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Comment by IceWreck | Hacker News Reader

Even if he was cheating, its a dumb move to do that. It's super easy to stop websites from knowing that you're switching tabs or windows.

https://github.com/IceWreck/Page-Visibility-User-Script

I made this a while ago.

Or just use another computer.

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He's a chess prodigy not a computer nerd. It probably never even occurred to him that chess.com was tracking page focus to get a sense of cheating.

yeah exactly. if you're cheating online at a high-level, would this not be the exact first thing you'd think about dealing with? chess.com can have all the crazy algorithms in the world to try and figure out if you're playing like a human, but if you're tabbing out every time your opponent plays a move, you're giving the game away in move 1 (or - to take a more literal approach - whatever move takes you out of your opening repertoire...)

and yeah you could argue that if you're not into web dev it's not hyper obvious that websites are able to know when you lose focus on them, but I'd argue that it is fairly obvious. there are indications that should make it clear. facebook flashing notifications in their tab title until you click on them, to take a simple example.

Well, if you are just 16 you are bound to make some slip-ups like this due to having an incomplete idea of the possible "attack" surface that the defender can use (to accuse you of cheating).

You probably could have made your point without posting the GitHub link with the exact means to do so.

I imagine there is one chess cheater reading this that will use your repo soon.

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