4 ms·

This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies. Have you considered more advanced network analysis? It's one of the areas I

by ghxst 2y ago

This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies. Have you considered more advanced network analysis? It's one of the areas I have an interest in (professionally and personally) so if you want any suggestions let me know.

kelnos 2y ago
> This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies Is latency going to be good enough on mobile data (especially if they're also using proxies) for a FPS, though? Sure, they're using cheating software, but I wouldn't be surprised if the software gets the information it needs to cheat too late often enough for it to be useful.
- Sayrus 2y ago
  Assuming obvious cheat, even 100ms or 200ms latency is unbeatable by a human. Especially since the cheat doesn't need time to aim. Even for non-obvious use-cases, it's hard to beat the advantage provided by knowing the position of players. On my own hotspot, I have less than 30ms of latency.
- ghxst 2y ago
  Yes the latency is not nearly as bad as you might think, it's comparable to a VPN in my experience, though the quality will depend on your location and the available connections. Sophisticated cheats in games like CSGO (and other competitive shooters) are usually very subtle, such as displaying enemies on the mini-map when they shouldn't be visible which provides a major advantage without requiring superhuman input, and the added latency is often negligible—especially when the info can be relayed to teammates and now you essentially have the entire team cheating with only 1 player suffering from a bit of increased latency. And I wouldn't say this is an edge case either as in my experience the majority of cheaters I encountered are individuals that play on an alt account and offer a service to guarantee wins in ranked games.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  I regularly played CSGO in Europe because the North American ranking system were screwed up. I got to Supreme (2nd highest rank) with 150 ms ping. The people I queued with hit Global. It's possible to play legitimately with very high ping. The higher ping put us at a disadvantage, but the skill gap between regions made it worth it to arbitrage.
  - Systemmanic 2y ago
    What was screwed up about the NA ranks?
    - xnyan 2y ago
      NA is (or at least was when I played) the most populated and visible regional zone, and attracts a lot of players attempting various kinds of rank manipulation. On the one hand you have smurfing, which is the practice of a relatively high skill player using a an account with relatively low rank so that they can dominate lower ranked players. On the other side you have boosting, which is a relatively high skill player ranking up new accounts for later sale. In practice this means at lower ranks, it was not at all uncommon to be matched with players with similar rank but vastly better skills.
      - ultimafan 2y ago
        This was my experience too years ago when I played CSGO. The difficulty at higher ranks (up to a certain point) felt significantly easier than the lower ranks. Getting out of the silver and gold ranks (can't remember the exact names) was a hellish grind with lots of matches that ended in one sided stomps with one or two guys on the other team racking up some insane k/d. Past that was smooth sailing for a long long way.
    - jjmarr 2y ago
      At the time, there were no people of very high ranks. I also queued office only which didn't help. It's basically impossible to keep one's rank at Supreme if you only play against Gold Nova or so due to the way the rating system works.
- eertami 2y ago
  It's not ideal but I lived half a year with unreliable internet and frequently played over a tethered 4G mobile connection (in Europe). Latency was around 40-50ms, which was still lower than the people playing from Eastern Europe who would play in EU West matchmaking. I imagine with 5G it could be even lower.
mouse_ 2y ago
The tactic 4chan uses: Regular IPs can post freely VPN or mobile IPs (blacklisted) must pay for a key ($20/year) that allows posting from blacklisted IPs. Key is good for posting from one blacklisted IP, locked for 30 minutes, so users cannot share keys. That way, you can ban the user by their key, if their IP is public. It's not a perfect solution but it seems to be the best they've found for such a situation so far.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I mean, in this case it's 4chan so who cares, but I hope we are not very slowly moving towards a troubling world with lower classes of IPs and upper class IPs. IPs should be IPs should be IPs, it shouldn't matter whether it comes from an ISP, a mobile network, a VPN, or anything else, and we shouldn't attach some kind of IP caste to providers or countries. I think we really need Internet-wide IP randomization, where you can't just block a /24 or a /16 because they're in some icky ghetto. Yes, I know there is abuse, but if this is the alternative, it doesn't seem worth the cost in terms of innocent people losing access. EDIT: Well, I guess the tribe has spoken. Pretty surprising. I think y'all are just assuming you'll always be the ones with the "good" IPs...
  - kbolino 2y ago
    We are already there and have been for a long time. Geoblocking is very common for low-effort DRM and abuse mitigation, common VPN providers are easy to detect by IP but generally frustrate and/or ignore abuse reporting (until serious illegal activity is committed), college and other institutional networks are often no better than VPNs in this regard, etc. The Internet hasn't been able to operate as a network of peers at least since it was opened up to the public.
    - miki123211 2y ago
      > until serious illegal activity is committed What do they do in such cases? Assuming they get the report after the fact and assuming their "no logging" promises are true, can they even do anything? They're not even supposed to know which customer did it, after all. If their promises are false, wouldn't they reveal their hand if they handed logs over willy nilly?
ec109685 2y ago
Want does mobile data tethering make it harder to ban an IP address?
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  Mobile networks are all IPv6. IPv4 traffic is behind CGNAT. As a result, you can't ban individual cheaters, you have to ban the whole network.
  - ec109685 2y ago
    I don’t think CGNAT is particularly limited to mobile networks. If you don’t serve traffic on IPv6, more and more of it will be proxied.
- ghxst 2y ago
  You toggle airplane mode and you have a new IP and the old one you are banned on is now used by someone innocent.

by ghxst 2y ago

kelnos 2y ago

> This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies Is latency going to be good enough on mobile data (especially if they're also using proxies) for a FPS, though? Sure, they're using cheating software, but I wouldn't be surprised if the software gets the information it needs to cheat too late often enough for it to be useful.

