20 years behind bars in America, and a $250,000 fine, after stealing a really not-very-good domain name.…

Plus: Employee unrest over diversity, harassment reported within Microsoft, Google this week

Special report Three of the five people fired from JavaScript package management biz NPM Inc last month claim that bosses got rid of them for trying to form a union.…

You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run

Samsung has confirmed that its dual-screen Galaxy Fold handset, which was due to go on sale for $1,980 apiece later this month in the US, has been delayed due to the touchscreen easily breaking quality control issues.…

Maine has become the latest state to take a serious look at sports betting, as a pair of bills have been introduced in the state House of Representatives with the same goal of legalizing sports gambling, though with different takes on the matter.

LD 1348 was introduced a month ago by Rep. Jeffrey Evangelos (I – Friendship) and includes most of what one would expect in a sports betting bill. The legal gambling age would be 21 and betting would be permitted at racetracks, off-track betting shops, casinos, and online.

The price is fairly steep for operators, though. The licensing fee is $30,000 (which, on its face isn’t bad, but revenue generation in Maine is going to be limited by its population) and the tax rate is 25 percent on net sports wagering income. Most of the state’s proceeds would go toward K-12 education.

Evangelos told the Portland Press Herald the reason for trying to legalizing sports betting, saying, “It is pretty obvious why we are doing it. It is fun and everyone else is doing it. Why shouldn’t we get a piece of it, too?”

Alright. Pretty simple.

More recently, Rep. Dustin White (R-Washburn) introduced LD 1515, which also aims to legalize sports betting. His bill, though, has a legal gambling age of just 18-years old while at the same time not permitting online and mobile sports betting. The fees are lower, as well: the licensing fee would be $5,000 and the tax rate would be 18 percent, although that tax rate is still higher than most states that have already legalized sports gambling.

The tax revenue would be spread much thinner than in Evangelos’ bill. Only two percent would go to the Department of Education for K-12 programs, while another two percent would be earmarked for community college scholarships. The state’s Native American tribes would get a larger chunk than education and racetracks and off-track betting parlors would also receive funding.

“We’ve had casinos for many, many years now. Gambling isn’t anything new to the state of Maine,” White told the Press Herald. “I think people are more open to sports betting than they have been in the last year. Looking at the national attention, it is just going to trickle up to Maine. I’d rather be the first in New England.”

There may be more sports betting bills to come, as well, which could be a good thing, as it means that multiple lawmakers are giving it heavy consideration and many different idea will be put on the table. One person who is reportedly crafting a bill is state Senator Louis Luchini (D-Ellsworth), chair of the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, where Evangelos’ bill currently resides.

“Anytime we expand gambling we have to consider the negative effects. That always becomes part of the equation,” he said. “Gambling bills are always controversial. It is something you have to take the time and meet with all the parties and hash out something responsible.”

Another bill, SB 553, was also introduced in January, but it is just a placeholder bill, literally waiting for regulations to be added.

The post Maine Legislature Considering Multiple Sports Betting Bills appeared first on Poker News Daily.

Sh*t! Sh*t sh*t sh*t

Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me? where readers share their panic-inducing moments of tech support cock-ups.…

In early March, PokerStars began restricting the use of third-party software tools, namely seating scripts, in an effort to improve the poker environment for its players. Unfortunately, the policy move didn’t quite work out as intended and in response, the online poker room tightened its restrictions, banning seating scripts altogether.

Seating Scripts are Abusive

A seating script is a software program that a user runs alongside the poker client which automatically seats the user at cash game tables based on predetermined criteria. These criteria are derived from data the user has on opponents; the goal is to find the weakest players and sit down at their tables. Seating scripts scan the cash game lobbies for these players and with no intervention needed by the user (aside from activating the software), seats the user where those “fish” are located.

The reason seating scripts were restricted is that they foster a hostile environment toward those weaker players. They are hunted throughout the poker room and picked on by stronger players. Weaker players are always going to have problems winning, but they are not stupid; they know when they are being tracked down and drained of their money. Poker becomes less fun for them and they often do not return.

The new rule read as so:

Any tool or service that sorts available games or (semi-) automates the process of joining games based on the game-play statistics or notes of other players will be prohibited. A tool that solely (or semi-) automates adding players to a set number of tables, without any reliance on information about other players, is permitted.

Unintended Consequences

Interestingly, though, the ban on only certain kinds of seating scripts may have backfired. Posters on Two Plus Two quickly started complaining:

“I thought they were banning scripts but they seem as rampant as ever. Some times hard to even get sat down at regular tables due to this.”

“Pokerstars now is a massive game of musical chairs, and the music stops when a fish sits.”

“scripts are still allowed but not to sit vs color-tags
now they just sit vs every reserved seat or newly sat player, making it 100% worse”

What had happened was that seating script developers modified their scripts to adhere to the new rules, so instead of targeting specific players, users started having their scripts essentially carpet bomb lobbies with seat reservations. Seating scripts would put mass-holds on open seats and then users would wait to see if weaker players would arrive. The result was that non-script using players had trouble even sitting down.

In response to the problems and the complaints, PokerStars decided to cutoff scripts altogether. A PokerStars rep posted on Two Plus Two:

Due to ring game seating scripts inherently causing this “table blocking”, we are making changes starting from today to prohibit players using these seating scripts. This change is effective immediately. It will take several days to update information on our webpages.

We thank the players who have raised their concerns with us on this issue.

The interesting thing about this is that, unlike when the original policy change was announced at the end of February (it went into effect on March 4th), PokerStars did not make another announcement on its site. Instead, the rep just posted in the poker forums on April 11th, a location where only the most dedicated players will notice.

What remains to be seen is how effective the blanket ban will be. Script developers will now likely get much sneakier with their software and a cat-and-mouse game with PokerStars may heat up.

The post PokerStars Bans Seating Scripts Completely appeared first on Poker News Daily.