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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • It’s an arms race, the arms just keep moving deeper into the stack system. Used to happen entirely in usermode, one process poking in and reading/writing memory of the game, so anti-cheat started keeping an eye out for malicious processes. Then at some point someone patched their kernel to cheat in a way the game couldn’t possibly detect from usermode, so someone made an anti-cheat that ran at the kernel level too.

    Modern KLA is basically a fully fledged rootkit, living in your system from boot, doing absolutely anything they can to try and make sure nothing has been tampered with. Validating signatures on bins, hooking memory mappings, watching for anything that might try to read/write the kernel or game’s memory space unexpectedly.


  • Casuals stop playing games when cheaters prevent them having fun, and it’s the casuals they need to keep happy to keep their game alive.

    IMO the answer is to internally maintain a “fun to play with” metric. It would be specific to the game, but each player’s actions and interactions with other players would be evaluated to determine how “fun” they are to play with (might need to be multidimensional, since different players like having different types of interactions). It doesn’t matter if they’re cheating, or if they’re just really good, or if they use cheesy strategies, etc, if the person isn’t fun to play with, then match them with other people who are similarly unfun to play with.

    This would cover your point that, if there’s a cheater in the lobby, and their behavior somehow makes everyone have more fun, then who cares?


  • We have memory security, virtualization and antitampering features

    As someone who games entirely on Linux and wants multiplayer to work out, the features you’re referring to are for keeping the application contained by the kernel, not the other way around. On a system where the user has full autonomy, no application should be able to know what is going on outside of its user space, and I don’t want it to.

    It’d be nice if it was a solved problem, but it’s not. From consoles to phones to windows, currently the industry relies on you not having autonomy over your device for anti-cheat to work. Every other solution is either expensive (obfuscation arms race), or untenable (real time, high resolution server side validation of every property of every player).





  • Merging the space after your Data partition is easy. Merging the space before it is slightly less trivial, but doable. GParted is your friend. It has the ability to grow an NTFS to the right, as well as slide it to the left. The slide is copying everything over though, so it will take time.

    (Note that if you are mounting Data in your fstab using the string /dev/sda4 and you delete the partitions before it, you will likely need to update your fstab.)

    Personally, I don’t think you need to go as far as unhooking your Linux disk and live booting, but I understand being unsure about it. If any data on these drives is your only copy, that’s your first mistake. Back up your data elsewhere (rule of 3, ideally). Then just use gparted carefully.

    Afterwards, you’ll need to regenerate grub to get the extra boot options to go away. Should be straight forward on mint.

    It’s gonna feels so good deleting all those nonsense windows partitions.

    Edit: I glossed right over your links to your updates saying you had already done all of this lol. GG glad it went smooth for you! Also, I am surprised canceling the NTFS slide mid-copy didn’t break anything lol. You might want to back that up and format the whole drive just to be safe. Never know when you’ll find the files that were corrupted by that…maybe run an fsck on it.



  • I have a friend who was trying out endeavor with kde. He uses a trackball mouse, and configuring the acceleration curve has been a nightmare for him. Apparently it’s the wayland compositor’s job to expose the ability to configure libinput, and only certain ones do it (KDE being one of them), but configuration isn’t as straight forward as in windows.

    He was more able to configure it when using X11, but kept hitting a bug when using a custom acceleration curve where the cursor would shoot to the top left of the screen (I think it triggered when moving the cursor while clicking).

    I haven’t looked into it much myself, but it sounds like it has been one of those unfortunate sticking points for him right out of the gate.