alt Hacker NewsThe privacy points in general are valid, but what irritates me is using this rationale against kernel mode anti cheats specifically.
You do not need kernel access to make spyware that takes screenshots. You do not need a privileged service to read the user’s browser history.
You can do all of this, completely unprivileged on Windows. People always seem to conflate kernel access with privacy which is completely false. It would in fact be much harder to do any of these things from kernel mode.
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There is no need for irritation. I condemn all sorts of anticheating software. As far as I'm concerned, if the player wants to cheat he's just exercising his god given rights as the owner of the machine. The computer is ours, we can damn well edit any of its memory if we really want to. Attempts to stop it from happening are unacceptable affronts to our freedom as users.
Simply put, the game companies want to own our machines and tell us what we can or can't do. That's offensive. The machine is ours and we make the rules.
I single out kernel level anticheats because they are trying to defeat the very mitigations we're putting in place to deal with the exact problems you mentioned. Can't isolate games inside a fancy VFIO setup if you have kernel anticheat taking issue with your hypervisor.
Kernel access is related to privacy though, and its the most well documented abuse of such things. Kernel level access can help obfuscate the fact that it'a happening. However, it is also useful for significantly worse, and given track records, must be assumed to be true. The problem is kernel level AC hasnt even solved the problem, so the entire thing is risky, uneccesary and unfit for purpose making an entierly unneccesary risk to force onto unsuspecting users. The average user does not understand the risks and is not made aware of them either.
There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance and behaviour and simply binning players with those of similar competency. This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks. No banning required. Detecting the thing cheating allows is much easier than detecting ways in which people gain that thing, it creates a single point of detection that is hard to avoid and can be done entierly server side, with multiple teirs how mucb server side calculation a given player consumes. Milling around in bronze levels? Why check? If you aren't performing so well that yoh can leave low ranks, perhaps we need cheats as a handicap, unless co sistently performing well out of distribution, at which point you catch smurfing as well.
point is focusing on detecting the thing people care about rather than one of the myriad of ways people may gain that unfair edge, is going to be easier and more robust while asking for less ergregious things of users.