Annie Duke & Hellmuth to Quit UB - Rats Leaving the Sinking Ship?

Annie Duke posted on her Twitter this week that her time at Ultimate Bet Poker the home of the endless allegations of Ultimate Bet Scandals and often weird software bugs and security holes that have drifted out over the last few years. Despite optimism that the future was bright for the room and they were putting some of these things behind them they have been blasted by the departure of one of their most senior pro team members.

Ultimate Bet Domain Dropped in Attempt to Move on From Scandal

Not ones to be long out of the headlines for their scandals, security holes and general poor software (not that all those stories are true of course but many are and they have started to pay compensation for the main scandal) Ultimate Bet has dropped the use of that domain to focus on UB.

Rigged Random Number Generator at Ultimate Bet? - Questions Arise Over Quality of Cereus Code

This is an opinion piece not Poker News
Following from our recent article where we discussed the massive security flaw posed by the Cereus Network (Ultimate Bet - UB, and Absolute Poker - AP) not using SSL and effectively therefore transmitting hands in an extremely insecure manner questions have arisen about the quality of their code. Questions have also arisen about the eCOGRA seal they received for the security and fairness of the code and systems and clearly this is something no competent programmer could have thought was acceptable. Certainly if provided with full details no regulating body should find it acceptable either.

In the face of such incompetence we are assured by the UB website:

The Quad Dimensions RNG uses a widely recognized algorithm to generate random numbers. The numbers generated by this RNG have passed Marsaglia's "diehard" tests for statistical randomness. iTech Labs has also evaluated the shuffling for single and 6 decks games. Chi-squared tests were applied
to over 2.5 million shuffled decks each for single and 6 deck shuffle, using samples ranging from 1,000 to 100,000 deals. The tests were applied to suits, ranks and cards. iTech Labs has found that the number sequences are unpredictable, non-repeatable and the cards are uniformly distributed.
Ultimate Bet Website

Searches for "Quad Dimensions RNG" on Google don't return any useful information. The fact they also do not disclose the algorithm being used and that so many 'widely known' algorithms are horrendously weak and can be cracked should be a massive worry to poker players in light of the fact that they have already been exposed as incompetent in the area of player security by the Poker Table Ratings Report.

Because UB flat out lied about their encryption, one could also logically conclude that their RNG algorithm (they say on their site they use an algorithm, not any specialist hardware) is actually probably grossly simple, with backward logic such as 'the more layers the better', crackable and would be quite interesting to look at. It wouldn't suprise me in the slightest if that was found to be unrandom, and there were hackers out there calculating poeples cards etc.
Gullanian - Respected 2+2 Member

Now don't get me wrong - there's no way anyone at present can tell whether UB/AP have made another blunder with their algorithm here. All we know is the companies that hosted the biggest scandal in the history of Poker and have recently had to own up to having no proper encryption on their games also fail to disclose the full details of their Random Number Generator - which is key to the game. I for one will continue to boycott their action - I would recommend you all do as well as operators like this have no place in a hopefully regulated poker market of the future.

Absolute/Ultimate Bet Security Flaw Found (Again!)

Masters of always being in the press for the wrong reasons, Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker were hit once again. This time it is the shocking revelation that they do not have SSL (or similar) encryption on their gaming software connections. So we can honestly say they learned nothing of substance from the Potripper scandal and the fact they had massive holes in their security all those years ago.

Do we need to panic? Well PokerTableRatings expert thinks not:

We have no way of knowing if this exploit has been discovered and used to steal from Cereus users, but it seems unlikely. It is our hope that this information will allow Cereus users to protect themselves.

The issue in general terms is that rather than using industry standard SSL encryption Cereus has used a custom form of encoding (not encryption) which can be cracked using the windows calculator.
Poker Table Ratings Blog

So in summary it seems not the easiest flaw to exploit but one that for a brand that has brought so much shame to the Poker industry with it's failings is surely unforgivable.

I wonder how many more times the alarm bell has to ring before the greedy amongst the poker players online realise guys like UB and AP are bad for the game in the long run and short term support for them is very damaging to the future of online poker. Of course those stupid enough to be both an informed regular and playing on UB/AP proves there is plenty of dead money in the poker world for a long time to come.