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The privacy points in general are valid, but what irritates me is using this rationale against kernel mode anti cheats specifically.

You do not need kernel access to make spyware that takes screenshots. You do not need a privileged service to read the user’s browser history.

You can do all of this, completely unprivileged on Windows. People always seem to conflate kernel access with privacy which is completely false. It would in fact be much harder to do any of these things from kernel mode.

There is no need for irritation. I condemn all sorts of anticheating software. As far as I'm concerned, if the player wants to cheat he's just exercising his god given rights as the owner of the machine. The computer is ours, we can damn well edit any of its memory if we really want to. Attempts to stop it from happening are unacceptable affronts to our freedom as users.

Simply put, the game companies want to own our machines and tell us what we can or can't do. That's offensive. The machine is ours and we make the rules.

I single out kernel level anticheats because they are trying to defeat the very mitigations we're putting in place to deal with the exact problems you mentioned. Can't isolate games inside a fancy VFIO setup if you have kernel anticheat taking issue with your hypervisor.

This take sucks. The anticheat software in this context is for competitive games. No one cares about people cheating in isolation in single player games. The anticheat is to stop 1 guy from ruining it for the 9 others he's playing with online.

You can argue about the methods used for anticheat, but your comment here is trying to defend the right to cheat in online games with other people. Just no.

> The anticheat is to stop 1 guy from ruining it for the 9 others he's playing with online.

Don't play with untrusted randoms. Play with people you know and trust. That's the true solution.

That is not the solution if you want to play competitively of whenever you feel like it.

Kernel level AC is a compromise for sure and it's the gamers job to assess if the game is worth the privacy risk but I'd say it's much more their right to take that risk than the cheaters right to ruin 9 other people's time for their own selfish amusement

Cheating may not be moral but it's better to put up with it than to cede control of our computers to the corporations that want to own it.

If it kills online gaming, then so be it. I accept that sacrifice. The alternative leads to the destruction of everything the word hacker ever stood for.

I'm sorry but you are fighting a crusade you can not win by definition. If I am free to use my computer for anything I want then I am also free to lock it down to enjoy my favorite game. If I care about my freedom I will have a dedicated machine for this game that I accept I will not have control over.

You are hijacking this thread about VOLUNTARY ceasing of freedom as if the small community even willing to install these is a slippery slope to something worse. You have a point when it comes to banking apps on rooted phones and I'm with you on that but this is not the thread for it

Valve drives significant development of compatibility layers for Linux for the sake of gaming. Their customer base is anything but small. There is potential for this kernel stuff to spill into the entire Linux ecosystem. It was bad enough having to deal with nvidia. I really don't want other companies screwing up the kernel.

again fighting against windmills, valve isn't even mentioned in the article. Valve's anti-cheat for CS2 is user-mode.

Do you have evidence valve is working to infect the linux kernel for everyone?

Realistically I don't see how Valve can avoid this. They want all those games on Steam Deck and the new console. Game devs want KAC. Therefore Valve can either provide them with some way to implement KAC - which effectively requires a "signed kernel / drivers only", same as on Windows - or tell them to go away. Why would they do the latter?

Mind you, it doesn't mean that the Linux kernel will be "infected for everyone". It means that we'll see the desktop Linux ecosystem forking into the "secure" Linux which you don't actually have full control of but which you need to run any app that demands a "secure" environment (it'll start with KAC but inevitably progress to other kinds of DRM such as video streaming etc). Or you can run Linux that you actually control, but then you're missing on all those things. Similar to the current situation with mainline Android and its user-empowering forks.

Streaming services already have a solution for environments where they can't run DRM - crap quality stream. My solution to their solution? torrents.

People can dual boot, what's wrong with a special gaming linux distribution?

> we'll see the desktop Linux ecosystem forking into the "secure" Linux

> Or you can run Linux that you actually control, but then you're missing on all those things

We cannot allow this stuff to be normalized. We can't just sit by and allow ourselves to be discriminated against for the crime of owning our own devices. We should be able to have control and have all of those nice things.

