Does this mean league of legends is a weapon
Weapon of Mass Distraction.
Psychological Warfare for sure
I mean, there’s always been speculation that Vanguard is spyware. There’s absolutely no need or justification for always-on cheat detection.
What speculation? It’s literally spyware. You are giving it full low level access to your processor.
Don’t get me wrong, Vanguard is BS, and I quit playing riot games because of it. However, simply having low level access isn’t sufficient to classify it as spyware, otherwise drivers would be spyware. I still haven’t seen any evidence that it currently does anything nefarious with that access, which means it’s quite unlikely it’s being used for mass surveillance.
To me, there are 2 problems: 1) It could be used for targeted attacks, and the likelihood anyone would find out is much lower than in a widespread surveillance scenario. 2) It could be used to deploy a massive bot-net.
I think the US reclassification here is precautionary in nature.
Exactly. I avoid kernel-level anti-cheat not because of any known spying they do (and honestly, anything w/ user-level privileges can read all your personal data), but that they add yet another attack vector for a bad actor. I highly doubt Vanguard gets as much security scrutiny as drivers, for example.
Yep, agreed. It’s the potential for exploitation that’s the main issue.
And the lack of a reason for vendors to put security first. “It’s just a game” or whatever, so they’ll do the bare minimum to keep the money flowing.
Drivers, on the other hand, make or break a sale, because it makes the product look bad. So if a driver gets exploited, customers are likely to buy from a competitor. If that happens w/ a game, players will get pissed but keep playing the game.
Except drivers are designed to interact with hardware and to make it usable, kernel-level anticheats are designed to specifically scan/block/etc software. They are pretty different with their intended purposes, even though they offer the same/similar invasiveness.
A weapon against sanity, yes.
Weapon of mass-debation
Gosh I feel like I’ve heard Tencent has a stake in some other company that isn’t mentioned here yet.
what was it . . . hmmmmm
I’m really not sure which one you mean, because they own interest in a ton of companies.
Tik Tok is what they’re referring to
I was thinking of reddit
Tik Tok is the only tencent company I know if that’s been labeled a national security risk.
They also have a stake in all these companies…
Legaue of legends
Epic games
Ubisoft
From soft
Activision blizzard
WeChat
Activision Blizzard
I think the MSFT buyout eliminated their stake in ABK?
Fromsoft is unfortunate, but I honestly don’t use any of the rest.
I believe discord is also owned by tencent
Again, non of those have been legally banned in the US.
I’m not saying those companies don’t exist? Just answering the question of who the top commenter was referring to, which in my opinion is Tik Tok because it’s the only one being legally banned.
I was just listing things I know tecenet had a holding in… Like everyone else…
They gonna force a sale of League of Legends now?
Do Fortnite next.
Tencent owns 11% of Reddit…
And? 11% isn’t full ownership like the thing I said.
And what DOES Tencent have full ownership of? They dip into almost everything as rich as they need to carry China’s water.
RIOT Games. The thing I started this thread saying…
More likely they would leave the market. That game isn’t really popular in NA but it’s the most popular non-mobile game in Asia
…Are you kidding? LoL has been huge for years in NA. RIOT is an American company that was bought by Tencent. Leaving the market means they lose their entire dev team.
RIOT is an American company that was bought by Tencent.
Sure but it ignores that Tencent gave $20 million to create LoL (first 10 then another 10 to buy out the other investors)
Investing 2 years after the game was first playable by the public counts as “giving money to create it”, now? That’s at least 6 years after they’d have started development.
You’ve ignored reality.
They invested before it was released, what are you talking about?
Tencent paid for it to be made
Edit: upon research you are talking about when Tencent became the owner. Not their investments to have the game made.
Not mentioned in a Washington Post article but
“ Over the summer of 2008, Merrill and Beck’s work seeking funds proved fruitful and the two landed $7 million more in funding from Benchmark and FirstMark Capital venture capital firms.”
/+ 10 mill from Tencent and prior to launch Tencent gave another 10 mill to buy out those investors
You’re probably thinking the “full release” but the game was being played by the public for several years, and was quite popular for over year prior to the “official release”. So, no. They didn’t. Their investment came a full year after I’d already been playing the game.
The game was made already. They bought an existing product.
I can’t find anything suggesting the game was released prior to 2008
Riot released some video at sometime talking about how they had to cram to make the game even playable prior to the sales pitch so I really doubt it was made before that
LoL isn’t popular in NA anymore?
