EPIC Bravely Defeats 14 Year Old's Mom In Court To Continue Lawsuit Against Her Son For Cheating In Fortnite

from the punching-down dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about EPIC, makers of the popular Fortnite game, picking up the baton from Blizzard to pretzel copyright law such that it believes it can sue those that cheat in its game for copyright infringement. This belief centers on the claim that these cheaters break the EULA, despite the fact that no actual copying occurs when breaking a EULA. To make PR matters worse for EPIC, the company managed to sweep up a fourteen year old in its lawsuit-blitz. Despite the teenager supposedly being quite brazen in his use of cheats, and in his communications to others about how to cheat in Fortnite, I had assumed that EPIC would find a way to quietly back away from this particular suit, given how shitty the optics would be. It did the opposite, pursuing the case and seeking a summary judgement after the teenager failed to respond. The court refused, however, citing a letter to the court from the teen's mother, who argued that the suit against her son was overkill and, critically, that the argument over the EULA was null because her minor son couldn't legally enter into such an agreement without her input.

Rather than again trying to salvage some PR positivity from any of this, EPIC then decided instead to take on the mother's letter as a legal matter, with its lawyers countering it as a legal argument. EPIC argued that caselaw is clear that such contracts aren't void, even if one party is a minor, so long as that minor enjoyed the benefits of the contract. Unfortunately, the judge in the case has decided that he will not dismiss and will allow this lawsuit to move forward.

“As detailed in plaintiff’s response memorandum, defendant has not shown that the complaint fails to allege sufficient facts to state a claim for relief that is plausible on its face,”

“[T]herefore, in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, plaintiff has stated a plausible claim, and the motion to dismiss must be denied.”

Now, in fairness to the judge, the court is required to adjudicate motions to dismiss with an eye towards favoring the plaintiff. Frankly, it was somewhat of a commitment to fairness that the court even allowed the mother's letter to serve as a motion to dismiss in the first place. On the other hand, it's useful to frame this ruling as one that comes from a judge steeped in the law, favoring a large company with a legal team likewise steeped in legal knowledge, and against the mother of a fourteen year old who cheated in an online game. When seen in that light, this whole thing is plainly ridiculous.

And dangerous, too, particularly as part of a trend in gaming companies misusing copyright law in this way to go after cheaters in online games. Yes, those cheaters are annoying. Yes, this teenager appeared to be a fairly bad actor. And, yes, EPIC has gone out of its way to suggest it wouldn't be trying to bankrupt this family and mostly just wants the cheating to cease. All of that can be true while it also being true that abusing copyright law in this way is both bad and opening a litigious door that we should want to remain shut.

Filed Under: cheating, copyright, fortnite, parents, teenager
Companies: epic

Epic Decides To Double Down On Copyright For Cheating Lawsuit Against 14 Year Old By Taking On Mom

from the great-PR-you-have-there dept

When Blizzard decided to pretzel copyright law such that cheating in its online games constituted copyright infringement in a novel way that makes no sense, we warned that other game studios would join this insanity party and create a true judicial problem for the courts. Unfortunately for the world, we were right about that, and several other studios began claiming that such cheats broke EULAs and that this somehow resulted in copyright infringement, despite no actual copying occurring. Among those other studios was Epic, makers of the popular Fortnite game, but unique in that it managed to sweep up a 14 year old using a cheat in its lawsuits. The prospect of suing high school freshmen was likely not what EPIC had in mind with its lawsuits and, after the teen's mother responded to the court chastising the company for the lawsuit and also arguing that her son could not have agreed to the EULA as a minor, we noted what a massive PR nightmare this had become for Epic.

On top of all of this, a lawsuit against a fourteen year old simply for using a cheat for a video game is a public relations nightmare. On the other hand, Epic is in a horrible position. It would look odd to simply drop the suit against the fourteen year old because he's fourteen and still pursue the suits against the non-minor parties. Either what was done was either copyright infringement or it wasn't (it wasn't, but that's besides the point). The whole thing just looks... petty.

My assumption was honestly that Epic would run away from this lawsuit, given how horrible it would look taking on a teenager and his mom. Somewhat astonishingly, Epic did the exact opposite, served the teenager with a new version of its suit that redacted his name to his initials, and showed up in court. Neither the teen or his mother joined them and Epic asked for a default judgment. The court, however, refused to do so and instead decided to take the teen's mother's letter to the court as a request to have the case dismissed.

