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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Client side anti-cheat is inherently flawed. These games are asking an untrusted computer whether it is cheating. That’s like asking a known liar whether they’re lying at that moment. The one way to make it harder for the computer to “lie” is by increasing the permissions the AC has, which comes at the cost of privacy for people with the game, and security for every Windows user (not just the ones with a certain game installed).

    Client side anti-cheat can be poked and investigated locally, with no restrictions. All it takes a skilled enough cheater is time, and they will bypass it. The only way to test server side anti-cheat is by hopping in the game, trying to learn how it works, and trying to bypass it. That is a much more time consuming and expensive process.




  • On the Steam Deck, while using SteamOS (or other Linux distros), EAC (and a few others like Battleye) run in userspace, not as kernel level.

    The intention of Anti-Cheat and DRM is to hide what they’re doing, in an attempt to prevent people from cheating or pirating. Malware often uses similar techniques to hide what it’s doing.

    Kernel level Anti-Cheat runs with the highest level of permission on your system, meaning it has access to everything happening on your PC, and all your hardware.

    That means kernel level Anti-Cheat can do whatever it wants on your computer, and it’s intentionally hard to figure out what it’s doing. Even though it’s probably not harmful, it shares a lot of similarities with actual malware, and we can’t be fully sure whether it is harmful or not. This is why a lot of people are against kernel level Anti-Cheat.

    EAC, afaik, has acted as just an anti cheat, and is therefore likely not harmful to your system. However, like other Anti-Cheats, it is harmful with the standards being set.






  • The only build is an aab file. This is a Play Store bundle file, not an APK, so not directly installable in Android without the Google Play Store.

    The only build being a Google Play release also indicates that non-foss libraries were likely included, such as the FCM libraries, as is common for GPlay releases of otherwise FOSS projects.

    As far as I’m concerned, Element X for Android is not available yet, unless either building from source (with modifications to included libraries), or by using a non-FOSS version from GPlay.



  • VRChat in particular has been degrading in quality and experience ever since they needed to start pleasing investors. You can give it a try if you want, but there’s a lot of toxicity there. Platforms like ChilloutVR or NeosVR have a better (but smaller) community.

    Although some titles like BONELAB or Pavlov do feel a lot more like “tech demos”, they are still great titles. Some desktop titles also have VR ports that are worth playing, No Mans Sky and The Talos Principle come to mind.

    The modding scenes of a lot of games have good VR mods too, “Vivecraft”, if you’re into Minecraft. Subnautica has a good VR mod, Half-Life 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Outer Wilds, and much more.



  • Lets take the imaginary program Y. It is free open source software with the GPLv3 license. If Valve wants to include Y in SteamOS, they are free to do so. Any time Valve makes changes or fixes to Y, they are legally required to provide the source code of their changes, as stated in the GPL license included with Y.

    A lot of programs have this license (or a similar one), which forces corporations to contribute back to FOSS projects.

    Some Valve-made components in SteamOS are truly “SteamOS only”, but a good amount of fixes to non-Valve programs are submitted “upstream” (to the original project). Due to the nature of Linux, it might be possible to copy the few non-foss components in SteamOS and directly use them in another distro.

    Alongside forced contributions due to licensing, Valve contributes a lot of code to “gaming” programs on Linux, such as Wine or DXVK. They also make some SteamOS components FOSS, including Gamescope for example. Valve is (currently) doing a lot of work “for the community” rather than for direct profit.

    Mainly their creation of Proton, and contributions to DXVK and WINE have helped Linux gaming become possible on any distro.


  • It is up to the device manufacturer. Google develops Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and the Google apps and services (Google Play Store for example). This feature (afaik) is in AOSP.

    Google developed the version in AOSP, which is open source. Device manufacturers are then able to change the code as needed. If a device manufacturer uses base AOSP with (nearly) no changes, the fix Google made will be applied when the AOSP update goes through the manufacturers build pipeline and to the device (on Google Pixel phones for example). For manufacturers that have a lot of changes compared to AOSP (Xiaomi, Samsung, and many more), they might have to create their own fix that works on their own version of Android, which takes a lot longer.

    One of the reasons people run “Custom ROMs” on their Android phone is to be responsible themselves for updates and fixes instead of the device manufacturer.




  • Most of these projects are FOSS, so you have two options. Either ask the devs for OpenBSD support (but try installing everything on OpenBSD to see what goes wrong). Or try modifying the program yourself to add OpenBSD support.

    Developers of these projects often target Linux, since it is by far the most used server kernel/OS. *BSD is not nearly as common.

    The only way to potentially change that industry wide is to have enough people stubbornly use *BSD and help implement *BSD support for Linux specific tools they use.

    Official support is often only provided with a docker setup as it standardizes bundled libraries and other needed blobs. This makes it easier to support many Linux distros.