Never was that popular
COD and Fortnite are much bigger with the latter even making sports radio talk
The popularity spike was when MLG needed to fill in the Halo Reach spot due to that game’s lack of appeal
What? League is consistently the top result of twitch. Even accounting for other regions, league is by far one of the largest games people watch in na. Big na streamers pull in thousands of viewers (doublelift, tyler1 for example)
You can listen to Riot themselves
They aren’t bringing in new players, their playerbase is just getting older
Which explains why they’ve made it less mechanical demanding and more about positioning over the years
There’s not way you can say that game wasn’t ever popular. Maybe it’s never been the literal most popular, but it’s definitely had a life as a majorly popular game. Large streaming views, tons of players, etc. I have no idea how it’s doing now, but it definitely had a number of years of major popularity.
Already can’t trust kassadin, don’t need an anti trust
Calling Tencent a “web and gaming giant” is really deceiving here.
It’s one of the biggest tech conglomerates in the world. Tencent invest into literally everything: games, social networks, entertainments, cloud computing, finance, AI, other investments… Tencent owns WeChat, Tencent Cloud, Tencent Healthcare just to name a few and helps CCP with surveilance and censorship through these ownings (tbf they don’t really have a choice, they’re based in China)
100% they are involved in military too so this classification is very much justified.
Don’t they also have lots of stakes in other companies.
Yeah that’s what the comment said
Epic Games for one.
And Reddit
Discord
We have a puppet coming into the presidency. China will have all the inroads to our government they care to pay for. Tencent and Co. will be a non-issue.
As opposed to all of our previous presidents, who refused to be bought by corporate corruption? LoL.
That’s horrible. I should Google for more information so I can avoid using companies involved with the military.
Would Call of Duty be the American equivalent?
I wonder what this means for 50 Cent?
He’s five times better, or worse.
Lol pretty much every American company should be added to a similar list given how deep they are in the pockets of CIA, etc
Cool whataboutism, this article is about a Chinese company and China, not about America or its mil companies.
It’s not like it’s an insult to say Tencent is involved with the Chinese military, why are you so defensive? Do you think you’re sharing unknown info? I think we’re all quite aware of the US MIC.
Do you seriously believe China and every other country doesn’t keep similar lists already? This is basic ass shit.
Every time anything about China is posted someone like you comes running to tell us all “b-b-but America too!!!” as if that changes a damn thing in regards to the discussion topic at hand.
Pointing out hypocrisy is not whataboutism. Whataboutism is when you bring up a separate topic as a criticism to distract from the original topic. For example, if you make fun of my cooking and I bring up your drawing skills in response, that’s whataboutism. If you suck at cooking and yet bring up me sucking at cooking, that’s just pointing fingers and trying to paint that as a negative for someone else when you possess the same deficiency.
Imo whataboutism is not even a real thing.
That’s just a dumb label made up for use against ussr it was just never intended to be used against US lol. But pointing out that ur opponent has ulterior motives is properly legalTrue, and maybe I’m playing a losing game by arguing within that context, but I did want to point out that even under those conditions the “logical fallacy” doesn’t fit.
Weird. I can’t see the .ml after your name. Must be a Lemmy bug.
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They’re getting downvoted for an unrelated comment not because they don’t believe America has companies that contribute to their mil industrial complex.
that is its own topic, bringing it up here is trying to shift attention away from the topic at hand. Its also topic that should be talked about more, but in its own context.
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Aint we got tea companies that make war machines here?
hence why this article is not a big deal or dig at China in any way lmao
Why does everything need to be whataboutism’d to America. Yes we also have companies that work with our military, who gives a fuck? This article is simply pointing out that a big Chinese company with ties to lots of social media (Reddit for example) is also mil adjacent.
It’s just a fact, not commentary on China that then makes the US hypocritical.
Why are you making whataboutist comments unrelated to the article? Every fucking country has companies that work with their military, that’s not what the article is about.
I’m just pointing it out bro, nothing more bro, just mentioning it bro, nothing wrong with constantly running negative stories about China bro, not manufacturing anything bro.
I don’t know which company you’re referring to, but I think it’s pretty damn likely that China also classifies them as a military company too. Shit, most western companies are banned in China.
I fail to see the hypocrisy that you appear to be implying.
I only meant to say that it is quite normal for private interprises to dabble in military application
That’s when they become the Outerprise.
