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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

IT all depends on how, where and when does this malware run. If they can be installed along with the games under a gaming only account on the Linux machine, that is, with zero permissions on system and other users files around, that's fine with me. However if they require to pollute system directories or, much worse, be installed as kernel modules or system level daemons, then it's way different. Security conscious gamers would probably put their gaming machine behind a firewall that screens their entire LAN (other hardware, NAS etc), and forget doing anything but gaming with it.

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> If they can be installed along with the games under a gaming only account on the Linux machine, that is, with zero permissions on system and other users files around, that's fine with me.

Completely ineffective. It will be trivial to circumvent those protections. Might as well not bother.

The truth is cheaters are merely excersising their computing freedom. It's my computer, the game is merely running on it. If I want to read the game's memory and adjust aim or automate boring parts, it's my prerogative.

In order to prevent any of this, the game company must take over my machine. They must literally own my computer. Anti-cheating software is virtually indistinguishable from malware and there is no situation where this is acceptable. The game company's "needs" are irrelevant.

I think there is an underlying assumption that you’re entitled to play the game, therefor anti cheat is violating your freedoms.

But if we remove the assumption that you are entitled to play any game how ever you please i think this argument somewhat falls apart. If you don’t like their using anti cheat, then just don’t play those games which use it.

I just don’t think enough people agree with you that it will work in your favour unfortunately.

It's not entitlement to want to play the games I paid money for without my computer getting owned. This is basic respect, not some insane notion. Why are game companies entitled to complete control over our computers?

It depends on if you're talking about single player or multiplayer. Notably EAC and battleye are both only really used on multiplayer based games. Cheating on those games isn't "exercising your rights" because you aren't entitled to ruining others experience. Multiplayer is more than a simple "buy and own everything inside" experience because you are buying the ability to use their servers according to their rules and TOS. I support requiring the ability to run your own server without anticheat and full ownership and ability on those but you don't have the right to abuse multiplayer services just because you bought a license to play it.

Then don't give these companies your business. I certainly don't. There are enough games that don't pull this kind of shit to keep me entertained.

True. Nowadays I play single player games because of this. I simply can't trust these companies. The situation should never have gotten to this point.

Sometimes the malware is not disclosed and a game may start to use a malware after you bought it.

And the needs of other players to have a fair game are also irrelevant then?

After all, you're the top rank in CS:GO not because of your skill but because you simply exercise your freedom to have everyone else play against your computer.

Correct, they're completely irrelevant. Of all the affronts to computing freedom, anti-cheating is the worst. The truth is the online gaming model where we play with untrustworthy strangers is completely broken. We should all be playing with friends we can trust instead.

I wouldn’t install anti-cheat malware personally, but I think many of the people who want to play these games care more about not having cheaters in their games than having ring 0 control.

They’re extremely passionate about their skills and want nothing more than a fair playing field. Playing only with friends is not a real solution.

Computing freedom means you have the freedom to give up control, too. It’s your choice.

> Computing freedom means you have the freedom to give up control, too. It’s your choice.

Absolutely. As long as they don't force this malware on the rest of us who do care, it will be fine.

Completely agreed. Where is this "right not to be cheated in an online game" coming from anyway? Sounds absurd when you put it in proper terms, that is someone else taking control over your computer.

From the same place that real-life competitions tend to have rules about cheating that are enforced.

Why do people think that they get a free pass because they can't see the opponent face to face?

If you want to play with friends, plenty of multiplayer games offer that without anticheat (Arma lets you even uninstall the anti-cheat and play on anti-cheat disabled servers).

Does my local basketball competition requiring all competitors to submit negative doping tests before competing? Do they get to monitor me for 24 hours before the game?

Because that's the level of seriousness of most gaming and the proportionality of using a rootkit to prevent cheating. Sure, the Olympic athletes (or I guess in this analogy, eSports pros competing online) get the full "we're going to make very sure you're not cheating approach" but "my local basketball league" or "unranked ladder" doesn't justify these measures being routine

Nintendo says yes https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/07/zelda_breath_of_th...

But if you play online with strangers, you're not really participating in a local basketball competition are you?

