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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

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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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?

7qW24A 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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?