- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
Riot Games‘ kernel-level anti-cheat, Vanguard, has received an update that is allegedly altering system firmware to remove the ability of the user to access certain hardware associated with cheating.
Riot Games quoted one post discussing the anti-cheat, replying “congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight.” But how exactly does Vanguard’s new system make “paperweights” out of hardware?
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RIP the false positives. o7
Note: don’t play Riot Games games.
This should spook the hell of anyone still playing anything that relies on that. Imagine have that kind of malware running in your system, with kernel-level priviledges, that could simply fuck up your hardware if it thinks you might be cheating.
People say they won’t switch to linux because it can’t play every game.
Meanwhile games that don’t run on linux do shit like this.
I’m having a hard time understanding this piece. How is updating the system’s firmware causing bricked hardware? Is the new firmware purposefully useless?
That’s because what it actually does is change your system firmware so that a physical piece of hardware commonly used for cheating will no longer connect and be available. It doesn’t actually brick anything. It prevents a handshake. It’d be like if a piece of software was able to go in and unmount your hard drive. Nothing is wrong with your computer. Nothing is wrong with the hard drive. They just don’t talk to each other anymore.
So the headline is just hyperbole? What a weird editorial choice
What dummies. Even if you are cheating, violating a TOS doesn’t give them the right to violate the law.
I can’t speak to false positives but it would target an external gpu or other device connected for the purpose of cheating. The user can just disable iommu in bios and still use their cheating hardware outside of vanguard protected games.
Congrats to the devs! They won the scumbag race against cheaters. Hope they‘re proud.
That’s definitely too heavy handed. It’s not uncommon for anti cheat to flag someone erroneously, and to just hand an executioner the ability to nuke your computer without any form of redress is asinine and anti consumer, if not criminal.
Yup, these systems have a history of false positives and flagging legitimate programs as cheating software and messing with a users system, using cheat software or not, to this extent is just absolutely wrong.
It’s a big reason for me why I stopped buying and playing these types of games.
On one side, I love how it breaks cheaters hardware, should not have cheated… eh?
On the other side, worried that it might and will break non-cheaters hardware sooner or later.
I think even breaking hardware that you know is only for cheating should still never be done. It’s a game, it does not matter that much. Hopefully this results in a lawsuit
