Hell yeah let’s BACKDOOR ALL USERS to accommodate a single PRIVATE CORPORATION HELL YEAH
I understand why this might appeal to some gamers, I really do. I promise I sympathize, but if you’re willing to run EAC on your Linux install it’s worth asking why you’re running Linux and what you think you’re getting out of it?
At this point we’re starting to see some better gaming performance due to good compatibility layers and Microsoft just repeatedly shooting themselves in the dick, but for me at least a large part of it was escaping that ecosystem that gives them control over your system. Giving them that kernel level access so you can keep playing Fortnite is a devil’s bargain. Seriously, please find a new game and I’m trying to convey that in the least judgmental way possible.
I don’t play EAC games, so I don’t really have a stake in this.
There are plenty of reasons to run Linux apart from “I want complete and utter freedom” or something like that.
I would gently remind you that we have been giving kernel-level access to e.g. Nvidia for decades too.
It’s a trade-off, and there are still plenty of actual day-to-day practical benefits of running Linux beyond philosophy.
Valid points, I type from a laptop running proprietary drivers. But I do argue there’s a difference worth considering what Nvidia might be doing with those closed drivers (something that does increasingly worry me given the current state of things) vs. the much more clear intent of what Secure Boot and TPM implementations are outright stating they intend. These are documented DRM applications with direct control over your system, mostly right of denial, over what software you can or can’t run depending on the state it’s in and what they think about it.
It’s not a zero sum game, every choice matters and comes with its own weight. I understand making these philosophical arguments is difficult and tedious, but if you don’t at least make them, there are a lot of people who aren’t ever going to hear them. EAC is the wide open door to demanding you run services, telemetry, and online accounts on your Linux system enshittifying that, too.
This isn’t putting anything sleazy in your kernel. Please take a look at my reply to another comment.
I read your comment and I’m familiar with the technology. I’m not insinuating they’re putting anything sleazy in the kernel, in fact I acknowledge there are practical security benefits to it. That’s where a lot of the nuance comes in.
Secure Boot and the TPM help verify the boot process and that it hasn’t been tampered with. I keep mentioning TPM as well because it’s part of the mechanisms already in place with CoD[1], it has remote attestation[2], and has been pitched as a DRM mechanism since at least 2009[3]. This makes a lot more sense in a corporate/enterprise environment where you’re either using a company issued laptop or your BYOD device needs to prove it’s up to a standard worthy of trust to connect and interact with network resources. In this scenario the company has created a secure platform and your device needs to be trusted within it.
But on a consumer level, while you can still argue there’s protection from tampering by malicious parties with the boot process, you have to ask yourself what platform you’re participating in and why. This is the equivalent of allowing the cops to put a camera in your house on the grounds that if everyone is watched it’ll reduce crime. Microsoft (or whatever game developer) wants to know your device can be trusted on their platform and you need to submit to whatever those standards are. Allowing EAC is opening the door to that process. If Microsoft sniffs something out on your PC they don’t like, they can decline to run the software. It gives them right of denial over what your system looks like. They can enforce you to run telemetry scraping services as part of the configuration that must be in place to trust your device.
So while I don’t have any proof that this is being used quite in that manner yet, or even what it might eventually look like, it is well within possibility. And we know the tech industry absolutely has an appetite for it. This is the Sony rootkit scandal from 2005 except now they just tell you they’re doing it instead of trying to hide the fact.
You’re free to make of that information what you will and evaluate how much of a likely threat you perceive any of that to be and if it’s worth the tradeoff. And sorry about the people downvoting you, I’m just trying to get this information out there. It’s complicated and nuanced, I get it.
Thanks.
I couldn’t care less about the downvotes, just like you I’m just interested in having a good conversation and sharing accurate information. So thank you for providing it!
You’re right about all of that. Especially the takeaway that it’s nuanced. Yeah, it really is.
I think what most people, including you, are reacting to is who is doing this rather than what is being done. And rightly so. I don’t want to trust Epic (or Mic🤮soft) with this kind of thing. But anti-cheat is nuanced, and I think I can persuade you (if you don’t agree already) that some kind of anti-cheat that actually works to some extent is needed.
You brought up:
… you have to ask yourself what platform you’re participating in and why.
I think the answer is pretty obvious here. The platform is an online game. Let’s say Fortnite just because it’s the obvious example to use (personally I’ve never played it). The reason you want to participate is for fun, for competition (maybe even professional), or both.
One thing is very clear: if other people playing Fortnite are cheating when playing with you, it prevents you from having fun or winning the competition. Unless you are a cheater yourself, you only want to play with non-cheaters.
So obviously you want there to be some way you can play Fortnite with some level of guarantee that other players aren’t cheating.
So let’s say you, the player, get to decide how this is enforced. The stipulation is that every player including you will be subject to the same level of enforcement, and any player that isn’t will be locked out of the platform. How do you do it?
You and every player will have to somehow credibly convince the game that you’re not cheating. The only way to do that is to reveal some information about the system running the game. The TPM and all those other technologies that you seem to understand much better than I do, are the way to do that credibly. The only question left, then, is which information (or “how much”) would actually be sent to the server to provide this proof.
That’s the trade-off. I agree with you that these companies will almost inevitably exploit this system to extract data about you that has nothing to do with cheating. If not at first, then soon afterwards. And that’s an endless battle that we’ll continue to fight. But it’s also besides the fundamental point.
Cheating in online games is a real problem that actually needs solutions. I think the framework presented by EAC v2 is a good one, and can be used to enforce anti-cheat on Linux without spying on you in any other way. That, I think, is a good thing.
