Comment on Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 week agoAMD had a graphics driver blocked because kernel level Anti-cheat flagged it as a cheat program. Genshin Impact’s anti-cheat was literally used to stop anti-virus programs running on people’s computers and mass deploy ransomware, and the gaming industry as a whole is extremely lax about the security of their users. Several companies anti-cheat have been flagged by anti-virus software as malicious.
There are layers to the kernel level anti-cheat business too and people still do buy games with kernel level anti-cheat. The fact that that kind of scanning is coming isn’t acceptable which is the point. I choose not to spend my money at companies that enable this kind of crap in their games. That’s not enough. It should be facing opposition from every quarter specifically because it is not only invasive, but also only raises the barrier to entry at the detriment to user’s security, and which is likely to cause the same boom that things like the campaign against piracy did in the 80’s/90’s. People didn’t know they could cheat so easily and now they do. Congratulations this has done the opposite of what is intended.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Anti-viruses flag a lot of things. It is called a False Positive (or sometimes a “Someone didn’t pay us for an exception” Positive but…). It has nothing to do with something hooking into a kernel or just being a program you run in userspace.
I assume you are referring to trendmicro.com/…/ransomware-actor-abuses-genshin-…
Which… I’ll just raise you polygon.com/…/dark-souls-pvp-exploit-multiplayer-… which allows for ridiculously dangerous RCEs without needing any kernel level hooks at all. So…
THAT I do not disagree with in the slightest. Which is why I am glad that most studios outsource anti-cheat because they are not at all qualified to handle it themselves.
I mean this in the most inflammatory and blunt way imaginable:
Nobody gives a shit about you. Nobody gives a shit about me either.
We are two people. We don’t fucking matter. What matters is the people who play every single Riot game ever made for thousands of hours each. THEY spend money.
Like I said before: it is about accepting risk. Knowingly or unknowingly, it doesn’t matter any more than telling your parents that you must have gotten a virus from that pokemon cheat code rather than the hardcore pornography that came in exe form for some reason.
You don’t want to compromise your security more than you already do. Cool. Most people playing these games are fine with that if it reduces the odds that they have their free time ruined for them by aimbots and wallhacks. And… clearly there is merit to this approach if studios are willing to pay for it.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 6 days ago
What is your argument here? Is it that Anti-cheat is good? Is it that Anti-cheat is necessary? Is it that it’s bad but you feel my information is incorrect? Because you’re all over the place.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
The point is that you are constantly spewing largely unrelated nonsense that mostly just demonstrates a lack of understanding of what you are arguing against. But you are Righteous so anyone who points this out is clearly a bad person so let’s whip out the ad hominem.
Because I see you working toward the same conclusions I increasingly see people make: You don’t know what should be done and you don’t care what it does to the game industry. You just want politicians to make laws to make the things you don’t like go away.
And… I really don’t understand how ANYONE can be privileged enough to think that is a good idea. Especially when the people who DO feel strongly enough to maybe educate themselves on a topic refuse to. But hey, 50-60 year old politicians who just want a handy from the nearest lobbyist are sure to act in good faith and make a great solution, right?
Again, this is the DRM wars. We lost. Used games are not a thing in the PC space and are rapidly fading in the console space. But what we did get was a removal of the genuinely bad DRM models (Starforce) and the more egregious activation models (formerly Securom, now Denuvo) are increasingly restricted to A-AAA releases. And that didn’t happen because people got angry on a message board and thought about asking jack thompson to draft a bill for them.
It happened because there was actual discussion between devs and consumers. I don’t like that EVERYTHING activates to an account with Valve (even if I like valve) but it is a really good middle ground that provides utility to all sides.
Rather than people throwing up complete nonsense that has nothing to do with the technology they claim to be against while also coming right off a studio being sent to the shadow realm harder than a themed deck user because of… a bad beta and character designs that weren’t sexy enough.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Aalayman who doesn’t know why the program was flagged and doesnt necessarily know the name of the Anti-cheat program or just hits delete all (which is probably thousands and thousands of people), you’re telling me you wouldn’t be extremely upset if a game you spent $60+ on suddenly wouldn’t start or your account go auto banned because the anti-cheat software has been deleted by an antivirus program by mistake?
I assume you are referring to trendmicro.com/…/ransomware-actor-abuses-genshin-…<<
You don’t have to assume. I linked the article.
You have failed once again to establish what this has to do with the original complaint, which is that kernel level anti-cheat allowed this security breach vector. And it has everything to do with the quoted text just below this from one of my previous comments:
. I choose not to spend my money at companies that enable this kind of crap in their games.
Nobody gives a shit about you. Nobody gives a shit about me either.
We are two people. We don’t fucking matter. What matters is the people who play every single Riot game ever made for thousands of hours each. THEY spend money.<<
This doesn’t explain regulating industries. It doesn’t explain why so many companies (including game development companies) spend so much money lobbying for the right to be free of regulations that should be covered by privacy law but aren’t because these companies don’t want that. And if you can’t see the correlation here then you’re a bit far gone because if they can lobby so can we. It has to start somewhere.
You don’t want to compromise your security more than you already do. Cool. Most people playing these games are fine with that if it reduces the odds that they have their free time ruined for them by aimbots and wallhacks. And… clearly there is merit to this approach if studios are willing to pay for it.<<
I would argue that the vast majority don’t know. People like to act like gamers are in some way really tech savvy and they just know all the ins and outs of all that goes into the game and what is installed on their system. But the opposite is true for most people. They buy a game or program from a source they don’t have a reason to distrust and they install it and give it whatever permissions it asks for. This is the main reason I’m arguing that people absolutely should be educated and they won’t get that education from game developers because for the most part those devs prefer it this way.
And… everyone else DID buy things. The genuinely bad shit like starforce went away in favor of activation model DRMs (which continues to this day) but also… alternatives were actually presented. Steam is basically a variation of GOO (which is also basically what GoG does) but Steam has the added benefit of people being scared shitless of getting caught by Uncle Gabe and having their account taken away.<<
People bought things with DRM because they didn’t know. And DRM was a significant thing even before the internet was a widespread thing which is why once it got it’s foothold it kept it. The average consumer didn’t know and wasn’t intending to pirate anything so they didn’t care.
Why is it asinine to tell the government I want a public industry regulated to protect my right to privacy? Because that’s what it comes down to. It’s my right to not just privacy but security of information. This would never be a question if a company were requesting it but when people do it it’s somehow problematic?
Education wasn’t your goal as far as I can tell because you’re extremely combative. You make a lot of statements that you don’t back up with anything. You assume a level of knowledge that you probably shouldn’t. And you get upset when the other person doesn’t understand, completely ignore their questions and points in favor of whatever crusade you happen to be on, and then double-down while ignoring the clarifying questions they ask.
There’s not going to be a discussion between devs and consumers if we don’t educate people on what’s going on. That’s literally what we’re talking about. And you seem to assume that I’m just adverse to that without taking into account that I think we should have both things. We as consumers should have open dialog with the industries that rely on us to buy products. But we should also very much expect that our government that we pay taxes to regulates industries accordingly.
Because we’ve had so many data breaches in every industry but the ones in gaming have been pretty abundant and that’s not okay. You seem to want to act like nothing is connected to anything else and that’s a good way to go through life without getting anything done and with a giant target painted on your back.
I can’t assume that every consumer is like me. You shouldn’t either. And just because they got rid of other DRM that you view as worse doesn’t mean that we’re in the clear.