However, US District Court Malcolm Howard wouldn’t allow Epic to cruise to a win that easily. Instead, he ruled that the mother’s letter should be seen as a motion to dismiss the case.

“While it is true that defendant has not responded since proper service was effectuated, the letter from defendant’s mother detailing why this matter should be dismissed cannot be ignored,” Judge Howard wrote earlier this month.

Because of that, Epic again was faced with a choice. It could stop this insanity of suing a teenager for copyright infringement when no such infringement was committed, or it could respond in court to the angry, anguished plea of a teenager's mother. It chose again, unbelievably, to play the villain in this drama, and tripled down on its lawsuit. Its response mostly argues that the mom failed to make a legal claim in her letter, which, duh. It then goes on to claim that the teenager can't claim his status as a minor prevents him from signing the EULA because of all the benefits he got from signing it.

“This ‘infancy defense’ is not available to C.R,” Epic writes, pointing to jurisprudence where another court ruled that a minor can’t use the infancy defense to void contractual obligations while keeping the benefits of the same contract.

“C.R. affirmatively agreed to abide by Epic’s Terms and EULA, and ‘retained the benefits’ of the contracts he entered into with Epic. Accordingly, C.R. should not be able to ‘use the infancy defense to void [his] contractual obligations by retaining the benefits of the contract[s]’.”

I cannot stress enough how crazy this is on multiple fronts. The breaking of a EULA in this way is not copyright infringement. The claim in Epic's response is that the court should consider a teenager capable of entering a binding EULA, one which Epic theorizes cements copyright requirements, just because he played the game for which the EULA is written. And, ever present is the simple fact that Epic is going to all of these lengths to sue a fourteen year old that used a cheat in a video game. That's nearly insane enough to read like fiction, except that all of this has been done in a public court.

How any of this could possibly be worth the PR hit Epic is taking is beyond me.

Filed Under: cheating, copyright, fortnite, parents, teenagers
Companies: epic

Denuvo Sold To Irdeto, Which Boasts Of Acquiring 'The World Leader In Gaming Security'

from the what-year-is-this? dept

Any reading of our thorough coverage of Denuvo DRM could be best summarized as: a spasm of success in 2015 followed by one of the great precipitous falls into failure in the subsequent two years. While some of us are of the opinion that all DRM such as Denuvo are destined for eventual failure, what sticks out about Denuvo is just how stunningly fast its fall from relevancy has come about. Once heralded as "the end of game piracy," even the most recent iterations of Denuvo's software is being cracked on the timeline of days and hours. You would be forgiven if, having read through all of this, you thought that Denuvo was nearly toxic in gaming and security circles at this point.

But apparently not everyone thinks this is true. Irdeto, the company out of the Netherlands we last saw pretending that taking pictures of toys is copyright infringement and insisting that a real driver of piracy was winning an Oscar, has announced that it has acquired Denuvo.

Now, however, a new development has the potential to herald a new lease of life for the Austria-based anti-piracy company. A few moments ago it was revealed that the company has been bought by Irdeto, a global anti-piracy company with considerable heritage and resources.

“Denuvo provides technology and services for game publishers and platforms, independent software vendors, e-publishers and video publishers across the globe. Current Denuvo customers include Electronic Arts, UbiSoft, Warner Bros and Lionsgate Entertainment, with protection provided for games such as Star Wars Battlefront II, Football Manager, Injustice 2 and others.”

Irdeto says that Denuvo will “continue to operate as usual” with all of its staff retained – a total of 45 across Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the US. Denuvo headquarters in Salzburg, Austria, will also remain intact along with its sales operations.

No terms of the deal are listed, but this is striking in how bizarre it all seems. Denuvo has been in something of a death spiral for going on two years now, so unless Irdeto acquired it on the cheap in order to get access to the underlying security technology to be applied elsewhere, it's hard to understand just what the point of all this is. Even more strangely, Irdeto boasts on its website that Denuvo is 'The world leader in gaming security", which is a bold claim to make of a company that can't keep itself out of the news for its tech failing to do its job.

One clue that may provide an answer is the emphasis Irdeto's press release puts on Denuvo's anti-cheating applications rather than its anti-piracy abilities.

Cheating on gaming platforms is also a challenge which must be addressed, as it can distort virtual in-game economies. This makes the game less enjoyable or even unplayable for gamers, and can be used to manipulate or bypass in-game micro-transactions. Denuvo’s anti-cheat technology prevents hackers in multi-player games from manipulating and distorting data and code to gain an advantage over other gamers or bypass in-game micro-transactions. This prevents dilution of the value of the game for the user and the game studio.