Everything is gonna demand "secure" Linux. Banks want it because fraud. Copyright monopolists want it because copyright infringement. Messaging services want it because bots. Government wants it because encryption. At some point they might start demanding attestation to connect to the fucking internet.

If this stuff becomes normal it's over. They win. I can't be the only person who cares about this.

It has already become normal on mobile, which is where most users are.

You're not wrong - this is a very bad outcome! - but I'm afraid the battle has already been lost.

From what I've read they actually tried to push back against it. I'm just saying this stuff is coming to our systems and should be resisted.

I'm starting to think you've never actually played an online game before

I wish that is an option. Nowadays many non competitives games that you play with friends you trust still use EAC (yet accept non-kernel mode operation on Linux). I suppose other than VAC you can't buy a usermode anticheat middleware now.

PvE shouldn't need it either, and yet games routinely ship with anti-cheat applied to everything (including single player).

I rather suspect that the reason for this is the current gaming economy of unlockable cosmetics that you can either grind for, or pay for. If people can cheat in single player or PvE, they can unlock the cosmetics without paying. And so...

Multiplayer PvE can still be ruined by cheating. In many such games, such as MMORPGs, you are still competing for resources such as rare spawns.

Spending hours setting up conditions for the rare spawn to appear, and then before you can get to it having someone using a tracking cheat and a speed cheat get to it first is very annoying.

> As far as I'm concerned, if the player wants to cheat he's just exercising his god given rights as the owner of the machine.

By this same logic: As far as I'm concerned, if the game developer only wants to allow players running anticheat to use their servers then they're just exercising their god given rights as the owner of the server.

This is just yet another example of the remote attestation nonsense where your computer is only "trusted" if it's corporate owned. If you own your machine, you "tampered" with it and as a result you get banned from everything. You get ostracized from digital society.

My position is this is unfair discrimination that should be punished with the same rigor as literal racism. Video games are the least of our worries here. We have vital services like banks doing this. Should be illegal.

This is the most asinine take I've seen on the subject in a while.

You may think it's your "god-given right" to cheat in multiplayer games, but the overwhelming majority of rational people simply aren't going to play a game where every lobby is ruined by cheaters.

I don't like cheaters either. I just respect their power over their machine and wouldn't see that power usurped by corporations just to put a stop it.

The computers are supposed to be ours. What we say, goes. Cheating may not be moral but attempts to rob us of the power that enables cheating are even less so.

Kernel access is related to privacy though, and its the most well documented abuse of such things. Kernel level access can help obfuscate the fact that it'a happening. However, it is also useful for significantly worse, and given track records, must be assumed to be true. The problem is kernel level AC hasnt even solved the problem, so the entire thing is risky, uneccesary and unfit for purpose making an entierly unneccesary risk to force onto unsuspecting users. The average user does not understand the risks and is not made aware of them either.

There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance and behaviour and simply binning players with those of similar competency. This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks. No banning required. Detecting the thing cheating allows is much easier than detecting ways in which people gain that thing, it creates a single point of detection that is hard to avoid and can be done entierly server side, with multiple teirs how mucb server side calculation a given player consumes. Milling around in bronze levels? Why check? If you aren't performing so well that yoh can leave low ranks, perhaps we need cheats as a handicap, unless co sistently performing well out of distribution, at which point you catch smurfing as well.

point is focusing on detecting the thing people care about rather than one of the myriad of ways people may gain that unfair edge, is going to be easier and more robust while asking for less ergregious things of users.

