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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

A blogger going by the handle "No One's Happy" has investigated the digital restrictions management technology being pushed into the Linux kernel [nooneshappy.com] at the behest of various malevolent actors.

I want to preface this with the fact that I’m not a gamer. I’m game-curious, but I often lack the time to really devote. But a close friend of mine games pretty frequently and he brought me (a bit) up to speed recently. I hobbled together a computer from various parts (and then overpaid for a GPU), I got excited about spending some liesure time playing. But during the process I realized that in order to play many of the biggest games, you are forced to install a closed-source driver and provide root access to your operating system. So I decided to do some research and found that the owners of this anti-cheating software include a Chinese firm on a US defense list, a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, and a private-equity chain.

Furthermore, it hasn’t stopped cheating. They largely moved to external hardware that these drivers cannot see.

What “kernel anti-cheat” means

These are ring-0 drivers. They run with the same privilege level as the Windows kernel, with full access to memory, processes, loaded drivers, the filesystem, and hardware. They are closed source so no one can review them; you can only review their policies. Multiple games (and some of the largest coming soon) now also require TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, and use remote hardware attestation to confirm your machine’s boot state before letting you play.

[...] In short, a driver that loads at boot, records continuously, fingerprints your hardware, and reports back whether or not you are suspected of anything is not shaped like cheat detection. It is shaped like monitoring. And the companies holding that access are, mostly, companies that already make money watching you. Epic and Activision share player data with advertising and analytics partners. [19 [nooneshappy.com]] Activision went as far as patenting a matchmaking system designed to nudge players into buying microtransactions — it says the patent was exploratory and never shipped, but a company patents what it is thinking about. [26 [nooneshappy.com]] EA’s own User Agreement grants its anti-cheat permission to “monitor and collect” from your memory, processes, visuals, communications, and file storage. [27] [nooneshappy.com]

The approach to infect mission critical software such as productivity software with DRM failed several decades ago due to push back. However, in short order the same digital restrictions technologies were successfully deployed, often on the same systems, via music players and other multimedia as people handed over work laptops to their kids to play videos and music. This same approach to use kids as a vector seems to be used again, this time pushing restricted boot [fsf.org], UEFI [lightbluetouchpaper.org], TPM [pclosmag.com], and whole rootkits [techrights.org] via games ... intially. Few will say no to their kids who "just wanna" play a game, and thus will ensure that the digital restrictions get a wide deployment. As before, push back is needed.

Previously:
(2025) This Group Pays Bounties to Repair Broken Devices—Even If the Fix Breaks the Law [soylentnews.org]
(2020) Popularity of Older Tractors Boosted by Avoidance of DRM [soylentnews.org]
(2018) International Day Against DRM Celebrates its 12th Anniversary [soylentnews.org]
(2017) Tim Berners-Lee Approved Web DRM, but W3C Member Organizations Have Two Weeks to Appeal [soylentnews.org]
(2016) This Lawsuit Could be the Beginning of the End for DRM [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission