Lichess is Probably Going to be Swamped by Cheaters

Ok! I misunderstood. Thought it was only about using a comp and not hack.

It's not a new program and most people who set their engine properly are still playing without issues. Some only use it for first 15 moves too for the opening. There are a few FAR, FAR better ones too, that run in javascript and draw on your screen, they look even more human to the server. They allow you to inject your own human moves.

Cheating is very common here, some use it the whole game, some use it only against strong players "to test how strong they are". Only ones who get caught it seems are those who are very green in terms of cheating. But people who know how to do it are running wild.

At the moment, the funniest one (too obvious) to follow is http://en.lichess.org/@/abbasimehdi60 but there are several others. I saw an 1800 doing it perfect the other day, he'll never get caught. At least lichess is a free site and doesn't spam you non-stop asking for money. The sad thing is that those who ask for money, chess.com for example, should have a stronger cheat detection cheat but they just don't give a shit.

habatur, agree. It's also very hard to catch cheaters in antichess and atomic: there is an engine for these variants, but I don't know how else is it possible to find a cheater there, if not with game analysis. I think, there are a lot of cheaters.

#20 I have to disagree with you again! By definition, hacking is hacking. The law defines which 'hacking' is illegal. Besides, the creator of the crap code (it really doesn't work - or if it does, badly) never hacked this website........

I think just constructing a program that communicates with the server isn't hacking. Hacking is if you try and manage to do something that should be impossible to do.

But I'm not an expert...

#6 Having these information, I assume that this bot does reiterative scans of a given position via a chess OCR software, then the engine thinks and submits its move. So the idea is indeed correct: moving the board might work. I don't know how sensible the OCR is, but if slight movements of the board would be inefficacious, some animations between a move and the other would definetely interfere with the position recognition. Or you could just set a 9x9 board... Ri1! how cool would be? :D

If it breaks the EULA for the site and can be shown to be causing harm to the site (in terms of technically disrupting users ability to play) there are arguments the CFAA could be used, or if they have to bypass an encryption mechanism to read the moves then DMCA could be used. Its really comes down to the resources lichess.org wants to throw at them. I do think people who have been flagged as chess assistance players should have their rating frozen at 1500. I've seen a few people around the 2200 mark with the flag. IP addresses are useless due to their transitory nature (changes every 24 hours on average). There are ways of fingerprinting devices via clock skew, and other hard to change information which could identify the device they use, its much harder to replace a device. That is however very murky water especially in the EU.