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"it is" settings
You know software with more access than I have is quality when even the error messages have typos. Fuck that, I'm not installing malware to play any videogame...
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I can barely trust security companies to not screw up, let alone a game company running something at kernel level
Yep, every day "security solution Y had/has critical vulnerability". And every second day "no patches yet".
Goddamnit, I sort of kind of predicted this would eventually happen with Kernel level ACs... about 24 hrs before this started happening.
Now, I was describing it in a context of someone trying to run like an extra Kernel level AC over a game that had a non Kernel AC... to make it 'more secure'...
But yeah, this is pretty much back to the olds days of McAffee and Norton fighting each other and identifying each other as malware, when they're both installed at the same time and always running.
Awesome.
My experience with BF6.
Open beta required to watch twitch for 30 minutes to get a key to get early access. Got key, doesn't work, says it's invalid. Load up game, can't play because it's only early access beta and locked. Try again the next day, now the game won't even start up saying secure boot must be enabled. Check bios, secure boot is enabled. Guess I can't play BF6?
Article lost me at "The Girlies Are Fighting..."
Was this written by a sad puppy?
:gong_show_gong.gif:
[deleted]
Do you lock your door at night?
No, I rely on a bro from Riot Games to come round and lock me in, so they can be sure I won't go out at night and commit crimes.
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Why are you booing him? He's right. I haven't played battlefield since battlefield 2. Every time I've installed the sequels it's filled with cheaters invisible running around in the sky at hyperspeed with rocketlaunchers and headshots fuck all that. I liked battlefield. If you tell me that all I need to do to negate the security concern of the kernel level anticheat is to run the dualboot windows partition im already running for games, why the fuck wouldn't I be satisfied with a kernel level anticheat if its keeping invisible skygods out of my team shooter?
I care about privacy but this guy says its a non-issue if you do a very small amount of work i've already done. Downvotes don't explain how he's wrong, and it makes intuitive sense that installing a kernel level anticheat would only affect the windows kernel it was installed on not the linux kernel on the other drive partition. like, i've got my graphene pixel phone i got on sale for privacy, and i've got a shitty little 'burner' phone for like banking apps and google maps. how is this significantly different? why can't I have my cake and eat it too? What's the point of cake if I can't eat it?
Running around in the sky at hyperspeed is a fine example of the kind of cheating that can easily be prevented server side and would be impossible if your game was designed correctly.
Personally I have no interest in keeping a Windows system around at all, so anything that relies on its kernel internals is never going to be useful for people like me. But that's not the only problem with "kernel level" anticheat. Many people who are willing to run actual Windows do so because they find it useful for more than playing just one game, and do not want its security and integrity compromised in order to temporarily slow down the cheaters for one lazy game dev who can't be bothered to find better ways.
Games have no business messing around with the OS kernel. For people who know things about computers, it just feels wrong — in much the same way as forcibly locking everyone inside at night in order to prevent nocturnal burglaries would be wrong, even if it was completely effective.
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It's a big complicated topic. Here's one link to help you get started if you actually want to learn about it: https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~cslui/PUBLICATION/detect_cheat.pdf
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There are many possible approaches, depending on the specifics of the game and the level of effort one's willing to put into it. Plenty of techniques to choose from. Messing with the client-side OS kernel is one that will soon be looked back on as a ridiculous dead-end approach that wasted a lot of people's time until we all realized it was futile, sort of like the way they used to use deliberate sector misalignments to produce disk i/o errors to prevent people copying floppy disks.
Who's "this guy" that says privacy is a "non-issue"? A kernel level anti-cheat has basically any possible permission on your computer. Even if you trust the game dev or publisher to not do anything other than trying to catch cheaters (you shouldn't), you are not safe from a vulnerability in said anti-cheat that could be exploited by malicious actors.
Also, kernel level anti-cheat is far from being a silver bullet. You can use an hypervisor, that runs even higher in the chain than the anti-cheat. There are DMA cards that allow you to read game memory from outside your system. You can use a secondary computer, with a capture card, that will use computer vision to cheat.
Those options are harder to implement, but far from impossible, and are already being sold.
All of this to say, as others have said, that the only true way to fight cheating is by implementing the anti-cheat server side.
it was the guy i was responding to directly who said it and it doesnt matter who said it, its true or not. the general thrust tho is something like, whats the privacy concern at all if im running a dedicated gaming partition? suppose i do trust ea well enough to give them blanket lermission on my win10 partition. what could they do with it if my linux partition is separated? what am i actually risking? they could run a botnet ig? i feel like anything they could try to do would automatically be under prohibitively intense scrutiny. not that i trust ea, im just ignorant and u seem like u wanna actually correct me instead of telling me im stupid with a downvote. i may be stupid but i try to get better.
So yeah, as you said if you dual boot your non gaming OS will stay untouched, outside of the anti-cheat's influence, so you don't risk much this way. I'd imagine that you would still use your credit card on your gaming OS to buy games, so that particular information stays at risk.
