Plot twist: Theres still hackers in multiplayer even with all that crap plus rootkit they bundle with.
Its gonna be really funny in a few years when we learn that TPM2 / Windows’ Specific Implementation of SecureBoot has a backdoor for the NSA, just like how the Kinect did.
And uh, no, it doesn’t matter if this happens intentionally via collaboration, or not, through incompetence.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Turns out my ribs don’t actually care whether the boot that cracked them came from a decisive kick or because someone clumsily tripped over me.
(Also sufficiently advanced malice is often indistinguishable from incompetence by design: “oops we didn’t mean to, please forgive us and we pRoMiSe we won’t
get caughtdo it again!”)Yep, that last part is … basically the most important concept of running a large organization, if you’re a corpo/evil bureaucrat.
The obfuscation is the point.
The ‘I thought I was in compliance’ is the point.
The ‘this is too complex to assign blame simply’…
That is the fucking point, of designing and running a system that works in that way.
weaponized incompetence exists at basically all levels of human interaction, alas…
but it’s especially shitty when corpos do it.
I really wish we’d stop fucking around and make executives regret what the people they are literally responsible for do. Their monetary compensation should be consummate with consequences–if they’re making three thousand times the amount of their front-facing employees they should be three thousand times more culpable for the shit their organization pulls.
says horrifying thing
waits for reaction
If positive reaction: all good.
If negative reaction: “Calm down, it was just a joke.”
Ergh this made feel kinda icky, I now want to unplug my 360 from the wall when I’m not using it even though I know the chance of them actually watching me is little more than paranoia
The NSA has something like the 5th or 6th largest data center in existance, its been around for about a decade, in Utah.
They just capture everything, they have wiretaps on all the trunk lines that feed into undersea cables going international, they work with every major ISP, basically every major city in the US has a building where there are a bunch of floors for major ISPs/TelComms, and a bunch of floors for DHS, FBI, NSA, (Not the) CIA, etc, where those trunk lines come in.
For over a decade now, the problem is that they have so much data that they don’t know what to do with it, how to search through efficiently.
Or, well, that was their problem.
Enter Palantir, whose intial early whole thing as a company was developing ways to prioritizes and rapidly search through astounding amounts of data.
… You aren’t paranoid enough.
If it makes you feel better, when Elon and his idiot DOGE crew did their thing earlier this year, they probably compromised, amongst many other Federal databases… SIPRNet, the superuberduper classified comm system the military uses for the most sensitive realtime digital comms.
Yeah they just fucking got a log in and then opened a shitty remote portal so they could get into it from wherever, as opposed to, you know, a secure site.
Chinese and Russian IPs were nearly instantly seen trying to barge their way in, and frankly, I think they managed to.
Those “features” are not about security. They’re about uniquely identifying the system without using, “personally identifiable information”.
Is everyone in this fucking thread Twitter-levels of paranoid to the point you could rival H.P. Lovecraft??? What are ya’ll even saying. Please get some tech literacy. You cannot identify a system through Secure Boot/TPM 2.0. Microsoft and every gaming company with anti-cheats can do that by simply checking all of your hardware’s signatures.
Ironic comment
This was funny to read, can’t deny ur right
The games that require secure boot/tpm already are installing kernel level “malware” so they can do much more with that than they can by knowing if you have tpm or not (which you do because you are playing, so 100% of their userbase will have it).
rofl you ask for tech literacy, yet have no idea how TPM uniquely identifies a computer… Irony is an understatement.
You’re the exact kind of overconfidant, beligerantly stupid user these corporations pine for. What do you think is included in those hardware signatures? How does Apple use a TPM chip to sign off on what other components are allowed to operate in the machine?
If you cannot answer those two basic questions, then it becomes very clear which one of us needs more tech literacy, because they’re not only used to uniquely identify your hardware.
Just dont fucking play those games. Simple.
Which is so ridiculously easy in my head. But then I see like 4 million people playing and I’m wondering… Am I the crazy one?
When i see that many idiots being duped it just makes me feel superior~!
>:3cJoking aside, look at how foolish the median person is. That they are average means that literally half of humanity is even more foolish than they are.
Quantity may be a quality all its own but in light of such damning disqualifications it hardly matters at all.
No, it just means that the sad reality that in order for the right things to happen for the betterment of society, it takes a long time for idiots to figure it out. Which means we’ll be long dead before they ever do and they’ll still be playing Black Ops 133rd: Operation Dickcheese that’s going to require 12 Petabytes of storage.
Continue working against conformity!
Lmfao at this one dude literally losing his shit and defending this repeatedly in the comments like a fucking Microsoft white knight
He once got killed by a hacker and lost all his marbles.
He has a monthly keyboard budget also.
Yeah I dont need to play any game that requires me to allow spyware.
There are so many good indie and older games these days too.
Nice that steam tells you so you don’t have to waste the bandwidth before refunding it.
What game? Name and shame!
Call of Duty Black Ops 7 https://store.steampowered.com/app/3606480/Call_of_Duty_Black_Ops_7
“Uses Kernel Level Anti-Cheat RICOCHET Anti-Cheat Boot Protection - Requires both Secure Boot & TPM 2.0”
Battlefield 6 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2807960/Battlefield_6
“Uses Kernel Level Anti-Cheat EA Javelin Anticheat - Requires manual removal after game uninstall Boot Protection - Requires both Secure Boot & TPM 2.0”
I just won’t play such games. Simple as.
Welp, vote with your wallet. Money is the only thing these companies understand.
the problem is that the overwhelming majority of gamers are short sighted little gremlins who need constant access to new shiny to feel validated.
