Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses
massgrave.dev
massgrave.dev
(¥) you might have to figure out some details
Unfortunately not for anyone who has activated the auto-update feature on his/her Xbox, as the latest system software version seems to include a higher kernel version than supported by the collateral-damage exploit.
> No action may be brought under this subsection for the negligent design or manufacture of computer hardware, computer software, or firmware.
I guess Microsoft could argue their entire operating system business, app store, and update infrastructure are intentionally negligent, and so not covered.
I’d think a reasonable court would say that it’s working as designed, and therefore not covered by the carve out.
We could easily go back to installing firmware on-disc or in-download and only calling it at runtime. We won't because devs are in a desperate and futile campaign to outrun console modding (and to some extent piracy) they can't control. With consoles moving to common PC hardware rather than custom hardware like Flipper or Cell they're just going to get broken into faster and faster, so the only bet is harsher and harsher DRM on the software side. AMD straight up sold PlayStation 5 defects as the AMD 4700S "all in one" board.
6.61 from January 2015[1].
[1] https://www.psdevwiki.com/psp/index.php?title=Official_Firmw...
I want to be the only cheater in my lobby.
Can you manually modify the system clock? If so you could roll the calendar back every 3-6 months.
If it's working right now, an update can only cause it to break. The best case scenario is that it still works. Why would your roll the dice?
There's a timing argument - that unless you're at risk of zero days (like you're the DOD) - that you probably don't need to upgrade immediately. But it seems unarguable to me that the longer you wait, the greater the risk from a security perspective.
As always, security is a trade off. Risk of breaking from an update has to be balanced against risk of exploit. I'd argue the latter is going up more quickly than the former.
on a more serious note though I don't think machines with ipv6 enabled that are behind a NAT are likely to be vulnerable to this, i suppose maybe wormable if you can natpunch through some p2p voip or gaming service, it's the sort of patch i would probably install if i were made aware of it (if i had ipv6 enabled), but being made aware of it doesn't like, leave me worried, and i don't consider it to be likely to affect me unpatched
Would you be interested in educate yourself about IPv6?
I suspect it's because I don't use many common software packages so the attack surface is small-ish.
Agree in general that people wildly overestimate the risk leaving things alone. e.g. nginx hasn't had a security advisory affecting basic http 1.1 serving static content without TLS in many years. And of course desktops are behind stateful firewalls.
I only let my browser autoupdate (somewhat reluctantly) since I view that as the most likely security issue on my winpc but when I used to let win10 autoupdate (and other garbage dell drivers), things would start breaking after each update
this also applies to phone app updates - I only update if there's a reason to, not just for the sake of updating...
and people wonder why I have the best working phone and pc at the office...
Boxes get popped all the time. Why are you painting such a dishonest picture?
> and people wonder why I have the best working phone and pc at the office...
Probably because you know about computers. Nothing to do with your poor security practice.
And this still doesn’t say anything about the explicitly absolutist advice in the parent comment. “No matter the circumstance, turn auto-update off! Just in case you want to partake in some piracy!”
IME knowing about computers is what causes auto-update to break things. Because you actually rely on the kind of things that it would break.
[1]: Borrowing syntax from Markdown.
Is that a common usage /auf Deutsch/? Such use is listed on the Wikipedia page, but it's a use I don't ever recall having seen before.
§ is a bit less common but iirc used in some legal texts. It's also easy to use on ANSI German keyboards with shift+3.
Especially on sites like this one, which have no previews.
From my understanding, if you have the license, then you can still download it but it's not available for new users.
Right now, I'm using an android emulator to be able to run the app on a laptop (we don't have tablets) but it's a janky experience compared to a native windows app.
1. Go to https://store.rg-adguard.net.
2. Paste in https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n4wgh0z6vhq.
3. Change ring to "Retail".
4. Download the file with an "appxbundle" extension.
5. Install it (might need to enable developer mode for this step; don't remember).
0: https://massgrave.dev/unsupported_products_activation#hevc-v...
ms-windows-store://pdp?productId=9N4WGH0Z6VHQ
ms-windows-store://pdp?productId=9PMMSR1CGPWG
ms-windows-store://pdp?productid=9MVZQVXJBQ9V
ms-windows-store://pdp?productid=9N4D0MSMP0PT
ms-windows-store://pdp?productid=9N95Q1ZZPMH4
There are many articles with this workaround. Funny how it still works, almost 4 years later. This is not an accident, MS knows what it's doing.