“Hackers and cybercriminals in the gaming space are savvy, and always have been. It is critical to implement robust security strategies to combat the latest gaming threats and protect the investment in games. Much like the movie industry, it’s the only way to ensure that great games continue to get made,” said Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo, Irdeto. “In joining with Irdeto, we are bringing together a unique combination of security expertise, technology and enhanced piracy services to aggressively address security challenges that customers and gamers face from hackers.”

For what it's worth, Denuvo's reputation for stopping cheating within online games is not nearly as flame-torched as its anti-piracy efforts. Still, much of the talk is about whether or not marrying Denuvo with Irdeto will breath new life into the Denuvo DRM, given the range and resources at Irdeto's disposal. It won't, at least not beyond some temporary situation. DRM will fail, forever and ever, amen.

Still, this union between the world's most hated DRM and a laughably aggressive anti-piracy outfit is not a welcome one.

Filed Under: cheating, copyright, denuvo, drm, piracy, video games
Companies: irdeto

South Korea To Tackle Video Game Cheating By Criminalizing Breaking A Game's ToS

from the municipal-cheat-code dept

I have some admiration for South Korea's ability to look squarely at the national hostage situation that is its northerly neighbor and spend so much time enjoying video games. That this dedication to my favorite hobby occasionally pulls the country's government into putting forward dumb laws is an unfortunate by-product, however. It seems the South Korean government is still at it, as it attempts to join Japan in criminalizing cheating in video games.

And it has managed to construct this law to criminalize cheating in what simply has to be the dumbest way possible.

According to PvPLive, a recent amendment passed by the South Korean parliament bans the “manufacturing and distributing programs that are not allowed by the game company and its Terms of Service.” In theory, this makes it easier for the creators of competitive games to crack down on things like hacking programs, aimbots, and other game mods that give players an unfair advantage in online play.

Great theory, but this method for stopping cheaters should be setting off alarm bells all over the place. Criminalizing the violation of a ToS is a really, really bad idea. Our own CFAA legislation should serve as a wondeful primer on how broadly criminalizing violating terms of service can result in gross overreach by prosecutors who will use the law as a tool to jail people nobody thinks should be imprisoned. There's a reason why these attempts to use ToS to thwart cheating, or modding, are widely considered creative end-arounds to the actual law: because they're basically bullshit. Codifying into law the criminalization of the violation of a software ToS that nobody reads is casting quite a wide net to combat an otherwise small problem.

It's also well worth noting that most of the benign modding community regularly violates game ToS as they do their work.

But while this could deter would-be hackers from creating programs explicitly for cheating, the somewhat ambiguous act of outlawing any program that violates the Terms of Service has some League of Legendsand Overwatch players worried that non-malicious mods could be caught in the crossfire.

Look, eSports is becoming a significant enough industry that I understand the effort to combat cheating within it. And the online portion of the gaming experience is so center stage at this point that it would have been surprising if governments weren't starting to look at how to protect the industry from a saturation of cheaters who break the game for other gamers. But broadly worded legislative nukes aren't the way to combat a cheating insurgency.

Filed Under: cheating, crime, modding, south korea, terms of service, video games

Disappointing: Twitch Brings CFAA & Trademark Claim Against Bot Operators

from the gotta-be-a-better-way dept

I think most people agree that bots that drive up viewer/follower counts on various social media systems are certainly a nuisance, but are they illegal? Amazon-owned Twitch has decided to find out. On Friday, the company filed a lawsuit against seven individuals/organizations that are in the business of selling bots. There have been similar lawsuits in the past -- such as Blizzard frequently using copyright to go after cheater bots. Or even, potentially, Yelp suing people for posting fake reviews. When we wrote about the Yelp case, we noted that we were glad the company didn't decide to try a CFAA claim, and even were somewhat concerned about the claims that it did use: including breach of contract and unfair competition.

