11 ms·

That is a great link. Perhaps even more interesting is this: Valve is working with anti-cheat vendors for Linux (Proton) support. So one of the biggest remainin

That is a great link. Perhaps even more interesting is this: Valve is working with anti-cheat vendors for Linux (Proton) support. So one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Linux gaming may soon be addressed as a side effect of this.

dkdbejwi383 5y ago
I hope they put some effort into anticheat on Linux for their own games. Team Fortress 2 has been barely playable for the past year because of cheaters running bots using widely available software which Valve seemingly can’t detect on Linux.
- CreepGin 5y ago
  With YOLOv4-based aimbots on the rise, it's really a losing battle even for the most anticheat infused games.
  - episteme 5y ago
    Not sure what the connection is between YOLOv4 and difficulty of detection? Isn't YOLOv4 about object detection? No matter how good your object detection is, you need to read the game and influence the input which is the part an anticheat is trying to detect, no?
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      There is no way to defeat an aimbot that just reads the screen, detects enemies, and moves a mouse.
      - majormajor 5y ago
        There are probably plenty of ways to tell "fake controller input from a bot" from "actual human controller input" today. Sounds like a scary arms-race, though. At some point the bots will probably be very hard to distinguish from "skilled human." It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know. I'm surprised how gleeful some people seem to be about this sort of "soon cheating will be undectable!" tech advancement. Or you just go all-in on the surveillance path and there are models that look at your performance in the game over time, your performance in other games over time, etc. Mediocre player suddenly amazing? Probably a cheater! etc... Not great sounding privacy-wise, but Steam probably has access to the data to do this.
        the8472 5y ago
        > Sounds like a scary arms-race Or a GAN
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        Also, there is enough variance amongst human that eventually the generator network can actually slip under the noise floor and become 100% undetectable.
        greenknight 5y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc They are using deep learning to detect hackers, since 2018
        mhh__ 5y ago
        And it's not working too well.
        mikenew 5y ago
        > There are probably plenty of ways to tell "fake controller input from a bot" from "actual human controller input" today. Only in the "do these movement patterns appear human-like or not" sense. These aim bots can use assistive devices to input mouse movements and there's no way to tell whether or not there's a human hand moving the mouse.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        There might be for now. You just have to train a second model that actually moves the cursor towards the target on normal player behaviour, eventually it becomes essentially perfect, and what then? As far as performance improvements, oh it's going to make the cheat programmers even more money as they implement a skill ramp up period and get to charge more. The only way in which I'm "gleeful" is that it might finally put an end to the spyware when we realize that controlling someone else's computer is a losing proposition. Otherwise yeah it does suck.
        nullsmack 5y ago
      - kibwen 5y ago
        That's kind of beside the point. Classic aimbots work by reading the game's memory, which means that you can aim at things that are on the other side of walls, or behind you, or obscured by smoke or darkness, or so far away that they don't even render. "Only" being able to aim at things that are actually visible is a significant step down from what we have today, which is the tradeoff for being almost impossible to detect.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        Actually, no, that's incorrect. You're thinking of wallhacks or wallhacks+aimbot Aimbots only aim at things you can see, it's one of their main features. That way you won't snap into someone's head through a wall which would make everyone know you're hacking and get you banned.
        kibwen 5y ago
        I'm no expert here but surely aimhacking originally implied wallhacking? The alternative requires doing actual image analysis in realtime, which AFAIK has only become feasible in the last decade and is way more processor-intensive than just reading coordinates in memory and doing some trig to adjust your aim height. Maybe this is selection bias talking, but I see plenty of videos of cheaters who are obviously just snapping to heads through walls.
        f1refly 5y ago
