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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2025

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  • If you want it to still be steam OS and compatible with games then you couldn’t use kernel.org kernels that’s the point.

    If a person stands to make a lot of money figuring out how to use a regular, non-anticheat kernel then they will do it. It would be a lot less difficult to do when the kernel code is open source.

    For anti-cheats, it isn’t the case, as with Windows, where you can semi-trust that the kernel isn’t lying. If an anti-cheat runs and wants to see what DMA devices are connected it uses the kernel to do that and it trusts that the kernel isn’t lying. You could trivially modify the Linux kernel’s source code to not list a specific card when asked by a kernel module.


  • He’s just being pedantic.

    Technically ‘ls’ has kernel access because it depends on system calls in order to produce its output.

    System calls are the mechanisms through which programs request services from the Linux kernel, allowing them to perform tasks like file management, process control, and device management. Any program that’s running on your machine has the access required to make syscalls and so you could say they have access to the kernel. They won’t have kernel-level privileges, so they can’t act as the kernel, but they do have access. Obviously the original user was referring to kernel anti-cheat modules which act as the kernel with all of the same privileges.


  • The language about collecting and using data have been in TOSs for basically every online service since the early '00s.

    I’m not saying that this is okay. The data that these services collect, which we’ve given them unlimited rights to, has only become more valuable and the incentives for these companies are always for them to gather more data about you.

    You can use archive.org if you want to look at older policies from the same company. But, if you pull up any other game with an online component you will see that they all are essentially “Don’t cheat our services or hide your identity, We’re going to collect your data and use it how we want, and you have to enter into binding arbitration” with various levels of detail and verbosity.













  • It is also worth nothing that no Borderlands games use anti-cheat, much less kernel anti-cheat. I’d even go as far as to say that no Gearbox, Take2 or 2k Games use kernel anti-cheat.

    This is boilerplate language for games which include an online service component. Publishers often use the same Terms of Service across all of their games, so they include language that is often irrelevant for any specific game.

    The only thing that’s different about this is that there are a bunch of bored people who consume engagement farming content, which often make outrageous claims in order to earn money from engagement farming. This “story” is not an actual story, but it is a great example of how a mob can be summoned with some creative writing and a credulous audience.