Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?
Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?
Now that Stop Killing Games is actually being taken seriously - maybe we need to take a look at Stop Fucking Around In Our Kernels
I haven't really been personally affected by it before - I don't play any competitive multiplayer games at all. But my wife had her brother over, and he's significantly younger than us. So he wanted to play FortNite and GTA V, knowing I have a gaming PC. FortNite is immediately out of the question, it'll never work on my computer. Okay, so I got GTA V running and it was fun for a while, but it turns out all of those really cool cars only exist in Online. But oh look, now they've added BattlEye and I can no longer get online.
While this seems like a trivial issue (Just buy a third SSD for Windows and dual boot), it's really not. Even if I wanted to install Windows ever again, I do NOT want random 3rd party kernel modules in there. Anyone remember the whole CrowdStrike fiasco? I do NOT want to wake up to my computer not booting up because some idiot decided to push a shitty update to their kernel module that makes the kernel itself shit the bed. And while Microsoft fucks up plenty, at least they're a corporation with a reputation to uphold, and I believe they even have a QA team or 2. CrowdStrike was unheard of outside of the corporate world before the ordeal and tbh nobody has ever heard of it afterwards again.
So I think this would be a good angle to push. That we should be careful about what code runs in our OS kernels, for security and stability reasons. Obviously it'd be impossible to just blanket ban 3rd party kernel modules to any OS. However, maybe here in the EU at least we could get them to consider a rule that any software that includes a component running in the OS kernel, MUST justify how that part is necessary for the software to function in the best possible way for the user of the computer the software is running on. E.g I expect a hardware driver to have a kernel module, and I can see how security software needs to have a kernel module, but I do NOT see how a video game needs to have an anti cheat with a kernel module. How does that benefit me, the customer paying to be able to play said video game?
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Now that Stop Killing Games is actually being taken seriously
It is? They're still at 39%. Let's not call victory before reaching the start of the race. Getting to 100% will just be the beginning.
Also, kernel level anti-cheat seems like an easy thing to fix: don't buy the game. Be a little bit more principled and selective in your purchasing choices.
"Don't buy a game that ships with malware" is a perfectly correct decision, but it doesn't address the fact that games are shipping with fucking malware.
It's a very recent development, but the consumer actually does have enough information just from the store page these days to know that a game uses kernel level software. The thing that still sucks is that it can be retroactive. In those cases, I suppose we just ask for a refund.
I don't live in the EU, and am not sure it's a good idea to sign the petition for that reason even though I agree with them 100%.
Let me assure you, if you're not actually an EU citizen, signing would be a decidedly bad idea. All that would accomplish is pumped numbers that will be disregarded in the end, so it can only serve to hurt the campaign.
I've seen the Government in America ignore more than one petition they claimed was tampered with and I wouldn't want that to be the result here (The EU seems to be more on the up and up than the US government, but still).