5 ms·

This reads like privacy-invasion propaganda directly from the Chinese state. "Look how great we are at having full control over your PC. You know, to battle che

by prkl 1y ago

This reads like privacy-invasion propaganda directly from the Chinese state. "Look how great we are at having full control over your PC. You know, to battle cheaters!". Kernel-level anticheat is ridiculous. Especially when your data becomes a gaping would ready for the chinese state to stick their fingers into and twist around. It's like the police installing mandatory cameras in everyones house to catch thieves (if society here is games with kernel-level cheats). I want to go back to the days of Windows 7. When there was minimal corporate bloat in the ecosystem, no ads in the startmenu, and when game studios actually knew what they were talking about and had some balls to stand up for their values.

charcircuit 1y ago
Riot doesn't use a kernel anticheat on mac os because Apple provides sufficient security from their OS. Once Microsoft eventually catches up Riot will not need a kernel level anticheat for Windows. The ridiculous thing is how Microsoft has failed to secure Windows from cheaters despite it being a problem for such a long time.
- 7qW24A 1y ago
  Yeah but that’s an interesting technical point, more suited to 2015 HN - in 2025 we can’t let technical matters get in the way of our Sinophobia…
  - throw10920 1y ago
    There is precisely zero Sinophobia in the parent thread. Conflating criticism of a country's government with discrimination against that country's people is a very old state propaganda technique that is deeply evil and you should be ashamed of yourself.
    - pessimizer 1y ago
      This thread is actually about criticism of Riot Games, not any country's government. But for some reason, whenever Westerners do things to other Westerners, they call each other Chinese. In the not-racist way that one does that.
      - throw10920 1y ago
        > This thread is actually about criticism of Riot Games, not any country's government. And, as anyone remotely familiar with the situation would know, Riot Games is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tencent, a Chinese company, and all Chinese companies are subject to arbitrary amounts of control by the Chinese government. > they call each other Chinese. In the not-racist way that one does that. You just committed the same fallacious propaganda technique of the parent. It's extremely dishonest and malicious. Don't do it.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > The ridiculous thing is how Microsoft has failed to secure Windows from cheaters despite it being a problem for such a long time. The problem is, it's gotten hard to do drivers for custom hardware on macOS as a result for everything that can't be done with libusb as a result - and it's also gotten harder to patch over deficiencies of macOS. You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and an OS that is secure from cheaters, software pirates and malware at the same time. Android is the best example - either you run an OS that passes Play Integrity/SafetyNet and is blessed by Google and thus can use games, Netflix, banking or a whole lot of other apps that require non-rooted phones these days, but you lose e.g. the ability to do an actual full-device backup, or you run a phone that's rooted or runs a custom OS (say, aftermarket once the manufacturer ceases providing even security updates) but you lose out on about 2/3rds of apps because they just refuse to run.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and an OS that is secure from cheaters But do these need to be the same OS? Or is it possible to have them be partitioned off from each other that way you can have a game run with full integrity and then also be able to have a customized experience for things which don't care about integrity.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Dual-booting utterly sucks experience-wise, and the very second you allow any kind of "untrusted" code on a device - even if it's another OS nominally "separate" from the main OS - you multiply the attack vectors that are possible. That's part of the reason why Apple is so against not just jailbreaks for mobile devices but also any kind of non-Apple-sanctioned access to anything they deem safety critical.
      - charcircuit 1y ago
        I was referring to virtualization. The experiences doesn't have to be bad. For example on Windows 11 you can double click on a shortcut to a Linux app and when it opens it looks like a regular window like any other program on the computer, but it's actually running on Linux.
- Neikius 1y ago
  The consequence game does not work on Linux as far as I am aware. Interesting in the time when most of the other games do.
