The Windows OS Thread - Formerly THE OS for gamers and normies, now sadly ruined by Pajeets

[Slav Power]

Does anyone else have games that use kernal level anticheat, alot of youtube fags say you should not play those games becaues the anti-cheat operates at the highest security level on your computer but I don't know if its just paranoia.

I don't, but that's basically what kernel level anti-cheats are. They have access to absolutely every single bit of resource in your computer (ring 0) to make sure you're not doing anything naughty, and IIRC some of them run constantly in the background even if you're not playing any games that require them. Remember that they are closed source, and due to them operating in ring 0 they 100% have countermeasures that are meant to prevent you from checking what they're doing so that they can't be circumvented by cheaters, so you're willingly installing a spyware rootkit just to play some gacha garbage. If you're wondering why people say Valve Anti-Cheat is so ass, it's because it's way less intrusive than something like Easy Anti-Cheat, which means it's way easier to circumvent and is less effective, but at the same time CS:GO has proven that Trust Factor was more effective at avoiding cheaters, so much so that people howled at Valve to add it back when CS2 released.

Fun fact: cheaters have moved onto dedicated hardware cheats which cannot be detected by kernel level anti-cheats. So at this rate you'd need to purchase certified locked down hardware from game publishers that prevents those just so that people wouldn't cheat. That's the level of cat and mice retardation these anti-cheats are at, so it's safe to say that any games that use kernel level anti-cheat are fucking worthless.

 

[Overly Serious]

Possibly cultural sensitivity, some cultures read right-to-left and having it in the centre might have issues with usability. Remember when Microsoft had to remove the time-zone picker from later builds of Windows 95 because India threw a bitchfit over it.

Ah-ha-ha-ha!

 

[Max Weber]

Does anyone else have games that use kernal level anticheat, alot of youtube fags say you should not play those games becaues the anti-cheat operates at the highest security level on your computer but I don't know if its just paranoia.

A lot of online games have those. The likes of Easy Anti-Cheat, BattleEye, Riot's Vanguard, etc. are kernel-level. And yeah, kernel-level literally means it operates at ring 0 privileges, having full access to the entire system. The idea is that the AC monitors your RAM while you're in-game to detect access to the game's memory or other patterns that would indicate cheating. In theory, though, with privileges like that, they could do anything. Or, if they happen to be compromised, they become an attack vector. Funny thing, their introduction just created an arms race where cheaters move on to create ways to bypass it (up to and including modifying hardware), while the rest of players have to live with a potential rootkit on their system.

 

[ditto]

One of my friends was still running Vista around the time 8 got released, it was more secure according to him. I'm pretty sure it was just UAC defaults being more intrusive.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but Vista was actually pretty good, it was the hardware of the era that wasn't good enough to support it. It wasn't until the Core 2 series that it was really usable. Ironically it was the same problem that NT 3.1 had over a decade earlier.

 

[Overly Serious]

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but Vista was actually pretty good, it was the hardware of the era that wasn't good enough to support it. It wasn't until the Core 2 series that it was really usable. Ironically it was the same problem that NT 3.1 had over a decade earlier.

You go too far!

Vista was when they fixed the security model of Windows and was the first step towards Windows becoming a decent OS, imo. But on release it was a mess for a couple of reasons. Yes, one of those reasons was because MS bowed to vendor pressure and allowed hardware which wasn't good enough to get the precious "Designed for Windows Vista" sticker. But it also was released in a pretty shaky form. Like Windows XP it wasn't until a giant service pack (SP2 for XP) came out that a host of issues were fixed. If you're talking what Vista ended up as, then yes, it was decent. The best Windows so far for those of us that cared about security. But Windows Vista done right was Windows 7, imo.

But YMMV.

 

[StacticShock]

You go too far!

not at all, it took apple 18 years to port the SVPREME VISTA AREO THEME into their shitty iOS.

 

[Miller]

Does anyone else have games that use kernal level anticheat, alot of youtube fags say you should not play those games becaues the anti-cheat operates at the highest security level on your computer but I don't know if its just paranoia.

Kernel-level anti-cheats are a joke. They don't stop cheaters.
I used to have BF2042, I uninstalled it after a recent patch requiring TPM 2.0 enabled on top of their kernel-level anti-cheat.

Easy Anti-Cheat, BattleEye

Easy AC and Battle Eye don't require kernel access.

 

[Betonhaus]

I don't, but that's basically what kernel level anti-cheats are. They have access to absolutely every single bit of resource in your computer (ring 0) to make sure you're not doing anything naughty, and IIRC some of them run constantly in the background even if you're not playing any games that require them. Remember that they are closed source, and due to them operating in ring 0 they 100% have countermeasures that are meant to prevent you from checking what they're doing so that they can't be circumvented by cheaters, so you're willingly installing a spyware rootkit just to play some gacha garbage. If you're wondering why people say Valve Anti-Cheat is so ass, it's because it's way less intrusive than something like Easy Anti-Cheat, which means it's way easier to circumvent and is less effective, but at the same time CS:GO has proven that Trust Factor was more effective at avoiding cheaters, so much so that people howled at Valve to add it back when CS2 released.