        Since you can check in memory where the enemies head is, you can obviously also check if theres a wall inbetween. Cheats for video games have had humanizing/cloaking forever.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        You don't actually need image analysis. There are tricks you can use to decide if an enemy is visible or not without it - obviously the game itself does it already to decide if it should draw the enemies to begin with :) Also yes these were invented a long time ago because people got caught snapping through the wall when CS servers started recording demos.
      - brigade 5y ago
        Only if it’s running on a separate computer and you’re passing your own mouse movements through that computer. I think it’s still typical for the ML aimbots to run on the same computer?
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        There was a recent demo of one that didn't. With modern hardware you can run Yolo on an RPi 4 with an 8$ capture card and a Teensy as USB HID for like 50$, you could definitely charge 200$ for it as a cheating appliance. BRB I'm gonna ask for VC funding (just joking)
        blooalien 5y ago
        > "BRB I'm gonna ask for VC funding (just joking)" I dunno … Mebbe you should run do that right now, before someone else does … Get that price down by around half and most every gamer everywhere can afford your shiny new "modern game genie"; Once everyone can cheat, the original cheaters have nowhere left to hide. They're on even footing with everyone else. Cheater problem solved! ;)
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        How about: every time you snipe someone from an implausible distance, you have to identify some crosswalks and traffic lights before the score is counted.
        blooalien 5y ago
        Don't forget to monetize that CAPTCHA with an ad banner and a popover streaming video ad for a different game you can "[Install Now!]"
        blooalien 5y ago
        Yeah, didn't think that'd be a popular idea. LOL
      - spyder 5y ago
        Captcha in games, oh no :O
  - bobsmooth 5y ago
    I had never considered an ML-based aimbot until now. That's both amusing and infuriating.
- azinman2 5y ago
  Non-gamer here: what’s the point of these bots? Is there money as stake? Or just a leader chart? But if you get your bot to #1, but you’re not able to do anything with it and it’s a bot, what’s the incentive?
  - neaden 5y ago
    For some people, causing frustration and annoyance in others is all the incentive they need. But in this case also, possibly hats.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    Some men just want to watch the world burn
  - KillahBhyte 5y ago
    Depends a lot on the game. If there is nothing to be 'earned' by being competitively better then it is nothing more than street cred. Think simple games or older games. CS 1.6 before rewards, knifes, and skins. A small few players might make some comp scene to get to some incentive but most are ultimately found out. The bigger issue, and I believe the primary reason for the rise in popularity of these bots, is when your performance does 'earn' you something. As the OP was speaking of TF2, this comes in the form of hats and custom weapons. Today's counterstrike game has weapon skins and knifes that go for pretty extreme real world dollars. Almost every modern shooter has some sort of rank up system tied to rewards. Some of the worst examples would be PUBG's real world money trading of loot box items or Diablo 3's real world money auction house. In my mind, these kind of systems turn video games meant for enjoyment into some weird NFT mining system where normal players are manually mining them with pen and paper while the bots have built ASIC devices. In cases where the items themselves cannot be sold, you have people selling the whole accounts. There are entire middlemen businesses set up around this stuff. It's crazy but there is your primary driver for incentive.
    - alliao 5y ago
      China and it's 50k USD cap per capita restriction (probably lower and harder still now) practically become in infinite demand side pressure for these too. They can buy players /cheat to farm, then sell the virtual goods over to those with USD; with healthy discount as profit for the other end. Thereby transfering their asset out of China.
CodesInChaos 5y ago
I expect the anti-cheats to require an unmodified SteamOS. Though the FAQ says the following, so it might not be quite as bad as I feared: > We recommend using user-space anti-cheat components for best results, as they can typically run in the Wine environment and provide the same level of functionality. Kernel-space solutions are not currently supported and are not recommended.
- p1necone 5y ago
  It's just a pc, you can install any OS you want on it, if anti cheat already works on that OS then it will also work on the Steam Deck.
ziml77 5y ago
I really hope this happens for all current anti-cheat software. With Windows 11 coming, I was looking into the state of gaming on Linux and anti-cheat seems to be one of the main blockers right now.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  It's really discouraging honestly. Wine/Proton finally gets to the point that nearly everything works and now all of the anticheat systems move to injecting kernel mode drivers.