  - LexiMax 1y ago
    Linux does support Secure Boot, and I believe Red Hat offers RHEL with signed bootloaders, kernels and kernel modules. However, I don't know how secure the secure boot environment is in practice, and I'm pretty sure Secure Boot support on most distros is stubbed to be good enough to boot with Secure Boot enabled, but not good enough to meaningfully verify the integrity of your environment. I wouldn't be surprised if Valve started making serious innards into improving Secure Boot support on Linux for the sake of Steam Deck compatibility. However, I'm not sure that would work with the lack of stable driver ABI on other platforms that aren't a known quantity.
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      The mainstream GNU/Linux/whatever software stacks fully support secure boot on a technical level. > not good enough to meaningfully verify the integrity of your environment That depends entirely on whose perspective you take. There are tools to do pretty much anything you can think of and you always have the freedom to extend them yourself. So for the end user it's significantly better at that task than proprietary competitors because the end user has full control over the process. From the perspective of an entity like Riot it doesn't offer anything of value because (AFAIK) none of the distros choose to provide releases that verify the environment binaries match official releases built by the maintainers. I imagine the majority of maintainers would consider providing such a thing to be an anti-feature. Valve could easily provide an attested system if they wanted to. I'm glad they choose not to (at least so far). If a studio is turning to kernel level anti-cheat they screwed something up to arrive there.
      - throw10920 1y ago
        > If a studio is turning to kernel level anti-cheat they screwed something up to arrive there. How do you prevent cheating in online multiplayer games without kernel-level anticheat?
throw10920 1y ago
Riot Games is a morally bankrupt and extremely profit-driven company. If they're not abusing Vanguard to provide MSS actors access to user's machines (free VPN to cover your tracks!), then they're mining data from your computer - perhaps for market research or to sell to adtech. As a player of some of their games - they not only don't care about their players, but have a deeply abusive relationship with us.
- squigz 1y ago
  You seem to feel pretty strongly about Riot. Are you going to stop playing their games?
  - throw10920 1y ago
    Yes! I've already gotten about 2/3 of my friends to stop playing their games. I'm working on the last third - after I get a couple key people off I can quit for good.
    - squigz 1y ago
      That's good to hear. A lot of people are unwilling to give up even the smallest things despite talking very strongly against some companies.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Yes. I played League on Linux before they imposed anticheat, and stopped immediately afterwards. Quitting Riot games was one of the easiest things I've ever done, especially now that Deadlock lets you make lobbies.
- impulser_ 1y ago
  Crazy you think Riot Games is extremely profit driven. I have played League of Legends for 13 years and not once have they required or requested a single penny from me. I have given them 0$. An extremely profit driven company wouldn't allow that.
bsder 1y ago
The issue isn't cheating--the issue is that cheaters can come back cheaply. Consequently, human moderation of cheating doesn't really work. Given how intrusive these anti-cheats are, identity verification and login would be less intrusive. At least with verification, when you ban a cheater, they stay banned. At that point, you can put humans in the loop.
- Madmallard 1y ago
  Or they could tie your account to a phone number and use burner lists. You know, like DotA. This isn’t about that at all. They want their cake and to eat it too.
- throw10920 1y ago
  Yes. Riot doesn't really care about cheating - else they would use identity verification to permanently ban cheaters - this is about something else. They either want that kernel-level access to harvest data, or else it's about modders making mods for custom skins that cut into their revenue.
HK-NC 1y ago
Id go for a "RealID" anticheat service that takes my passport info or some other photo ID along with a video of me saying some junk to prove I am that person.
pathartl 1y ago
Lol, this wasn't Windows 7 days. This was 98/XP. The real fall of multiplayer gaming is from player support of F2P and a lack of legislation against the absolute predatory gambling tactics these games use. By the way, kernel level anti heat has been around for a LONG time. Battle Eye was introduced with Battlefield Vietnam in 2004.