Sure, they come on the internet to yell and scream about the horrid injustice of it all, but the second the vile evil company that they’ll never again support releases their next game… they are at gamestop preordering the 800 dollar super legendary edition.
There are people who actually do follow through, I am one of them… There are several companies on my shit list that I will never buy from again, and in over a decade have not bought from them. . . but people that actually follow through on it are too rare to make a difference.
A lot of gamers tend to also be teenagers/young adults who just want to play a game with their friends in their social group. I was a kid once too after all so its understandable. However its the “just want to play with my friends” crowd that enables the industries worst practices by being consumers who think of yearly video game release hype cycles as vehicles of social interaction instead of caring about games as an art form thats being slowly degraded by corporate cuckery over time.
You are fighting the LORD’s cause, son, the LORD’s.
You say this as if we weren’t inside a big echo chamber of turbonerds right now. Everyone here already knows it. The actual way is to convince your less tech inclined friends and family.
I hate the idea of software/hardware that can prove that the user does not have control over it so much
What game is this? so I know what company to never buy from again.
Battlefield 6 by EA, which is now privately owned by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
You mean if I play EA games I will be supporting a murderous regime that engaged in the largest terrorist attack on US soil resulting in the massive loss of our rights?
Oh darn, I guess I won’t be missing much.
I know all about EA’s sellout.
Call Of Duty Black Ops 7, however im hearing Battlefield 6 is also in the same boat.
Want some nostalgia? Plutonium for Black Ops 2 is still relatively alive with a crap ton of modded servers. Game is still fun to play.
One that obviously isn’t worth playing.
Welp, doesn’t run in proton. Next on the list…
Way I see it, there’s two ways to address the “cheating” issue in multiplayer online games.
First, let’s establish that game cheats typically involve using another application to modify the game’s running code while it is loaded in memory.
Historically, anti-cheat has largely taken a “reactive” approach. Try to detect the hook / modification taking place, ban the player if it is detected. These systems and bans were often circumvented. There are entire games that I stopped playing because the experience was ruined for me - GTA Online and the late stages of Titanfall 2 are standouts in my mind.
With how the Windows device security landscape has changed In the 2020s (MacOS has had something similar for ages), there’s now the option of taking a “proactive” approach by preventing application memory from being tapped in the first place. These technologies, notably Secure Boot and TPM, help mitigate rootkits and malware that might steal sensitive information from application memory, as well as paving the way for other protection measures like disk encryption.
And that’s the main part they’re interested in - by ensuring the entire process up through the kernel cannot be tampered with, the anti-cheat is going to be highly effective at pre-empting anyone from attempting the cheat to begin with.
It really sucks that, in the curent landscape, that means there are a handful of games that I can’t play on my Linux devices. But it also makes sense - Proton runs with many layers beneath it, which would make it trivial to tamper with memory and engage in cheating.
I’m hopeful that we’ll someday see a solution that opens up the opportunity for the same degree of integrity protection in Linux so that anyone can enjoy any game on the operating system of their choosing.
Regardless of what others have to say about EA or the franchise (and boy do they have their issues), Battlefield has always been a beloved series for me. I’m having a blast in Battlefield 6 and I have yet to encounter any cheaters. Previous entries in the series would see me hopping to a new server whenever I encountered one or, on some occasions, ending my play session out of frustration. Anecdotally, the cheating felt much more prevalent before.
I have a lot less time to game than I used to, so that time is sacred to me. While I’d obviously prefer another way, maintaining a Windows system and enabling two BIOS settings (well, leaving them enabled - they’re on by default) has been worth it for me.
That’s a false dichotomy though. There are ways to prevent cheating that don’t rely on the security of the client against the owner of the device on which the client runs (which is what both of what your ‘ways’ are).
For one thing, it has long been a principle of good security to validate things on the server in a client-server application (which most multi-player games are). If they followed the principle of not sending data to a client that the user is not allowed to see, and not trusting the client (for example, by doing server-side validation, even after the fact, for things which are not allowed according to the rules of the game), they could make it so it is impossible to cheat by modifying the client, even if the client was F/L/OSS.
If they really can’t do that (because their game design relies on low latency revelation of information, and their content distribution strategy doesn’t cut it), they can also use statistical server-side cheat detection. For example, suppose that a player shoots within less than the realistic human reaction time of turning the corner when an enemy is present X out of Y times, but only A out of B times when no enemy is present. It is possible to calculate a p-value for
X/Y - A/B(i.e. the probability of such an extreme difference given the player is not cheating). After correcting for multiple comparisons (due to multiple tests over time), it is possible to block cheaters without an unacceptable chance of false positives.Effectively doing that server-side would substantially increase the bandwidth requirements though.
If we take wallhacks as an example, that takes place entirely in the local rendering pipeline. In a game like Battlefield or Counter Strike, smoke and foliage are used for tactical purposes.
Aimbots read player location data sent from the server and send input commands to the OS to automate headshots.
Preventing local memory from being read and modified outright prevents (well, substantially raises the skill ceiling) for performing these kinds of hacks. I have a hard time envisioning a server-side solution to those.
security of the client against the owner of the device on which the client runs
That’s exactly who a cheater is though
If the server runs a significantly cut-down rendering model, you can do things like culling player models when you can’t see them. No more wallhacks.
And there always will be cheaters. If running a cheat on the local machine doesn’t work anymore, there is nothing stopping someone hooking up an SoC running a inference model analysing your screen and sending inputs to an usb-dongle that emulates mouse input. Can probably be Mass manufactured cheaper than those inflated price tags on those games.
I told you so. You called me paranoid. I said so. Now lookatyou.
Secure Boot and TPM do NOT run anything in the lower rings, ffs. It’s literally a security true/false hash check.
who said they do?
