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charcircuityesterday at 5:30 AM4 repliesview on HN

Do you consider being banned in a video game because of hacking to be an example of something killing computing freedom?

The user still maintains all the freedom of doing whatever computing they want on their own machine, but if they want to play with others who don't want to play with cheaters then they have to use the official client.

For people who want a high degree of freedom and be able to access as many digital services as possible I foresee such people using a hypervisor that runs both a provable secure OS and another OS that is as free as they want.


Replies

franga2000yesterday at 6:08 AM

How about being banned from online banking, government services and all social networking / communication platforms? Because that's the road we're already heading down.

What makes you think they will give us this magical hypervisor capability? It's more effort, increases the chances someone finds a bypass and takes power away from the incumbent online platforms. It's so much easier to just prevent it all. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is the amount of devices without this ability in circulation. But that number is shrinking rapidly.

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xeyowntyesterday at 5:41 AM

I think you got it reverse.

Gaming and such are dedicated services. Fine if people agree to pay premium to have the required platform / console / etc.

General services such as communications / banking must be free, and must not require trusted hardware on the end point. The services must be designed to be secure even in the case of compromised end points. But that's against the current trend where all banks are trying to push all the responsibility on the end user because they want to reduce their costs. There are plenty of solutions but they don't go for it because it's not in their interest and they want to squeeze out any little penny of infrastructure cost.

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matheusmoreirayesterday at 5:38 AM

> Do you consider being banned in a video game because of hacking to be an example of something killing computing freedom?

No. It's the constant attempts to invade our computers and "prevent" the unwanted behavior that are problematic. See kernel level anticheat nonsense. They want to own our computers.

> if they want to play with others who don't want to play with cheaters then they have to use the official client

They should be able to play with whatever client they want. It's their computer, it should run whatever software they want.

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greybcgyesterday at 5:57 AM

We had fun in online games without kernel level nonsense. Why do I need to compromise my hardware when the problem is an outlier in the social graph? Anticheat is part an arms race and part just raising the bar so people cant cheat too easily. That said you can feed a video feed into a Kria K26 or even a pi or jetson and make automatic targeting completely transparant to the kernel. Then what? Hardware attestation in peripherals?

How do old boomershooter communities tackle cheaters? When and why do methods that work on a social graph fail or necessitate anticheat? I agree on the hypervisor part. Putting different applications in microvms would be good for isolation.

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