Looks like Gambling is coming to DC!

The District of Columbia has legalized Internet Gambling – with the government expecting to make an estimated $14 million in tax revenue in the first four years.
Patrick Thibodeau of ComputerWorld examined how officials will be able to determine if the gambling is being done within DC and asked our very own Sam Alapati for his take:
Sam Alapati, senior technical director of Miro Consulting, believes legalized Internet gambling is “a far superior alternative” to offshore gambling, and there is technology that can restrict it to a geographic area and prevent underage gambling, with the latter requiring age verification procedures using Social Security numbers and motor vehicle records.
“The challenge is to strictly regulate the internet gambling, so the geo-location technology can verify that the user in a permitted geographical area,” said Alapati.
“Technologies such as proxies, firewalls, network address translators (NAT) and VPN can circumvent geo-location data,” said Alapati. “The challenge here is not that you won’t be able to prevent the usage of these technologies, but how to build in countermeasures to prevent the use of one of these technologies to circumvent the geo-location technology. The geo-location software can, for example, use the physical characteristics of an Internet connection such as the round trip delay, to determine if the request is possibly coming from outside the D.C. area. If the software is unable to determine the location of the user with a high degree of certainty, it can block the customer and flag the account for a review.”
“Operators and regulators can use software such as pattern recognizing software to routinely scan the transactions to detect anomalies and suspicious behavior, to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing, both of which are not easily detectable in normal casino, due the use of cash,” said Alapati. “A no cash, all digital transaction leaves plenty of auditable records for ensuring compliance with laws,” he said.
Check out the rest of the article here!