by prkl 1y ago

charcircuit 1y ago

Riot doesn't use a kernel anticheat on mac os because Apple provides sufficient security from their OS. Once Microsoft eventually catches up Riot will not need a kernel level anticheat for Windows. The ridiculous thing is how Microsoft has failed to secure Windows from cheaters despite it being a problem for such a long time.

7qW24A 1y ago
Yeah but that’s an interesting technical point, more suited to 2015 HN - in 2025 we can’t let technical matters get in the way of our Sinophobia…
- throw10920 1y ago
  There is precisely zero Sinophobia in the parent thread. Conflating criticism of a country's government with discrimination against that country's people is a very old state propaganda technique that is deeply evil and you should be ashamed of yourself.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    This thread is actually about criticism of Riot Games, not any country's government. But for some reason, whenever Westerners do things to other Westerners, they call each other Chinese. In the not-racist way that one does that.
    - throw10920 1y ago
      > This thread is actually about criticism of Riot Games, not any country's government. And, as anyone remotely familiar with the situation would know, Riot Games is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tencent, a Chinese company, and all Chinese companies are subject to arbitrary amounts of control by the Chinese government. > they call each other Chinese. In the not-racist way that one does that. You just committed the same fallacious propaganda technique of the parent. It's extremely dishonest and malicious. Don't do it.
mschuster91 1y ago
> The ridiculous thing is how Microsoft has failed to secure Windows from cheaters despite it being a problem for such a long time. The problem is, it's gotten hard to do drivers for custom hardware on macOS as a result for everything that can't be done with libusb as a result - and it's also gotten harder to patch over deficiencies of macOS. You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and an OS that is secure from cheaters, software pirates and malware at the same time. Android is the best example - either you run an OS that passes Play Integrity/SafetyNet and is blessed by Google and thus can use games, Netflix, banking or a whole lot of other apps that require non-rooted phones these days, but you lose e.g. the ability to do an actual full-device backup, or you run a phone that's rooted or runs a custom OS (say, aftermarket once the manufacturer ceases providing even security updates) but you lose out on about 2/3rds of apps because they just refuse to run.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  >You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and an OS that is secure from cheaters But do these need to be the same OS? Or is it possible to have them be partitioned off from each other that way you can have a game run with full integrity and then also be able to have a customized experience for things which don't care about integrity.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Dual-booting utterly sucks experience-wise, and the very second you allow any kind of "untrusted" code on a device - even if it's another OS nominally "separate" from the main OS - you multiply the attack vectors that are possible. That's part of the reason why Apple is so against not just jailbreaks for mobile devices but also any kind of non-Apple-sanctioned access to anything they deem safety critical.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      I was referring to virtualization. The experiences doesn't have to be bad. For example on Windows 11 you can double click on a shortcut to a Linux app and when it opens it looks like a regular window like any other program on the computer, but it's actually running on Linux.
Neikius 1y ago
The consequence game does not work on Linux as far as I am aware. Interesting in the time when most of the other games do.
- LexiMax 1y ago
  Linux does support Secure Boot, and I believe Red Hat offers RHEL with signed bootloaders, kernels and kernel modules. However, I don't know how secure the secure boot environment is in practice, and I'm pretty sure Secure Boot support on most distros is stubbed to be good enough to boot with Secure Boot enabled, but not good enough to meaningfully verify the integrity of your environment. I wouldn't be surprised if Valve started making serious innards into improving Secure Boot support on Linux for the sake of Steam Deck compatibility. However, I'm not sure that would work with the lack of stable driver ABI on other platforms that aren't a known quantity.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    The mainstream GNU/Linux/whatever software stacks fully support secure boot on a technical level. > not good enough to meaningfully verify the integrity of your environment That depends entirely on whose perspective you take. There are tools to do pretty much anything you can think of and you always have the freedom to extend them yourself. So for the end user it's significantly better at that task than proprietary competitors because the end user has full control over the process. From the perspective of an entity like Riot it doesn't offer anything of value because (AFAIK) none of the distros choose to provide releases that verify the environment binaries match official releases built by the maintainers. I imagine the majority of maintainers would consider providing such a thing to be an anti-feature. Valve could easily provide an attested system if they wanted to. I'm glad they choose not to (at least so far). If a studio is turning to kernel level anti-cheat they screwed something up to arrive there.
    - throw10920 1y ago
      > If a studio is turning to kernel level anti-cheat they screwed something up to arrive there. How do you prevent cheating in online multiplayer games without kernel-level anticheat?

throw10920 1y ago

Riot Games is a morally bankrupt and extremely profit-driven company. If they're not abusing Vanguard to provide MSS actors access to user's machines (free VPN to cover your tracks!), then they're mining data from your computer - perhaps for market research or to sell to adtech. As a player of some of their games - they not only don't care about their players, but have a deeply abusive relationship with us.

squigz 1y ago
You seem to feel pretty strongly about Riot. Are you going to stop playing their games?
- throw10920 1y ago
  Yes! I've already gotten about 2/3 of my friends to stop playing their games. I'm working on the last third - after I get a couple key people off I can quit for good.
  - squigz 1y ago
    That's good to hear. A lot of people are unwilling to give up even the smallest things despite talking very strongly against some companies.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  Yes. I played League on Linux before they imposed anticheat, and stopped immediately afterwards. Quitting Riot games was one of the easiest things I've ever done, especially now that Deadlock lets you make lobbies.
impulser_ 1y ago
Crazy you think Riot Games is extremely profit driven. I have played League of Legends for 13 years and not once have they required or requested a single penny from me. I have given them 0$. An extremely profit driven company wouldn't allow that.

bsder 1y ago

The issue isn't cheating--the issue is that cheaters can come back cheaply. Consequently, human moderation of cheating doesn't really work. Given how intrusive these anti-cheats are, identity verification and login would be less intrusive. At least with verification, when you ban a cheater, they stay banned. At that point, you can put humans in the loop.

Madmallard 1y ago
Or they could tie your account to a phone number and use burner lists. You know, like DotA. This isn’t about that at all. They want their cake and to eat it too.
throw10920 1y ago
Yes. Riot doesn't really care about cheating - else they would use identity verification to permanently ban cheaters - this is about something else. They either want that kernel-level access to harvest data, or else it's about modders making mods for custom skins that cut into their revenue.

HK-NC 1y ago

Id go for a "RealID" anticheat service that takes my passport info or some other photo ID along with a video of me saying some junk to prove I am that person.

pathartl 1y ago

Lol, this wasn't Windows 7 days. This was 98/XP. The real fall of multiplayer gaming is from player support of F2P and a lack of legislation against the absolute predatory gambling tactics these games use. By the way, kernel level anti heat has been around for a LONG time. Battle Eye was introduced with Battlefield Vietnam in 2004.