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by MOARDONGZPLZ 699 days ago
No. They are large and presumably have some sort of trust, and can lose the trust of people if they do particularly shady things. This may not bear itself out in practice of course. But a game studio has something to lose, whereas hobbyist developer 73683 asking for root permissions for no real gain to you has nothing to lose from any number of things like scraping sites you visit or using your browser as a tor exit node or any number of things.
2 comments
sandworm101 699 days ago
>> No. They are large and presumably have some sort of trust, and can lose the trust of people if they do particularly shady things.

Sony? Microsoft? EA? Apple? Exactly which giant megacorporation is beyond shady things?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

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ocodo 698 days ago
Apparently people are a telepathically interconnected species, who won't fall for corporate scams in waves.

Sadly, both those things are untrue.

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gryn 699 days ago
yeah, I'm sure Genshin impact's creators went out of business when their Kernel access anti-cheat was hacked by ransomware or more recently the hacks mid live broadcasted tournaments (don't remember which game, I think it was apex).

I mean that's what kids, teenagers, and young adults and non technical people in general are known for: their prudence and good technical decision making.

lets not talk about the other risk vector that Tencent, a chinese company is the one buying most of these game studios that have Kernel access (not exclusively).

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dspillett 699 days ago
It doesn't even need to be a hack, or a malicious new owner taking over a game or other software package that has such access.

The original company could be malicious/stupid/both. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... for the most famous example of “both”.

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MOARDONGZPLZ 699 days ago
I don’t know what that is.
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dspillett 699 days ago
Which is the problem with games having kernel access for anti-cheat and <whatever-else-they-want-to-do-with-it>.

You don't know what they are doing in there. You don't really know who they are. Even if you do, corporate machinations might mean who has access to the facility to <what-ever-they-want-to-do> on your PC could change at any moment without your knowledge.

Most end-users are blissfully unaware of the potential consequences of these level of access (Games having kernel access, and browser extensions having all-sites/all-contexts access).

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techjamie 699 days ago
Can you imagine if one of the big anti-cheats got hit with a supply chain attack? That would be devastating.
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