My guess is that it’s the easiest and cheapest way to set up “MFA”.

TOTP is cheaper.

SMS is actually expensive at scale. An example would be Signal, the messenger app that doesn't use SMS. They have overhead for sending backup codes/new account creation/Verification/etc... https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/ 6 million a year. API integrations for SMS messages/codes are still like 1-5 cents per message.

TOTP's requirements? A reasonably accurate clock on the server, and storing the shared secret in a database.

A Karen and a cop can’t put someone in jail. It takes a prosecutor, a judge and a jury of her peers.

This is not factual. A cop can bring anyone into jail that they have just about any made up reason to.

It takes all those extra individual to put you in prison.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/jail-vs-prison-difference

Stopping processes is actually a user space action. You can do it without admin rights btw. Even if it popped the admin screen that’s still not a kernel level action.

Absolutely not. Task management is the job of the operating system/kernel. You can request to end a job/task. The kernel will do it on it's own time. UAP prompts are attempts to elevate permissions so that you can access higher kernel calls.

https://linux-kernel-labs.github.io/refs/heads/master/lectures/syscalls.html#linux-system-calls-implementation

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/111625/how-does-linux-kill-a-process

You can make requests the to the kernel. If you have permission/ownership to the process the kernel will work through the sigterm/sigkill to meet your request. It is not a user space action at all to kill a process, you make requests to the kernel to do it. Hell in linux it's even more obvious as you can instruct the kernel on HOW you would like to kill the task and even then it may not follow your direction. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/kill.1.html with kill being a kernel tool. If you spawned the process, then you have permission/ownership to the process. But my point in the previous post was that anti-cheats can reach into the system, reading dlls and such that are absolutely NOT user space to begin with, require elevation beyond user space to install.

Yeah that it’s considered malware. I did Google it and there’s nothing saying that.

Seriously? You can't find anything? You sure about that? Cause I can literally pull up thousands of articles and forum threads by literally typing "is vanguard anti-cheat malware?" or "is easy anti-cheat malware?"

https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/288793-easy-anti-cheat-launcher-detection/

Heuristics detect these things for what they are. Anti-virus software have to whitelist them because people choose to play the games anyway.

https://www.techguy.org/threads/is-valorant-vanguard-a-malicious-rootkit-or-not.1267682/

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-controversy-over-riots-vanguard-anti-cheat-software-explained/

The name is appropriate, because Vanguard doesn't just sniff around for cheats when Valorant is running: It starts up with Windows and keeps an eye on other processes whether or not you're playing Valorant at the time. [...] Vanguard detects software with vulnerabilities which could be exploited by cheat makers, and blocks some of it.

https://www.sp-cy.com/article/is-valorants-anticheat-spyware/

Vanguard cannot be easily fully disabled since after manually quitting the process, a system reboot will be required to be able to open Valorant again.
The EULA prevents any legal recourse against Riot Games.
Valorant/Vanguard sends encrypted data to Riot. Which is Chinese owned by a giant corporation called Tencent.

Let's attack this question from another perspective. Do you trust a games developer to properly develop kernel code? Most people BARELY trust Microsoft to do it these days. And you can't review/evaluate it yourself at all. You have no fucking clue what they're doing and never will. We've seen what happens when random companies inject shit into the kernel like crowdstrike did. You think that these anti-cheat softwares are acting in your interest when they're being implemented and paid by a corporation? How can you look at these anti-cheats that have made backdoors on systems, cause people everywhere unstable kernels/BSODs, send data about your system without permission, interacts with software on your system that isn't their code, etc... and say they're not malicious?

but so far at least I’m happy with the bandwidth.

Oh for sure, it's boatloads and I love it... but I'm in the market for a /28. I want to hand them like $40 extra a month. LET ME PAY YOU QUANTUM/LUMEN/CENTURYLINK/LEVEL3. It's effectively free money as once it's setup there's nothing that changes or goes down. There's so little maintenance/upkeep cost to it that I just don't understand why they don't want to print free money.

Source for what in specific?

That stopping processes is a kernel action? Go ahead. Open powershell and ask it to close some other system process... The UAP prompt (if you're on windows, linux will just fail silently most of the time unless you sudo or are root) that shows up is the kernel validating that you even have permissions to do that. The kernel handles ALL task scheduling/management. When you close something you're asking the kernel to do it. The kernel also handles ALL file management and driver management (drivers being extensions of the kernel). So the fact that it can read other active DLLs and such hooked into other processes (say your graphics drivers) is literally proof.

That industry agrees that it's malware? Depends on which part of industry I suppose. But if it's able to do all these actions at the kernel level, and attached itself it to other software to install, often doesn't uninstall when you remove the game it was attached to, AND gets flagged by anti-viruses that don't have it whitelisted yet... It's definitionally malware. Go search for "Is malware". Very few people will argue that they're not.