One example that stands out was the hacking/modding scene of the GTA Vice City with Multi Theft Auto, and even GTA SA, which gained a massive player base that would have never experienced the game and created emotional bonds with it. I can't prove this of course, but I bet a huge portion of the GTA V success was from users who played a moded version of the game in the past "for free".
Another example is the Adobe Suite, like Photoshop, and Illustrator, which allowed many people to become proficient with the Adobe tools and be part of a qualified workforce using that same suite of tools. A lot of these professionals from low-income countries would never had access to these tools otherwise in their formative years.
Price is a barrier to entry for many users who wouldn't have paid for the software.
This is what demos, student licenses, etc. are for. I don't care what your justification is, property theft is wrong.
It sure is, and those people should promptly return their stolen Photoshop bits to the front door of any local fire station so Adobe can put them back into their bit warehouse and ship them to paying customers next day air
And I adamantly disagree with your password analogy if for no other reason than your password scenario creates temporal harm (assuming I do not change my password, of course) in a way that someone pirating version 1.0 does not automatically give them access to 1.1 or other product lines. In fact, I'll see your temporal factor and raise you: if someone pirates a product on Monday, and then buys the product on Tuesday, should they be jailed on Wednesday?
I'm eventually going to be sorry that I waded into this discussion, but I found the stolen bits == property theft so absurd I wanted to mock it, and now it seems this thread is somehow doubling down on false equivalences.
Piracy can be morally wrong for taking food out of software engineer's mouths, but one should not lump it into breaking-and-entering just to ratchet up the "look at how bad it is" factor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_distribution#Shrinking_of...
One person breaking and entering is bad. But in my example, this person broke-and-entered and then gave all of my future earnings away to literally everyone on the planet, thanks to the multiplicative power of technology – that's an outrageous violation.
I would expect Adobe would be nothing but a forgotten brand name list to the annals of time at this point, considering their Suite has been the most pirated application every year since the early days of Windows 95... And yet....
the term you want is Copyright infringement
We have the word infringe for the cases where the word theft is inaccurate.
Digitization doesn't somehow transform my limited time and resources into something you're suddenly entitled to.
If you think copyright infringement and theft are synonymous then presumably you'd be happy with people paying for copyrighted goods with a picture of some money, because a copy that doesn't involve a transference of control is identical with the actual item, right?!
No theft occurred, so everything's fine, right?
Some might says you did steal the password, because you made it unusable for me, but that's a pretty subtle position I'm content with either side of.
Perhaps you'd understand better if you consider a physical key - if you take it then I cannot open the lock (with that key at least). If you only copy it, I can still open the lock, so you didn't steal it from me; but the possibility of use allowed you to deny me the use of whatever the lock protects. Not so with most copyright works. If you copy my music I can still listen to my copy as often a I like.
Maybe you understand the distinction now?
Take World of Goo. Very popular game. Released in 2008; got a sequel in 2024. Why so long for a sequel? In part, because when they experimented with a DRM-free release, they had a piracy rate of over 90%. Can you prove that's lost sales? No. Would any reasonable person say that is lost sales? Absolutely.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-o...
Ever wonder why mobile games failed, and why every mobile game is seemingly full of ads? The Android piracy rate is enormous (over 60%); and freemium allows money to be earned while denting piracy rates. Let's not forget also why Nintendo went after Yuzu - over 1 million illegal downloads of Tears of the Kingdom before the game even launched. How many do you think paid afterwards?
And before anyone quotes the one or two studies showing an increase in sales from piracy; that ignores the 30+ studies showing a moderate to severe sales impact from piracy, that we also have. Nobody talks about those though, because that's a rather unpopular conclusion. However, you can't pick and choose studies to show it is a good thing.
