Always on Anti-Cheat, worst than always on DRM?

[Sauron]

48 minutes ago, BachChain said:

Rings are a processor feature, not kernel. And ring zero is even higher than administrator level

I'm assuming they mean that this runs in the part of the kernel that normally runs with ring 0 privileges

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

and without knowing the actual numbers claiming that games are plagued with cheaters is just as irrelevant.

Yes numbers are irrelevant because not even the developers know how many. However I can go on experience and my experience is that it is more rare to be on a server without someone cheating in some form than not, it's near impossible to play a few hours and not be in a round with someone using some form of cheat and that goes for any game fairly consistently.

 

If I think someone is I'll go spectator if I can and watch them and it's very easy to know if they are or not.

 

Inability or non-caring doesn't add any weight to your argument. Also it's not like I get angry at people cheating I just refuse to give them my time or waste my time play games where one's ability to put in a CC number and CVC gets you a good ranking. I have invested enough time in my life across many games to know it's just not worth it so I don't. I'll try out some games when they come out or play with friends but I'm not going to stick at online MP when I can get the same or better enjoyment out of a single player game and never have to worry about getting stuck in a game for 20 minutes where your entire team is dying at the spawn point because one or a few cheaters are on the other team.

 

It's why I was a strong believer in dedicated servers rather than match making, I could pick servers I knew had active admins or had their own support forums to report players and they could deal with it outside of purely having to rely on the game developers. The only way to fight an army is with an army and game developers disbanded their front line cannon fodder. Now it's all generals and no man power.

[jagdtigger]

2 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

Ring 0

Isnt Ring 0 System which is even higher than the Admin Account?

[spartaman64]

1 hour ago, suicidalfranco said:

played PUBG, playing Warzone, played OW, played Destiny2. 

The probability of encoutering someone cheating are so slim it's a none issue, and shouldn't require an anticheat of this level compared to already present, acceptable solutions. 

I play a game called BDO and recently i cant grind for an hour without encountering a speed hacker and bdo uses xigncode which is pretty much useless imo. the market in bdo is also player driven so the speed hackers are directly affecting everyone in the game by inflating the prices of items. i hope theres a big banwave coming up

[yian88]

Is this a joke m8? from windows itself to almost every tool out there that you install on you PC has a background service that starts with windows, ask autodesk and adobe, those are not security /privacy issues? EA'a games punkbuster was the same yet no one complained about it.

It seems to me that people react to digital security/privacy issues when its some popular topic, viral or popular service/game/app involved, there is no fucking consistency in people's reactions and demand for the aforementioned issues fix.

If you want security/privacy you have to immediately cease to use most public services, uninstall windows, stop using android, stop using google services, ms services, facebook services and so on, and most profesional tools like the ones from adobe collect massive data and have always-on service.

There is no way to have privacy in this new world, either we start a movement to enforce as law that companies cannot collect any sort of data without permission, and it cant be in the Privacy Policy, disclaimer, ToS and so on, that if you want to use the product you HAVE to agree, no there needs to be a law that forces companies to move data collection and spying outside of those and allow you to use the service without sharing data or running such services, otherwise these sort of viral issues that pop once in a while are meaningless.

[suicidalfranco]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yes numbers are irrelevant because not even the developers know how many. However I can go on experience and my experience is that it is more rare to be on a server without someone cheating in some form than not, it's near impossible to play a few hours and not be in a round with someone using some form of cheat and that goes for any game fairly consistently.

and out of my personal experience i can say that i've never/rarely encoutered, or never/rarely experienced a kill where i felt  cheated.

I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, just saying that it's not as prelevant where majority of someone losses can be attributed to someone else cheating.

 

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It's why I was a strong believer in dedicated servers rather than match making, I could pick servers I knew had active admins or had their own support forums to report players and they could deal with it outside of purely having to rely on the game developers. The only way to fight an army is with an army and game developers disbanded their front line cannon fodder. Now it's all generals and no man power.

I can agree to that, dedicated servers where the best for MP.

[MyName13]

2 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

 

i'd be be oposed on regulations and lean more towards just boycotting the game. But since the later can't be achieved due to the collective idiocy of the target demographic, i say let the idiots be damned and open the gate for the next release of Darwin awards

Do you really think most gamers will read about anti cheats?That's like buying a hand sanitizer with low alcohol content that isn't very effective and saying "Lmao it's your fault, do research first!".At some point it's ridiculous to be forced to research absolutely everything.

