Ghosting on the same IP address?

[mikkyT]

You cant really do multiple chatrooms with ICQ like you can with IRC. Plus it depends on the network with regards to trackability. At the server level, they are both as transparent as each other. Of course, it requires you to be the server which as an end user is impossible.

[Ironside]

i would have thought that 1 chatroom on a empty chat server is what cheats would want so that they are not intrupted easy to do i=on icq not so easy on irc unless your the host and only admin on the server

icq is the daddy of all messengers but popularity of msn means its now looking a little dated infact about 6 years ago or so aol bouth out mirabilis so they could use icq and the benchmark of there messenger

skype is crap for online to online stuff is only of a benifit if you want to call someone offline

[jammer]

well instant message services aside, you could write your own software dedicated for the purpose of sharing cards and calculating the resulting odds changes within a week or so. And i'm sure people have.

[Bongo]

If you really wanted to cheat you could just set up your own chat server and encrpyt the connection.

You could then run that on a different PC with a different IP and be pretty sure that the poker rooms had no chance of detecting it - apart from if your plays were obvious.

[mikkyT]

IRC is the daddy for this type of work, it is open source and there are many off the shelf server packages available tailored to your needs. Many trojan virus writers these days use IRC for their bot farms. The virus bot will "call home" to the IRC server its owner has programmed into it, and all the viruses will sit in the irc room waiting for commands to be typed in, such as "attack IP address x.y.z.a" and then all the machines that the viruses live on will silently start attacking the destination, meaning that poor sap will now loose his internet connection.

All of this is untraceable unless you know the address of the writers server. Which of course is not a public server, its a server running on his hosted machine with a random domain name somewhere out in iraq.

The beauty of things like IRC is that its a standard protocol, easy to program for, yet so difficult to track down. Propietory software like MSN etc is a joke. Why let microsoft hold the copyright to your coversations!?

[Trace]

Why let the Government stop us smoking in a pub?