Could you cite a few of the best such stories that are not sponsored by media giants please and thank you.
And seems like they learned nothing from this terrible experience, because they've also released World of Goo 2 DRM-free: https://worldofgoo2.com/
Of course not. People pirate more than they consume. The amount of series and movies in my backlog is insane. I have them physically on a RAIDZ2 (RAID6) and I have access to various streaming services. But what I lack is time. I used to watch the same stuff in the 90s cause of not having access to more (or very mediocre stuff on TV). Then piracy came into play and I could download many stuff I couldn't afford. Now I have more money available, but I don't have the time anymore. It is the same with regards to my Steam library. However, a lot of that is stuff bought on sale, and that is not 1:1 compared to a gained sale as the profit wasn't full price.
The double irony is that, even if it works, I may not be able to read my own game-saves since the Console's own public key is on the revocation list. I could sidestep this by resigning the CON files with the default value, 0.
The triple irony may be forthcoming yet. this all looks very familiar indeed.
fuckin brilliant
this bug is essentially a retro-active pivoting platform for the lucky day you combine unsanitized input and context escape.
seems like just trivial digital sticker-swapping, but MS over-leveraging its successes, refusal to break things (to maintain backwards compatibility, and it's own technical debt..), mean that some mistakes, however trivial, yet affecting, are immortalized
Oh and by the way Pluton is now on the latest batch of Intel laptop chips. And has been on AMDs for a while. How soon until Windows requires it?
it's important to ask which one of the motivations will allow them to lock users down and ask for ongoing rent. one of these two will, and that's what will always drive the decision.
I never did. The worst part is explaining it to people drinking the MS coolaid. I'm an MS admin so people at work love Win11, Intune etc all that max lockdown shit. To me that's not what Windows is about, for me Windows is excellent because of the admin tools and backwards compatibility. But hey that's just me.
Proton will be another TPM thing, introduce it, wait 5 years, then mandate it. They have time.
So, uh... Lenovo?
you know how google and apple dropped actual totp 2nd factor for their own accounts and force you to sign on another device to confirm signing on new devices? same thing.
They probably dropped totp because non-technical people can’t figure it out.
It is absolutely better than nothing even if isn’t great.
It's not their fault though. Every web site or service that offers totp and the most user-facing apps like google authenticator all scrupulously avoid telling you to save the seed value in the initial setup qr code.
That short random string is all you need to have working totp on as many different devices as you want, set up a new one any time you want, and it's nothing but a simple static never-changing secret exactly like a password.
You can wake up naked in a foreign country and be all back in a few minutes and without having to re-setup any sites or anything like that.
That is, IFFFFF you have previously saved all the totp initial setup seed values right along with the passwords for those same accounts. If not, you can go do it right now.
That string is not just one-time use. You can just save it and enter it into totp apps all over the place all day for the next n years.
keepass apps all support it now for one example, so you could save the string in a notes field in keepass, but they have a dedicated totp field now too. You paste it in, and now that password entry not only stores your name & password for that site, it stores the totp seed for setting up totp apps, and also displays the current totp time code just the same way the totp app like google authenticator does.
It's all stored in the keepass db file just like the normal passwords, so to set up a new device, all you need is access to any copy of the keepass db file. Install any keepass app like keepassxc on a laptop, load the db, and there's your working current totp codes for all sites. You want a more convenient dedicated totp app than having to dive in to keepass, just copy the totp seed from keepass into gnome authenticator or whatever. The different apps have different ways to supply the string when not taking a picture directly with the camera. Some like google hide it from direct access. Last time I used google authenticator I think it had no usable export, but it just recently got the ability to store the seeds in googles cloud, but not like in an ordinary google drive file that would be useful, just some internal magic that all it does is if you can somehow manage to log in to your account on a new phone, it will pull the seeds down and start working on the new phone. It doesn't let you set up any other apps or devices, and Google has a copy of your seeds in a form they can read, even though you can't!
But the same seeds could be just as cloud-enabled by being inside a password manager db, which is still sitting on a google cloud server, but this time in a file that you own, and in a form that google can't read but you can.