> kernel level AC hasnt even solved the problem

> There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance

Ask any CS player how VAC’s statistical approach compares to Valorant’s Vanguard and you will stop asserting such foolishness

The problem with what you are saying is that cheaters are extremely determined and skilled, and so the cheating itself falls on a spectrum, as do the success of various anticheat approaches. There is absolutely no doubt that cheating still occurs with kernel level anticheats, so you’re right it didn’t “solve” the problem in the strictest sense. But as a skilled player in both games, only one of them is meaningfully playable while trusting your opponents aren’t cheating - it’s well over an order of magnitude in difference of frequency.

i searched "hacking in valorant" and found hella complaints about aimbotting and wallhacking. I can give you a simple way to make that work right now in a way that completely bypasses KLAC. Vanguard hasn't meaningfully solved the problem, and so my point stands. Something as simple as a webcam, a virtual controller, and a cnn can be used to construct a fully isolated aimbot. No memory inspecting anticheat will get that, klac or otherwise. Don't need to go that far though, since streaming means you can simply capture video output realtime, and better than realtime vision/action models exist. Its a project a skilled and motivated highschool student could easily finish in a weekend, in fact, im sure if you search something along these lines you'll find someone doing a video series on exactly this.

What an analysis, “hella complaints”

As opposed to your more high brow verbiage equally low brow take? Come now, engage with the core critique.

>This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks.

Anti-cheat is not used to "protect" bronze level games. FACEIT uses a kernel level anti cheat, and FACEIT is primarily used by the top 1% of CS2 players.

A lot of the "just do something else" crowd neglects to realize that anticheat is designed to protect the integrity of the game at the highest levels of play. If the methods you described were adequate, the best players wouldn't willingly install FACEIT - they would just stick with VAC which is user-level.

I dunno man, at least give me the option? Like at least give me the option to play without klac with the exception i can join klac'd lobbies or something.

I mean, thats what Valve did. You are free to play on Valve's ranked ladder without KLAC. All the pros, semi-pros, and the people who want a cleaner ranked experience play on ESEA or FACEIT.

I doubt for other newer games the option would ever be worth it. Why host to servers and matchmaking pools for a tiny player base, who is will probably already be prone to complaining?

Counter Strike is a pretty good example that the statistical analysis alone doesn't work at all...at least not now. Valve has been collecting data since at least 2017 for their VAC Live system and it still doesn't work well enough to prevent or decrease the amount of cheating. The model only gives a cooldown of 20 hours if it flags your gameplay as irregular, and that cooldown resets over time.

It usually takes months, if not years for cheaters to get banned, but it takes a couple of dollars for a cheater to get a new account and start cheating again. Every time Valve fine tunes their models, they end up accidentally banning more innocent players in the process, so nobody has trust in that system anyways. There's too many datapoints to handle in competitive games, and there is no way to set a threshold that doesn't end up hurting innocent people in the process.

And if we embraced instead of feared remote attestation and secure enclaves, the days of game companies having this level of access would come to an end.

That's arguably even worse. Remote attestation means you get banned from everything if you "tamper" with "your" computer.

Remote attestation is the ultimate surrender. It's not really your machine anymore. You don't have the keys to the machine. Even if you did, nobody would trust attestations made by those keys anyway. They would only trust Google's keys, Apple's keys. You? You need not apply.

Game compagny have to have those kernel anti cheat because MS never implemented proper isolation in the first place, if Windows was secured like an apple phone or a console there wouldn't be a need for it.

Anti cheat don't run on modern console, game dev knoes that the latest firmware on a console is secure enough so that the console can't be tempered.

Consoles and phones are "secure" because you don't own them. They aren't yours. They belong to the corporations. They're just generously allowing you to use the devices. And only in the ways they prescribe.

This is the exact sort of nonsense situation I want to prevent. We should own the computers, and the corporations should be forced to simply suck it up and deal with it. Cheating? It doesn't matter. Literal non-issue compared to the loss of our power and freedom.

It's just sad watching people sacrifice it all for video games. We were the owners of the machine but we gave it all up to play games. This is just hilarious, in a sad way.

who are you to judge what gamers should care about?

A fellow gamer.

one of those secure consoles you talk about, Xbox, is running Windows as OS

Trusted computing isn't about security. Its about vendors not trusting you.