Can online gambling sites bias their games? There's biases in gambling, such as the 0 on a roulette table, but that is arguably obvious to the player. Is it legal for online casinos to knowingly or unknowingly bias their games at a software level (random number generator etc) in their favour? Could something like this be covered in the small print? A problem with RNGs is they all have a bias, we have no perfect system of generating random numbers, but if a bias is detected by the casino, would they legally be required to adjust or change the system they're using? Specifically I'm interested in the UK and anywhere notable in the US, or if there's somewhere in particular gambling websites set themselves up to avoid these regulations. It would also be interesting to see if the more popular gambling websites worldwide have any common locations. This seems to cover randomness in the UK, does it apply to card games? (under section Randomness) http://www.gov.im/lib/docs/gambling/Regulations/onlinegamblingsystemverification.pdf
In at least one jurisdiction for at least one game type, the answer is "Yes". Modern slot machines and internet slot games are software, and yes, payout ratios are set as a parameter in the software, as an explicit bias in the software. There are statutory minimum payouts in some jurisdictions. The exact parameterized payout ratio for any specific game does not need to be made clear to a player. The jurisdiction may test, approve, and gather and publish aggregate statistics for all casino games. As I am most familiar with New Jersey casinos: as a recent innovation in the law, New Jersey casinos can operate internet games. They are regulated by the Casino Control Commission of New Jersey. The Commission approves all games, and gathers and publishes statistics about the aggregate payout ratio which is shared by third party sites and becomes cited in advertisements (so there is a market based component to keep casinos from setting the parameters too far out of the pack of their competitors: NJ's statutory minimum payout ratio is 83% but you can see at the second link that all NJ casinos hover around 90-91% for the 2014 year of data). http://www.nj.gov/oag/ge/gamingsites.html http://www.americancasinoguide.com/slot-machine-payback-statistics.html#New-Jersey If there is a new game or new software, before it is placed in service, it must be tested by the Commission; and the code employed by the casino must be a "true copy" of the code as tested. I don't know for certain if "pseudorandom" artifacts are a sufficient reason for failure in game testing for the Commission, but maybe you can find more to your specific case here: http://www.nj.gov/oag/ge/tsb_mission.html
First of all, in a GDPR contest, the process described is not strong anonymization. It may be hard for an outsider to go from the stored record to any PII, it is much easier for an outsider to &quot;single out&quot; an individual. This means that given a known individual, one can determine whether that person is among those listed in the records, or can determine this to a significant degree of probability. For this only the algorithm and the rotating salts are needed, one need not break the hash. Note also that the GDPR specifies that if a person can be singled out with the assistance of the site operator the data is not considered anonymized. Thus this data needs a lawful basis under the GDPR, and the various other GDPR requirement all apply. However, even if the data were totally anonymized, and say just added to a count of users with this or that User Agent, the process of reading local data (including but not limited to cookies) itself requires informed consent, and so a cookie banner or other interaction with similar info under the e-Privacy directive (EPD). The EPD, being a directive and not a regulation, must be implemented by national laws, and the exact provisions in those laws may differ somewhat from country to country. But I believe that all of them require consent before any local data is read.
No. The site would not be liable for irrational and idiotic behavior, because irrationality and idiocy remain quite legal.
Are online stores supposed to state the true “order cost”/value of an order on the package/envelope for the customs? Yes Is it common practice to slash 10x off of the price for the customs to not add various fees? Common? Probably no. Uncommon? Also, probably no. Isn't that illegal? Yes Of course, they can claim it was a mistake if ever found out, but if they do it consistently, that seems difficult... Not to mention there must be electronic proof of how much each order actually cost the customer? Yes Look, robbing banks is illegal but people still rob banks. Similarly, ripping off HM Revenue &amp; Customs is illegal but people still do that too. In fact, far more people do that than rob banks.
Let’s say I go to a cash machine, ask for £100, and the machine gives me £10,000. I use my banking app and see that £100 left my account, not £10,000. At this point I haven’t done anything illegal. If I asked for another £100 and got £10,000 again, that might be illegal. But the extra £9,900 are not mine. They are the bank’s money. If I try to keep it, that is simply theft.
Extrajudicial implies there is some weight of law behind the casino behaviors you describe. I don't think there is. For example, refusing to cash out chips could just be a management intimidation tactic to try to coerce the customer into agreeing to be "questioned." Which the customer would be under no legal obligation to do. Card counting can't be proven if the counter is not using a device of any kind. The casino can refuse to serve the customer and expel the customer but they can't unilaterally keep the customer's money by not cashing the customer's chips without a judgment. I am not an attorney. This answer is not legal advice.
are there any safeguards you could take to preemptively block such behavior, such as a disclaimer inside the book cover that reads something like The safeguard you outline would be overridden as soon as the author enters any contract that requires assignment of copyright. (I would not delve in the differences between licensing and copyright assignment because that hypothetical author is dealing with a contract of adhesion which readily requires assignment; the author has no option to change the ToS to allow for licensing only) Under contract law, one of the essential prerequisites is that the conditions of a contract be entered knowingly and willfully. By deliberately clicking on a ToS page to move forward with the uploading a copyrighted work, the author is signaling his awareness and acceptance of the ToS. The fact that the author chose not to read the ToS is irrelevant and very unlikely to strike whatever entitlements the website owner formulated in the accepted ToS. For the same reason, the author's safeguard disclaimer does not bind the website owner: It cannot be said that the website owner was aware of that disclaimer at the time of the formation of contract between the author and the website owner. That is, the website owner did not knowingly and willfully accepted the author's safeguard. The website owner is not even expected to know about any safeguards which one of its potential user intends to establish. The length of a ToS document is also irrelevant because the website owner has the valid argument that "the user-author could have skimmed through the ToS or do a search (via Control-Find) of keywords such as 'copyright' or 'property', whence any allegation of 'inadvertent' assignment of copyright is untenable". Is there a way to protect your IP from inadvertently being licensed/stolen/assigned via TOS "agreements", without having to waste your life reading huge one-sided online "contracts" that are "subject to change without notice" anyway? Yes. That consists of not uploading one's works in such platforms. In contract law that would be expressed as "declining an exchange of considerations". There are many other alternatives for an author to promote his work without being required to assign copyright.
That's probably not a violation of that rule...but that's not your biggest problem. The most reasonable interpretation of that line in the terms is that you can't use a bot or do anything that looks kind of like using a bot. So if you and all your friends used a script to enter your picks for you, that wouldn't be allowed. Manually entering picks based on some predetermined methodology is hardly &quot;robotic, repetitive, automatic, programmed or similar.&quot; Your much larger problem is mathematical, not legal: you'll need 42,467,327 friends (plus yourself) to guarantee a perfect pick. It seems like you need to correctly rank 4 groups of 4 in order, plus correctly guess the result of an additional 7 two-team games, so that's ((4 nPr 4) ^ 4) * 2^7 = 42467328 entries required to cover all possible rankings. Last year, there were 5 million participants (and only one perfect pick among them), so if you get that many people to enter, I'd bet Riot would be more than happy to give you a free computer for advertising their tournament to so many people.