this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
925 points (98.3% liked)

Games

32321 readers
1856 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Now if only they could more clearly communicate when games are playable offline.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Woodstock@lemmy.world 32 points 10 hours ago (11 children)

Can someone explain like I’m stupid on kernel level anti cheat and why I should watch out for it? Not a dig at all, a genuine question!

[–] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 81 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (6 children)

To put it very simply, the 'kernel' has significant control over your OS as it essentially runs above everything else in terms of system privileges.

It can (but not always) run at startup, so this means if you install a game with kernel-level anticheat, the moment your system turns on, the game's publisher can have software running on your system that can restrict the installation of a particular driver, stop certain software from running, or, even insidiously spy on your system's activity if they wished to. (and reverse-engineering the code to figure out if they are spying on you is a felony because of DRM-related laws)

It basically means trusting every single game publisher with kernel-level anticheat in their games to have a full view into your system, and the ability to effectively control it, without any legal recourse or transparency, all to try (and usually fail) to stop cheating in games.

[–] barlescharkley@lemmy.world 47 points 9 hours ago

More importantly, if traditional anticheat has a bug, your game dies. Oh no.

If kernel level anticheat has a bug, your computer blue screens (that's specifically what the blue screen is: a bug in the kernel, not just an ordinary bug that the system can recover from). Much worse. Sure hope that bug only crashes your computer when the game is running and not just whenever, because remember a kernel-level program can be running the moment your computer boots as above poster said

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)