[mschuster91]

That's the thing with psyops and "plausible deniability" stuff. Do too much of it and eventually you'll be blamed for everything that's gone bad no matter if you actually did it or not. China and Russia are in the "FO" phase of "FAFO".

Besides, sowing discontent is a tried and true propaganda strategy.

[orbital-decay]

I'm sorry, but no posts above make any sense, which is obvious to anyone with any degree of familiarity with chinese/russian/brazilian/german/british/north american cheating demographic and communities (yes that's a thing, also note how those two are only 1/3 of the worst offenders, and the poster above clearly doesn't have any idea about it). Stop the nationalistic flamebait and FUD, please.

[mschuster91]

Everyone cheats, I think no one here is seriously arguing that, no matter the country.

The question is: who coughs up the money for developing these cheats? Some of these, particularly the PCIe hardware rootkits, take a lot of money, time and skilled people to develop - and it is not too far fetched to assume that a nation state has been of assistance here.

Others openly flout their allegiance to Russia like the MIG-Switch developers, a ton of "bulletproof hosters" use Russian ASNs and/or are based in Russia, malware automatically disables itself when it detects indications of being in Russia... I can explain the latter away as "don't shit where you eat", but the others? There's no way there aren't direct links between the Russian government and the criminal actors. At the very least there must be some sort of "tacit approval".

[orbital-decay]

I know that I'm repeating myself but none of that has any connection to reality for anyone remotely familiar with the devs of specific cheats and their history. Especially DMA hardware developers which are neither Russian nor Chinese. I can write a long post about this some day (especially about how local online game hacking economy/culture works, for every cultural bubble - they overlap a lot, and specific moments of drama inside them) and post it to HN, but please, stop being a part of the "psyop" you're talking about.

[mschuster91]

That wasn't my point though. My point was to offer an explanation why everyone is so quick to blame Russian and Chinese propaganda these days - I call it "inverse yell fire" or "inverse crying wolf": both countries have so often denied any involvement or responsibility in clear and serious violations that now everyone defaults to not believing their denials.