[suicidalfranco]

1 minute ago, MyName13 said:

Do you really think most gamers will read about anti cheats?That's like buying a hand sanitizer with low alcohol content that isn't very effective and saying "Lmao it's your fault, do research first!".At some point it's ridiculous to be forced to research absolutely everything.

it's ridiculous but it's the smart-consumer way in my opinion, you get yourself informed before deciding to acquire something. And since it's not a life threatening product if consumed, regulation don't have a place in this camp. 

[spartaman64]

10 minutes ago, yian88 said:

Is this a joke m8? from windows itself to almost every tool out there that you install on you PC has a background service that starts with windows, ask autodesk and adobe, those are not security /privacy issues? EA'a games punkbuster was the same yet no one complained about it.

It seems to me that people react to digital security/privacy issues when its some popular topic, viral or popular service/game/app involved, there is no fucking consistency in people's reactions and demand for the aforementioned issues fix.

If you want security/privacy you have to immediately cease to use most public services, uninstall windows, stop using android, stop using google services, ms services, facebook services and so on, and most profesional tools like the ones from adobe collect massive data and have always-on service.

There is no way to have privacy in this new world, either we start a movement to enforce as law that companies cannot collect any sort of data without permission, and it cant be in the Privacy Policy, disclaimer, ToS and so on, that if you want to use the product you HAVE to agree, no there needs to be a law that forces companies to move data collection and spying outside of those and allow you to use the service without sharing data or running such services, otherwise these sort of viral issues that pop once in a while are meaningless.

well those programs usually dont have kernel level permissions 

[suicidalfranco]

32 minutes ago, MageTank said:

I've come across my fair share of cheaters in competitive Overwatch. What makes modern cheating so interesting is that it's not as blatant as it was in the past. Most sophisticated cheating programs won't snap to targets or pull the trigger for you, but they'll assist in tracking your targets or provide soft aim assists (akin to console controller aim assist settings) that give you a pretty significant advantage. They even allow you to configure whether or not you want to track through walls, or only within your line of sight, as well as whether or not you want to automatically aim for the head or the body. There was a few interesting youtube videos on some of the various Overwatch cheating tools, sadly Blizzard has done everything in their power to remove them, even when they served to educate the public. Luckily one was just uploaded a couple months back.

This video shows the most blatant kinds of cheating, but does not really touch upon the more subtle cheating people do to avoid detection and bans. 

 

The point is, it's getting harder for anti cheat systems and players alike to detect cheating. You are correct in that there are some salty individuals that refuse to believe they are inferior to their opponents and will accuse anyone that is better than they are of cheating, but it's equally true that cheaters do exist, and can be incredibly difficult to detect. I will say as a disclaimer, I played competitive Overwatch for 10 seasons straight but have not played since, so I can't say if it's still as common as it was, but it was definitely a thing back then. 

That was an interesting watch, legit impressed at the AI one.

But if it's also true that these software can go for such crazy prices (1200$!? People would really pay that much for a victory?), i have a hard time believing that the issue is as widespread as some make it out to believe.

And i also played competitive OW (admitedly never got past gold) up till the time Blizz released HotS 2.0, where i got generally fed up with loot boxes and dropped both games weeks after.

[MageTank]

2 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

That was an interesting watch, legit impressed at the AI one.

But if it's also true that these software can go for such crazy prices (1200$!? People would really pay that much for a victory?), i have a hard time believing that the issue is as widespread as some make it out to believe.

And i also played competitive OW (admitedly never got past gold) up till the time Blizz released HotS 2.0, where i got generally fed up with loot boxes and dropped both games weeks after.

It's surprisingly lucrative based on what I've heard in the past. People pay others to boost them on a daily basis to a certain rank, so if they can cheat and do it themselves, it's probably within the realm of possibilities. I recall several high-profile Overwatch League players getting banned/suspended for boosting accounts for money, so there was absolutely a precedent set for that service. 