Unfortunately, Twitch's lawsuit uses not just those claims, but also throws in two very questionable claims: a CFAA claim and a trademark claim. I understand why Twitch's lawyers at Perkins Coie put that in, because that's what you do as a lawyer: put every claim you can think of into the lawsuit. But it's still concerning. The CFAA, of course, is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was put in place in the 1980s in response to the movie War Games (no, really!) and is supposed to be used to punish "hackers" who break into secure computer systems. However, over the years, various individuals, governments and companies have repeatedly tried to stretch that definition to include merely breaching a terms of service. And that appears to be the case here with Twitch:

To provide their services and with the goal of defrauding Twitch’s users, Defendants knowingly and intentionally used bot software that accessed Twitch’s protected computers without authorization or in excess of the authorization granted to them by the Terms. Also without authorization or in excess thereof, Defendants willfully, and with the intent to defraud, accessed Twitch’s protected computers by means of that fraud, and intended to and did use Twitch’s protected computers. For example, Defendants represent that they can access Twitch’s protected computers and circumvent Twitch’s security measures in order to provide their bot services without being detected by Twitch.

Except, it's a pretty big stretch to argue that bots accessing your open website that anyone can visit requires some kind of specific "authorization." Yes, cheating bots are annoying. And yes, they can be seen as a problem. But that doesn't mean that Twitch should be trying to expand the definition of the CFAA to include accessing an open website in a way the site doesn't like. As a company, Twitch has been on the right sides of lots of important tech and policy issues. It was vocal in the SOPA fight. It even sponsored us here at Techdirt for our net neutrality coverage. It's generally viewed as a pretty good internet citizen.

So it's especially disappointing that the company has chosen to come down on the wrong side of another really important tech policy issue: abuse of the CFAA.

The trademark claim is also somewhat troubling, though not as much. But it's also a huge stretch:

As described above for each Defendant, Defendants use the TWITCH mark in domain names and on their websites in connection with the provision of bot services. Defendants’ use of the TWITCH mark in commerce constitutes a reproduction, counterfeit, copy, or colorable imitation of a registered mark for which the use, sale, offering for sale, and advertising of their bot services is likely to cause confusion or mistake or lead to deception.

No one is visiting the sites of these bot makers and assuming that they're endorsed by Twitch. I mean, they're all pretty clear that their entire purpose is to inflate viewers/followers on Twitch, which is clearly something that Twitch is against. As we've noted over and over again, having a trademark does not mean that you get to block any and all uses of that word. Using a company's trademarked name in a way that refers to that company is generally seen as nominitive fair use (basically using the trademark in a descriptive manner, rather than as a way of deceiving people into thinking that there's an endorsement).

There's a similar "anti-cybersquatting" claim in there as well, but that's basically just a repeat of the trademark claim, "for the domain name," so the same thing applies.

Twitch doesn't need to use either of these claims, and it's disappointing that they and their lawyers have chosen to do so. This is not to say that bots and fake followers are okay. But these kinds of cases can set really bad precedents when a company like Twitch decides to overclaim things in a way that harms the wider tech and internet industry. I'm not even sold on the need to litigate these kinds of issues at all, prefering to think that a tech-based approach should be good enough. To be sure, Twitch notes that it's still mostly focused on technological and social moderation methods for stopping bots, but has decided to go the lawsuit path as a "third layer" of attack against bots.

Even if it felt it needed to go down that path, it really should have thought more carefully about bringing claims under the CFAA and trademark law. One hopes that the company will reconsider and perhaps drop those claims, even if it wants to pursue other claims, such as breach of contract.

Filed Under: bots, cfaa, cheating, trademark
Companies: amazon, twitch

Subtle: Iraq Flips The Internet Switch For 3 Hours To Combat Cheating Students And Corrupted Teachers

from the well-okay-then dept

We've talked about cheating in academia in the past, usually revolving around whether or not what used to be called cheating might be better thought of as collaboration. Beyond that, we've also talked about some of the strategies used to combat the modernity of "cheating", which has included the monitoring of students online activities to make sure they weren't engaged in cheating behavior.

Well, the nation of Iraq doesn't have time for all of this monitoring and sleuthing. When its students have their standardized tests, they simply shut the damned internet off completely.

For a few hours each morning, the Iraqi government keeps cutting off internet access—to keep students from cheating on their end-of-year exams. As reported by DYN research, which tracks internet blackouts around the world, the country’s access went almost entirely dead between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. in the morning on Saturday, Sunday and again on Monday.

And this isn't the first time the Iraqi government has gone about things in this way. Last year, they pulled the same lever to shut down internet access to the country, with the same explanation that it was combatting a scourge of question and answer sharing occuring online. What's interesting about this is that the real problem appears to be the teachers, not the students. Teachers in Iraq are apparently regularly bribed by students to share the questions and answers to tests and that those leaks are then spread across the internet for other Iraqi students to see.