There are more of us out there!
Yet you can still install Linux on PCs sold with Windows, you can still install third party software on Windows not from a Store, you can still watch pirated movies downloaded from torrents.
You can even run an unregistered/unpaid version of Windows if you don't mind that it will not let you change the desktop background image.
So either way it fails it's purpose
Also consider that some keys for Secure Boot have been compromised.
LUKS also only protects an online system. So why are you using it?
Oh, I think I know, if you are on Windows it's bad to use BitLocker because it's made by Microsoft and it doesn't protect against malware, but if you're on Linux of course you use LUKS, it's a sensible thing to do. Got it.
Same with MS's recall feature.
A Windows PC is just C but not P anymore.
To that customer, Bitlocker itself was a threat.
In my small sample size, I’ve seen that more often than lost laptops. I’ve also seen many more malware infections.
Tying encryption to the TPM, which is the default, makes it easier to lose those keys. With LUKS I choose my own password.
It’s an important implementation difference, especially if it is going to do it by default. Warning a person “you will lose all data if you don’t write this down” in big bold red text is sometimes not enough.
Does tying those keys to your MS account fix that failure method?
Yes. Bitlocker recovery keys are escrowed to the Microsoft account. I've relied on this recover data from a family member's PC when it failed and they had unknowingly opted-in to Bitlocker (a Microsoft Surface Laptop running Windows 10 S Mode).
Which then opens the door to other attack vectors, even government.
I’m vulnerable to the $8 wrench attack, but enjoy knowing it is only a VISA problem if I leave it a laptop the bus.
So one scenario, everyone can access the data if they get the drive. The other, the government might get Microsoft to release the encryption keys.
You are presenting a false dilemma where either Bitlocker is in use or the drive is entirely unencrypted; there are other ways to ensure data integrity in the face of physical compromise.
2. Bitlocker can totally be used without a MS account and without sending keys anywhere and without TPM... But seeing how most people fail to RTFM we're back to point 1.
Secure boot and BitLocker for the enterprise laptops, sure.
For gamers/hackers/hobbyists, why?
RIOT requires users to enable TPM-enforced Secure Boot starting with Windows 11 to play Valorant: https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/100...
Riot has a pretty indepth blogpost about their anti-cheat systems, they've had years to mature them on some of the most demanding competitive gaming platforms ever made. Requiring players install kernel anti-cheat was very far down the list of possible solutions, but that's what it came to. It was either this or stop being free to play.
It's impossible to tell in-game if a baseball player is using steroids, yet there's a laundry list of banned substances and players who got banned for taking them because the MLB believes it gives them an unfair advantage. It's called competitive integrity.
Since it sounds like you don't play games, at least not competitively, I'll clarify that "cheating" in this case isn't the obvious stuff like "my gun does 100x damage" or "I move around at 100mph" or "I'm using custom player models with big spikes so I know everyone's location" that you would've seen on public Counter-Strike 1.6 servers in 2002. Cheating is aim assistance that nudges your cursor to compensate for spray patterns in CS, it's automatic DPs and throw breaks in Street Fighter 6 that are just at the threshold of human reaction timing, it's firing off skillshots in League of Legends with an overlay that says if it's going to kill the enemy player or not. All of this stuff is doable by a sufficiently skilled/lucky human, but not with the level of consistency you get from cheating.
This is relative to meat-space, not videogame, but we could go there and say caffeine or Adderall use is cheating, thus making anti-cheat a little more invasive…
And there another difference, you're referring to professional sport. I have no problem with invasive anti-cheat for professional gamer, even better it the gaming device is provided by tournament organization.
But we're talking about anti-cheat used for all players, akin to asking people playing catch in their garden or playing baseball for fun an the local park to take a blood sample for drug test.
> All of this stuff is doable by a sufficiently skilled/lucky human, but not with the level of consistency you get from cheating.
That's the point, there no difference for the other players between playing against a cheater and playing against a better player. Any ELO-based matchmaking will solve this, cheater will end-up playing against each-other or against very skilled player.