 

When I last played Overwatch (mid-diamond ELO) it was not too uncommon to run into a cheater. I'd say 1 in every 15 or so games, you'd run into an aimbot widowmaker/tracer. To Blizzards credit, they were often banned very quickly, sometimes mid-match. I also read that they recently deployed a system that will cancel a match entirely if a cheater was suspected in participating, and not penalize the rest of the players involved. Still, 1 in every 15 games was quite a common occurrence and it never felt good, even if you had the cheater on your team. It became an unwritten rule in competitive that if you ended up with a cheater on your team, you threw the match on purpose to force them to lose/draw. At least with overwatch, aimbotters were at a disadvantage if they had to go against a shield-heavy coordinated team by themselves, so it wasn't impossible to legitimately beat a cheater. 

 

I don't have any proof to my claim of 1 in every 15, so treat it as hearsay and do with it what you will, it was just some of the experience I had at the time when boosting and cheating was extremely common. Back in those earlier seasons, it was prolific enough for a lot of the big name streamers to address it and force Blizzard to respond to it. Jeff Kaplan even did a video specifically to address the concerns, I just can't say if anything has changed with the modern state of the game aside from what I've read online.

 

While I respect Riot's decision to go after cheaters aggressively, I would like to see them dial it back to avoid innocent players suffering the consequences of these aggressive forms of anti-cheat. Even if they are not being banned by the anti-cheat, nobody wants to suffer a performance penalty or worse, a potential backdoor exploit just because others refuse to play fairly. 

[GreyestGoat]

11 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

That was an interesting watch, legit impressed at the AI one.

But if it's also true that these software can go for such crazy prices (1200$!? People would really pay that much for a victory?), i have a hard time believing that the issue is as widespread as some make it out to believe.

And i also played competitive OW (admitedly never got past gold) up till the time Blizz released HotS 2.0, where i got generally fed up with loot boxes and dropped both games weeks after.

Where there is money...

 

 

 

[williamcll]

Sadly I think the only good way to anti-cheat is behavioral analysis.

What's not to say this this Anticheat is circumvented already?

[yian88]

33 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

well those programs usually dont have kernel level permissions 

How do you know that software anti-cracking protection in these programs dont? did anyone investigate every single one of them? i doubt it. And kernel level permission doesnt mean shit, you can collect any sort of data you want in windows without kernel permission, its just IT bollocks thinking there is any sort of protection in windows. Any software running as service or in the background can collect as much data as they want about anything else you are doing, as long as 3rd party apps/services are not sandboxed from accessing your system files and keyboard input, screen etc there is no privacy.

[Sauron]

11 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Sadly I think the only good way to anti-cheat is behavioral analysis.

Ideally you'd have an unintrusive software cheat detector and a community report system; both would highlight suspicious behavior to be checked out by a human. That's expensive though so companies would just rather install malware on your computer or ignore the problem.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, yian88 said:

How do you know that software anti-cracking protection in these programs dont? did anyone investigate every single one of them? i doubt it. And kernel level permission doesnt mean shit, you can collect any sort of data you want in windows without kernel permission, its just IT bollocks thinking there is any sort of protection in windows. Any software running as service or in the background can collect as much data as they want about anything else you are doing, as long as 3rd party apps/services are not sandboxed from accessing your system files and keyboard input, screen etc there is no privacy.

Not all anti-cheats run in the background while the game isn't open. I agree that they could still be doing something malicious (though not quite to the extent this could) but that's just a problem with proprietary software in general.

 

Also this level of permissions could potentially allow it to just hide in the system even if you try to uninstall it - that's not the case with most background services. This is literally malware.

[Rune]

Hard no then. Theres enough shit running as is.

[Chunchunmaru_]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

Wonder what Microsoft has to say on it considering it violates all their guidelines, not that they would comment on it but would be nice. Would be even more nice for a Windows security patch to come out that blocks it, a big "Yea, no you don't".

I'm surprised they actually signed that driver and not some VirtIO drivers for KVM running Windows VM's

[Loote]

Back in my day we had voting, any cheater would get banned and that's all. Sure they can get onto another server, but being banned after a moment wouldn't be fun. Sure the method wasn't perfect, I did get banned by angry noobs once a week and not obvious cheaters could take some time to get noticed, but all in all it was good.

On the other hand getting banned in a paid game could mean getting blocked out of multiplayer forever, possibly forcing them to buy another copy, I think this should mean that not free games would be mostly hacker free, even if the producer would have to commit resources into support for hack reports.

 

In free games shit's tough, but it is possible to find a private server protected by password which will ban people who hack.

