Also users behind large NAT gateways (colleges/dorms, apartment complexes with ISP contracts) or CGNAT (most mobile users including 5G hotspots which could be a primary internet connection for a household) will often appear to be behind one or a handful of IPs, and not only does blocking one block them all, but blocking a gateway IP that is part of a pool might not necessarily block the intended user at all. Also as was stated, it’s trivial to get a new IP either via VPN or, sometimes, resetting your modem.

IP bans are often not effective.

None of this is actually about cheating. All of these companies want control over as many people as they can get their grubby fat fingers around.

I figured it wasn't feasible now. Darn. It sucks there's no better option theyre offering other than kernel anti cheat which means gaming on linux will be dead again in 4 years

I never got interested how anti cheat software works but article claims kernel level anti cheat relies on hardware fingerprint. They say people can buy new game and cheat again, I think it's cheaper now for people to buy new hard drive and change fingerprint and don't even bother with this shit. This is stupid.

Agreed, a good article and I learned a lot from it. One thing I learned is that while secure boot and tpm are neat, I’m more confident than ever that they are just overkill and unnecessary for an average user.

Whether intentional or not - they DO get in the way of using other OSs or bootable flash drives like ventoy. Either by by malicious intent, accidental non signing or delayed signing, or just general complexity of coordinating signing everything with all the manufacturers.

It’s just a lot of hoopla for…. What?

Anti cheating? There’s been cheaters in online gaming forever and that will never change. Give me the option to make friends and play private games with them and I don’t care who cheats.

Security? I mean I guess…. but “don’t boot shady crap and make sure you’re downloading the right stuff” goes pretty far.

I dunno - secure boot and tpm are the first things I turn off and I’m not interested in using software that insists I turn them on. The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

It does seem a bit overkill especially for home desktop use. I think with laptops an argument could be made that there may be some benefit even for home users.

But for gaming anti-cheat specifically, it's definitely overkill.

Shame. Someone needs to steal these.

EDIT: Battlefield 6 Open Beta launches for me when I enrolled the HackBGRT hash into my mobo's SecureBoot lol. But I think I am shadowbanned.

Fortunately not nearly all games utilize anticheat, and single player games with anticheat measures are relatively rare.

if that function is for signing custom efi binaries, you can still only sign it using your own keys. that would work to attest that you trust it and approved running that thing with secure boot enabled, but anticheats are looking specifically for the approval of microsoft, for which microsoft would need to sign it with their own key.

you probably wouldn't get banned, the game just won't launch. but be sure that you are not runnig the "process hacker" task manager along with the game, neither similar tools inname because formerly garbage anticheat was triggered to the "hacker" name in the process name. I don't know if that would trigger a ban though, or they just wouldn't allow connecting, but since this is niche software and they won't have any recourse for false positives maybe I wouldn't try my chances unless I wanted help in stopping playing that game forever.

All those kernel level protections go out of the window, if the motherboard itself is compromised