You could argue that they could create new account or purposely cripple their ELO ratting, but this is the exact same problem as smurfing.
> Any ELO-based matchmaking will solve this, cheater will end-up playing against each-other or against very skilled player.
Well, first, you're wrong, because cheating only makes them good at one part of the game, not every part of the game. e.g. in League of Legends, a scripting Xerath or Karthus who hits every skillshot is going to win laning phase hard. However, scripting isn't going to help if they have bad macro and end up caught out in the middle of the game, causing their team to lose. Most cheaters don't end up at the top of the ladder, they end up firmly in the upper-middle.
Secondly, you're basically saying "cheating is OK because they'll end up at the top of the ladder." You don't realize how ridiculous this sounds?
Third, ranked and competition aside, playing against someone who's cheating isn't fun, even if you end up winning because they make mistakes that their cheats can't help them with.
You don't play competitive games, that's fine, but a lot of people do and they demand more competitive integrity than casual players.
Little difference : I don't play competitive game with completes strangers on company run servers.
I've played competitively on community based server, with people being screened by other players and the community able to regulate itself (ban or unban players).
The problem space is vastly different, you don't need intrusive ring 0 anti-cheat for this.
The whole kernel-level anticheat stuff is a poor solution to a self-made problem by the developer : they wanted to be the one in charge of the game and servers, so they needed to slash human moderation need. They also wanted to create a unique pool of player and didn't want the community to split between itself and play how they want.
People don't consider playing around with your friends to be competitive. You don't get to choose who else is competing in the game or what strategies they use. This is just an area that you are clearly not familiar with.
> The whole kernel-level anticheat stuff is a poor solution to a self-made problem by the developer : they wanted to be the one in charge of the game and servers, so they needed to slash human moderation need. They also wanted to create a unique pool of player and didn't want the community to split between itself and play how they want.
This wasn't self-made by the developer, it was demanded by the players. Competitive games have almost exclusively moved to online, skill-based matchmaking with a ladder system because that's what players want.
I didn't say friends. Please don't modify my argument to refute it.
> You don't get to choose who else is competing in the game or what strategies they use.
I, as a single player, no, but us, as a community, yes, and it's the same for any game or sport, different group run different tournament with different rules about who play and how.
> This is just an area that you are clearly not familiar with.
Please refrain to use ad hominem, especially when you have no idea who you are talking with.
> This wasn't self-made by the developer, it was demanded by the players.
I don't know any players who asked for the disappearance of community run server or human moderation, neither that wanted do lose agency on the way they play. I don't they these players doesn't exist, but I don't make gross generality about players.
> Competitive games have almost exclusively moved to online, skill-based matchmaking with a ladder system because that's what players want.
They're not a hive mind, lots of them didn't or doesn't like matchmaking in any form, and even for the ones that wanted it, that doesn't mean developers have to remove other mean of play, like server browser and private server.
The state of game cheating has professionalized A LOT, it is extremely competitive and cheating companies produce extremely good quality tools compared to what we had 20 years ago. There is a lot of money to be made, we are at the point where you can just pay a cheap monthly subscription and you get access to actively maintained cheating tools. I know people working on the anti-cheat side, it is a really messy, highly dynamic (the bad actors are constantly adapting), complicated problem that isn't solved once and for all. We are far from the situation where just a few people are using some hacked-together software that will obviously be spotted as cheaters.
Game dev companies (at least US/European ones) have zero interest in developing or paying for kernel-level anti-cheat. That's a massive barrier of entry for the player base and they know this. It's also far from being cheap.
(Note: ignoring geopolitical factors, Chinese companies such as Tencent or Russian companies could definitely have interests in developing kernel-level anti-cheat for information gathering)
I will comment on a game I used to play though: Escape from Tarkov. The game costs somewhere between 40$ and 250$+tax, depending on what pack you buy. Banning cheaters for this game is literally a profit center. Every time you ban a cheater and they re-buy the game, you made at least 40$. The majority of cheating in the game was due to real money trading - cheaters would make in-game millions quickly, sell them, get banned, buy the game again at a profit.
