[judge2020]

Let's go with online games, which is mentioned in the article. This focus will specifically be on Riot, but any game publisher can perform this.

> - security for who?

Riot Games

> - security from who?

The users of their software.

> - security to what ends?

Ensuring a device (A) is running windows (B) is running unmodified Windows system files (C) a rootkit that replaces syscall behavior isn't installed

All of this is an effort to prevent cheats that wallhack/aimbot or otherwise give the player an unfair advantage - at least, it ensures the cheats aren't loaded early enough to where their anti-cheat is unable to detect their influence on the game process.

While i say 'Riot Games' is who benefits, it's all at the request of their users; you can search for 'hacker' or 'cheats' on r/leagueoflegends and see tons of posts from years ago complaining about cheaters scripting (automatically using abilities in the best possible way) and gaining an unfair advantage against them. Every posts' comments will boil down to "Riot really should figure out how to stop these cheaters". It's a cat-and-mouse game, but it'll be a lot easier to catch the mouse once they can safely enable the remote attestation requirement and only lose 0.1% of their players.

On the less moral side, this can also be applied to single-player games to reduce the chances of a game's anti-piracy protections being cracked.

[Schroedingersat]

We don't need to replace trust with complete submission to a third party. Just build trust. Game servers don't need to be a single festering pool of every user who purchased the title. You can just play games with a community that has accountability.

It's like putting a camera network and automated tranq drones in every playground so kids don't play tag 'wrong'.

This insanity of trying to conflate complete submission to a third party with trust or security when in reality it provides neither because that party is an adversary is a society-wide mental illness.

[nixgeek]

But via the same argument, you are also free to look at Riot Games products and say "No thanks, I'm not willing to submit".

I play some games like Valorant which use Ring 0 anti-cheat mechanisms, and to do this I have a Corsair i300 which I bought basically exclusively for FPS, flight simulators, and other games that I enjoy. I'm actually equally unhappy with corporate-provided Mobile Device Management and "Endpoint Protection" technologies being on personally-owned devices, but one clear solution is to just physically partition your devices by purpose and by what restrictions you're willing to tolerate on them. "But I can't do what I want with the hardware that I own" is a bit of a misnomer, you can, you just might not also have the right to participate in some communities (those that have 'entry requirements' which you no longer meet if you won't install their anti-cheat mechanisms).

Why tolerate Riot Games, why not "play games with a community that has accountability"? It's simple for me: in the extremely limited free time that I have for this activity, my objective is to click <PLAY> and quickly get into a game where my opponents are 'well balanced' (matched against my own abilities) and servers which are not infested with cheaters.

Without any question in my mind, cheaters utterly ruin online multiplayer games, Team Fortress 2 has been a haven of bots and cheats for several years and Valve is only recently starting to take steps to address.

I have exactly zero desire to spend time "locating communities with accountability". I want a matchmaking system provided by Riot Games which simply doesn't tolerate cheating, period. I'm willing to be in that community even with its 'entry requirements'. You may not be willing to submit to those entry requirements and that's okay. You should advocate that games support your desire to launch without anti-cheat protections, and restrict you to playing on 'Untrusted Servers' outside the first-party matchmaking community, where you will enjoy no anti-cheat protection, and you can gather freely with your own "communities with accountability".

[mindslight]

While I'm right there with you on physical partitioning as a practical matter of mitigating the damage, it is most definitively not a solution to dealing with the looming threat of remote attestation.

The premise of personal computing is that my computer works as my agent. For any remote party that I'm interacting with - their sphere of influence ends at the demarcation point of the protocol that we interact with. Attempts to dictate what software my computer can run when interacting with them are unjust, and ultimately computationally disenfranchising. Despite the naive references littered throughout this thread to users being able to verify what software companies are running, it will never work out that way because what remote attestation does is magnify existing power relationships. This is why so many people are trying to fall back to usual the crutch of "Exit" as if going somewhere else could possibly tame the power imbalances.

