The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization is making these devices harder to detect. Presumably AI will soon obviate the need for an accomplice.
Joseph Kanowitz • December 29, 2024 12:46 AM
ב”ה,
I’m aware this is a bit early and off-topic, but reminder to keep in mind that various actors are likely to use the [search for ‘local’ news on an] air disaster to disseminate all the usual cyber-/malware payloads.
Andy • December 30, 2024 9:39 PM
This sentence struck me:
your opponents are other patrons rather than the casino itself
in other words, casinos are not that motivated since it’s not their money at stake.
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Clive Robinson • December 28, 2024 10:23 AM
@ Bruce, ALL,
With regards,
In a way you can blame the “British Broadcasting Corporation”(BBC) for putting this idea in the public perception.
The BBC put a miniature colour broadcast quality camera in a “Cricket Stump” so viewers in the UK could have a “wicketkeeper eye view” during the game. Which kind of made the idea of a hidden camera in action during the thick of a game obvious.
I was involved with successfully putting “drivers eye cameras” on “Formula One”(F1) motor racing vehicles for “FOCA” in their Chessington (SW London) works way back last century.
There was even an experimental system put in a Snooker players que and table pockets. It was not that successful as those who came up with that one did not understand physics (see clip from “Top Gear” and talk on physics starting 4mins in on this recent vid https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fz-EgtXVGqE )
And it was not that long after the big money sports got the hidden cameras that “late night games” on another broadcast station put such cameras in “poker tables” so that “experts” could discuss the play for the viewers.
But what made it realy easy to do was Swann in Australia making a colour camera and 2.4GHz ISM Band transmitter in a cube less than 1cm that ran off of a 9V battery. I helped people put them in “Radio Control” models so they could get a pilots / drivers eye view. Sadly the “goggles” of the time were awful so the effect was not as good as it could have been as we see with drone systems today.
Swann went on to put ultra small cameras into devices that you could hide behind shirt buttons with video recorders small enough to go easily and very discreetly inside a jacket pocket so surveillance became childs play. You could buy the entire setup for around $100 back then.
Now you can buy replacement cameras upto 4K with vision stability systems designed for small lightweight drones for about the same price and build your own surveillance systems…
And the latest equipment is in effect “label surveillance kit”. The need for ultra thin high megapixel cameras for mobile phones has moved away from conventional optics and now uses MEMS designs. To make optical “phased array” sensors as thin as paper and as small as the diameter of a pencil lead, along with the processing electronics and low power transmission system you could end up with a sticky patch little bigger than a band-aid you could just stick to a convenient surface or object and peel off almost tracelessly later.
In theory we are very close to being able to build such non focused optics systems not in a cricket stump but in a matchstick. All in little more than a decade of technology development.