Yes, of course they will be under some scrutiny, but I'd prefer if they just didn't do it. Your use case is very far from applying to the majority of users who simply run Windows for everything they do.
And there's still the danger of vulnerabilities in the anti-cheat. For exemple, last year, this happened. It's not exactly the same as the anti-cheat but the tech is close enough. The TL;DR is that CrowdStrike has a platform that runs at kernel level, and an update to the tool had a bug which prevented Windows from booting, instead crashing to a BSOD. Now, CrowdStrike is a security company, and a generally well regarded one at that. It doesn't prevent them from making mistakes. So how can you trust that anti-cheat to be without vulnerability? You simply cannot.
If you tell me that all I need to do to negate the security concern of the kernel level anticheat is to run the dualboot windows partition...
...it makes intuitive sense that installing a kernel level anticheat would only affect the windows kernel it was installed on not the linux kernel on the other drive partition.
The intuition is incorrect as the kernel-level anticheats are not necessarily trusted. Operating systems interact with low-level hardware and firmware on the system. As such, it is not self-contained.
There exists both UEFI bootkits and firmware implants. Its intuitive if you understand it like this: if there exists a communication pathway from (A) lower-privilege code -> (B) higher-privilege code, there exists the potential for vulnerabilities.
This is due to (A) now having an effect on the code execution for (B).
Bootlicker spotted.
First, kernel level anti cheat is more akin to a business owner installing very invasive cameras, on your person, and they watch every little thing you do, including going to the bathroom. If they see something they don't like, you gtfo of their store. Don't know about you, but I wouldn't willingly agree to go into a store like that.
Second, in a game like battlefield... Who cares if someone is cheating? It's not a competitive shooter like CS or Valorant. If someone is cheating, change servers...
If you really care about cheating that much, get a console. Stop giving these companies the okay to install rootkits on your PC.
First up you're comparing two completely different scales of bad things happening. If someone cheats in a game it doesn't really meaningfully affect anyone, having your house broken into is a direct threat on your property. Locking a door has minimal downsides but allowing someone who can be trusted less than most corporations to have root access to your entire computer has a pile of risks and opens doors for worse. If anticheat is just to deter cheating then there's no justification to have more access. If you can't handle maybe having a match ruined then you shouldn't be playing online games.
Do you lock your door at night? Why? Anyone could just use a fireman's axe and open it. Or they could just drive through your living room and steal everything.
For kernel-level anti-cheats its quite simple. Those in opposition to kernel-level anti-cheats likely view locking a door as a small task with minimal downsides, which could reasonably deter an opportunistic criminal, or buy you time to escape with your life or call the police.
They also likely view kernel-level anti-cheats as, for the benefits they provide, having too large of downsides. (providing a third-party company kernel-level access via a closed-source program)
If you're concerned about privacy just dual boot windows in a separate SSD to play games and use Linux and Graphene OS.
In another thread in this comment section I mention UEFI rootkits and firmware implants (kernel-level access is strong starting point for this). Your solutions do not address these issues, which could be important to someone. (Depending on their threat-model)
The headline makes it sound worse than it is.
From the article:
Riot head of anti-cheat Phillip Koskinas cleared up the misunderstanding in an X post earlier this week.
"Vanguard is compatible with Javelin, and you don't need to uninstall one anti-cheat to use the other. However, BF6 does not currently allow the VALORANT client to be running simultaneously, because both drivers race to protect regions of game memory with the same technique."
So, you can play play BF6 and VALORANT at the same time... not exactly a massive issues unless you're running a mainframe, I guess?
People running BF6 have been getting error messages that seem to tell them they need to entirely uninstall Valorant.
Why did you link an article that you haven’t read?
From your article:
AnAveragePlayer tried to run both games simultaneously on his PC, which led to the problems. This is generally not a particularly good idea, as both programs compete for the available hardware.
The problem can be easily solved by not trying to play two games at the same time. Which is actually impossible with two fast-paced first-person shooters.
I did read it.
The point of posting it was to provide further context to evidence my claim, that users are getting errors that tell them to uninstall Valorant.
Yep, its also true that this happens when you have both games or their launchers running simultaneously, and this can seemingly be solved by not doing that.
Still, a poorly worded error code often causes great confusion... as ... evidenced by this entire situation.
Both the OP and the article are both about a Reddit post by one user who got a weird error when trying to run both games at the same time.
Then the lead developer at Riot responded on X explaining that the error was caused by running both clients at the same time.
That’s the entire story.
There’s nothing presented, in either article, that suggests that it is a widespread problem.
Just because the clickbait press is reporting the same story with different headlines doesn’t mean it is a widespread problem. They’re both writing about the same Reddit post and the same X reply.
It’s a non story
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Stop believing everything I read on the internet. Okay I don't believe this comment I read on the internet...
Try reading the articles, not the headline.
I don't believe this comment since I read it on the internet.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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