What would be best, of course, is if a more trustworthy organization made a similar anti-cheat solution following EAC v2’s footsteps.
This seems worse than just dual booting Windows, which you’d end up having to dual boot Linux if the reason you got into Linux was to get away from sketchy permissions.
I don’t like the normalization of this type of anticheat for Linux, and if other games adopt this it seems like this would lead to a worse situation than having games not support Linux if more Linux games start adopting this EACv2 requirement.
This isn’t putting anything sleazy in your kernel. Please take a look at my reply to another comment.
Even assuming what you said is right: fucking link the other comment, no one is gonna hunt another random comment that we don’t even know it’s right
I didn’t because linking to a post or comment on Lemmy (or the fediverse at large) is awful. Does this work? https://vger.to/discuss.tchncs.de/comment/29001869
I suggest to disable the voyager redirect in the settings, idk where it is tho
The alternative is to link to a specific instance. In which case if you open it you’ll be logged out.
The alternative seems better, especially because some clients just point at the comment regardless of the instance
These are the options for sharing in voyager
Voyager: https://vger.to/lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/28868556
Threadiverse: https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/28868556
Home instance (different for each user): https://aussie.zone/comment/25675833
Lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/comment/26557830
Lemmy.dbzero: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/28868556
All of these work in my Voyager app. But I’ve had links to other instances not work and takes me to Firefox
Settings > general > share links (near the bottom)
Hmmm… do I want to run unverified code in my kernel from the “Programming is too hard!” guys?
That’s not what this is doing. From my understanding, the kernel doesn’t include any new code made by Epic. It just needs to support Secure Boot and a bunch of other requirements, all of which are already possible with existing Linux solutions.
The anti-cheat wants to verify that you haven’t fucked with your system, there are ways to do that and EAC requires that your setup can credibly after attest to it.
Video going over the requirements (with timestamp): https://youtu.be/3Xi7m0CYk5s?t=7m39s
Source: https://onlineservices.epicgames.com/news/introducing-easy-anti-cheat-linux-v2
On Windows, we rely heavily on a kernel driver to protect the games. This driver isn’t always on, it starts when a game is launched and stops when the player exits. For EAC Linux v2 we will not leverage an equivalent kernel module, and instead we’ll take full advantage of existing Linux platform security features like measured boot, the kernel lockdown LSM, and IOMMU support, plus our own eBPF logic to maintain integrity and detect cheaters. These security features are not available on every distro and may require configuration changes to activate.
I agree with your sentiment though. But somehow, against all odds, the “programming is too hard” people landed on a solution that sounds pretty good to me.
The problem is not the high-level solution. If the anti-cheat does what they claim – great.
If.
The problem is that EACv2 itself is unverified machine code running with elevated privileges. Unless the source code is released, it will be impossible to know what kinds of shenanigans it engages in. It demands that users trust it implicitly, along with the people and clankers that wrote it, the mistakes they made, and the people and interests they are beholden to.
Trust should be earned, and the fact that people have been indoctrinated to give it away freely should be deeply concerning to everyone.
If you wanted to test it, you could try sandboxing it to run as an unprivileged user with access to nothing else on the operating system. They claim it will run without needing sudo or root.
I’m not gonna test it though. I’m not willing to use a distro that doesn’t let me compile and install my own kernel modules.
[edit] I read a bit more, looks like they are allowing unprivileged code into the kernel. That’s apparently what eBPF does.
Stay far away from this project.
what eBPF does
Holy shit, that’s like
curl | sudo bashon steroids. Fucking hilarious.
I don’t care how good the solution is, I’m not having my shit get attested for no good reason. If needed I’ll just wait for a game to get cracked. I’m not installing any anti-cheat enabling bullshit.
Someone on reddit wondered if this is the embrace phase of embrace, extend, extinguish.
This is what most people arguing in favor of this don’t get. This changes the entire ecosystem via some kind of peer-pressure once more and more game developers implement EACv2 (from the side of both developers as well as players). And other AC vendors like BattlEye will likely also follow suit. Imagine letting Tim into your kernel… I’m not even letting Gabe into my kernel.
Also RIP custom kernel modifications/tweaks for the sake of performance or new features if you want to play any future game which will implement EACv2. Also RIP applying in-development or bugfix patches, especially AMDGPU ones. And RIP OOT modules for niche hardware that’s not packaged by the distro.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1xgm7qi/comment/19rq81f8dnsyt/?context=3
eBPF does run in kernel mode.
Maybe better than a module, but I wouldn’t say “the kernel doesn’t include any new code”
It’s also why they have to use “integrity” mode of kernel lockdown
If they used “confidentiality” mode, their eBPF code would be untrusted by the kernel and couldn’t be loaded
you still shouldn’t use it and support these asshats. i don’t care if this one thing is good by chance. that’s a single living tree in a forest of rot
No.
We need to keep boycotting Epic Games.
Epic Pinball and Jazz Jackrabbit were pretty good tho…
https://www.dosbox.com/index.php
There are various forks if you want more functionality. Or 86Box if you want more compatibility.
Dosbox has been amazing for ages now. I’ve heard of 86box but never had a need to check it out.
86Box is only needed when you need to emulate a whole PC, or some 86Box specific hardware (OPL4 sound cards, Awe32, etc.).
But didn’t Exact Audio Copy stop at v1.8?
Really? Even Microsoft is working to get this crap out of the kernel…
EAC v2 is technically not in the kernel, it uses existing Linux security features to get the same level of control over your computer AFAIK. Which is probably what Microsoft is aiming for too
Congrats CachyOS. Now you get to wait for Epic to approve any new release or risk losing all your users who will come to depend on EAC.
