3,093 karma · joined October 10, 2016
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C++ can remain irrational longer than you can remain sane.
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There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
- C. A. R. Hoare (RIP)
A TPM is entirely under your control. It's designed in such a way that you can't do certain things with data within it, but that's not because (at least in theory) someone else can and is controlling your TPM to prevent you from doing those things. The TPM, unlike an installation of Windows, doesn't only listen to Microsoft.
They have bet on the behavioral analysis anti-cheat horse but it hasn't won any races yet.
Moreover, they've proven that it's certainty more difficult to get it working than regular old fuck-the-end-user anti cheat.
Lastly, don't assume that the success of the platform will persuade these companies. They were already firmly un-persuaded when the steam deck got popular. And really, I think the popularity of a platform depends on the support of these companies more than the support of these companies depends on the popularity of a platform.
This is basically effectively where KLA has gotten to. There are still plenty of cheaters, people just don't realize.
I think it does matter in a strictly moral sense, and if people were more aware of how bad the problem is, they would likely be outraged. Alas, since they can't see it, they are not aware of it, so there is no outrage and the games companies are satisfied.
Given that valve refuses to use KLA for their own competitive multiplayer games, and has gone out of their way to not make their hardware locked down, I really dont think they will go down the path of making a locked down platform or facilitating intrusive anti cheat.
* I don't care what the intention is, they are _objectively_ intrusive.
** Last time I argued this, someone seemed to assume that I was claiming that writing Linux kernel drivers is harder than Windows kernel drivers. I am not arguing that, you need some kind of trusted party enforcing signed kernel drivers and a signed kernel in order to make KLA sufficiently hard to bypass.
*** In terms of the average Joe just wanting their game to run rather than having to think about the ethical implications of buying hardware you don't actually own or running an OS which gives control of your hardware to various corporations (but not you).
Real software engineering does exist. It does so precisely in places where you can't risk trying it and seeing it fail, like control systems for things which could kill someone if they failed.
People get offended when you claim most software engineering isn't engineering. I am pretty certain I would quickly get bored if I was actually an engineer. Most real world non-software engineers don't even really get to build anything, they're just there to check designs/implementations for potential future problems.
Maybe there are also people in the software world who _do_ want to do real engineering and they are offended because of that. Who knows.
Just spent half a day reverse engineering a Windows virtual printer driver (for work) and had to force myself to stop spending the rest of the day doing it.
The cracked screen thing - funny.
I wonder how long these twats will hold out.
I hope by the next time I fly Ryanair, someone has figured out how to emulate the look of the app and extract the relevant data so I don't have to run their garbage malware on my phone in order to have the pleasure to fly a "cheap" airline which bills you for everything after using every dark pattern imaginable when you purchase their tickets.
You don't need to take my word for it, Tim Sweeney said it himself (using dirty innuendos and weasel words, but anyway). EAC supports Linux, but doesn't utilise KLA (for many reasons), and doesn't make the same claims about protection as it does on Windows.
There aren't _that many_ games in that realm, but most PC gamers play at least one of them a lot.
Without effective KLA support (which would require a locked down Linux aka Gamedroid, for reasons I explain in my other comments) the best you can do is support these mostly non-competitive-multiplayer games. If you have friends who play lots of games, you'll quickly find most of them play at least one game which requires KLA.
And, again, Gamedroid != Linux and PS5's OS is not anything like normal BSD. In both cases (hypothetical Gamderoid and current Console OSes and Windows) the game companies are granted a controlled runtime environment. Linux will not support any effective KLA without a third party providing a blessed (all drivers must be signed, secure boot, etc) distro.
The reasons are:
* PITA to support different distros (although not infeasible). * Trivial for anyone to just write their own kernel module which your KLA is blind to. * Trivial to modify how your KLA driver hooks Linux to make it blind to the cheats.
That's cool, but you can't enforce that the rest of the kernel hasn't been modified with that kernel module. You need a chain of trust.
> We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.
Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.
> Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.
It doesn't support it with KLA. Bypassing this kind of anti-cheat on Linux is relatively trivial compared to windows with KLA.
It would require that a Linux based OS was released which allows games companies, in a standardised way, to take full control over the system. And at this point, it won't be a Linux distro, it will instead just be like Android. I think calling that a market takeover would be similarly thin and insignificant as calling android a "Linux takeover of the mobile OS market".
But this isn't to say that Microsoft won't lose the market share to "Gamedroid" or whatever, it just won't be losing it to Linux.
* As has been demonstrated, KLA and similar technologies do help make cheating more difficult and require more resources. But, as the cheating industry's pocketbooks make clear, cheating hasn't stopped, it has just become more discreet such that most players simply don't notice when they're losing to cheaters.
I'll put this on the backlog of things to implement if I'm incredibly bored and want to weaken the security of my infrastructure.
Neither, I do it so I can track which companies sold my email address on without my permission so I can put them on my shit list / report them to my government / shame them on the internet / whatever.
> The protocol proposes to alleviate a UX burden. The back and forth.
That seems to be _one_ aspect but that assumes you're logged into whatever email verification provider is in use.
