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Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

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Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#101

Post by beeboobaa3 »

lupusreal wrote: post #33
nulld3v wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can recognize that app/game developers are starting to require Secure Boot enforcement if you want to continue to use their apps or play their games. RIOT requires users to enable TPM-enforced Secure Boot starting with Windows 11 to play Valorant: https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/100...

If it's software your job requires, that's one thing. But games? Just play different games, or get a different hobby. You have a choice so exercise it.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#102

Post by beeboobaa3 »

dmonitor wrote: post #38
choo-t wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let me tell you a secret: it's because the gamers are demanding that. Citation needed. Whose these gamers ? I surely didn't ask for this neither any of the gamers I know, nor seen any demand about that in gaming forums. > The game companies couldn't care less if there are cheaters in the game, but it's the players which put huge pressure on the game companies to detect and ban cheaters. The jump from this to "requi…

Cheating in online games (especially ones that are free) is so absurdly rampant and disruptive that you can sell gamers just about anything if it can meaningfully deter cheaters. Every now and then a Youtuber will say “kernel level anti-cheat is bad for [reasons]” and gamers will pretend to care about it until the video leaves the “For You” page.

[flagged]

Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#103

Post by choo-t »

brookst wrote: post #79
realusername wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's cheaters even on consoles which are vastly more locked-down than a PC. Those technical shenanigans clearly aren't working, be ready to be disappointed if you thought that a TPM would help against cheaters. Cheaters always find a way, what those game needs is proper moderation. Yes that does cost money but that's the only known thing that works in the long run.

This seems like the old “any imperfect solution is no better than doing nothing” argument. Moderation is expensive, hard to scale, and can only address problems after other users have bad experiences. It’s like saying seatbelts are useless because some people still get hurt, so instead of seatbelts we need a lot more ambulances and hospitals. Like any complex system, games have a funnel. These technical measures redu…

> This seems like the old “any imperfect solution is no better than doing nothing” argument.

Isn't this the argument used against non-kernel-level anticheat and server-side anticheat in the first place ?

Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#104

Post by beeboobaa3 »

brookst wrote: post #77
choo-t wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're demanding a way to handle or ban cheater, not requiring TPM, that's a non sequitur.

[flagged]

There's no way secure boot totally prevents cheating, either. It just moves the goalpost a little, cheating will always be possible.

Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#105

Post by ZeroWidthJoiner »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #67
dangus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are concerned about this should realize: Microsoft will never create a situation where alternative operating systems can’t be installed. They already went through the antitrust ringer on that issue. They don’t even control what hardware vendors do for the most part. This requirement will only hit multiplayer games where cheating and security threats are rampant. Also, if you have a PC with secure boot enab…

> Microsoft will never create a situation where alternative operating systems can’t be installed. They already went through the antitrust ringer on that issue. They have shipped ARM Surfaces where alternative operating systems could not get installed, enforced with Secure Boot permanently on. Have they been through any such "antitrust ringer" in the past 10 years? > Also, if you have a PC with secure boot enabled, th…

> They actually advise OEMs not to install this second key by default ("Secured Core" PCs), and some vendors have followed the advice, such as Lenovo. Resulting in yet another hoop to install non-MS OSes.

True, 3rd party not trusted by default is a "Secured-Core PC" requirement, but so is the BIOS option for enabling that trust [0]. On my "Secured-Core" ARM ThinkPad T14s it's a simple toggle option.

> Even recently, a Windows updated added a number of Linux distributions to the Secure Boot blacklist, resulting in working dual boot systems being suddenly cripped. Of course, _ancient_ MS OSes are never going to be blacklisted.

Actually they are in the process of blacklisting their currently used 2011 Windows certificate, i.e. the Microsoft cert installed on every pre-~2024 machine, also invalidating all Windows boot media not explicitly created with the new cert. It's a manually initiated process for now, with an automatic rollout coming later [1].

It'll be very interesting to watch how well that's going to work on such a massive scale. :)

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5025885-how-to-m...

Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#106

Post by candiddevmike »

brookst wrote: post #77
choo-t wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're demanding a way to handle or ban cheater, not requiring TPM, that's a non sequitur.

[flagged]

Back in my day we all played on private, community ran servers where you could easily vote to kick/ban folks, the server owner was your buddy, or you played with people you trust.

