361
Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
I should probably mention some notable downsides to kernel anti-cheat as well:
Because kernel anti-cheat has full access to your PC, if any virus/etc can take advantage of a security vulnerability in the anti-cheat program, it gains absolute access to your PC.
Kernel anti-cheat needs special signing keys to get access to the kernel, but the more companies that get access to the keys the more likely it is to have compromised keys. Genshin impacts keys were compromised and used to sign ransomware, giving it full kernel access on any computers it was able to get on.
Devs have used kernel anti-cheat to secretly install Bitcoin miners on users machines
Kernel anti-cheat can be compromised and used to directly gain control of a users PC. Some apex legends streamers had their PCs compromised and cheats installed remotely through their anti-cheat during a tournament.
A lot of anti-cheat programs are created by Chinese companies or companies that are mostly owned by Chinese companies. China is well known for spying on users, and there's a ban on a lot of Chinese hardware due to spying concerns and backdoors that the Chinese government requires to be in their devices. I think the invasive nature of kernel anti-cheat makes it an obvious spying platform, and I think it's absurd to think that any anti-cheat coming from China isn't actively spying on you.
I think it's absurd to think any anti-cheat ~~coming from China~~ isn't actively spying on you.
Our data has proven to be very lucrative. The companies that make anti-cheat are also the types of companies that would want to cash in on our data.