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Comment by daneel_w | Hacker News Reader

"I distinctly remember Shroud (a popular Twitch streamer and former CS:GO professional) asking for this (for PUBG) in 2018. I remember Chocotaco (another popular Twitch streamer) voicing support for South Korean laws[1] that criminalize cheating in video games."

And what are the 99.9999% other players' opinion on this approach? Surely their collective voices weigh heavier than those of a handful celebrities.

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It's hard to overemphasize how weird the gamer threat model is compared to the average HN user's threat model. Another example: Peer to peer chat is considered less secure than something mediated by a server regardless of other features, because the threat model is "my opponent finds my IP and DDOSes me" rather than "the chat provider does something like publish my messages".

If you visit the subreddits for these games, most people support it as well. No one wants to have cheaters in their game.

True, no one wants that. It's an entirely unsurprising sentiment, really. But it's in no way whatsoever mutually exclusive with disliking this specific approach.

Most people in the gaming communnity don't think about the implications of software like this. They just see it as more effective anti-cheat and don't consider the security and privacy concerns that come with something like this

They think about the implications, and have accurately judged the risk to be worth it. Riot games isn't going to steal your banking info, your nudes, or your super-secret startup idea. It's not going to post pictures of MAGA hats on your facebook, and it's not going to take over your web browser. It's not going to drone strike your location, or kidnap you into a concentration camp because you're ______. It doesn't have the power of pit and gallows over you.

If you're being repressed, what you have is a political problem, not a technological one. If you're being robbed, you should probably only install binary blobs that come from legitimate enterprises.

You're kind of proving my point.

The implication of this software isn't that Riot is going to steal your banking info. What would they possibly do with it? They're a legit business. They can't just starting selling bank credentials or billing people randomly. There's potentially lots of less sensitive information that most people would consider "not Riot's business" that they can get at with this software. Will they? probably not. It's how much do you trust Riot.

And none of that even begins to address the security concerns of having software running with elevated privileges.

I'm not saying it isn't worth it to some people or that it's unreasonable to decide that it is worth it. I'm saying most people don't understand or consider the implications.

> And none of that even begins to address the security concerns of having software running with elevated privileges.

Laymen are even more paranoid about it than techies. Most people incorrectly assume that a malicious program can do just as much damage to your system as a rootkit. They are already willing to accept the maximum possible risk, just from installing a binary blob.

But unlike techies, they spend less time wargaming all the ways in which vendors of these programs seek to wrong them.

This doesn't make them ignorant - at least, it doesn't make them ignorant in the way that you imply.

Too many people have a thought process that is along the lines of "[Bad thing] happens? They should make a law against that." That's the end of it, to them. They're not necessarily thinking about the Nth order effects that that their approach would have on society.

It's really the middle school teacher approach to cheating. It's also fascinating to see the sentiment difference between online gaming and remote education. Not that proctor malware isn't worse, it is, but that the arguments in this thread would have been aggressively downvoted in those other threads.

That sound suspiciously close to how we got the PATRIOT act after 9/11.

I was intrigued by this, because I always wonder if people who are calling for death or life imprisonments in the heat of the moment will think better when they are considering an issue in a relative state of calm.

I did a quick survey of Reddit threads that had to do with cheating criminalization itself, rather than people commenting on instances of people being caught cheating. Fortunately the vast majority of upvoted comments (besides jokey commentary) are anti criminalization. Representative highly upvoted comments: "Cheating is shit and shows no integrity but making it a crime in online gaming?... Idk man..." Or: "This is asinine, I have NEVER been in a game with a hacker and thought that they deserved to be in the same place as a rapist or murderer." I think you'll find a lot of in-the-moment raging over hackers, but when people are considering it as an issue they are more cautious.

But it could also be that different populations are interacting with different types of topics.

Caution: extremely unscientific five minute study above :)

The point is that the celebrities' opinions are to an extent representative of the communities within which they are famous.

> The point is that the celebrities' opinions are to an extent representative of the communities within which they are famous.

I think there's no particular reason to assume that the loudest and best-known voices in a community reflect the view of the broader community. (That's not to say anything about whether it's true here, just that I think it's far from a given, and, if true, is an additional data point rather than a consequence.)

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