Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

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The goals of the people mandating Secure Boot are completely opposed to the goals of people who want to decide what software they run on the computer they own. Literally the entire point of remote attestation is to take that choice away from you (e.g. because they don't want you to choose to run cheating software). It's not a matter of "no one stepped up"; it's that Epic Games isn't going to trust my secure boot key for my kernel I built.

The only thing Secure Boot provides is the ability for someone else to measure what I'm running and therefore the ability to tell me what I can run on the device I own (mostly likely leading to them demanding I run malware like like the adware/spyware bundled into Windows). I don't have a maid to protect against; such attacks are a completely non-serious argument for most people.

Is there any even theoretically viable way to prevent cheats from accessing a game you're running on a local machine without also disabling full user control of your system?

I suppose something like a "reboot into '''secure''' mode" to enable the anti-cheat and stuff, or maybe we'll just get steamplay or whatever where literally the entire game runs remote and streams video frames to the user.

And all this came from big game makers turning their games into casinos. The reason they want everything locked down is money is on the line.

anti-cheat far precedes the casinoification of modern games.

nobody wants to play games that are full of bots. cheaters will destroy your game and value proposition.

anti-cheat is essentially existential for studios/publishers that rely on multiplayer gaming.

So yes, the second half of your statement is true. The first half--not so much.

> anti-cheat far precedes the casinoification of modern games.

> nobody wants to play games that are full of bots. cheaters will destroy your game and value proposition.

You are correct, but I think I did a bad job of communicating what I meant. It's true that anti-cheat has been around since forever. However, what's changed relatively recently is anti-cheat integrated into the kernel alongside requirements for signed kernels and secure boot. This dates back to 2012, right as games like Battlefield started introducing gambling mechanics into their games.

There were certainly other games that had some gambly aspects to them, but 2010s is pretty close to where esports along with in game gambling was starting to bud.

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