“What happens usually is that some teachers would be giving the exams questions to students who pay money, then [those] students would sell online questions all over country,” one Iraqi, who requested his name not be used in a story, told Vocativ. “Between 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. [is when teachers finalize questions] so this is the time when teachers [who have been paid off would] give questions to students by Facebook or Viber or Whatsapp and so on.”

Now, perhaps this move is effective in its aims. I don't know, since students looking to cheat haven't exactly always required the internet to do so. Still, even if it were, there must be another more subtle yet effective way to combat this cheating scourge. Perhaps one that doesn't interrupt internet access for, oh I don't know, everyone else in the entire country. Because the effects of this blackout aren't exactly limited to students.

Human rights groups were outraged at the outage. “We see this, especially in such a destabilized country as Iraq, as really terrible. It’s a lot of people under a media and communications blackout,” Deji Olukotun, Senior Global Advocacy Manager at the internet freedom nonprofit, told Vocativ.

Come on guys, figure this out.

Filed Under: cheating, exams, internet, iraq, students

Remember How The DMCA 'Stopped' The Release Of Ashley Madison Cheaters Data? About That...

from the boom-goes-the-dynamite dept

Last month, you may recall, the news broke that the "dating site for people who want to cheat on their spouse," Ashley Madison, had its systems hacked, and all its data leaked. For rather obvious reasons, this had a lot of people rather worried about what would be revealed. However, the company insisted that there was no problem at all, because it had used the DMCA to take down all leaked copies. We pointed out how ridiculous this was on multiple levels. First, that's not what the DMCA is for, and as embarrassing as this was for Ashley Madison's parent company Avid Life Media, it does not hold the copyright in such data. Second, the idea that this would actually stop the data from reaching the public was ludicrous.

And... it took longer than expected, but less than a month later, the data file has leaked online, and you can bet that lots of people -- journalists, security researchers, blackmailers and just generally curious folks -- have been downloading it and checking it out.

Maybe, next time, rather than claiming copyright, the company will do a better job of protecting its systems.

Filed Under: cheating, copyright, dmca, infidelity, leak
Companies: ashley madison, avid life media

Marital Infidelity Site AshleyMadison Hacked, But Claims No One Should Worry Since It DMCA'd All Leaked Copies

from the wait,-what? dept

As you my have heard by now, on Sunday, online security super reporter Brian Krebs revealed that the infamous "dating site for married people who want to cheat on their spouse," AshleyMadison had its systems hacked, with whoever is responsible claiming to have basically everything. Apparently the site (and a few other similar sites run by the company) had 37 million registered users, many of which are probably a bit more worried about their information leaking publicly than they were a couple days ago.

But, no worry, claims the company to a reporter at Wired: it's issued takedowns to everyone who posted the info, so problem solved:

In a followup statement to WIRED from Avid Life Media Monday morning, the company writes that it has used copyright infringement takedown requests to have “all personally identifiable information about our users” deleted from the unnamed websites where it was published.

First off, what? Anyone who actually believes that DMCA takedown notices actually stopped this information from being available is probably also busy shipping the contents of his or her bank accounts to friendly princes-in-need across the Atlantic. Second, what? The company has no "copyright" claim in the information in question in the first place, and issuing a copyright/DMCA takedown doesn't make any sense at all, other than in a sort of desperate "please save us!" attempt to not have the company be completely destroyed by this incredible data breach. While perhaps some sites actually took the information down, there is simply no legitimate reason to use a copyright takedown claim to do so.

Meanwhile, others are pointing out that the site already leaked information about who had accounts if you knew what to look for -- and, somewhat ridiculously had bragged about its security in the past. Back in November of last year, after a bunch of celebrity nude photos leaked on the internet, AshleyMadison had a PR person reach out to me (and others) talking up AshleyMadison's privacy and security features: Note: "the company takes every measure possible to ensure the safety of their members' information...." Or, maybe not. It also seems worth noting that the hackers are claiming to release this information because the company charged an extra fee to supposedly delete all of your info from its servers... but, according to the hacker, did not do so. And, of course, that might mean that the company is facing fraud charges beyond just having its basic business destroyed. But, no worries, I'm sure the company will look to use copyright law to fix that too...