I really don't see any need for advanced anti-hack software, sure there are ways to make game for oneself easier, which can't be spotted by spectating on the hacker, but honestly I have no time nor hardware to compete so the only way to have good amount of fun is for me to play with friends anyway.

The software not closing down seems like a bug, it should never do that, the only reliable protection you can have is server-side anyway.

[Touch My Hamm]

hmmm sounds like ill wait before playing this one. 

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

I'm surprised they actually signed that driver and not some VirtIO drivers for KVM running Windows VM's

Especially since they ripped out securom....

[mello4evr]

Is there a way to see a list of all programs running with ring 0 permissions? This has me curious about what other programs work this way.

[PlayStation 2]

We didn't learn anything from StarForce, huh?

[Doobeedoo]

I haven't noticed performance issues, but yeah rather iffy how they made it work. They did mention it will use least elevated privileged mode needed, but yeah... who knows. Even with this way, to make it harder to cheat, still there cheaters can show up. So, I guess try to develop it without such access since it's also not 100% protected against cheats. 

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, Sauron said:

What's hard to understand about "poison"? It's definitely easier to understand for most than "it runs in the background in Windows' ring 0". The point here is that just because they don't have a monopoly doesn't mean we should just tolerate all kinds of anti-consumer practices.

They're not telling us exactly what this does. It just runs in the background at elevated privileges and you have no way of knowing what it's doing because it's a black box. It could be logging your passwords or mining monero for all you know.

So now regulation is fine for health but not other things. You're already raising the bar here and basing it on a completely arbitrary distinction. As I said, we can argue over what is worth regulating - but it's absurd to say that regulation is inherently wrong so long as there isn't a monopoly.

I consider "you buy our game and in exchange we take full control of your computer" to qualify as "taking advantage of consumers". A lot of people won't read the fine print (it's not like the store page has a big red warning saying they'll take over your computer) or won't understand what this implies.

 

Gambling is a "non essential and completely optional" service too and yet it's regulated. So are cigarettes, alcohol and all sorts of other things that you could easily live without. You could do without the vast majority of food products for that matter but they're still heavily regulated to prevent health issues to an extent. There's no shortage of examples I can make here, many of which - I think you'd agree - are important.

I don't think it's ethical to sneak what is essentially malware onto your costumer's computers. Since the game can just as well be distributed and monetized without it, I don't see how this even hurts Riot beyond preventing the company from acting unethically - not that I would have a problem cutting into their profits if it served to protect their customers.

 

If you think it is ethical then we can argue on that but that's beside the point - regulating companies to prevent highly unethical behavior is at times both ethical and necessary.

 

Also 1) this has nothing to do with liking the product, it's about malware that is bundled with the product and 2) don't conflate regulation with a ban. I never said the game should be banned, I'm saying there should be regulation to prevent Riot from adding malware to it.

 

And mind you, regulation doesn't necessarily mean "they can't do it"; it could just mean imposing that they make it really clear on the store page that they're installing malware, which wouldn't change the product and would just let costumers make a more informed decision. Are you saying that it's unethical to demand transparency in the transaction?

So simple and so easy that it has pretty much never worked. I can't think of a single high profile case where a boycott of a large company for unethical behavior has succeeded. Even just the threat of regulation has very often caused companies to backtrack immediately - while malding on social media never has. That's because they know the latter won't actually end up undercutting their bottom line while the former very well might.

Not all products are the same, you simply cannot compare medicines or human consumable products of that nature to this software. I can't believe you are even trying to.   You may as well try to argue the automotive safety standards should be applied to toy cars.

 

 

Now you are talking about malware,  what malware? it isn't malware and doesn't come with malware,  using malware as an argument for regulating a product is so loose a reason it will be abused to prevent any software the regulator decides they don't want in the market.  how do you even decide what software is susceptible to malware sufficiently to be regulated?  Linux has malware occasionally, maybe we should regulate that.  Sounds bloody stupid to me.

 

There is a reason I specifically mentioned monopolies.  Because a transparent product like this cannot be anti consumer in any way if it does not leverage a monopoly of some sort that a consumer cannot avoid.  This can be avoided, there is literally no reason someone would have to buy or install this product.

 

This product is not anti consumer, it is not a pre-requisite for essential services or software, you don't lose anything by not using it.  It is transparent in what it does and how it does it,  what right do you have to demand it be regulated?