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Comment by nlightcho | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your argument on principle but cheating in multiplayer games is a real problem and for now kernel level anti-cheat is pretty much necessary until better methods are developed like server-side ML detection. For what it's worth anti-cheat software is routinely disassembled by cheat developers so at the very least it doesn't do anything obviously malicious and likely doesn't have glaring security issues (any of which would get immediately exploited by said cheat developers).

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If your game company “pretty much requires” you to install “anti cheat kernel modules” on my machine, unless you’re supplying that machine to me as part of my game purchase price exclusively to play your game with, you can just go broke thanks. Flawed business models do not give you the right to break into and exploit my hardware.

So what if it's a problem? Are these game companies entitled to stop cheating by any means necessary? No. It's my computer and game companies have no right to tell me what I can or can't do with it.

If I want to cheat at their game, that's my right. The game is running on my computer and I should be able to modify anything I want whenever I want. Cheating at games is just an exercise in computer freedom. It shouldn't be prohibited to begin with as a matter of principle.

I actually have little interest in cheating though. What happens often enough is these anti-cheat services will scan my processes, detect my development tools or virtual machines and label me a cheater because of them. Some games literally refuse to even start because of this. They also ensure a lack of Linux compatibility due to their proprietary Windows drivers.

> so at the very least it doesn't do anything obviously malicious and likely doesn't have glaring security issues

Remember capcom.sys?

https://mobile.twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/7793978407622...

If it's an online game you cheating ruins the experience for other people who have their own rights and interests in a purchase they made. I still don't think it justifies a rootkit but it should be made clear that the impact of cheaters is often to the detriment of thousands of other people.

What's broken is the online gaming model. It's wrong to play with random untrusted people and expect to not find cheaters among them. Just like it's wrong to place a computer on the open internet and expect it to not be scanned, probed and possibly exploited by malicious actors.

The horrible truth these companies don't want to face is people should be playing only with trusted friends. This would destroy their "massive online game" model so of course they don't want to do it. They'd rather own your computer instead.

I don't want to play with just my friends, I as someone who's been playing online games for about 20 years, don't think the playing with many other people part is broken and that is very enjoyable. What's broken is often the choice of server architecture and decision to not have the right amount of moderators to handle reports.

Many games use either partly or entirely P2P decision resolution which is easier to game then purely server side. Then also the gaming industry has been downsizing and automating moderation for years now which means typically the companies with the largest online presence (looking at you ActiBlizzard) don't have enough actual moderators to handle reports and they resort to leaning more heavily on these grey area technologies to catch cheaters. It's fundamentally an issue with expense cutting imo.

There are other ways to attack cheating. Besides, trusting a remote system you don't control is a case study in Security Failures 101. It's about as likely to work in the long term as typical DRM schemes: it does create a barrier, and it will deter casual violation by most people for as long as that barrier holds, but if there's enough incentive then sooner or later someone who knows what they're doing will break the barrier, and then they might share that ability with everyone else anyway.

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