Now everything is matchmaking, private servers, live service and that sense of community is gone.

Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#107

Post by ineptech »

dist-epoch wrote: post #11
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #5

After reading the article, and specially the remarks about this engine being copy-pasted from the Xbox DRM engine , does anyone still believe that Pluton, also copy-pasted from the Xbox, is about end user security? And not totally about MS finally having enforceable DRM on PCs? Oh and by the way Pluton is now on the latest batch of Intel laptop chips. And has been on AMDs for a while. How soon until Windows requires…

People have been saying that for more than 10 years now, since the TPM was introduced. Yet you can still install Linux on PCs sold with Windows, you can still install third party software on Windows not from a Store, you can still watch pirated movies downloaded from torrents. You can even run an unregistered/unpaid version of Windows if you don't mind that it will not let you change the desktop background image.

People will keep saying it, because that ratchet only seems to go one way. Consumer access to general purpose computing is something we take for granted, but every year it seems like there's a bit less of it, and once we lose it we will never get it back.

Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#108

Post by mjr00 »

choo-t wrote: post #92
mholm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This absolutely happens already. The problem with finding statistical outliers is that plenty of legitimate players are outliers too. And if you're banning/segregating players for being outliers, you get a very angry player base. Riot has a pretty indepth blogpost about their anti-cheat systems, they've had years to mature them on some of the most demanding competitive gaming platforms ever made. Requiring players in…

The server is all-seeing, if there is no way for the server to discriminate cheater from other player, then no player can possibly know there a cheater on the server, thus cannot complain about cheating is either irrational or the server-side detection is severely flawed.

> The server is all-seeing, if there is no way for the server to discriminate cheater from other player, then no player can possibly know there a cheater on the server, thus cannot complain about cheating is either irrational or the server-side detection is severely flawed.

It's impossible to tell in-game if a baseball player is using steroids, yet there's a laundry list of banned substances and players who got banned for taking them because the MLB believes it gives them an unfair advantage. It's called competitive integrity.

Since it sounds like you don't play games, at least not competitively, I'll clarify that "cheating" in this case isn't the obvious stuff like "my gun does 100x damage" or "I move around at 100mph" or "I'm using custom player models with big spikes so I know everyone's location" that you would've seen on public Counter-Strike 1.6 servers in 2002. Cheating is aim assistance that nudges your cursor to compensate for spray patterns in CS, it's automatic DPs and throw breaks in Street Fighter 6 that are just at the threshold of human reaction timing, it's firing off skillshots in League of Legends with an overlay that says if it's going to kill the enemy player or not. All of this stuff is doable by a sufficiently skilled/lucky human, but not with the level of consistency you get from cheating.

Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#109

Post by botanical »

criddell wrote: post #12
heraldgeezer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>does anyone still believe that Pluton, also copy-pasted from the Xbox, is about end user security? I never did. The worst part is explaining it to people drinking the MS coolaid. I'm an MS admin so people at work love Win11, Intune etc all that max lockdown shit. To me that's not what Windows is about, for me Windows is excellent because of the admin tools and backwards compatibility. But hey that's just me. Proton…

Another TPM thing? What problem do you have with the TPM?

Hundreds of millions of perfectly good PCs are going to be end-of-life due to this.

Re: Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses

#110

Post by dumbo-octopus »

choo-t wrote: post #100
jprete wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To run anti-cheat in that way, you need all game mechanics to be run server-side, and you need to not let the client ever know about something the player should not know - e.g. in a first-person shooter you need to run visibility and occlusion on the server too! Otherwise the cheating will take the form of seeing through walls and the like. This is going to boost the cost of the servers and probably any game subscrip…

Well yeah, that's the correct way to run a server, don't send information you don't want the user to get. But as you are pointing out, forcing client-side intrusive anti-cheat is cheaper, thus this as nothing to do about preventing cheating, but about reducing cost.

The end state of your argument is the game runs entirely on hosted hardware and you pay for a license to stream the final rendered output to your monitor. This is already happening. Soon games won’t be able to be “bought” at all, you’ll just pay the server a number of dollars per hour for the privilege of them letting you use their hardware.

You will own nothing and like it.

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