Clock Hacking

When I first joined Chess.com, I was excited. I felt like it did the best job out there of managing latency. I also liked the fact that it was java, making it much harder to hack.

Sadly, there are clock hackers out there and they are abundant. Now before you start the typical cover up excuse giving of pre-move and latency, let me preface this post by saying that:

1. I know how to hack. I know that hacking Chess.com is harder than most due to above. But it can be done (as the staff knows).

2. I also know more about latency than most members of the site. That is unless they are proficient with packet sniffers, etc. Or if they have experience managing Citrix networks (latency senstive), or tweak their protocol stack to be as efficient as possible. (making sure cable modem is directly connected to pc. Making sure no ads are running (sorry chess.com, ads slow me down, so I have to kill all the ads on the site and go directly to the java game and bypass the whole interface.) In other words, you can't get latency as tweaked as I have it. It's what I know, it's what I do. I am an online gamer and started one of the first online gaming networks in 1996. This is back before anyone knew what a ticdup was (scroogle.org it).

CONCLUSION:

Please stop the hackers. They are either packet editing (because I believe you pull the elapsed time from the users pc and then update server side). Or they are start/stoping their network card or "hiccuping" their network connection. (downloading a torrent in the background or something of the like would create a similar effect). The problem is that chess.com is too kind. They need to kill the game if there is a disconnect. This is because that is how I think some are hacking. Essentially plug/unplug ethernet cable, but at a software level so it is efficient to keep chess.com "kind", but not so much as to actually penalize.

When you play 1-0 games, this is a huge advantage. So please fix it. I would also mention some other methods which will work, but I don't want to ruin it for everyone else. I have already said enough for anyone would be hacker wanna be's.

So again, this post is meant to start an awareness campaign against the OBVIOUS hacking. Not the pre-movers, or latency issues. Both of which I am accutely aware..Not the false sense of security of pretending it's not happening.

If it continues, oh well. But it is a shame because the board is the best.

It doesn't take "clock hacking" to get a 1500 rating.

Ok, assuming that you are correct, and that time hacking is going on, the problem with stopping all games the instant they disconnect is that there are players playing from all over the world here, and not all of them have good internet connections, meaning that killing games on the instant of disconnect would mean that a number of honest players would be unable to play at all. You cant punish the honest players because there are a few dishonest ones.

What qualifies as "obvious" hacking? Chess.com doesn't have a police force out there trying to catch hackers, and there is no real way to prove somebody was hacking after the fact (absent maybe recording the game via fraps or such, which might cause latency on your end!). And you said yourself that it can be hard to distinguish cable-jiggling from legitimate latency problems such as downloading a torrent while playing chess.

Unless you have a more specific suggestion, I doubt much can be done.

clock hacking?  like members are tampering with the clock while playing live games?  seriously?  that's pretty awesome.

or maybe it's just lag and slow servers or slow connections or a bad mouse.

sorry dude, i simply don't buy it--at all.

plus 1 minute chess isn't real chess.

I thought about that. Give us the option to set this. Unrated/Rated, Disconnect = Game lost. So I thought about this. Again, it only matters in super bullet games. I wouldn't care as much otherwise. I don't like a shortcut key, that disconnects, then the player pre-moves like 2-3 pcs, then it reconnects, and sends moves. I could give you a list of ways to hack a game, and to think it's not happening is just plain naive.

So you don't think it's possible to hack this? Mark my words, you will hear more and more people complain about this as Chess.com gets more popular. That's because you can absolutely hack the clock. To believe otherwise is just naive.

Loomis, your point is? Please, this is for being constructive about ways to narrow hacking. Not to defend the "this can't be hacked" policy.

You conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. If some number of chess.com members think the moon is made of cheese, there will be more and more of these members as chess.com gets more popular. That's because there will be more and more of every kind of person as chess.com gets more and more people, not because the moon is actually made of cheese.

Well, for one, we could have an option to set a property to be "disconnect = game lost". like we do with Unrated/rated.

Chess.com can definitely do something about it. They could look for certain things "out-of-band" that would help them know if packets are being edited. They can also look at the bios clock on the pc and there are ways to know if the sync is off. They can also be more granular about why the connect is dropping. Is it PHYSICAL, or is it SOFTWARE. Is the service being stop/started or is the software interrupted, or is the hardware unplugged. Little things like this go a long way. These are just some thoughts to get this thread on a proper course toward thwarting hackers.

I never said anything about whether it can or cannot be hacked, so I don't know how you read my post as defending a policy which may or may not exist and I never spoke about.

Most likely you think you're being cheated because you lost to someone you don't think you should lose to. But the fact of the matter is that it's just not that hard to get a 1500 rating. Your explanation is widespread complex computer hacking. The simpler, and more probable, explanation is that there are just better players than you out there.

I have plenty of players who call me a cheater after they lose. So I'm sure there are lots of paranoids out there.

The issue isn't about the type of chess you prefer to play. I happen to be obsessed with 1m games and enjoy the combination of quick thinking with quick moving. It's a personal choice, not for everyone. I absolutely do not like regular chess. I wouldn't even play if there wasn't bullet chess. In my opinion, most of chess is memorizing, then there is a different level altogether. If you can memorize all the great games, and then learn patterns from that, then you can dominate sub 2k players. It's not even a fair match. With bullet games, what I lack in skill, can be made up with quick thinking an speed. You also begin to recognize patterns due to the number of games you play. So it's another way to get patterns down. You can then carry that back to a normal game and adjust strategy. If you want to that is ;-)

It is called LAG. You could google it. And it's a serious IQ test those who play online must take it. Sadly, many fail it.

There's a reason I have an operating system between the BIOS and the outside world. I would not like to have a website accessing my BIOS whenever they like.

Loomis, please stay on the subject. It's my opinion. But you happen to be incorrect.

Premise, the more people that join, the more you will hear about hacking.

Proof: I searched the forums about hacking issues. It was pretty quiet. I joined less than 3 weeks ago and after carefully studying a few thousand games, I satisfied my belief that hacking is happening. I then proceeded to write a post. Hence you are hearing more about it.

Save the intellectual mental masturbastion for the others who care to split hairs. You are doing nothing more than instigating and attempting to discredit the message by discrediting the messenger. Please be constructive, and not major in the minors. The hacking awareness will increase as more people play.

Clearly a poster who didn't read the opening post. Disregarded.

I wouldn't use Google. I use Scroogle.org instead. I don't trust google. They are not your friend.

Everyone knows the moon is made of chess.

You have a rating of 1400, so your opponents will have a rating at most 1500. It is very clever indeed that one of them (or many) spent a lot of time reverse engineering the site's interface only to get a rating below average.

As I said, LAG is a very serious IQ test and many players here fail it.

"You have a rating of 1400, so your opponents will have a rating at most 1500. It is very clever indeed that one of them (or many) spent a lot of time reverse engineering the site's interface only to get a rating below average."

Not quite. The OP's 1448 Bullet rating places him in the 96th percentile, hardly "below average" for this site.

i'd happily provide a lifetime membership to anyone who can show proof of intentional clock hacking and how it is done. we verify time both on client and server side.