Jetset

Here's one that is guaranteed to generate some discussion!.

Press Release

24 August 2004

Today Project Fairdice announced the initial release of software designed to prevent the rigging of games by online casinos.

Spokesperson Douglas Reay said "This will deal a bitter blow to conmen and criminals in the gambling industry, and clear the way for the honest online casinos who give their players a fair chance."

Currently the only way the honest online casinos have to show they are trustworthy is to invite auditors occasionally in to check on things, and many players don't trust that. Too many get ripped off once and never come back. The problem is, when a casino says they've shuffled a deck of cards fairly, how can you know if they are telling the truth?

With the launch of this initial implementation of the Fairdice cryptographic protocol, Project Fairdice is offering casinos another way. We're saying to all the casinos out there, 'Come get involved in the project. Enable your websites to use the Fairdice Protocol. If you are not rigging your games, you have nothing to lose. This is your chance to really prove to your players that your random number generators are not fixed.'

Online gaming watchdog eCOGRA (eCommerce and Online Gaming Regulation and Assurance) require in their code of practice that the probability of any event occurring shall be as for the actual physical device except where deviations are clearly displayed to the players. Now eCOGRA and other regulatory bodies have their first opportunity to give real teeth to their laws. "It's going to be very interesting to see who welcomes this breakthrough with open arms, and who ducks for cover or tries to ignore it."

To find out more about Project Fairdice, come visit us at:

http://fairdice.sourceforge.net/

PRESS CONTACT:

Douglas Reay

Lead Developer

Project Fairdice

+44 1223 426485

http://fairdice.sourceforge.net/

douglasr+press@chiark.greenend.org.uk

ABOUT PROJECT FAIRDICE:

Project Fairdice is a non-profit organisation whose vision is to use open source software to revolutionise the gambling industry.

nafanny29

This is gonna scare the pants out of a lot of casinos i rekon!!!!!

Jetset

Probably not the honest ones. And there are several companies offering similar concepts and a lot depends on their ability to do what they say they can do, obviously.

We sent off a list of detailed questions relevant to this press release, using the email address quoted above. It bounced unfortunately, which is not a promising start. We're now trying to get answers by going through their websites.

Gamblegirl

Yeah, sure it will. You might as well write your review now:

"An interesting attempt, with flawed methodology and unverifiable data."

Jetset

nafanny writes reviews, too? Who do you write for, nafanny?

eek

Ahem!

There may be slight delays before wider use by the general public...

(I thought computers were meant to make things easier)

The third instruction of one section....

1. sanity check the first section of the the MAKEFILE

2. type "make"

3. pray



------------------------------------------------------------
How to install and use the Fairdice apps
If, after reading the caveats, you still want to have a go at installing and running the fairdice apps, here is a step by step guide. It assumes you have already downloaded the base and external modules. If you have not, go now to the download page and do so first.

Install External
You will need to install:
Windows

Cygwin (including bash, make and gcc)

Install Tom's Crypt Library (tested against v0.96):
http://libtomcrypt.org/download.html
(included in external module)

Install the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library
http://www.swox.com/gmp/
(included in external module)

Install the Expat XML Parser Toolkit
http://sourceforge.net/projects/expat/
(included in external module)

Install SCEW
http://www.nongnu.org/scew/
(included in external module)

If you want to generate your own docs, you will also need Doxygen
http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/
(included in external module)


Install Base
1. sanity check the first section of the the MAKEFILE

2. type "make"

3. pray

Run the tests
All commands should be run from the base directory, as they will refer to other files relative to that.
exec/frdi_test.exe This should give a long output to stdout (and a little to stderr). Some of the tests require human scrutiny for verification (yes, this ought to be changed. It is on the todo list). The actual tests are in the tests/ subdirectory. If you get any fails, examine your installs of the external applications, make sure you have all the include and library files on the relevant paths. You may well need to re-edit the make file and recompile. If you are unlucky you may find yourself having to port the thread code.

Run the scenarios
Scenarios cannot be run simultaneously (due to port usage).
Each one can be run either manually, by running each executable with the appropriate config file from a different bash shell or automatically by running a script which launches all the applications. Note that for timing purposes all the applications in a scenario should be launched within a second or two of each other. (yes, this is bad, please please come write a decent test harness for me.)

To run scenario single call the script scenario/single/bin/scenario_single.sh. (You will probably find it easiest to add each of the scenario specific bin directories to your path or use simlinks).

Check the scenario results
Look in the relevant scenario directory (eg scenario/single) for .stackdump files. Then proceed to look at the log files (eg scenario/single/logs). For each instance of an application there will be three files: .std Standard out
.err Standard error
.log the user log
What these contains will depend on the flags you set in the XML config file for that instance (look in scenario/single/conf). Each flag may be either "YES" or "NO". For advanced manipulation you can also pass various #define flags to make such as SILENT.
Verbose
YES puts lots of debug information in .std, NO is silent
THREAD
put a thread identifier on each line of .log
TIME
puts a time identifier on each line of .log
MESSAGETEXT
put the exact text of each message sent on the wire to .log
MESSAGEBYTES
records the total bytes sent and received per connection in .log
RESULT
puts a user readable game summary in all three files
In general, if there is a game summary for each game played on each application, and there is a total bytes summary for each connection then the scenario ran correctly. Well done!

Got2Bet

LOL - don't blame him for that, he is only taking a swipe at the complications of compiling scripts. Makefile is one of my worst nightmares.

Not having gone through the actual application yet, at this point I have no further comment.

GrandMaster

Just to clarify something, Fairdice is not about game testing. Here is what I posted on this topic at Casinomeister.com:

It is an implementation of a cryptographic protocol to generate random numbers that are acceptable to both parties.

Let's say we want to toss a coin. I don't trust you, you don't trust me, but we can agree that we each toss a coin, and if we both get the same result, then we call it heads, otherwise we call it tails. As long as at least one of the coins is fair, the outcome will be fair, and neither party has an interest in using a biased coin, because it could be exploited by the other.

Fairdice is the same sort of thing done electronically. The general idea of such protocols is that I generate a random number, you generate a random number, I send you an encrypted version of my number, you send me an encrypted version of your number, then we both calculate the same number somehow. If there is ever a disagreement, we can both reveal the numbers we generated and do the calculations to decide who is right. I had a quick look at the website, I did not see any information about which protocol they use, whether it is new or previously known.

Jetset

We're still getting bouncebacks on all of the emails used on the press release and through the website, so further clarification is still pending on this. Perhaps one of the UK-based readers would like to try phoning them - Grandmaster?