Feds go all-in on a gut shot: On Wednesday prosecutors from the Southern District of New York froze $34 million in assets from 27,000 online poker players. The move directed four banks – including Citi and Wells Fargo – to freeze the accounts of Account Services and Allied Systems, which are payment processing centers servicing popular offshore gaming companies like FullTiltPoker.com and PokerStars.com. Yet some legal speculators believe the Feds have less than bullets in the hole and are trying to buy the pot on a bluff; along with freezing the funds the Feds issued an aggressive order to seize the money on the basis that it is “property involved in money laundering transactions.” According to Lou Krieger of the blog Keeping Flopping Aces, “They don’t have the law in their corner, and all they have going for them is their ability to posture and trumpet their opinion.” While this is getting straightened out in the courts, impacted players should breathe easy: Both payment centers have promised restitution out of their own pocket. In case readers are curious the jurisdiction for the Southern District of New York includes Manhattan, home to AIG and now half a trillion dollars in TARP money. But way to go on the poker thing, fellas.
Likes long walks on the beach and a simple interface: If the past several years have been about creating more services to use on the web, perhaps the next several will be about new services that build bridges between these islands of activity. Most discussed among these services are single sign-on options like Facebook Connect, which would allow users to transport the redundant profile information entered on almost every site (along with the network of friends) to different sites using the verified system. This creates opportunities for convergence on a less grand scale, for example dating websites, as this post from VentureBeat posits. The 40 million US lonely hearts who use online dating services utilize an average of three to four sites each, making it prime ground for some sort of dashboard to manage these different services with features such as central data entry, message response, and photo posting and editing. But could this service get in the way of keeping my party-loving rock star persona on Match.com from my good church-going self on ChristianSingles.com? Sometimes silos might make sense.