The solution to this is brain-dead simple - more manual moderation (these cheaters are very obvious to spot). What the developers did instead just killed the game.
Citation needed.
Whose these gamers ? I surely didn't ask for this neither any of the gamers I know, nor seen any demand about that in gaming forums.
> The game companies couldn't care less if there are cheaters in the game, but it's the players which put huge pressure on the game companies to detect and ban cheaters.
The jump from this to "requiring TPM" is quite a long one.
That's akin to saying that, as people want security on the street, mandatory strip search as soon as your exit your home is fair game.
Asking for a result doesn't give a blank-check for all the measures taken toward this result.
Hell, blatant cheaters literally stream themselves cheating and their own communities do not recognize the cheating till the stream makes a mistake and selects the wrong scene. This also means that VAC methods of sending footage to random players is ineffective, as some streamers who are very obviously actually cheating do so in front of tens of thousands of people, and those people do not recognize the obvious cheating happening.
We also know game companies don’t care about cheating, as activision admitted in their lawsuit that they leave cheaters on a safe list so long as the cheaters have any semblance of an audience streaming.
That is absolutely wild, and completely characteristic of Activision.
Do you have a link that I can share with my CoD-playing friends?
It really doesn’t even take that many viewers. Zemie, for example, is a straight up cheater that runs a button activated aimbot and wall hacks. He only averages a couple thousand viewers and is safe listed by a number of game companies.
Truth be told, if the exploiter-class of your game would even consider a kernel-level exploit, your game is fucked from the start. Seriously, go Google "valorant cheating tool" and your results page will get flooded with options. You cannot pretend like it's entirely the audience's fault when there are axiomatically better ways to do anticheat that developers actively ignore.
Those technical shenanigans clearly aren't working, be ready to be disappointed if you thought that a TPM would help against cheaters. Cheaters always find a way, what those game needs is proper moderation.
Yes that does cost money but that's the only known thing that works in the long run.
It’s like saying seatbelts are useless because some people still get hurt, so instead of seatbelts we need a lot more ambulances and hospitals.
Like any complex system, games have a funnel. These technical measures reduce (but not to zero) the number of cheaters. Then moderation can be more effective operating against a smaller population with a lower percentage of abuse.
On the other hand, all the games / servers I've seen which are successful against cheater have some very good moderation.
Look at Counterstrike with regular VAC based matchmaking and then with kernel level anti cheat in FACEIT. One is overrun with cheaters and one isn't. It's the same game.
Isn't this the argument used against non-kernel-level anticheat and server-side anticheat in the first place ?
Alternatively, it's like saying poisoning your customers is a bad way to reduce complaints, because some of them survive. Matter of perspective.
The reasonable, fair, common-sense pro-consumer thing to do is to split the online play in two: a non-anticheat server and an anti-cheat server. Players can opt-in to installing a rootkit/sharing their SSN/whatever if they want to play on the hardened server. This costs nothing, and makes all types of gamers happy.
But doing this has less upside for the publisher than forcing anti-cheat on everyone. The only risk is that they might get dragged through the mud by a handful of influencers peddling impotent rage to viewers who are just looking for background noise while sleepwalking on their Temu dopamine treadmill live service of the month.
This is a very good point! And I'd like to point out that there is an analogue to the problem of smurfing in online video games, and the corresponding solution, which is to require semi-unique ID to play (e.g. a phone number which can only be tied to one account at a time with a cool-off period when transferring between accounts). Valve does this for Dota 2, and smurfing is far, far less common than it is in League of Legends.
Some League players complain that they don't want to give their phone number to Riot (which is entirely reasonable given that it's a subsidiary of Tencent), but if enough people don't want that, then Riot could simply split the ranked queue into two: one where (soft, ie phone #) identity verification is required, and one where it isn't.
Riot won't do this, though, not because it wouldn't fix the problem (it would, as demonstrated by Valve), but because they profit from smurf accounts buying skins.
The phone number requirement is only there if you want to play Clash. Normal ranked play works flawlessly with no number.
But guess what is happening now that MS requires TPM for Windows? All virtualizers now have some support for TPM. The time will come.