Filed Under: cheating, copyright, dmca, hacking, infedility, privacy, takedown
Companies: ashleymadison, avid life media

Meanwhile, In Japan: More Arrests For Cheating At Video Games

from the h4x0r! dept

Some months back, we noted that something odd was happening in Japan: online gaming cheaters were being arrested. Yes, arrested. Not arrested in a virtual sense, not banned from games, arrested as in picked up by police and charged with a crime. This, in case you are undecided on the matter, is insane. Cheating and online gaming have been a virtual arms-race for going on forever and generally it's been on the gaming companies to win that war. If they can use law enforcement as a new ally, the implications could be scary, especially when it's quite easy to levy accusations of cheating and when simply finding ways to exploit an advantage within a game is often times mistaken for cheating as well.

The latest incident is not an example of the latter. A man in his thirties in Japan, named Akihide Yamamoto, was picked up for running a web-store for cheats to exploit a game titled Alliance of Valiant Arms.

According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest paper, Yamamoto was arrested for suspected violation of Japan’s Unfair Competition Prevention Law. Reports state that Yamamoto, a Himeji City resident, is believed to have apparently sold a hacked character and overpowered weapons to a 40-year-old man in Saitama Prefecture for 20,000 yen or US$168. This isn’t a first for Yamamoto, who has also been arrested for using cheats in another game.

Look, on the one hand cheaters are beyond annoying. Add to that the emergence of big-time eSports, the tournaments of which often times include large sums of prize money, and I can see why a gaming ecosystem exploding around online gaming means that cheaters are a bigger problem today than they were ten years ago. That said, c'mon, arresting these people and charging them criminally? For gaming? And, in this case, it's not even the cheater that's being charged, but a person providing the "tools", if you will, for the cheaters. That adds a whole new layer to this, because at what point do we want to chill the tinkering and hacking that goes on with the possibility of criminal charges?

Now, I don't want to sound like I'm making excuses for Yamamoto, who might well be the gaming-world's devil for all I know. But gumming up the legal system with guys who are selling game exploits seems like a massive waste of time and resources.

Filed Under: arrests, cheating, japan, threats, video games, virtual crime

Chess Grandmaster Exposed As App-Using Cheat

from the there's-an-app-for-that dept

I love chess. As the original multi-player turn-based strategy game, chess serves as the backbone for many a modern era game, for which it has my respect. Despite this love I have for the game, I happen to be quite horrible at it, but that only makes me all the more reverent of those that master its wily machinations. Kasparov is a name I know solely because he was a grand champion, one of those faces of chess that spurred on so much intrigue as people wondered just how he was able to dominate his opponents so completely.

Gaioz Nigalidze was one of those folks, too, having attained the title of grandmaster, but now he isn't. He might actually be as good as advertised, but we can't trust that he is any longer because he was found to be using a iPhone to cheat his way through a match. The plot begins and ends, as all good plots do, in the toilet.

On Saturday, Nigalidze, the 25-year-old reigning Georgian champion, was competing in the 17th annual Dubai Open Chess Tournament when his opponent spotted something strange.

“Nigalidze would promptly reply to my moves and then literally run to the toilet,” Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian said. “I noticed that he would always visit the same toilet partition, which was strange, since two other partitions weren’t occupied.”

Yes, the strange part was which toilet Nigalidze used, not the fact that his bladder decided to punctuate each move with a potty trip. As it turns out, Nigalidze had hidden an iPhone in one of the restrooms, wrapped in toilet paper because there ain't no stealth in chess, and had been running the game he was playing through an application that analyzed and suggested moves. In other words, he totally h4x0red that chess tournament, ya'll!

It turns out that being the Barry Bonds of chess isn't great for one's career and Nigalidze's past and future have both been placed in jeapordy.

Nigalidze was expelled from the tournament, which is still ongoing and features more than 70 grandmasters from 43 countries competing for a first-place prize of $12,000. The Georgian’s career is now under a microscope. His two national titles are under suspicion. And under recently tightened rules against cheating, he could be banned for up to 15 years.

This has reportedly sent the chess world into some kind of insane tailspin over concerns that, now that someone has proved that cheating in tournaments with a small device such as a phone is doable, who knows how many other of our revered grandmasters are big, steaming, salty cheat-burgers? The ancient game is now understood to be relatively easy to master with something as common as a smartphone, which means chess tournaments are about to get way more TSA-like with security, I guess.

Filed Under: cheating, chess, gaioz nigalidze, grandmaster, phones, technology