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Splash one for GDPR

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has ordered the country to delete 3.2 million people's personal data after ruling that its national ID card scheme was "unlawful from a data-processing point of view".…

Shopping centres, museums and conference centres among all found to be using tech

Facial recognition is being extensively deployed on privately owned sites across the UK, according to an investigation by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch.…

Forget Vegas or Barcelona. Be 'gigabit-capable' in Blighty

Fiddling around with crap conference Wi-Fi is an occupational hazard for attendees. But today the UK government has dug deep to produce the princely sum of £250k to tackle this national problem.…

Good-faith security research tool or help for hackers? Both?

Apple has filed a copyright infringement complaint against Corellium, which provides virtual machines running iOS as a service to developers and security researchers.…

Back in 2013, after three states – Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware – passed online gaming and poker regulations, it was thought that there would be a “gold rush” for other states to get their intra-state industries established. In the more than six years since then, there have been relatively few states who have entered the game and, of those that have, online poker seems to have been an afterthought. Two states that have recently entered the game are demonstrations that it is online gaming and sports betting that are driving the industry, not online poker.

Pennsylvania in “No Hurry” to Start Online Poker

In the past month, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has been bringing its online casino gaming and sports betting industry online. To this point, all looks to be running smoothly for the industry (more will be known with the first reports of revenues from the outlets). But what hasn’t been seen on the Pennsylvania market are any of their casinos starting up online poker operations.

When the online gaming industry debuted last month in the Keystone State, three casinos hit the internet and were soon followed by a few more. None of them, however, opened the doors to an online poker site. In fact, those places that have online poker licenses available to them have literally said they are in “no hurry” to open these outlets, in some cases opting to hold off until 2019 before they enter the game.

West Virginia? Don’t Expect Anything Soon…

In Pennsylvania’s neighbor West Virginia, the story is even more disheartening.

Although they passed legislation earlier this year to open for online gaming and poker, West Virginia lawmakers are still in the process of penning the regulations that they would need to govern the industry. The expected completion date for this is the summer of 2020 and the story gets even worse after that.

If it were to be mid-2020 that West Virginia would even start accepting online gaming license applications, the review process and testing would take several months on its own. That means that it wouldn’t be until 2021 that there would be any online casino gaming or poker in the Mountaineer State.

To pass the time, it seems that West Virginia is looking towards sports betting to pick up the slack, passing laws for both live and online sports betting. Three casinos in the state offer live sports betting – Hollywood Casino, Mountaineer Casino and The Greenbriar – but there is currently no outlet for online sports betting. That was shut down earlier this year when a dispute with a third-party vendor caused Mardi Gras and Wheeling Island to shut down their online (and live) operations.

So Why the Delays?

The reason for the delays is a simple one – money.

Online poker hasn’t shown that it is a massive moneymaker for any online gaming operation. In New Jersey (the biggest state to have both online casino and online poker offered to its citizens), monthly revenues from online casino gaming – including slots, blackjack and other table gaming – outpace online poker revenues tenfold. Add in the sports betting offering and the story gets worse; in New Jersey, it only took a few months before sports betting began to rival online casino gaming in “take” (revenues) and, in some cases, pass it on the revenue board.

Without big bucks coming in for the operation, casinos are examining their online operations and giving the people what they seem to want: online sports betting and casinos. Poker, in most of these cases, is an afterthought and, if it were possible, some of these operations may not consider it critical to have an online poker outlet at all. Unless there is a way to pool the players through compacting (something that has been placed in doubt by the insistence of the federal government to revert their interpretation of the Wire Act to pre-2011), there isn’t going to be massive revenues created for online poker operations.

There very well may be other states that enter the game this year (Illinois and Michigan are both on the “watch list”), but they won’t be throwing the switch on their games immediately. And, with the 2020 elections looming on the horizon, some of those in power in state capitols won’t want to offend any of their constituents with an approving vote for gambling. Thus, we may be looking at the end of any legislative action and/or openings regarding online gaming and poker for 2019 – and we may not see any action in states that have approved online poker for much longer.

The post Pennsylvania, West Virginia Slow-Walking Online Poker Rollout appeared first on Poker News Daily.

But how much will go to AWS?

Public sector procurement body Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation (YPO) has opened its £400m framework for data centres, cloud hosting and data security.…

Unit 42 crew tours the cloud security hellscape, finds admins have learned nothing

Anyone hoping to halt the flood of data leaks stemming from cloud services got bad news this week when Palo Alto's Unit 42 found little sign companies were improving their security practices.…

Brave investors would have to match awards four times over

The UK government yesterday waved around some pocket change aimed at making forever-nearly-here quantum technologies a reality.…

Back to the drawing board thanks to SN2016iet

Astronomers have stumbled across the strangest supernova left over from the death of a humongous star 200 times as massive as the Sun. It’s the largest known star to have ended its life in a supernova explosion yet.…

Hello, can I speak to Rob please? Second name Ber

Criminologists have long known petty crooks to be dumber than law-abiding citizens. Throw in some Dunning-Kruger and you have the perfect storm of a moron who thinks they're a criminal mastermind.…

Omnishambles just keeps on rolling and you're paying for it

Sussex Police's probe of the infamous London Gatwick airport drone fiasco of Christmas 2018 has doubled in cost to nearly £900,000 – and the bungling force still hasn't arrested the person or persons responsible.…

The boss that went rogue and cocked a snook at the corporate policy he wrote

On Call With the gateway to the weekend upon us, it is time to crack open the On Call files once again to enjoy a tale from one of those brave engineers at the front line of the tech world.…

Join us at MCubed and dive deep into practical, hands-on knowledge

Event It’s great to see hear about the possibilities of machine learning, and AI, but to really understand their potential, nothing beats getting your hands dirty under the watchful eye of a bona fide expert.…

ICO wants to know if AI surveillance systems in central London are legal

The UK's privacy watchdog last night launched a probe into the use of facial-recognition technology in the busy King's Cross corner of central London.…

Bypass our tracking controls at your unspecified peril, warns maker of minor browser

Apple's WebKit team on Wednesday formalized the company's oft-repeated pro-privacy stance (provided you're not in China) by declaring that privacy-piercing browser code will be treated as a security abuse.…

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Kaspersky and Trend Micro have released updates to address vulnerabilities in their respective security tools.…

Extending DNS security protocol to multiple platforms takes root

A plan to expand the current DNSSEC security protocol to cover multiple DNS platforms has received the backing of Salesforce, with a first proof-of-concept implementation of the approach announced on Thursday.…

A human driver is still needed, for the moment at least

Package delivery giant UPS has invested in TuSimple, a self-driving startup based in San Diego, California, to develop autonomous trucks, the mega-corp announced on Thursday.…

Google Assistant can now send reminders to friends and family – this won't end well

Having failed to grasp the lesson of Microsoft's annoying animated Office assistant, Clippy – humans hate being hectored by software – Google has empowered its Assistant software to remind people to do things at the behest of another.…

Reminder: They're not allowed to do that without permission

The Attorney General of Ohio has banned cops and the Feds from accessing the US state's database of drivers' license plates and faces until the officers and g-men receive adequate privacy compliance training.…