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
> and I did not speak out
bit. They're going to keep coming for stuff until it's something you care about.
For more information please refer to this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
The libertarian maximalist i-can-do-what-i-want-with-my-computer ignore the many use cases where I want to trust something about someone else's computer, and trusted computing enables those use cases.
How is it great? Vanguard is extremely invasive; having kernel access, you have to relinquish your PC to this chinese-owned company at all times (whether you're playing the game or not), and just trust in their good faith.
And for what? Cheaters are more rampant than ever, now that they have moved to DMA type cheats, which can't (and never will) be detected by Vanguard.
So you give away complete control of your PC to play a game with as many cheaters as any other game. I wouldn't call that "great".
Now, the amount of DMA cheaters may still be unacceptably high, but that’s a different statement than “the same amount as”.
So, it’s not “giving up something for nothing”, it’s giving up something for something, whether that something is adequate for the trade offs required will of course be subjective.
You're right, a game with no anti-cheat or a bad one will have more cheaters. But as you said, it's about the tradeoff, and that's what isn't "great". It was for a period of two years or so, since the tradeoff was "lose all control of your PC by installing a rootkit, play a game completely free of cheats", which was compelling, but now that the game isn't sterile anymore it's hardly worth it, at least for me.
We gave up something real. But it has not been proven whether we got anything. Maybe we got nothing, maybe we stopped a few of the laziest cheaters, but we still see tons of cheaters. The number of possible cheaters is based off the quality of the software. No amount of aftermarket software will magically improve the quality of your game in a way that 100% deters cheaters. I’m positive that their marketing claims they reduce cheaters by an order of magnitude, but I have not observed them successfully catching cheaters with these tools.
I don't really buy the gaming one, in every other domain where a community of people are gathering to do a thing they enjoy together it's on the community and not the tool maker to figure out how to avoid bad behavior. If you don't wanna play with cheaters then just play with somebody else.
Relying on the community to police cheaters is not an effective strategy for online skill-based matchmaking games. There's a reason game companies spend money and effort on anti-cheat and it's not because they're ignoring cheaper alternatives.
This requirement will only hit multiplayer games where cheating and security threats are rampant.
Also, if you have a PC with secure boot enabled, there are popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu that have a signed key. Or, you can add a signing key to the firmware, depending on your hardware. And of course, most commercially available PCs will let you disable secure boot entirely.
(Most multiplayer games with anti-cheat software don’t really work on Linux anyway.)
They have shipped ARM Surfaces where alternative operating systems could not get installed, enforced with Secure Boot permanently on. Have they been through any such "antitrust ringer" in the past 10 years?
> Also, if you have a PC with secure boot enabled, there are popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu that have a signed key
Note that there's one key MS uses for Windows and one key they use for everything else. They actually advise OEMs not to install this second key by default ("Secured Core" PCs), and some vendors have followed the advice, such as Lenovo. Resulting in yet another hoop to install non-MS OSes.
Even recently, a Windows update added a number of Linux distributions to the Secure Boot blacklist, resulting in working dual boot systems being suddenly cripped. Of course, even _ancient_ MS OSes are never going to be blacklisted.
True, 3rd party not trusted by default is a "Secured-Core PC" requirement, but so is the BIOS option for enabling that trust [0]. On my "Secured-Core" ARM ThinkPad T14s it's a simple toggle option.
> Even recently, a Windows updated added a number of Linux distributions to the Secure Boot blacklist, resulting in working dual boot systems being suddenly cripped. Of course, _ancient_ MS OSes are never going to be blacklisted.
Actually they are in the process of blacklisting their currently used 2011 Windows certificate, i.e. the Microsoft cert installed on every pre-~2024 machine, also invalidating all Windows boot media not explicitly created with the new cert. It's a manually initiated process for now, with an automatic rollout coming later [1].
It'll be very interesting to watch how well that's going to work on such a massive scale. :)
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5025885-how-to-m...
As I said, yet another increase in the number of hops for no reason.
Before you say anything else: until this you could install _signed_ Linux distributions without even knowing how to enter your computer's firmware setup. Now you can't.