Siira 5y ago
Anti-cheat is not exactly consumer-friendly. They should design their games such that the client is not trusted, and then the only possible cheats would be UI/AI assistants to the human players, which is not really cheating.
- episteme 5y ago
  How would you apply those rules to say, chess? Games should be computers against computers or they are badly designed? That's quite a lot the biggest games of all time that you consider badly designed.
- majormajor 5y ago
  An "assistant" that generates input to move your player in a sports game, or aims for you in a shooter, is absolutely cheating. You can't make the client untrusted to the point of "I don't trust that the human really pushed the button" or you don't have a useful multiplayer mode anymore. Cheaters are truly ruining everything, here.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    You are right of course. Like so many seemingly intractable moderation problems maybe this is why we shouldn't scale to infinity. YouTube is literally too big to moderate. Maybe this is a feature of humanity. What's wrong with more, smaller communities that have a dang to keep everyone in line? Other than the unfortunate lack of dangs in the world. Back in my day CS servers were mostly privately run. If you were caught cheating you got banned. If you appeared to be cheating (you were too good) you also got banned. From the perspective of the players on the server those are the same thing. Communities formed on servers with similar skill levels and recognized players. Cheating in that kind of environment becomes extremely risky from a social perspective. You could piss off your actual friends. There wasn't a need for rank-based matchmaking or anti-cheat or anything like that, you just eventually found a place you fit in and could have fun. Valve tried to replace that with algorithms but maybe they should "crowd source" so to speak, like we did 20 years ago. This is all a lot of words to say that there is a "right size" for a community to form and enable everyone to have a good time. When you get to the point that "technology can't help us" I think that's an indicator that your community is too big.
entropy1111 5y ago
Here are a few good videos about the subject and Linux gaming. I don't know anything in article format or I would have linked that instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8apCPN56PU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8apCPN56PU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B35XhcmBDDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B35XhcmBDDI https://www.youtube.com/c/Collabora/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Collabora/videos
exit 5y ago
do you think anti-cheating is ultimately solvable? it seems likely to me that eventually bots just take in a video stream, running on an otherwise separate device. what happens to gaming then?
- mikenew 5y ago
  Not eventually: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-computer-vision-auto-aim-that-works-on-any-game/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...
darkwater 5y ago
I'm totally out of the game scene nowadays and I don't understand how anticheat software should be installed locally. How does it work? I thought it was done on the server level.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  On Windows, anticheat runs as root and scans processes like an antivirus would. As is par for the course with DRM/License management/anticheat systems it is more about making a token effort to increase the difficulty of the most primitive attacks than it is about actually stopping anything.
  - SpaceNugget 5y ago
    It's gone way past that. Some anticheat software runs in the kernel now. They are doing crazy things like looking for PCIe devices trying to DMA game memory. https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech/blob/master/readme.md#hardware https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech/blob/master/readme.md#har...
    - opheliate 5y ago
      I find it really difficult to see the value proposition for anti-cheat companies in spending time developing that functionality. Is it really worth spending dev hours on catching what I imagine is a tiny population of people, who you already know are prepared to use hardware modifications to circumvent anticheat? Or is it just a good marketing point?
      - rasz 5y ago
        Apparently its cheaper than cost of infrastructure that would allow properly implementing server side checks, like validating if the player supplied entity data is within possible parameter limits aka why the fuck is this dude flying all over the map and server letting him do that?!?!?!
        5y ago
matheusmoreira 5y ago
God I hope not. I don't want invasive proprietary kernel modules screwing up my system.
Rd6n6 5y ago
Personally, I don’t really want some invasive anti cheat running on my Linux system that I probably will not know about

