[kortilla]

>honestly don't understand why people act like this.

Because it’s social pressure to compromise your computer to a gaming company to get to play a game.

People don’t care about the anticheat on their computer, they want it foisted on everyone else who plays, which is a sucky proposition for privacy and security minded people.

It’s like advocating for the TSA to be controlling access to the grocery store because you want to feel safe there and don’t mind the privacy violation.

[CircleSpokes]

>People don’t care about the anticheat on their computer, they want it foisted on everyone else who plays, which is a sucky proposition for privacy and security minded people.

No they want games without hackers. Which kernel based anticheats helps with. Can it also impact privacy and security? Yes no doubt but so can any program running on the computer even in userspace. Remember we are talking about kernel anticheats on windows lol.

If you are really worried about it you could dual boot like many people. Either way this whole argument seems silly to me.

[kortilla]

You say “no” but then repeat what I said worded differently. When the current market for “games without hackers” is filled with kernel modules, it sucks.

[account42]

It's worth reminding that we already had a solution to the games with hackers problem: smaller community-run servers where people can get to know each other. But game companies want the centralized model so that they can stay in control of how the game is used to continuously monetize it and to forcefully retire it once they want to push a newer one.

Hackers are mainly only problem for anonymous ranked matchmaking. That's not to say cheaters don't exist without it but they are a) much less disruptive b) have much smaller reach and therefore c) are less motivated.

Like most ills being used to push anti-user technology, cheating is primarily a problem created by the industry itself.

[1827163]

It's a bit of a stretch, but maybe we as a society should be considering the social pressure as being the problem. Why do we allow ourselves to be 'controlled' in this way by others? Especially young people? If we could learn to move past this?

[charcircuit]

>to compromise your computer

What do you mean by this? As the user you are intending to have the game and its anticheat run. Having to download and run a game on your computer isn't compromising your computer either. Maybe the only thing which doesn't give the game company power to run potentially malicious code on your machine is cloud gaming. That also solves the cheating problem at least.

[takeda]

You're advocating for installing a kernel module that you don't even know what it does exactly when running a random game.

Would you also support a full cavity search each time you decide to fly a plane?

The kernel module has full access to your hardware, you don't know what it does exactly. You don't even know if it does something more than anticheat.

People got so complacent in recent years, and this is on a technology forum no less. I guess today the Sony rootkit[1] would be totally acceptable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

[charcircuit]

>You're advocating for installing a kernel module that you don't even know what it does exactly when running a random game.

You don't know what the game will do either. It requires trusting Riot even if there isn't an anticheat.

Also most users will never know what the other kernel level drivers do.

>Would you also support a full cavity search each time you decide to fly a plane?

I don't see how this is related?

>The kernel module has full access to your hardware, you don't know what it does exactly.

The same can be said about any other kernel level driver and even about Windows itself.

>People got so complacent in recent years, and this is on a technology forum no less.

What Riot wants to do is not possible with a user level anticheat. Once Windows eventually gets its security improved such that apps can query the integrity of the system Riot would likely be able to get away with a less privileged anticheat.

>I guess today the Sony rootkit[1] would be totally acceptable.

If it didn't try and hide itself I would agree with you.

[kortilla]

Do you think the 30+ years of user-space isolation improvements that have gone into modern OSes are not undone by a kernel module?

[charcircuit]

The whole point of a kernel level anticheat in that it can bypass the isolation to find cheats.

The isolation still exists for normal programs when the anticheat is present.

[takeda]

Sure, isolation exists except for Riot Games (and any other company that adds similar mandatory modules, which eventually will be all). Oh yeah, assuming there also won't be any vulnerabilities, but that's impossible, because we all know about the high quality software coming from gaming industry.