Why? Do I get to pick the people on the opposing team in the local basketball competition? I didn't specify a local club for a reason. Just because it's some competition organisers rather than a matchmaking algorithm doesn't change my perspective.

> Why do people think that they get a free pass because they can't see the opponent face to face?

We don't think that. We think anti-cheating rules aren't important enough to justify shipping literal malware to people's computers and taking over their machines.

It's not literal malware though, unless you have proof that it does something malicious like encrypt a users directory or exfiltrate sensitive data and that every single anti-cheat does that.

> Where is this "right not to be cheated in an online game" coming from anyway?

No idea. Who cares if some random guy cheats really? It's nothing compared to losing our computing freedom. Actual important stuff that matters. Same fundamental issue as DRM which nearly everyone agrees is bad.

Our computers are ours and game companies just need to deal with it. If people are gonna cheat, then so be it.

> Who cares if some random guy cheats really?

The kind of people who care enough to spend money on an online game.

> It's nothing compared to losing our computing freedom.

Then don't play online games with anti-cheat. Freedom doesn't mean your decisions don't have consequences—just you have the freedom to choose between the privacy of not submitting to an anti-doping monitoring regime or participating in certain competitive sports.

> Our computers are ours and game companies just need to deal with it. If people are gonna cheat, then so be it.

Game companies online services are theirs, and your just going to need to deal with it. If firms are going to require anti-cheat, then that's the cost of playing online. You have the freedom to not participate.

Don't wanna have anti cheats installed? Don't play (online) games, noone is forcing you, for me I'm really happy i have the option on Linux in the future.

You have the freedom to not install it.

What would be the point of a competitive game if you could just cheat? Racing games like Trackmania live off verifying people don't cheat because it's a game where people compete for leaderboards. Should they not be allowed to prevent you from cheating yourself to the top of the leaderboard.

They should recognize the fact that it's impossible to prevent cheating and stop shipping malware to users in an fruitless attempt to do so.

But it's not impossible to prevent cheating. CS:GO has a very low occurence rate of cheating as most cheaters are caught extremely early by anti-cheat or later by other anti-cheat efforts with more complex functionality.

CSGO actually have a lot, overwatch or valorant are way better examples.

Games like Trackmania should have SERVER SIDE data input validation instead of pushing rootkits.

They do in fact verify server side that everything is where it should be. But it doesn't stop people because ultimately the inputs of a high level player in Trackmania are nearly indistinguishable from inputs of a bot playing the track.

CS:GO faces the same issue where inputs by high level players are indistinguishable from cheating.

Speedrunning tends to have similar issues, where people perform tricks that are so close to TAS inputs that it can take years to spot an issue. Or in case of Dream, it takes an entire statistics paper to explain why they cheated. In those cases it's even worse because you cannot do server side validation on video data.

Being against anti-cheat is effectively being against competitive gaming or speedrunning.

"Online games are bad" is a hot take.

Yup. If you expect to be able to play with nice trustworthy people, it's horrible.

Not that I disagree but if you accept the EULA that states otherwise, doesn't that mean you don't have the prerogative? It sounds like you want to skip over the EULA, isn't respecting licensing models a huge thing for Linuxheads? Honest question.

> doesn't that mean you don't have the prerogative?

It means I've agreed not to cheat. I have the power to do it, I just agreed not to use it.

I won't let them take my power away though.

> isn't respecting licensing models a huge thing for Linuxheads?

Personally I'm not a fan of intellectual property in general. Licenses included. They all depend on copyright which should be abolished.

The only thing that makes any sense to me is the boundary between my computer and their servers. I should be able to do whatever I want on my computer. They should be able to do whatever they want on their servers. If they can't detect cheating server side, that's just too bad because they aren't gonna be doing it on my machine.

A lot of cheating just can't realistically be detected on the server.

Feel free to not play those games that requires anti cheats and let the ones of us who likes having it enjoy a game with less cheaters.

Nobody read EULAs.

The malware you’re describing would never be used. The designers of this stuff run it at ring zero on Windows with unlimited permissions and zero transparency

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