Practically what will happen is that, for example, online banks (and then web stores, and so on) will demand that you only can use locked down Apple/Windows to do your online banking. This will progress somewhat evenly with all businesses in a sector, because the amount of people not already using proprietary operating systems for their desktop is vanishingly small. Which will destroy your ability to use your regular desktop/laptop with your regular uniformly-administered OS, your nice window manager, your browser tweaks to deal with the annoying bits of their site, your automation scripts to make your life easier etc. Instead you'll be stuck manually driving the proprietary Web TV experience, while they continue to use computers to create endless complexity to decommodify their offerings - computational disenfranchisement.

I'll admit that you might find this argument kind of hollow with respect to games, where you do have a desire to computationally disenfranchise all the other players so it's really a person-on-person game. But applying these niche standards of gaming as a justification for a technology that will warp the entire industry is a terrible idea.

[judge2020]

Magnifying power relationships is the entire point of capitalism - consumers have always been at the whim of larger organizations and their wishes, with their only agency being when they decide whether to purchase a product or not. If both Product A and Product B are amazing and so prevalent that you must purchase one to be as productive as others in society, but you don't like certain terms they impose on you, then you don't have any options and must decide to either deal with it or go without using that product. Saying otherwise is effectively suggesting that companies be forced to make product in a certain way to accommodate your requests.

[mindslight]

> Magnifying power relationships is the entire point of capitalism

Only if by "entire point of capitalism", you mean the philosophical paradigm that highly centralizing corporations market to gain more power and ultimately undermine the distributed sine qua non of capitalism.

> Saying otherwise is effectively suggesting that companies be forced to make product in a certain way to accommodate your requests.

You're missing market inefficiency and the development of Schelling points based on the incentive for uniformity. In this case specifically, the inability of a company to investigate what I am running on my computer creates the concept of protocols, and keeps each party on a more even footing. Remote attestation changes that dynamic, undermining the Schelling point of protocols and replacing them with take-it-or-leave-it authoritarianism extending further into our lives.

[anilakar]

I'm willing to accept remote attestation of an unaltered multiplayer client with one condition: The company stops pushing their kernel level spyware and trusts the operating system. Anticheat providers won't let this happen because there's just too much money involved and they will insist on selling perceived extra value over that provided by the OS.

Earlier this spring, Easyanticheat crashed the Windows 11 Insider kernel and a good deal of games were unplayable for weeks.

[judge2020]

Remote Attestation is only one piece of the puzzle; all it verifies is that the user hasn’t tampered with the Windows boot process, it doesn’t stop kernel drivers from being loaded. Since it isn’t a turnkey anti-cheat solution provided by Microsoft, the game developer still has to detect and watch anything that injects code into the process and look at the list of kernel drivers to see if the player is cheating via a new cheat software or maybe even cheat software they made themselves. Effectively, Remote Attestation gives anti-cheat assurance that its process detections are accurate.

[Schroedingersat]

> But via the same argument, you are also free to look at Riot Games products and say "No thanks, I'm not willing to submit".

Informed consent requires the consenter have understanding of what is happening, know what the implications are and agree. Riot games anticheat software doesn'tpass the first two, and is largely irrelevant to the conversation because this use case is a trojan horse anyway.

Community and social graph is a finite resource. I can't just go get another one if you colonise mine.

This is exactly the same argument libertarians have against food safety and labelling regulations. I can't go get baby formula without melamine in it if every brand has it because they price dumped to bankrupt the competition and I don't have a chemistry lab to test for it.

I can't go find another bank if they all switch to requiring attestation. I can't go buy another government. I can't go find a new social graph if everyone on it is on facebook.

Operating systems and CPUs are utilities with natural monopolies, as is communication software. Treating an ecosystem, a community, and a social graph as a fungible good is a blatant lie.

[withinboredom]

One solution is to detect cheating through behavior and match them with other cheaters. It’s probably way easier to classify as “def not cheating” vs “maybe cheating” vs “obviously cheating.”

Any cheater will probably still do really well against another cheater while a human won’t have a chance. I think this is kind of like shadow banning?