Flagged for cheating

Did it ever get to court?

I thought they backtracked, apologised, claimed it was a mix up and removed someone from staff ?

No I saw that. Somewhat doubtful it affected his livelihood. What I mainly noticed was that it was a slip over a digit in a username which chess.com said caused the problem.

(Well, I also noticed that the cost of reaching settlement is undisclosed - maybe the guy is a gentlemen - that the guy is back playing here (which is kinda nice) and the somewhat weird point, well weird if you are at all into these things, that it was in a federal court.)

P.S. Removed someone from staff. Gossip, great! Who was it, do tell.

Maybe you should stop cheating.

well played

Yeah, lots of ways around it.  Just use the engine on a phone or tablet next to you.  But it's something I guess.

I had a look at the ICC site and see that you do need to download some software in order to play there. On a very quick look I did not find anything which explained what the software does.

As to ways round it, well of course there are ways round all sorts of things. Quite a number of people spend time looking for ways round an obligation to pay tax. But I have never heard it argued that this makes it wrong or a mistake to raise taxes.

Not stupid, just not good at cheating.  Any player of even an intermediate level should be able to cheat efficiently online and not get caught.

Sadly it would make perfect sense if the prizes were big and they got away with it.

Ha!  Hey, doc', my friend has this problem...

There's nothing that suggests it can't happen. In fact the opposite is true, it is already happening and considered a widely accepted practice going back around 15 years that I can think of. This is exactly what many video games do to detect cheating. They scan the PC to see what other programs are running. They would be able to demonstrate that no personal data is collected, by submitting source code to the court, log files, and so on. If the end user doesn't like it, no one is forcing them to play here. Whether it's good for business is another matter, but a court is not going to throw anything out if they implement it properly and don't have incompetent employees abusing the members.

My eyes are going bad. I thought this thread was titled "Flogged for cheating".

Interesting thread. I feel for the chess teacher, poor guy must've been devestated..

There was some hoopla a few years back about Nakamura cheating on ICC, not sure what their evidence was, maybe just cos he played like a top 10 GM?!

And then you've got "toilet gate", Kramnik was accused by Topalov of spending a suspicious amount of time in the bathroom. That was 2006, the atmosphere between them at the candidates last month was still toxic.

Not the same at all.  Only about 5-10 people could legitimately claim that their "professional reputations" or livelyhood were affected if they were publically branded as cheaters in Call of Duty ;).  This is less about what is technologically feasible and more about what will win in court.

As I said, even if they implemented it perfectly and 100% ethically, the negative publicity would still be there.  Corporations that try to tell their customers they are bad people can get themselves in trouble (even when they are right).

Passive detection methods work just fine anyway, in this case...you can't hide the patterns forever, unless the cheater uses the engine so sparingly that it's just not detectable at all, and, like using a second device, there's no way active software monitoring is going to catch that ;).  The proposal is futile, and can only hurt chess.com.

What chess.com could do is just covertly match up engine users with other engine users for all their games...what are they going to do, put in a ticket and report the other player that they almost beat who is an engine user? ;)

Well, one of the (several) things I find odd is Chess.com's insistence on publishing a list and branding the people on it cheats. I cannot readily see what anyone gains by that whereas introducing the risk - however remote - of litigation seems to me a clear disadvantage. Particularly as the owners do not seem to have bothered with limiting their liability.

I don't understand this either.

I never was...

Wait I am so confused now, I just got back and now 2 new pages of comments  Too lazy to read the whole thing, can someone tell me what happened? 

I like how they said they're not accusing you, when obviously they are.

"We're not saying you're cheating, just saying that our software that determines whether or not you're cheating says you're cheating.  We're still good, right?"

YOU IS NUB YOU IS