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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

> Dynamic binary analysis and instrumentation of applications with built-in integrity checks. As far as I know process_vm_readv isn't even detectable [...]

So... cheat development?

Coincidentally, the "manifesto" behind the bot invasion in Team Fortress 2: https://c-v.sh/unsownriddles

At first I thought that has to be straight trolling ("Educate yourself about GNU/Linux"!), but I'm not so sure it is: https://github.com/nullworks/cathook

Either way, deeply weird to put Linux (ehm, "GNU/Linux") into the headline of your cheat that's literally only designed to make a game unplayable (https://github.com/nullworks/cathook/issues/1480).

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It's deep trolling, as it doesn't even do Linux any favors. Alternative slogan; "Port your game to GNU/Linux! Gain less than 1% players and no revenue while increasing your maintenance cost in ways you couldn't imagine. Try to reverse the decision without too much bad PR or lose all your established customers, then watch it all die. Educate yourself about GNU/Linux!".

Just from doing a little bit of research, the problem there seems to be that the netcode in that game is pretty old and has a lot of unfixed bugs that trolls are taking advantage of, not really anything to do with Linux. If they don't want to pay people to fix it, maybe they can open source the server code so someone else can fix the bugs?

Valve probably ported their stuff to Linux as a hedge against the Windows and Mac App Stores. It barely even matters if people use it or not; they just need a way to convince Microsoft and Apple that breaking Steam isn't in their best interests.

Could also be a niche revenue stream in future if they starting build it now: A few old games (and modern ones) run better on Linux via Valve's work than they do windows, that mean's Valve can still sell them.

Or, DRM removal, or, malware analysis, or...

Or forward porting your old software for which you've somehow lost the source. Or helping reverse some abandoned commercial code to write a compatible replacement. Or help verifying you're getting from the compiler what you expected from your source. Probably half a dozen other things neither of us have thought up.

This is the sort of software smart people can use for fresh and novel things the designer never even intended.

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