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We don't need to replace trust with complete submission to a third party. Just build trust. Game servers don't need to be a single festering pool of every user

We don't need to replace trust with complete submission to a third party. Just build trust. Game servers don't need to be a single festering pool of every user who purchased the title. You can just play games with a community that has accountability. It's like putting a camera network and automated tranq drones in every playground so kids don't play tag 'wrong'. This insanity of trying to conflate complete submission to a third party with trust or security when in reality it provides neither because that party is an adversary is a society-wide mental illness.

nixgeek 4y ago
But via the same argument, you are also free to look at Riot Games products and say "No thanks, I'm not willing to submit". I play some games like Valorant which use Ring 0 anti-cheat mechanisms, and to do this I have a Corsair i300 which I bought basically exclusively for FPS, flight simulators, and other games that I enjoy. I'm actually equally unhappy with corporate-provided Mobile Device Management and "Endpoint Protection" technologies being on personally-owned devices, but one clear solution is to just physically partition your devices by purpose and by what restrictions you're willing to tolerate on them. "But I can't do what I want with the hardware that I own" is a bit of a misnomer, you can, you just might not also have the right to participate in some communities (those that have 'entry requirements' which you no longer meet if you won't install their anti-cheat mechanisms). Why tolerate Riot Games, why not "play games with a community that has accountability"? It's simple for me: in the extremely limited free time that I have for this activity, my objective is to click <PLAY> and quickly get into a game where my opponents are 'well balanced' (matched against my own abilities) and servers which are not infested with cheaters. Without any question in my mind, cheaters utterly ruin online multiplayer games, Team Fortress 2 has been a haven of bots and cheats for several years and Valve is only recently starting to take steps to address. I have exactly zero desire to spend time "locating communities with accountability". I want a matchmaking system provided by Riot Games which simply doesn't tolerate cheating, period. I'm willing to be in that community even with its 'entry requirements'. You may not be willing to submit to those entry requirements and that's okay. You should advocate that games support your desire to launch without anti-cheat protections, and restrict you to playing on 'Untrusted Servers' outside the first-party matchmaking community, where you will enjoy no anti-cheat protection, and you can gather freely with your own "communities with accountability".
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > But via the same argument, you are also free to look at Riot Games products and say "No thanks, I'm not willing to submit". Informed consent requires the consenter have understanding of what is happening, know what the implications are and agree. Riot games anticheat software doesn'tpass the first two, and is largely irrelevant to the conversation because this use case is a trojan horse anyway. Community and social graph is a finite resource. I can't just go get another one if you colonise mine. This is exactly the same argument libertarians have against food safety and labelling regulations. I can't go get baby formula without melamine in it if every brand has it because they price dumped to bankrupt the competition and I don't have a chemistry lab to test for it. I can't go find another bank if they all switch to requiring attestation. I can't go buy another government. I can't go find a new social graph if everyone on it is on facebook. Operating systems and CPUs are utilities with natural monopolies, as is communication software. Treating an ecosystem, a community, and a social graph as a fungible good is a blatant lie.
- anilakar 4y ago
  I'm willing to accept remote attestation of an unaltered multiplayer client with one condition: The company stops pushing their kernel level spyware and trusts the operating system. Anticheat providers won't let this happen because there's just too much money involved and they will insist on selling perceived extra value over that provided by the OS. Earlier this spring, Easyanticheat crashed the Windows 11 Insider kernel and a good deal of games were unplayable for weeks.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    Remote Attestation is only one piece of the puzzle; all it verifies is that the user hasn’t tampered with the Windows boot process, it doesn’t stop kernel drivers from being loaded. Since it isn’t a turnkey anti-cheat solution provided by Microsoft, the game developer still has to detect and watch anything that injects code into the process and look at the list of kernel drivers to see if the player is cheating via a new cheat software or maybe even cheat software they made themselves. Effectively, Remote Attestation gives anti-cheat assurance that its process detections are accurate.

nixgeek 4y ago

But via the same argument, you are also free to look at Riot Games products and say "No thanks, I'm not willing to submit". I play some games like Valorant which use Ring 0 anti-cheat mechanisms, and to do this I have a Corsair i300 which I bought basically exclusively for FPS, flight simulators, and other games that I enjoy. I'm actually equally unhappy with corporate-provided Mobile Device Management and "Endpoint Protection" technologies being on personally-owned devices, but one clear solution is to just physically partition your devices by purpose and by what restrictions you're willing to tolerate on them. "But I can't do what I want with the hardware that I own" is a bit of a misnomer, you can, you just might not also have the right to participate in some communities (those that have 'entry requirements' which you no longer meet if you won't install their anti-cheat mechanisms). Why tolerate Riot Games, why not "play games with a community that has accountability"? It's simple for me: in the extremely limited free time that I have for this activity, my objective is to click <PLAY> and quickly get into a game where my opponents are 'well balanced' (matched against my own abilities) and servers which are not infested with cheaters. Without any question in my mind, cheaters utterly ruin online multiplayer games, Team Fortress 2 has been a haven of bots and cheats for several years and Valve is only recently starting to take steps to address. I have exactly zero desire to spend time "locating communities with accountability". I want a matchmaking system provided by Riot Games which simply doesn't tolerate cheating, period. I'm willing to be in that community even with its 'entry requirements'. You may not be willing to submit to those entry requirements and that's okay. You should advocate that games support your desire to launch without anti-cheat protections, and restrict you to playing on 'Untrusted Servers' outside the first-party matchmaking community, where you will enjoy no anti-cheat protection, and you can gather freely with your own "communities with accountability".

Schroedingersat 4y ago
> But via the same argument, you are also free to look at Riot Games products and say "No thanks, I'm not willing to submit". Informed consent requires the consenter have understanding of what is happening, know what the implications are and agree. Riot games anticheat software doesn'tpass the first two, and is largely irrelevant to the conversation because this use case is a trojan horse anyway. Community and social graph is a finite resource. I can't just go get another one if you colonise mine. This is exactly the same argument libertarians have against food safety and labelling regulations. I can't go get baby formula without melamine in it if every brand has it because they price dumped to bankrupt the competition and I don't have a chemistry lab to test for it. I can't go find another bank if they all switch to requiring attestation. I can't go buy another government. I can't go find a new social graph if everyone on it is on facebook. Operating systems and CPUs are utilities with natural monopolies, as is communication software. Treating an ecosystem, a community, and a social graph as a fungible good is a blatant lie.
anilakar 4y ago
I'm willing to accept remote attestation of an unaltered multiplayer client with one condition: The company stops pushing their kernel level spyware and trusts the operating system. Anticheat providers won't let this happen because there's just too much money involved and they will insist on selling perceived extra value over that provided by the OS. Earlier this spring, Easyanticheat crashed the Windows 11 Insider kernel and a good deal of games were unplayable for weeks.
- judge2020 4y ago
  Remote Attestation is only one piece of the puzzle; all it verifies is that the user hasn’t tampered with the Windows boot process, it doesn’t stop kernel drivers from being loaded. Since it isn’t a turnkey anti-cheat solution provided by Microsoft, the game developer still has to detect and watch anything that injects code into the process and look at the list of kernel drivers to see if the player is cheating via a new cheat software or maybe even cheat software they made themselves. Effectively, Remote Attestation gives anti-cheat assurance that its process detections are accurate.