Wednesday, June 23, 2004

It seems that you really can't do much of anything these days in California unless you're a celebrity. We've got a celebrity governor and now the unheard of: a celebrity poker champion.

Yep, it's true, Ben Affleck won the California State Poker Championship.


California Poker Champion, Ben Affleck


Poker is certainly undergoing a tremendous amount of growth these days. I like the game, and have been playing in various California casinos for about 3 years now. I've never played at more than a $3-$6 game however, because I'm certain better players lurk at higher limit games. I will say that with the influx of all the new players, it has become easier and easier to walk away from a couple of hours of play with at least a 20% win.

I'm a tight-agressive player, and while I do get my share of bad beats, it almost always works out that some players will just call all the way to the river with absolute crap in their hands. I guess that it all works out in my favor in the end, and there's nothing I like more than to be verbally attacked for check raising some guy that is trying to see if his offsuit A-2 is going to somehow magically pay off.

I have been playing more and more online for a variety of reasons:

1. It's easy to get in and out of games.
2. There's plenty of bad players online.
3. I have a chart that I use to quickly evaluate hands, and I can use it in an online game, but not at the casino.
4. I can take notes on each players play, and when I get in a heads up situation with any of them, I have some very accurate data on which to make my decisions.
5. I can play at two tables at once. This one can bite you, as you can catch two good hands at once which leads to some quick decisions, but with tight-aggressive play, you end up throwing 80% of your hands away before betting, so this generally works out.
6. Play is much, much, much faster than in the casino.
7. You can play with a 4 color deck which makes reading a mix of clubs and spades as a flush absolutely impossible.

Anyway, if you're interested in playing online, I'm really enjoying myself at Party Poker. Go check it out! If you make a deposit, make sure to tell them that "sgtdilbert" sent you! :)

Monday, June 07, 2004

While attending that conference in Vegas, which included several information systems auditors, I learned of a vulnerability of the 802.11b wireless protocol. If you’re using a wireless router somewhere, you most likely are using the 802.11b protocol.

What I found interesting, as the auditor explained, was that the flaw was in the actual protocol itself. That doesn’t happen much to something as widely used as 802.11b.



After returning from the conference, I did a little reading on the subject, and I’m not certain that this flaw is a major problem, albeit an annoyance. First, no data is at risk here (although the security encryption inherit in many wireless routers has been cracked for sometime now; that’s another blog entry).

Here’s how it works: a hacker is able to issue instructions to their wireless card on their computer to send out data in a specific manner. The wireless router then interprets this data as interference. This apparently takes all of 8 seconds to accomplish.

The 802.11b protocol goes about its business until it encounters interference. When it does, it stops network traffic for a bit and then resumes. However, the hacker doesn’t just hit the network with one burst of bogus data. Instead, the bogus data is sent constantly, which essentially prevents the wireless network from working resulting in Denial of Service.

So how is the industry reacting to solve this problem? They’re not, according to this article. Go figure. Since the hacker needs to be within a few hundred feet of a wireless router, most companies are hoping that these malicious folks won’t be hanging around their offices causing problems.

Don’t these folks think that someone out there is going to invent a virus that finds wireless cards and forces them to send out the bogus interference data? That’s my prediction: sometime in the next six months, someone is going to release just such a virus, and it’s going to cause some serious connectivity issues.