Anti-viruses flag a lot of things. It is called a False Positive (or sometimes a “Someone didn’t pay us for an exception” Positive but…). It has nothing to do with something hooking into a kernel or just being a program you run in userspace.<<

Aalayman who doesn’t know why the program was flagged and doesnt necessarily know the name of the Anti-cheat program or just hits delete all (which is probably thousands and thousands of people), you’re telling me you wouldn’t be extremely upset if a game you spent $60+ on suddenly wouldn’t start or your account go auto banned because the anti-cheat software has been deleted by an antivirus program by mistake?

Genshin Impact’s anti-cheat was literally used to stop anti-virus programs running on people’s computers and mass deploy ransomware,

I assume you are referring to https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/h/ransomware-actor-abuses-genshin-impact-anti-cheat-driver-to-kill-antivirus.html<<

You don’t have to assume. I linked the article.

Which… I’ll just raise you https://www.polygon.com/22898895/dark-souls-pvp-exploit-multiplayer-servers-remote-code-execution which allows for ridiculously dangerous RCEs without needing any kernel level hooks at all. So…<<

You have failed once again to establish what this has to do with the original complaint, which is that kernel level anti-cheat allowed this security breach vector. And it has everything to do with the quoted text just below this from one of my previous comments:

and the gaming industry as a whole is extremely lax about the security of their users.<<

. I choose not to spend my money at companies that enable this kind of crap in their games.

I mean this in the most inflammatory and blunt way imaginable:

Nobody gives a shit about you. Nobody gives a shit about me either.

We are two people. We don’t fucking matter. What matters is the people who play every single Riot game ever made for thousands of hours each. THEY spend money.<<

This doesn’t explain regulating industries. It doesn’t explain why so many companies (including game development companies) spend so much money lobbying for the right to be free of regulations that should be covered by privacy law but aren’t because these companies don’t want that. And if you can’t see the correlation here then you’re a bit far gone because if they can lobby so can we. It has to start somewhere.

Like I said before: it is about accepting risk. Knowingly or unknowingly, it doesn’t matter any more than telling your parents that you must have gotten a virus from that pokemon cheat code rather than the hardcore pornography that came in exe form for some reason.

You don’t want to compromise your security more than you already do. Cool. Most people playing these games are fine with that if it reduces the odds that they have their free time ruined for them by aimbots and wallhacks. And… clearly there is merit to this approach if studios are willing to pay for it.<<

I would argue that the vast majority don’t know. People like to act like gamers are in some way really tech savvy and they just know all the ins and outs of all that goes into the game and what is installed on their system. But the opposite is true for most people. They buy a game or program from a source they don’t have a reason to distrust and they install it and give it whatever permissions it asks for. This is the main reason I’m arguing that people absolutely should be educated and they won’t get that education from game developers because for the most part those devs prefer it this way.

Because, at the end of the day? We’ve been through this. Back then it was DRM. DRM was bad and DRM was horrible and EVERYONE had a super obscure russian (?) cd rom drive that Starforce would brick. And the same arguments of “ideologically this is bad and it could ruin things for a very small percentage of people” came up. And the answer was always “I refuse to buy anything”

And… everyone else DID buy things. The genuinely bad shit like starforce went away in favor of activation model DRMs (which continues to this day) but also… alternatives were actually presented. Steam is basically a variation of GOO (which is also basically what GoG does) but Steam has the added benefit of people being scared shitless of getting caught by Uncle Gabe and having their account taken away.<<

People bought things with DRM because they didn’t know. And DRM was a significant thing even before the internet was a widespread thing which is why once it got it’s foothold it kept it. The average consumer didn’t know and wasn’t intending to pirate anything so they didn’t care.

And that is what we need here. Not asinine requests for politicians who understand nothing to solve this for us. We need actual alternatives that work better AND are less invasive.<<

Why is it asinine to tell the government I want a public industry regulated to protect my right to privacy? Because that’s what it comes down to. It’s my right to not just privacy but security of information. This would never be a question if a company were requesting it but when people do it it’s somehow problematic?

As an aside: I increasingly notice that you say very inflammatory things based on a misunderstanding or misconception of the thing you are criticizing. That is a bad habit in general but it is a REALLY bad thing when it comes to cybersecurity (which this basically is). Because it gives you a false sense of security when you think you are following best practices but are actually spewing nonsense and ignoring all your other risk vectors.<<

Education wasn’t your goal as far as I can tell because you’re extremely combative. You make a lot of statements that you don’t back up with anything. You assume a level of knowledge that you probably shouldn’t. And you get upset when the other person doesn’t understand, completely ignore their questions and points in favor of whatever crusade you happen to be on, and then double-down while ignoring the clarifying questions they ask.