dkdbejwi383 5y ago

I hope they put some effort into anticheat on Linux for their own games. Team Fortress 2 has been barely playable for the past year because of cheaters running bots using widely available software which Valve seemingly can’t detect on Linux.

CreepGin 5y ago
With YOLOv4-based aimbots on the rise, it's really a losing battle even for the most anticheat infused games.
- episteme 5y ago
  Not sure what the connection is between YOLOv4 and difficulty of detection? Isn't YOLOv4 about object detection? No matter how good your object detection is, you need to read the game and influence the input which is the part an anticheat is trying to detect, no?
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    There is no way to defeat an aimbot that just reads the screen, detects enemies, and moves a mouse.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      There are probably plenty of ways to tell "fake controller input from a bot" from "actual human controller input" today. Sounds like a scary arms-race, though. At some point the bots will probably be very hard to distinguish from "skilled human." It will be sad if online play becomes only enjoyable with people you already know. I'm surprised how gleeful some people seem to be about this sort of "soon cheating will be undectable!" tech advancement. Or you just go all-in on the surveillance path and there are models that look at your performance in the game over time, your performance in other games over time, etc. Mediocre player suddenly amazing? Probably a cheater! etc... Not great sounding privacy-wise, but Steam probably has access to the data to do this.
      - the8472 5y ago
        > Sounds like a scary arms-race Or a GAN
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        Also, there is enough variance amongst human that eventually the generator network can actually slip under the noise floor and become 100% undetectable.
        greenknight 5y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc They are using deep learning to detect hackers, since 2018
        mhh__ 5y ago
        And it's not working too well.
      - mikenew 5y ago
        > There are probably plenty of ways to tell "fake controller input from a bot" from "actual human controller input" today. Only in the "do these movement patterns appear human-like or not" sense. These aim bots can use assistive devices to input mouse movements and there's no way to tell whether or not there's a human hand moving the mouse.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        There might be for now. You just have to train a second model that actually moves the cursor towards the target on normal player behaviour, eventually it becomes essentially perfect, and what then? As far as performance improvements, oh it's going to make the cheat programmers even more money as they implement a skill ramp up period and get to charge more. The only way in which I'm "gleeful" is that it might finally put an end to the spyware when we realize that controlling someone else's computer is a losing proposition. Otherwise yeah it does suck.
      - nullsmack 5y ago
    - kibwen 5y ago
      That's kind of beside the point. Classic aimbots work by reading the game's memory, which means that you can aim at things that are on the other side of walls, or behind you, or obscured by smoke or darkness, or so far away that they don't even render. "Only" being able to aim at things that are actually visible is a significant step down from what we have today, which is the tradeoff for being almost impossible to detect.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        Actually, no, that's incorrect. You're thinking of wallhacks or wallhacks+aimbot Aimbots only aim at things you can see, it's one of their main features. That way you won't snap into someone's head through a wall which would make everyone know you're hacking and get you banned.
        kibwen 5y ago
        I'm no expert here but surely aimhacking originally implied wallhacking? The alternative requires doing actual image analysis in realtime, which AFAIK has only become feasible in the last decade and is way more processor-intensive than just reading coordinates in memory and doing some trig to adjust your aim height. Maybe this is selection bias talking, but I see plenty of videos of cheaters who are obviously just snapping to heads through walls.
        f1refly 5y ago
        Since you can check in memory where the enemies head is, you can obviously also check if theres a wall inbetween. Cheats for video games have had humanizing/cloaking forever.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        You don't actually need image analysis. There are tricks you can use to decide if an enemy is visible or not without it - obviously the game itself does it already to decide if it should draw the enemies to begin with :) Also yes these were invented a long time ago because people got caught snapping through the wall when CS servers started recording demos.
    - brigade 5y ago
      Only if it’s running on a separate computer and you’re passing your own mouse movements through that computer. I think it’s still typical for the ML aimbots to run on the same computer?
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        There was a recent demo of one that didn't. With modern hardware you can run Yolo on an RPi 4 with an 8$ capture card and a Teensy as USB HID for like 50$, you could definitely charge 200$ for it as a cheating appliance. BRB I'm gonna ask for VC funding (just joking)
        blooalien 5y ago
        > "BRB I'm gonna ask for VC funding (just joking)" I dunno … Mebbe you should run do that right now, before someone else does … Get that price down by around half and most every gamer everywhere can afford your shiny new "modern game genie"; Once everyone can cheat, the original cheaters have nowhere left to hide. They're on even footing with everyone else. Cheater problem solved! ;)
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      How about: every time you snipe someone from an implausible distance, you have to identify some crosswalks and traffic lights before the score is counted.
      - blooalien 5y ago
        Don't forget to monetize that CAPTCHA with an ad banner and a popover streaming video ad for a different game you can "[Install Now!]"
        blooalien 5y ago
        Yeah, didn't think that'd be a popular idea. LOL
    - spyder 5y ago
      Captcha in games, oh no :O
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  I had never considered an ML-based aimbot until now. That's both amusing and infuriating.
azinman2 5y ago
Non-gamer here: what’s the point of these bots? Is there money as stake? Or just a leader chart? But if you get your bot to #1, but you’re not able to do anything with it and it’s a bot, what’s the incentive?
- neaden 5y ago
  For some people, causing frustration and annoyance in others is all the incentive they need. But in this case also, possibly hats.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Some men just want to watch the world burn
- KillahBhyte 5y ago
  Depends a lot on the game. If there is nothing to be 'earned' by being competitively better then it is nothing more than street cred. Think simple games or older games. CS 1.6 before rewards, knifes, and skins. A small few players might make some comp scene to get to some incentive but most are ultimately found out. The bigger issue, and I believe the primary reason for the rise in popularity of these bots, is when your performance does 'earn' you something. As the OP was speaking of TF2, this comes in the form of hats and custom weapons. Today's counterstrike game has weapon skins and knifes that go for pretty extreme real world dollars. Almost every modern shooter has some sort of rank up system tied to rewards. Some of the worst examples would be PUBG's real world money trading of loot box items or Diablo 3's real world money auction house. In my mind, these kind of systems turn video games meant for enjoyment into some weird NFT mining system where normal players are manually mining them with pen and paper while the bots have built ASIC devices. In cases where the items themselves cannot be sold, you have people selling the whole accounts. There are entire middlemen businesses set up around this stuff. It's crazy but there is your primary driver for incentive.
  - alliao 5y ago
    China and it's 50k USD cap per capita restriction (probably lower and harder still now) practically become in infinite demand side pressure for these too. They can buy players /cheat to farm, then sell the virtual goods over to those with USD; with healthy discount as profit for the other end. Thereby transfering their asset out of China.

