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Comment by afarviral | Hacker News Reader

This is highly annoying/intentional timing as Minecraft 1.20 just got released but now it is tainted with fears of viruses and extra steps to mitigate. For a friend who streams minecraft content and relies on the income this is a big setback and extra-risky for them if their account secrets are stolen.

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Just play vanilla for now, I guess

I thought it took a hot minute to get mods updated anyway

Many smaller mods updated quickly. This is a) because this is not a very large update, and b) because Minecraft has pre releases and release candidates which are practically the same as the final release, so the mod can be updated before the final release of the version.

Also, many mods are necessary for performance reasons, due to vanilla's performance being questionable at times.

A lot of people use accessibility mods that suck to go without. Not having ItemScroller causes me physical pain after just a few minutes of clicking around in chests.

I'm just going to stick with 1.19 and the mods I downloaded several months ago until this matter is sorted out.

Maybe this is a dumb suggest, but what about using a VM or second computer?

I’m not a malware expert by any means, but I am pretty sure VMs are extremely hard for malware to escape when it isn’t expecting it.

And VMs take almost no technical skill to set up nowadays.

It's been years since I've done it so maybe it's much better now, but getting games to run properly in a VM was a huge hassle for me. In the best cases 3d acceleration was slow, often it just wouldn't work at all.

ehh I didn’t think of that.

Still though, isn’t Minecraft streaming mostly single player? I assumed latency is the big concern with VMs.

Although I also have very little gaming experience, I can imagine for very good players even slight delays are widely noticeable.

but btw Minecraft is Java, right? So technically it’s on a VM anyway lol. (I know, not really the same, making a joke)

It’s not better now, unless you can do GPU passthrough

A second computer is actually a pretty typical setup for streaming. One PC actually runs the game, and a capture card sends the audio/video output to a second PC that runs your streaming software.

Either way though, no matter how you sandbox Minecraft, at least your Minecraft account is going to be vulnerable.

VMs are no-go for gaming, unless you are willing to do dedicated gpus. Reminder that most people streaming minecraft do not know what a vm is to begin with :)

This wouldn't even be a good way to protect yourself, because the useful things are all tied to the game account, which would be inside the VM.

It really should not be too hard to put the whole thing into a sandbox where only select files can be accessed. But desktop OSs are way behind here.

Windows 10 has built in sandboxing now, might be worth checking out. I’m not sure if it’s available on Home and Pro editions though.

Data does not persist though, so maybe create a setup script to install mods combined with cloud syncing for saving game state.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...

You could play the game/mods on a burner PC or in a VM and do everything else, such as access your accounts, from a different computer.

Also would be surprised if a commercial AV like Bitdefender doesn’t pick this malware up.

There are scripts written by mod devs, and curseforge (the platform where mods are updated) to detect it, so that's useful.

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