On Feb 3, 2009, at 8:34 AM, Heikki Levanto wrote:
On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 10:41:53AM +0000, Nick Wedd wrote:
Providers of Go servers claim that it would be pointless to try to
implement client-side time, as players would be able to cheat by
hacking
their clients and fiddling with the clock. I don't doubt that they
would try to cheat, indeed I know that they would; but providers of
chess servers have been able to prevent cheating. As I understand
it,
their clients perform CRC checks on themselves to ensure that they
have
not been hacked, and the packets they send are CRC-checked by the
server
to ensure that the packets have not been hacked.
Sorry, I don't buy that. It may work with an audience of human
players who
are not good programmers. But for a person who is already writing a
go-playing program, and the whole time management in it, adding
what ever
cheats sounds trivial.
Besides, this would add an extra layer of complexity to be
programmed, with
new chances for mistakes.
All in all, I think this is a messy and unreliable solution to a
problem I
have not seen happening.
For what it is worth I vote against client-side time controls.
- Heikki
who admittedly doesn't even have a functional program at the
moment
--
Heikki Levanto "In Murphy We Turst" heikki (at) lsd (dot) dk
Perhaps you misunderstand how this is implemented for the chess
servers. The server authors themselves provide the client
authentication service. It acts as a filter between any go client and
remote server. On ICS, this was called "timeseal". Instead of your
go client connecting to the server directly, it connects via pipe or
local socket to timeseal, and timeseal makes the authenticated
connection to the remote server. In the past, this timeseal component
was distributed as an opaque binary for various hosts as a means of
hampering reverse engineering.
In other words, the burden is on the Go server author to implement
both the client and server sides of the timeseal protocol. Individual
Go program authors simply download the timeseal client and configure
their program to connect to it. No extra coding required.
Frankly, I'm baffled that nobody in the online Go world cares about
network lag. Timeseal has been a mature technology on the chess
servers for over a decade.
Ian
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