You do realise they’re trying to become the crypto WeChat?

Any evidence to support this claim?

Because I’m aware Signal introduced a beta crypto wallet 7 years ago, which was originally only available in select countries, and has had minimal resources allocated to its continued development since. They make zero mention of crypto/payment on their website, and best of all, the crypto wallet isn’t even enabled by default.

Shit app with horrible management.

And here you expose your personal emotional trauma by lashing at at the most inconsequential “nothing”: the development of a privacy preserving crypto wallet, “feature complete” half a decade ago, and disabled by default in a privacy preserving messenger.

Signal is the best free, open source, E2EE messenger that doesn’t leak metadata and has decent UX. Best of all, its completely free to use. Simplex is a good contender, but the UX is still lacking.

Its in a very alpha state, but check out Zen browser. Based on Firefox, incredibly fast and customizable. Their github page: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop

Not the same scale but Signal has a rather new approach for a messaging client. Completely free and funded by user donations - at least that’s the direction they’re trying to head as their initial seed funding starts running low. I’ve doubled my donations for Signal because I’d like to help prove that its a working model and I encourage everyone who uses it to donate, even if it’s just once. I’d love to see Firefox head in that direction where funding goes directly to the browser’s development. If I donate to Firefox today it might go to one of their dozen or so other pet projects that are unrelated to the browser. I think their side projects are great and glad they were able to do them while they had the cash, but funding is clearly drying up and they need a whole restructure to keep the browser alive.

100% agree.

If its not open source 1) you can’t fully trust/audit. and 2) you’ll be left in the dust should the company cease to exist as nobody can continue development.

If Firefox is not private enough use Librewolf. If you’re interested in something new and exciting give Zen Browser or Floorp (both based on Firefox) a spin.

First I’ve heard of browseraudit, thanks for sharing!

EDIT: For comparison I got the same scores on Firefox (duh) and the following on Edge.

Score :

• Passed : 392
• Warning : 39
• Critical : 0
• Skipped : 0

Bonus! Browserbench.org speedometer 3.0 scores:

• Firefox; version 132.0.1 (64-bit)): 13.9
• Firefox nightly; version 134.0a1): 18.6
• Zen; version 1.0.1-a.17 (Firefox 132.0)): 17.6
• Edge; version 130.0.2849.68 (Official build) (64-bit): 19.8

if it was pure theater my friends and family who pay for all their streaming services would be able to share the content without permission from Netflix, Hulu, etc. That this is not the case disproves your claim that it’s pure theater. It does exactly what it aims to do and that’s raising the barrier to entry for piracy.

It doesn’t meaningfully impact the rate of cheating at all

So EA and every other anti-cheat software is paying developers to make software that does nothing? I don’t follow.

yeah, someone dumb it down for us plebs

No, it doesn’t. Cheating is still incredibly common on games that install malware

I never claimed it’s flawless or that it works in all cases. Think of it like antivirus software. Does it catch every and any malware that has and will ever exist? No. Does it still work to minimize all kinds of “bad shit” for normal end users? Yes.

If people care enough to cheat, they will cheat whether you have kernel access or not.

Lets rephrase that: If people care enough to commit crimes, they will commit crimes whether you have cops in your city or not - Your statements logical conclusion would be to get rid of police and crime investigators. Does that sound reasonable? It shouldn’t, and it doesn’t make sense against anti-cheat software for the exact same reason.

They use it for the exact same reason they use DRM. Because they can.

They use it because it solves a real-world problem that’s unsolvable by other means. There’s no real alternative because you have to trust the end-user, who, although may not be very likely to cheat, makes it extremely easy for a bad person to spoil the fun for everyone else.

I would love to live in a fantasy world where we don’t need cops, a government, rules, regulations, and anti-cheat software, but there are bad apples that will spoil the fun for everyone.

It also can’t possibly theoretically “reduce harm” when every single installation on every individual computer is many orders of magnitude more harm than all cheating in every game ever made.

I mean “reduce harm” in the strict sense of spoiling the fun in gaming. vulnerabilities happen with all software, this isn’t unique to anti-cheat.

Client side validation cannot possibly provide any actual security

Except it already does.

but even if that wasn’t the case and it was actually flawless

Nobody is claiming its flawless. This is the same anti-seat belt, anti-air bag, anti-mask, anti-vax argument. It “DoEsn’T WoRk iN eVeRy CaSe!” - that was never the intent. It’s about harm reduction.

it would still be unconditionally unacceptable for a game to ever have kernel level access.

Anyone with a technical background would agree with you, as do I, but the reality is anti-cheat software with kernel level access already exists and it works specifically because it has kernel level access.

Right, but the server is still receiving data from the client. If the client sends a plausible head shot, even though it was actually a miss, how would the server know? You still need client-side “police”, AKA anti-cheat software to mitigate a significant type of software-based hacks.

Now that I’ve typed it out, cops are actually a great analogy to anti-cheat software. Cops play the exact same role. Nobody wants them around until a crime has been committed. Cops/anti-cheat software don’t catch everyone, but the threat of being caught mitigates some crime/hacks, and for the cases where criminals/hackers are caught, society/gamers are better off for it.

In closing ACAB - I completely understand why we don’t want anti-cheat software on our computers, but there really is no better way; or if there is, I still haven’t heard it.

If this works on Linux this is probably what I’ll switch to. I’ve played it and liked it, the pace is a bit too fast for my taste, but I can get used to it.

and if you’re technically capable, self host and share with friends/family. fuck corporate greed

fair lmfao. i’m intentionally here in attempts to out-populate the crazy

Thanks for the reminder! I’ll have to revisit. I wonder if that can be tweaked to play more like Apex.

I completely agree with you, there’s always ways to bypass the system. But at the end of the day its about raising the barrier to entry for everyone to be hacking. In the example you’re giving, someone who wants to hack the system now needs to configure to separate systems to work AND have the technical skills to set it up. Without any local anti-cheat software, all someone needs to do is run software written by one person and run by thousands.

My overall point is that the current anti-cheat systems do work, not in every case, just like spam or antivirus software, but raise the barrier to entry so that you see less hackers while gaming vs without.

Yeah it didn’t occur to me that I’d be relegated to playing with cheaters until after I posted. Best to just let the game go.

not all of us are crazy 😭

They already do this, so this doesn’t solve the problem.

Because it doesn’t have to.

But according to that article it’s still trusting the client. It’s just validating that the action was within the realm of possibilities, not that it wasn’t faked.

From the article (highlighting from me):

Here’s how it works:

• When you shoot, client sends this event to the server with full information: the exact timestamp of your shot, and the exact aim of the weapon.

The article continues to state:

The enemy may be the only one not entirely happy. If they were standing still when he got shot, it’s their fault, right? If they were moving… wow, you’re a really awesome sniper.

But what if they were in an open position, got behind a wall, and then got shot, a fraction of a second later, when they thought they were safe?

Well, that can happen. That’s the tradeoff you make. Because you shoot at him in the past, they may still be shot up to a few milliseconds after they took cover.

What’s stated above already happens in Apex, telling us that they already do everything this article is talking about. This article mentions nothing new and doesn’t solve the problem of clients sending fake data that is within the realm of possibilities - e.g. a headshot when you were actually off by a bit.