The trend is obviously there. First, MS forced Linux distributions to go through arbitrary "security" hoops in order to be signed. Then, MS arbitrary altered the deal anyway. Even mjg59 ranted about this. And the only recourse MS offers to Linux distributions is to pray MS doesn't alter the deal any further.
Maybe at no point they will make it impossible on x86 PCs, but they just have to keep making it scary enough. And in the meanwhile keep advertising how WSL fits all your Linux-desktop computing needs. While at the same time claim they have nothing against opensource.
> Actually they are in the process of blacklisting their currently used 2011 Windows certificate
No, they are NOT in the process, and that is precisely what I was referring to. They have not even announced when they are going to even start doing the process. All you quoted is instructions to do it manually. So I'll believe it when I see it.
And besides, just clearing the CMOS is likely to get you a nice ancient DBX containing only some grub hashes on it, and the Windows MS signature on DB. Not so much luck for the MS UEFI CA signature, as discussed above. So "recovery" will be trivial for Windows, not so much for anyone else..
The problem is nobody really has put enough effort to port Linux to it. Some people started but haven't gotten very far
https://github.com/orgs/linux-surface/projects/1 https://github.com/linux-surface/aarch64-firmware https://github.com/linux-surface/aarch64-packages
>, a Windows update added a number of Linux distributions to the Secure Boot blacklist
It was due to a bug/and or not being able to detect all manners of dual boot correctly.
The goal was not to blacklist old distros, it was to blacklist vulnerable boot managers
Microsoft's response and fixes were provided: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/sta...
Not all. I know for a fact you could not in the RT/2.
This is despite the fact that people _do put effort_. This is how I know, for example, that some Linux workarounds for "funny" ACPI interpretations had to be also "ported" to the ARM architecture in ACPI ARM Linux because Windows is literally making the same "bugs" all over again. Except, this time, Windows hardware is in the _minority_, and there's plenty of ARM ACPI devices that do not require these workarounds...
> It was due to a bug/and or not being able to detect all manners of dual boot correctly.
Sure. It is also a bug they just applied these blacklists automatically in the first place? It is also a bug that the list of blacklisted bootloaders mostly comprises non-MS oses, despite the fact there are well-known issues in many Windows versions?
Hell I can't even reformat it with a fresh copy of Win11 for ARM because it isn't offered. The only way to download windows for ARM is a virtual machine file for windows insiders. Then use third party tools to crack that open and extract the OS.
They should be prosecuted for that shit.
Amazing.
This is probably the most egregious/impactful manifestation of it, though, especially if it applies to Xbox.
I don't have links handy, but Android fell prey to this bug twice checking .apk signatures due to .zip files having duplicated copies of the manifest
Another example of this: the leaked Windows source code is available straight from GitHub.
It's more of a business move, than a technical move. Microsoft has plenty of capable people, they don't need such software to be FOSS to successfully inspect it.
For a person, yes go for it they won’t bother.
For a company… we have had some annoying MS audits. So how everything has to be retail WITH the cards. I have a stack ready for our next audit if it ever happens again.
So yeah LTSC was never meant to be available for single desktop users at home yet it's best version of Windows available.
By way of comparison, Windows 11 Pro is $200[2].
[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/201811300700_windows_10_ltsc.html
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
Allowing piracy at that level is actively safer in the long run.
The large OEMs have contracts to pay 9 cents per license.
They'll never crack the individual enthusiast building his own PC from Newegg parts and installing a hack, but he's small potatoes.
But back in the day, there there was a fair chance your local midsize business, government, university, didn't necessarily buy from Dell or HP-- they bidded out a few hundred PCs to a local shop, which had both the motivation and technical knowledge to use the same license key on each one, and the scale where it could represent significant lost revenue.
Introducing activation was probably a significant sabotage for them. Although I'd suspect the stick on license certificate was almost as big a deal in that regard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295819
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-sup...
I guess the method described here does „more“ since it’s much more elaborate. Not super familiar with the different levels of win licences
Did you open the link?
highly suspicious
Bit gross to be honest