There’s not going to be a discussion between devs and consumers if we don’t educate people on what’s going on. That’s literally what we’re talking about. And you seem to assume that I’m just adverse to that without taking into account that I think we should have both things. We as consumers should have open dialog with the industries that rely on us to buy products. But we should also very much expect that our government that we pay taxes to regulates industries accordingly.

Because we’ve had so many data breaches in every industry but the ones in gaming have been pretty abundant and that’s not okay. You seem to want to act like nothing is connected to anything else and that’s a good way to go through life without getting anything done and with a giant target painted on your back.

I can’t assume that every consumer is like me. You shouldn’t either. And just because they got rid of other DRM that you view as worse doesn’t mean that we’re in the clear.

What is your argument here? Is it that Anti-cheat is good? Is it that Anti-cheat is necessary? Is it that it’s bad but you feel my information is incorrect? Because you’re all over the place. “I’ll raise you” is you literally saying, malware can be spread without anti-cheat at kernel level so anti-cheat at kernel level is okay? And it’s not relevant to the conversation because it’s not about whether or not some threat actor can use other means to compromise a system or several thousand of them.

Like. Even if you feel you needed to add context you actually seem to be intentionally using inflammatory language in order to in some way try to discredit not my reasoning but my stance that Anti-cheat is invasive and should in fact see opposition.

My argument is that refusing to buy isn’t going to fix the problem and I thought that was obvious from what I said, but apparently not. So, the question originally was "is it time to take a stand (not as individuals, but as a group) against kernel level anti-cheat. And my answer is that it’s been time and bad things keep happening and have the potential to keep happening because of it, and no it doesn’t matter if it’s only a handful of users, especially if those users are rocking $3K worth of parts in a gaming rig.

You’re suggesting that a security issue that is wholly ignored by both the public and the government as well as the industry that should be regulated is going to be fixed not by regulating it with laws and that’s extremely confusing give. The fact that we know it’s not how this works and “Uncle Gabe” has already implemented a solution and that solution is to make it apparent that games have kernel level anti-cheat so some of us are more informed. Because some random corp is going to do a better job than the government at regulating the industry.

I’m not sure why you think that’s what’s going to happen or even how you might believe it’s any less of a pipe dream than these companies (Microsoft included) doing the right thing and safeguarding the data they are allowing access to. Anti-cheat at kernel level is running all the time regardless of whether you’re playing the game that has it or not. It’s not just one singular program. It’s all different ones because there’s not any regulation in this space to speak of. And companies don’t want there to be. Valve is not strong enough in this space to make this go away by themselves.

People say crazy things about how powerful Valve has become in the PC gaming space. But while they have consumers generally on their side, Microsoft is older and has been in the space longer, and is definitely more powerful (money, connections, longevity of the business etc), and they have no real intentions of doing away with kernel level access for anti-cheat despite what few articles there were suggesting otherwise just after the crowdstrike fiasco.

You’re right that corps don’t care about individuals. But they care about the masses because we’re the ones they exploit for money. That’s literally why any type of organized opposition from millions of people is successful at making any changes at all. So again, what point are you making here?

Is your intent to educate? Is it to say that I’m wrong for saying we should organize against Anti-cheat at kernel level? Is it that you think you have a better idea of how this works, and what changes should be implemented? Are you for keeping Anti-cheat because you feel it serves a purpose?

I’ve seen the Government in America ignore more than one petition they claimed was tampered with and I wouldn’t want that to be the result here (The EU seems to be more on the up and up than the US government, but still).

AMD had a graphics driver blocked because kernel level Anti-cheat flagged it as a cheat program. Genshin Impact’s anti-cheat was literally used to stop anti-virus programs running on people’s computers and mass deploy ransomware, and the gaming industry as a whole is extremely lax about the security of their users. Several companies anti-cheat have been flagged by anti-virus software as malicious.

There are layers to the kernel level anti-cheat business too and people still do buy games with kernel level anti-cheat. The fact that that kind of scanning is coming isn’t acceptable which is the point. I choose not to spend my money at companies that enable this kind of crap in their games. That’s not enough. It should be facing opposition from every quarter specifically because it is not only invasive, but also only raises the barrier to entry at the detriment to user’s security, and which is likely to cause the same boom that things like the campaign against piracy did in the 80’s/90’s. People didn’t know they could cheat so easily and now they do. Congratulations this has done the opposite of what is intended.

https://www.pcgamer.com/ransomware-abuses-genshin-impacts-kernel-mode-anti-cheat-to-bypass-antivirus-protection/

https://www.xda-developers.com/kernel-level-anti-cheat-tech-disaster/

We literally have a cloudstrike report giving direct examples of how bad it is potentially as a vector for malware. Additionally it doesn’t solve the problem it aims to solve, as reported by several outlets because it doesn’t stop hardware level cheating, just potentially stops scripts. So you could absolutely enable cheats through a device like a keyboard and mouse or controller and the Anti-cheat does nothing.