Fun fact: cheaters have moved onto dedicated hardware cheats which cannot be detected by kernel level anti-cheats. So at this rate you'd need to purchase certified locked down hardware from game publishers that prevents those just so that people wouldn't cheat. That's the level of cat and mice retardation these anti-cheats are at, so it's safe to say that any games that use kernel level anti-cheat are fucking worthless.

I wonder if the end game is that you basically have a m.2 drive on the back of your GPU that you install encrypted games to directly and play off it that way. Benefit is that the games would be OS agnostic and would run under any OS as long as the DRM handshake is working.

 

[Max Weber]

Easy AC and Battle Eye don't require kernel access.

EAC: See the screenshot in my post. Or just check the Steam page for Apex Legends.
BE: Same, but with Arma 3

 

[Miller]

EAC: See the screenshot in my post. Or just check the Steam page for Apex Legends.
BE: Same, but with Arma 3 View attachment 7643218

Easy AC is not kernel-level though, I play several games on Linux that have EAC and the games work fine.
Didn't Apex abandon BattlEye in favor of Electronic Arts' own kernel anti-cheat like BF2042?

 

[StacticShock]

EAC: See the screenshot in my post. Or just check the Steam page for Apex Legends.
BE: Same, but with Arma 3

BattlEye is shit, same as punkbuster and you need to do a manual cleanup after you uninstall it, it's entirely different from BF2042 or riot games chink spyware they call anticheat.
if you game might as well leave it in your pc, just do a clean install anyway if you want to move over to a new drive.

 

[Croak & Caw]

Windows 10 end of support.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support

I don't like change.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

Windows 10 end of support.

The LTSC Gaming thread has a few things to keep W10 going, if you want to give your info to MS, actual support ends in 2026-2028.

 

[Slav Power]

if you want to give your info to MS

Or just use Microsoft Activation Scripts. Can also be used to switch from 22H2 GAC to 21H2 LTSC. I did the latter.

 

[George Lucas]

Does anyone else have games that use kernal level anticheat, alot of youtube fags say you should not play those games becaues the anti-cheat operates at the highest security level on your computer but I don't know if its just paranoia.

I have two separate computers for gaming and life. They don’t share files and nothing sensitive goes on the gaming computer.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Does anyone else have games that use kernal level anticheat, alot of youtube fags say you should not play those games becaues the anti-cheat operates at the highest security level on your computer but I don't know if its just paranoia.

Kernel-level anti-cheats are a joke. They don't stop cheaters.
I used to have BF2042, I uninstalled it after a recent patch requiring TPM 2.0 enabled on top of their kernel-level anti-cheat.

Another example of a joke anti-cheat is SARD, which is used by mostly dead Korean games and Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown. It caused some of the very few players still playing TDUSC issues to the point that they had to disable it part way into Season 3, but it will be added back in Season 4.

 

[Civillian 18]

There are instances where the kernel level anti-cheat had been used as a vector to get around antivirus software installed on the target PC.
pcgamer slop article - hoyoverse (they mention that you do not even need the game installed apparently?)
more in depth artice - same hoyoverse driver I think
I am not super aware/up to date on kernel level anti-cheat, I do not play games that require it (not on some kind of principle or anything, I just seem to have not played any yet)

 

[the rat]

The people you really want to blame is Microsoft for signing these fucking kernel drivers.

 

[KYSing myself brb]

There are instances where the kernel level anti-cheat had been used as a vector to get around antivirus software installed on the target PC.

You're right on that, however, the thing is that I don't want kernel level anti-cheat on a principle level, so it doesn't matter whether it has been used practically for any attack, the fact that it could be used is already bad enough. Similar to how nobody actually got pwned through the Intel Management Engine, the very fact that there is a big part of the CPU that can be used maliciously against you, is already bad enough. Don't get me wrong, you're right in pointing out that those anti-cheat systems are dangerous, my point is that nobody should want them in his PC on a principle level.

 

[Fcret]

Does anyone else have games that use kernal level anticheat, alot of youtube fags say you should not play those games becaues the anti-cheat operates at the highest security level on your computer but I don't know if its just paranoia.

The issue is not really the anticheat itself in the sense of Epic/Valve/Mihoyo spying on you. It's more that kernel level anticheat is a RING 0 DRIVER that TALKS TO SHIT ON THE BAREBACK INTERNET. So it's very often a target for malicious actors who, if they find an exploit in it, can basically get total control of your system remotely.

Anyway, you shouldn't play those games because they're slop. The anticheat is a good secondary reason but not one of these modern games with anticheat is worth playing.