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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

I heard reports of some Overwatch players getting banned for using wine/proton. Just a heads up if anyone tries to run Blizzard/Activision games with these tools.

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No, it was just a mistake. Blizzard said in their own official forums that Linux (or Mac) users will not be banned for using Wine or Proton.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/can-we-get-ban...

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/9g111m/blizza...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard...

> UPDATE - 14 Sep 08:03: Blizzard is investigating and they will be looking to overturn the bans if this is indeed the case. There appears to be at least five reports of bans so far and does indeed seem that the most likely explanation is a false-positive from Blizzard's anti-cheat technology having issue with DXVK.

It's interesting because an emulation layer like that being present definitely would make cheating easier. I'd imagine a few clever modifications to DXVK itself would be all that's necessary to implement a wallhack or similar.

Maybe things are moving in another direction

https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/

https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news/67364/microsoft-is-tryin...

I am guessing that they look for cheating based on actions in addition to scanning the memory looking for known cheats. Aimbots are pretty recognizable to experienced players, and no doubt some machine learning is going on to look for those patterns. This lets them stay ahead of the curve on exploits... if it looks like an aimbot, it doesn't matter that it's some new binary they haven't yet heard of.

For some reason it never occurred to me that they'd use ML for detecting suspicious behaviour, until I read your comment.

I've never considered this but it makes perfect sense, thanks for that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

Watch this! It's about using ML to catch cheaters.

I searched youtube to show you this video; I used the search term "cs go machine learning". The first video was actually this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w88RIcTuGZQ

Looks like it's using ML to make better aimbots--lol!

I thought WINE stood for 'Wine Is Not an Emulator'

https://www.winehq.org/about/

True, it's essentially an emulation not of the hardware but of the API. I was using it loosely, but the point is, hijacking Wine's already re-implemented API would be trivial given that limited verification are possible on it and hooking all critical Windows API functions is essentially trivial.

Not really a huge issue - professional cheat developers invest huge amounts of effort in subverting and patching the Windows kernel itself just to get a step ahead of anti-cheat. Thinking about how much fun that kind of thing is really makes me rethink my career choices...

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