CodesInChaos 5y ago

I expect the anti-cheats to require an unmodified SteamOS. Though the FAQ says the following, so it might not be quite as bad as I feared: > We recommend using user-space anti-cheat components for best results, as they can typically run in the Wine environment and provide the same level of functionality. Kernel-space solutions are not currently supported and are not recommended.

p1necone 5y ago
It's just a pc, you can install any OS you want on it, if anti cheat already works on that OS then it will also work on the Steam Deck.

ziml77 5y ago

I really hope this happens for all current anti-cheat software. With Windows 11 coming, I was looking into the state of gaming on Linux and anti-cheat seems to be one of the main blockers right now.

Teknoman117 5y ago
It's really discouraging honestly. Wine/Proton finally gets to the point that nearly everything works and now all of the anticheat systems move to injecting kernel mode drivers.

Siira 5y ago

Anti-cheat is not exactly consumer-friendly. They should design their games such that the client is not trusted, and then the only possible cheats would be UI/AI assistants to the human players, which is not really cheating.

episteme 5y ago
How would you apply those rules to say, chess? Games should be computers against computers or they are badly designed? That's quite a lot the biggest games of all time that you consider badly designed.
majormajor 5y ago
An "assistant" that generates input to move your player in a sports game, or aims for you in a shooter, is absolutely cheating. You can't make the client untrusted to the point of "I don't trust that the human really pushed the button" or you don't have a useful multiplayer mode anymore. Cheaters are truly ruining everything, here.
- mulmen 5y ago
  You are right of course. Like so many seemingly intractable moderation problems maybe this is why we shouldn't scale to infinity. YouTube is literally too big to moderate. Maybe this is a feature of humanity. What's wrong with more, smaller communities that have a dang to keep everyone in line? Other than the unfortunate lack of dangs in the world. Back in my day CS servers were mostly privately run. If you were caught cheating you got banned. If you appeared to be cheating (you were too good) you also got banned. From the perspective of the players on the server those are the same thing. Communities formed on servers with similar skill levels and recognized players. Cheating in that kind of environment becomes extremely risky from a social perspective. You could piss off your actual friends. There wasn't a need for rank-based matchmaking or anti-cheat or anything like that, you just eventually found a place you fit in and could have fun. Valve tried to replace that with algorithms but maybe they should "crowd source" so to speak, like we did 20 years ago. This is all a lot of words to say that there is a "right size" for a community to form and enable everyone to have a good time. When you get to the point that "technology can't help us" I think that's an indicator that your community is too big.

entropy1111 5y ago

Here are a few good videos about the subject and Linux gaming. I don't know anything in article format or I would have linked that instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8apCPN56PU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8apCPN56PU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B35XhcmBDDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B35XhcmBDDI https://www.youtube.com/c/Collabora/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Collabora/videos

exit 5y ago

do you think anti-cheating is ultimately solvable? it seems likely to me that eventually bots just take in a video stream, running on an otherwise separate device. what happens to gaming then?

mikenew 5y ago
Not eventually: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-computer-vision-auto-aim-that-works-on-any-game/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...

darkwater 5y ago

I'm totally out of the game scene nowadays and I don't understand how anticheat software should be installed locally. How does it work? I thought it was done on the server level.

whatshisface 5y ago
On Windows, anticheat runs as root and scans processes like an antivirus would. As is par for the course with DRM/License management/anticheat systems it is more about making a token effort to increase the difficulty of the most primitive attacks than it is about actually stopping anything.
- SpaceNugget 5y ago
  It's gone way past that. Some anticheat software runs in the kernel now. They are doing crazy things like looking for PCIe devices trying to DMA game memory. https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech/blob/master/readme.md#hardware https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech/blob/master/readme.md#har...
  - opheliate 5y ago
    I find it really difficult to see the value proposition for anti-cheat companies in spending time developing that functionality. Is it really worth spending dev hours on catching what I imagine is a tiny population of people, who you already know are prepared to use hardware modifications to circumvent anticheat? Or is it just a good marketing point?
    - rasz 5y ago
      Apparently its cheaper than cost of infrastructure that would allow properly implementing server side checks, like validating if the player supplied entity data is within possible parameter limits aka why the fuck is this dude flying all over the map and server letting him do that?!?!?!
      - 5y ago

matheusmoreira 5y ago

God I hope not. I don't want invasive proprietary kernel modules screwing up my system.

Rd6n6 5y ago

Personally, I don’t really want some invasive anti cheat running on my Linux system that I probably will not know about