Along with the recent sanctions against other tech giants, can the EU make it so anti cheat can be compatible to Linux as well?
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Anti-cheat and all spyware should be banned from Linux. People wanting software to report all their activities and open processes to a third party source shouldn’t be using Linux in the first place. If you don’t understand how many rights you are giving up to Easy Anticheat or whatever, you shouldn’t be using Linux in the first place.
I’m in
Or just make that invasive client side malware illegal altogether.
It’s impossible for an anti-cheat to support every possible OS and codifying into law that “just” Linux(regardless of distribution??) has to be supported would arguably be anti-competitive by giving Linux a special legally protected status. 0% chance that this would work.
Current anti cheat is effectively in the same category as spyware, malware etc. The kind of things they do are usually things that Viruses need.
Linux can’t have any openings for this. Current anti cheat issues to me are design problems first and foremost.
This is a preposterous notion.
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Linux is completely incompatible with kernel-level anti-cheat. There can never be a kernel-level AC developed for Linux. It’s a technical limitation arising from the way Linux is designed.
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The current method for allowing BattlEye and EAC games to work with Linux is 100% USERSPACE-only, with NO kernel-level component.
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Whether you want to admit it or not, userspace-only versions of EAC/BattlEye are objectively less-secure than their Windows versions which have kernel-level components with root privileges.
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The EU can’t force a company to make their product less secure just to appease 1% of the gaming market. That’s why it’s currently opt-in, and it always will be.
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And that doesn’t even account for ACs like Ricochet, Vanguard, etc. Those could NEVER work in Linux, as they don’t HAVE a userspace component that can act standalone. EAC and BattlEye only became available for Proton because BOTH EAC and BattlEye already had native Linux userspace-only clients in production for years for native Linux games that used EAC/BattlEye.
This is a preposterous question, both from a legal and technical standpoint.
It’s a long stretch, but in theory it could be done with Ubuntu. Canonical has an excellent relationship with Microsoft, their kernels already have MS signatures for Secure Boot, next LTS version will officially support TPM encryption. All they have to do, is maintain a “gaming” kernel together with game developers, make it easy as an optional install.
Although gaming is not a priority for Canonical. Otherwise it might be possible.
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Statists are literally braindead
Imagine thinking that the only institutions who make economic decisions should be non-democratic ones.
Imagine thinking that compelling private companies into implementing your shit ideas is “democratic”.
You’re coming at this from the wrong angle. We should force EU to prevent ring 0 anti-cheats existing all together on the grounds of privacy. There is absolutely no need to have such invasive spyware on anyone’s system Windows or Linux.
We live in the age of AI and it should be up to game developers to develop and implement anti cheats that do most of the “anti-cheating” in the back-end side not on clients.
In addition I think some sort of virtualized game containers should be the standard going forward when distributing games in general. Every modern processor supports virtualization these days. Microsoft is already using such tech in their Xbox consoles. All the games effectively run as containers.
For example https://waldo.vision/ or https://anybrain.gg/ are examples of modern anti-cheats and where we should be headed.
This. Most modern anti-cheat mechanisms are equal to spyware that has way too many privileges on operating systems that support this kind of intrusive behaviour.
You’ll never shove that down (even unsuspecting) Linux distributions. It would jeopardize the whole user base. Now considering that some of these get used on servers, as well… the thought alone is outright unspeakable.
I’d immediately stop caring for security, when that happens, because the task would become nearly impossible.
I’m not sure about the necessity of game containers, though. I run NixOS here, which demonstrates that this is absolutely not necessary. But even just Proton demonstrates that quite well - at least for Windows™ things, imho…
Yet, some people (even Valve’s HoloOS) do like flatpacks and appimages etc., and i too have a few podman containers running. I’m not returning to building my own docker images, though, since this is accomplished so much nicer (and reproducible!) with nix.
I’m not sure where you’re getting at? Server side anti cheats are bad also? Is that your opinion? I’d have less of a problem with invasive anti-cheats if they even worked 99.999% of the time, but I’d still advocate for server side solutions. Truth is that we most likely never can get rid of the cheating completely but I’m not willing to sell my privacy for anything less than perfect solution.