Additionally though, I am not buying products with kernel level Anti-cheat and that is intentional, so I am not agreeing to the TOS or EULA of those games. If you add to this the fact that some games retroactively added kernel level anti-cheat, it’s bogus to assume that people are in the know or that they agreed to such things in the original TOS or EULA. Steam only recently made developers list kernel level anti-cheat on store pages for their game.

Also, kernel level anti-cheat in single player games is just ridiculous and invasive.

You did not read what I wrote in my response and it shows. I have taken responsibility for my machine. I don’t buy games with kernal level anti-cheat. I specifically view them as an attack vector for malware. They started the cake vs fork argument and my response was directly related to them using such a poor expression for the context of the conversation we were having and therefore it took that to its logical conclusion based on the argument they made.

Since you didn’t read and decided to downvote I am choosing to not discuss this with you further, having vetted the ingredients of your cake. Have a good day.

That doesn’t really track here. My reasoning is simple. They are requiring access to something they didn’t initially make public or allow an informed decision on, and they did that on purpose. While I don’t currently own or buy games that have kernel level anti-cheat, that doesn’t make the obfuscation any better.

I actually have not pressed the install button, nor have I pressed the purchase button. However, I also want you to look up the phrase “eat cake and have it to” and figure out what you mean. I’m buying the cake. I’m buying the fork to eat the cake. Neither the cake company nor the fork company should be able to tell me what to do with the product from the other company. You don’t have to agree with my stance, but understand that this is the argument that I am making.

I don’t live in the EU, and am not sure it’s a good idea to sign the petition for that reason even though I agree with them 100%.

They literally just urgently requested that everyone update windows 10 and 11 the other day because they found a zero day. Cloudstrike is only unknown if you don’t pay attention to anything privacy related.

It’s been time. Game companies have no right to access that level of any system I paid for. If they want to use kernal level anti-cheat on their consoles, that’s on them. But my computer? Absolutely not. They don’t have a right to that, when I bought the computer I didn’t agree to that in a EULA or TOS, and they do not make it apparent that their games carry this level of anti-cheat at sale.

Yea but that wasn’t the point of me pointing it out. The point was that they don’t need to resort to such measures in order to clandestinely acquire your unlocked phone.

If I recall correctly at the time I bought mine, the specs and price generally made sense. But I honestly doubt that Valve will be partnering with anyone for this in regards to hardware after the steam deck’s success except perhaps as an alternative to windows. It would honestly be better for most consumers to have that alternative in store. We want steam os to become more popular.

I believe EU also requires that you give up login credentials if they are biometric in nature. Meaning if you use a fingerprint reader or face unlock you are required to provide that to law enforcement when asked. So either way if they want your phone’s contents they can get it.

I still have a Facebook. I haven’t used it in several years. Mostly at this point I have it to facetank the million and one photos my mother in law sends everyone so she’s not sending them to me via text message every day at all hours.

I actually still own one of these Alienware Alphas (a Windows variant). Traded out the HD for an SSD and it’s surprising how much they could be overclocked.

Now that Steam OS is leaps and bounds better I really do hope Valve try again with this kind of gaming PC. It’s been a great entertainment center PC.

He has the same problem I did. He has games that aren’t compatible with steam os and it’s one of those things where it’s actually easier to dual boot windows than it is to fuck around with compatibility layers for things that don’t run in proton.

He also isn’t a fan of the touchpads. I personally like the ergonomics of the Ally x better but that’s my own preference.

It was a better looking device too. I would buy a vita right now if it played even just a fraction of the PS5 library and streamed the rest. I gave serious thought to buying one and modding it for retro games. I have never once considered the portal and I’ve had every PlayStation console except the first PS1 and their VR stuff.

Definitely not with the AYN Loki. So I do see your point.

I’m currently running Bazzite but have been thinking about picking up an ROG Ally X for my husband. I think it having steam OS would be better for him in general. Hope this is available soon.

Lemmy is meant to be a direct alternative to reddit and it copies plenty of design and user elements from there that don’t necessarily fit with the overall user use case here. There are whole instances without downvote buttons for example. This is an over-arcing statement that lumps together a bunch of instances and user bases that don’t necessarily comply with such a notion.