Sayrus 2y ago
Assuming obvious cheat, even 100ms or 200ms latency is unbeatable by a human. Especially since the cheat doesn't need time to aim. Even for non-obvious use-cases, it's hard to beat the advantage provided by knowing the position of players. On my own hotspot, I have less than 30ms of latency.
ghxst 2y ago
Yes the latency is not nearly as bad as you might think, it's comparable to a VPN in my experience, though the quality will depend on your location and the available connections. Sophisticated cheats in games like CSGO (and other competitive shooters) are usually very subtle, such as displaying enemies on the mini-map when they shouldn't be visible which provides a major advantage without requiring superhuman input, and the added latency is often negligible—especially when the info can be relayed to teammates and now you essentially have the entire team cheating with only 1 player suffering from a bit of increased latency. And I wouldn't say this is an edge case either as in my experience the majority of cheaters I encountered are individuals that play on an alt account and offer a service to guarantee wins in ranked games.
jjmarr 2y ago
I regularly played CSGO in Europe because the North American ranking system were screwed up. I got to Supreme (2nd highest rank) with 150 ms ping. The people I queued with hit Global. It's possible to play legitimately with very high ping. The higher ping put us at a disadvantage, but the skill gap between regions made it worth it to arbitrage.
- Systemmanic 2y ago
  What was screwed up about the NA ranks?
  - xnyan 2y ago
    NA is (or at least was when I played) the most populated and visible regional zone, and attracts a lot of players attempting various kinds of rank manipulation. On the one hand you have smurfing, which is the practice of a relatively high skill player using a an account with relatively low rank so that they can dominate lower ranked players. On the other side you have boosting, which is a relatively high skill player ranking up new accounts for later sale. In practice this means at lower ranks, it was not at all uncommon to be matched with players with similar rank but vastly better skills.
    - ultimafan 2y ago
      This was my experience too years ago when I played CSGO. The difficulty at higher ranks (up to a certain point) felt significantly easier than the lower ranks. Getting out of the silver and gold ranks (can't remember the exact names) was a hellish grind with lots of matches that ended in one sided stomps with one or two guys on the other team racking up some insane k/d. Past that was smooth sailing for a long long way.
  - jjmarr 2y ago
    At the time, there were no people of very high ranks. I also queued office only which didn't help. It's basically impossible to keep one's rank at Supreme if you only play against Gold Nova or so due to the way the rating system works.
eertami 2y ago
It's not ideal but I lived half a year with unreliable internet and frequently played over a tethered 4G mobile connection (in Europe). Latency was around 40-50ms, which was still lower than the people playing from Eastern Europe who would play in EU West matchmaking. I imagine with 5G it could be even lower.

mouse_ 2y ago

The tactic 4chan uses: Regular IPs can post freely VPN or mobile IPs (blacklisted) must pay for a key ($20/year) that allows posting from blacklisted IPs. Key is good for posting from one blacklisted IP, locked for 30 minutes, so users cannot share keys. That way, you can ban the user by their key, if their IP is public. It's not a perfect solution but it seems to be the best they've found for such a situation so far.

ryandrake 2y ago
I mean, in this case it's 4chan so who cares, but I hope we are not very slowly moving towards a troubling world with lower classes of IPs and upper class IPs. IPs should be IPs should be IPs, it shouldn't matter whether it comes from an ISP, a mobile network, a VPN, or anything else, and we shouldn't attach some kind of IP caste to providers or countries. I think we really need Internet-wide IP randomization, where you can't just block a /24 or a /16 because they're in some icky ghetto. Yes, I know there is abuse, but if this is the alternative, it doesn't seem worth the cost in terms of innocent people losing access. EDIT: Well, I guess the tribe has spoken. Pretty surprising. I think y'all are just assuming you'll always be the ones with the "good" IPs...
- kbolino 2y ago
  We are already there and have been for a long time. Geoblocking is very common for low-effort DRM and abuse mitigation, common VPN providers are easy to detect by IP but generally frustrate and/or ignore abuse reporting (until serious illegal activity is committed), college and other institutional networks are often no better than VPNs in this regard, etc. The Internet hasn't been able to operate as a network of peers at least since it was opened up to the public.
  - miki123211 2y ago
    > until serious illegal activity is committed What do they do in such cases? Assuming they get the report after the fact and assuming their "no logging" promises are true, can they even do anything? They're not even supposed to know which customer did it, after all. If their promises are false, wouldn't they reveal their hand if they handed logs over willy nilly?

ec109685 2y ago

Want does mobile data tethering make it harder to ban an IP address?

kmeisthax 2y ago
Mobile networks are all IPv6. IPv4 traffic is behind CGNAT. As a result, you can't ban individual cheaters, you have to ban the whole network.
- ec109685 2y ago
  I don’t think CGNAT is particularly limited to mobile networks. If you don’t serve traffic on IPv6, more and more of it will be proxied.
ghxst 2y ago
You toggle airplane mode and you have a new IP and the old one you are banned on is now used by someone innocent.