These days there are cheats that do not require any memory manipulation of the actual game memory from the cheat, and so developers try to push for even more invasive anti-cheats on client side to tackle this problem. Latest cheat engines can just look at the screen at frame buffer level with machine learning techniques and take control of your mouse. Therefore we need machine learning anti-cheats that are able to distinguish human input and behavior from machine preferably from sort of game log files that are analyzed after the game and compared to data set. In addition to running preliminary game recording client on users machine to collect this kind of data. I’d be fine with that.
What I want is a complete black box of a virtualized game that includes the anti-cheat in the “image” that you just boot up like a virtual machine and you’re in the game. Now I know this is a hard problem to solve but where there is a will there is a way. If someone more advanced in this kind of software development could chime in I’d appreciate it.
This is getting ridiculous. The EU is already a regulatory superpower.
Is that a bad thing? The EU is not a dictatorship, so it’s just fulfilling it’s role
Well… Problem is how it is done. In fact, their regulations aren’t law, but rather directives that should be assimilated to local law… And that’s point were problems start. It allows a lot of interpretation.
Also, EU only puts strict requirements on stuff they need to verify before giving permission, but when sth is due to local gov decision it may be totally different.
In that case blame your government and not the EU. If you don’t agree with your government, you can vote in another alternative and if the majority agrees with you, democracy will do the rest
I’m far from defending these shitheads from local government (no, there’s no alternative, all of them are trained by same people, all of them received sMe standards and are people who went there to get as much money as they can),but it’s actually fault of EU that they leave space for interpretation… And they shouldn’t if they want to unify law or at least general law. In fact, there’s differences between interpretation and suiting to standards… And there should be left only space for makeing law adequate to local situation… In any other case, that “union” loses point, unless it’s purely economical.
And… Who will you blame for lack of skills or incorrect execution of order by employed people? Employees or their supervisors for not teaching them correctly and supervising?
The EU is not a country (at least at the current stage), so every country have a lot of autonomy
It’s union… Union, by definition has similar solutions, same objective or same…
But a union does not mean that there isn’t any decentralization and autonomy, just like in a federation
No law is perfect. If a national government exploits a loop hole it just means they need to fix the underlying EU law. Democracy is a permanent work in progress, it takes constant effort to maintain democracy and not let it crumble into authoritarianism. The EU isn’t perfect as a hole and it never will be, but to simply reject anything outright because it’s not perfect is just childlike.
No law should allow for free interpretation also… Each line in each law should be interpreted in one precise way with… Ability to stretch in certain cases… And ignoring fact that problem is combination of causes is… really wanted by government… Or rather social engineering. You know, duality etc.
I’m not right person to talk about how EU is, I know however that it’s safe to say that EU government isn’t far from national governments… All of them are easily influenced by interests of their own or people who can offer them sth. Also, nobody said that sth should be rejected when it is imperfect, but no wise person should allow products with huge problems to release. Especially when it’s obvious problem.
I don’t think so. These games are made for windows. Devs have no obligation to support Linux.
Maybe, but games that have this shit aren’t worth my time. There are so many games in the world and many more to come that I won’t be able to play in my lifetime, so just ignore those with the anticheat shenanigans.
Didn’t valve come up with a way around anti-cheat? I think remembering reading something about that somewhere…
Well if it is true, we can assume that devs don’t implement it because they don’t want to, whether it is because it is too much work or not worth it for them, I don’t know.
Either way, the EU forcing them to use that workaround while good in theory can have… unforeseen consequences, like MMO’s not being available in Europe or devs moving from Europe to NA or Asia.
The only reason they managed to force Apple to do things in the past is that Apple is already international, moving all their assets from Europe would cost them much more than adapting their production.
But Devs don’t work that way, they are not multinational companies with factories and a billion stores, they have an office or several with teams, renting office space in the E.U or NA is the same to them as most game sales are done online nowadays and they were never done (as far as I am aware) in a developer specific physical store.
I don’t see how you could ever actually have a working anti cheat on Linux. You will always be able to recompile the kernel and add things the anti-cheat can’t know about.
In any case, I think the anti cheat companies could argue it is Linux which is incompatible with their product (and therefore should change to be more compatible) and not the other way around?
Doubt it. Multiplayer Linux gaming isn’t big enough of an issue for politicians to care about, I’m afraid.
I wouldn’t rely on government for anything.