> it would need Google (and other email provider supporting the + trick) to allow you to certify your ownership of a wild card set of email addresses, i.e anything matching what's before the + and the protocol would work just the same. Absolutely reducing some friction without adding you the extra burden your trick currently involves.
You assume that it's the email provider which has to implement this, which isn't so clear to me.
Only the email provider can attest that + addressing is in place, if a third party is involved, they can only explicitly match on full email addresses.
Like I said in my original comment, if it's the email provider that has to implement this, then the bulk of my issue is gone. Aside from the fact that now, as my own email provider, I have to implement this protocol somehow (easier said than done given my current infrastructure approach is aimed towards moving as many things into a non internet facing network).
If the email address isn't yet known to this third party (or, you are not logged in), there _will_ be a context switch which in my example case will occur for every registration since I use a per-entity email address.
* It's not clear if this service would be provided by a third party (in which case, the problem has merely just been moved) or the email provider. It sounds like the former, but in case it's the latter, then this doesn't have as big an impact I guess.
** While _I_ as the owner of an email address can decisively know that all emails of the form `myname+<whatever>@myemail.com` will go to me, you as the owner of a website attempting to verify my email cannot know that. The standards specify that + is valid in an email user part, but they do not require plus addressing to work.
Ofcom expects _you_ the foreign entity to implement geoblocking perfectly. And if not, they will try to fine you first before they even consider implementing blocking on their end.
That's the core issue here.
This has nothing to do with foreign entities circumventing UK based blocking and getting Ofcom letters for it.
I put up my cat picture website but because the UK is a tiny and barely known country, I don't realise that this cat website would be breaching laws there.
My website gets popular and I receive a strongly worded legal letter from an entity in the UK claiming that they want to take me to court and fine me for providing this website to their citizens.
I am like: WTF? Just fucking block it from your perspective if you don't want your citizens to see it? And I seek legal advice from my lawyer who says: Well, they have no jurisdiction here, so you can ignore this letter, but if you want to minimise hassle, you could just geoblock the UK and hopefully they'll stop coming to you.
So I implement basic geoblocking, which works 99.99% of the time (at least when it comes to figuring out which country an IP is in).
The UK entity acknowledges this in a letter and tells me that this is a sufficient solution for now, but they'll keep watching me.
I go about my business, for some reason or another I make a mirror, which I also implement the geoblocking on, now proactively, because I don't want any more annoying letters from the UK.
Some time later, the UK entity sends another letter claiming they're continuing the proceedings because someone in the UK told them that they could still access my cat website and provided evidence. Within 10 minutes myself and my lawyer both use VPNs to verify the geoblock is still working, and we're confused.
We ask the UK entity WTF, and they say: We have evidence, the fact that it's clearly still working from _our_ perspective is irrelevant, I bet you just geoblocked our IP address.
What do you do in this case?
Even if you hate how this guy writes, which I can agree is questionably professional at times. There's no real way to read this other than that Ofcom, instead of simply complaining that an IP wasn't geoblocked correctly, took the first opportunity they could find to restart their extraterritorial attack on SaSu. All that to avoid the presumably incredibly bad optics of implementing a GFW. Although honestly I would be the least surprised if the UK implemented a GFW soon.
There is work ongoing to try to make this more native on FreeBSD (by using Linux jails) but that work is not complete yet.
So, if you want to get the same kind of experience as Docker on FreeBSD, you are forced to use jails.
The only reason Docker seems accessible is because it's native to the platform people seem to like for running all their services, but if you're dealing with FreeBSD, you most certainly would not just "use Docker" to deploy your stuff. Because you would get worse performance than if you had just used Linux.
So the answer to "Isn't this just Docker with extra steps?" is truly and absolutely "No". Not because of some kind of old man shouting at cloud argument, but because if you are on FreeBSD (for whatever reason that might be) you can't just use Docker as an easier replacement for Jails (at least right now).
Also, it doesn't even need to be collusion between Microsoft and Google, but to pretend like that's never a thing is to be ignorant of history.
Stop defending these big companies for these things. Even if your version of the story is true, the fact they allow their platform to be abused this way is incredibly damaging to content creators trying to spread awareness of issues.
But also, do you seriously think there is a massive amount of competition at the scale of a 330k subscriber channel for people to bother pulling off this kind of attack for two videos on bypassing Windows 11 account and hardware requirements?
Regardless of what happened here, Google is to blame at least for the tools they have made.
As for Microsoft, I don't think there's anything disagreeable with saying that they've tried hard to get people to switch to hardware with their TPM implementation and lying about the reasons. Likewise for forcing Microsoft accounts on people. I am not certain they were involved in this case, but they created the need for this kind of video to exist, so they are also implicated here.
The thing about Hank Green is that he has been doing this sort of stuff (good things) for long enough time that I don't have trouble believing that this stuff a: pays fair and not over inflated salaries, and b: all the profits really do go to charitable causes.
I also don't think Alec is getting paid per sale, maybe he got some kickback for the consultancy, no idea. He would be obligates to disclose if he was getting a kickback, so I guess well see. If he is lying about such an affiliation, these things have a good chance of bubbling up especially for a channel the size of his.