in 1999 you had the ability to get into a music shop, load the cd and test listen to it. Or just go through the music charts. Or wish for a specific song on radio.
Also 1999 already had Napster, Morpheus and others.
Then you realize you aren’t paying $20 a month, and you buy a new album, that you fucking OWN forever.
You buy a Sony CD and decide to play it on your computer.
Your computer now has a rootkit installed.
And these days people just install the rootkit, only it’s allegedly to prevent game cheating.
And, when called out, everyone tells you you’re a paranoid, tinfoil hat wearing, organ trafficking criminal
That’s because you guys throw around the word “rootkit” like my parents call everything “woke” or “communist.”
You probably couldn’t even define what a rootkit is yet you’re scared shitless of a thing you can’t properly define.
So yeah, anyone who’s afraid of something they don’t even understand fully is absolutely paranoid.
Most people are not fully cognizant of the rights they sign away in a click through. There is paranoid and there is prudent.
Read the EULA, if you don’t want an anticheat that requires those permissions then don’t install the game.
Something having kernel access doesn’t make it a rootkit, it makes it high-risk for misuse by a threat actor. Only if the software was exploited by a bad actor to acquire root/hardware permissions would this issue actually become something.
That, or if the anticheat wasn’t uninstallable and/or dodged scans intended to locate it, etc.
Putting the responsibility to understand legalese (and advanced concepts like rootkits) to such an extent on the end user is just straight gaslighting. Nobody has the required expertise to determine what an EULA actually says outside of the lawyer who wrote it, and even then, I wouldn’t guarantee it.
No wonder piracy was so popular
1999 piracy mostly consisted of paying for a pirated copy that someone decided to make profit off; most likely, they weren’t the person to make the (first!) copy, and they’re not even sure what’s on the thing they were selling you. It was mostly bootlegging.