Hell it's possible for anti-cheats to write to UEFI if they really wanted to. There's no legitimate reason for that level of access, 0, none.

They have kernel access... They can control anything since they're in the kernel. And yes, I've seen it.

If you remember back in the late 2000's early 2010's there were a boatload of apps that would hook into games to do things like display overlays for chats (Teamspeak for example, overwolf as another.) some kernel anti-cheats would stop those processes from starting up.

But don't take my word for it.

https://www.pcgamer.com/according-to-experts-on-kernel-level-anticheat-two-things-are-abundantly-clear-1-its-not-perfect-and-2-its-not-going-anywhere/

I'm less worried about developers abusing kernel access, and more concerned with potential vulnerabilities introduced for third-party actors to exploit. Rigney cited two examples: the infamous Extended Copy Protection (XCP) from Sony, which bad actors used to compromise affected systems, as well as a backdoor vulnerability introduced by Street Fighter 5's kernel level anticheat. In 2022, a ransomware developer also took advantage of Genshin Impact's kernel level anticheat to disable antivirus processes.

Introduces backdoors to be used by malicious actors.

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-controversy-over-riots-vanguard-anti-cheat-software-explained/

Vanguard detects software with vulnerabilities which could be exploited by cheat makers, and blocks some of it.

Blocks external softwares that it deems "vulnerable"

https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/xf1cwr/the_insanity_of_eas_anticheat_system_by_a_kernel/

This is far from the first time that boot level firmware or kernel mode code inserted via patches or drivers have been used to install spyware, but every time I see it happen I want to warn users about the consequences, and provide some information about the danger.

Kernel devs beg users to not allow this shit.

Just look it up. All sorts of articles and experts have spoken on it.

Taking kernel level actions to stop processes on YOUR machine is absolutely taking control of the system.

Kernel level anti-cheats meet every requirement. Just because you think there's gymnastics going on doesn't make it so. It's actually well established in the security field that they count.

I'm not sure that Nintendo has any pull in any Middle Eastern country or China.

But all of this is moot as the lawsuit is in the US... And Nintendo would just tell the streaming services to ban them over and over again.

that kind of threat doesn’t work when they can just tell your country to arrest you for breaking the law.

That assumes the country gives a shit. Many countries simply do not care about what Intellectual Property you "own" or created in some other country.

Malware isn’t defined by its privileges but what it does.

Correct... and anything that intercepts all system calls and forces closed applications that it deems "not safe" even if I the user specifically run it is malware. You bet your ass they feed back information to the mothership too.

And btw, if you're accepting the "Spyware" moniker from the other comment chain. Spyware is a form/category of malware.

Definition from Malwarebytes:

Hostile, intrusive, and intentionally nasty, malware seeks to invade, damage, or disable computers, computer systems, networks, tablets, and mobile devices, often by taking partial control over a device’s operations.

Hostile - it's not meant to help you at all. If you're doing something deemed "unsafe" in their eyes. They will take action up to and including stealing your money that you paid for the game. intrusive - embeds itself in the kernel Intentionally nasty - Well it's not accidentally nasty.

invade - attached to games with little to no input on what you're installing. disable computer systems - specifically the software you paid for Taking partial control over a device's operations - the whole fucking kernel.

I'd say meeting the VAST majority of the definition and at least one portion of each category is sufficient to call them all malware.

Yeah it’s so simple to just live wherever you want

It is when you hold multiple citizenships. You tend to have more options if you're considered native in multiple countries. You should have read the article.

instance owners have quite a lot more information on their user’s activities

Not really. Only thing additional that could be identified is browsing patterns while on the site itself. I don't think it's that valuable. You likely already gave up what you're likely to see by commenting in communities. That's going to be tracked best through a proxy or something, not lemmy itself. And can even be tracked externally through other means. Ex: This post has a tracking image on it and because you need to connect to me to load it I now see everyone that had loaded this comment. So this can be done externally without even being an instance owner. Click view source to see it at the end of the post.

Votes are federated, kbin instances see them as "likes" publicly. Messages are federated, sent in clear text. And posts that are loaded can be tracked via other means... Think of sites that display ads... They do this exact thing and collect information by the boatload because they can inject on every page that shows an ad. Without needing to be an admin on the site itself.

Edit: In theory someone could canvas/comment on every post with a bot and embed tracking images everywhere. Rotate usernames doing it from different servers and rotate through domains that are all cnamed back to the same tracking node and you could attack the whole fediverse with this type of tracking. Probably already being done... But it would be visible in that we have the ability to check source of each comment. But who the hell is going to take the time to do that?

Edit2: Here's example of what was collected with that embedded image. Keep in mind that this type of tracking can happen with REAL images as well, making it impossible to track. And I'm specifically not tracking much of anything. But things like IP address used to access is on the backend. There's also Browser, OS, referrers... etc...