Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster

Sep 16, 2024

This week dives into the unexpected alliance between gamers and trusted computing, where gamers, driven by their disdain for DRM, surprisingly teamed up to combat cheating. The complexities of this relationship are unraveled, highlighting the contradiction between supporting anti-cheat measures and hating DRM. Microsoft's recent shift away from certain anti-cheat technologies raises privacy concerns and challenges in user autonomy. The discussion also touches on political coalitions' fragility and how these dynamics play out in the digital age.

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Quick takeaways

Gamers, despite their aversion to digital rights management (DRM), formed an unexpected alliance with trusted computing due to their stronger disdain for cheating.

Microsoft's decision to abandon kernel-level anti-cheat measures signals a significant shift that may empower gamers to challenge oppressive digital restrictions.

Deep dives

De-Google and Upcoming Events

Efforts are being made to transition away from Google-hosted services for the podcast feed. Upcoming speaking engagements include a panel on the right to read and book censorship at the Boston Public Library and participation in the SOSS Fusion conference in Atlanta. Exciting releases are on the horizon, including two novellas from the Little Brother universe, 'Spill' and 'Vigilant', set to be published by Tor Books. Additionally, preparations for the audiobook of the third Martin Hench novel, 'Pics and Shovels', are underway, with Will Wheaton slated to read the text.

Intro

4min

The Fragility of Political Coalitions and the Rise of Privacy Concerns

3min

The Implications of Microsoft's Shift on Anti-Cheat Technology

2min

The Complex Dynamics of Gamers and Trusted Computing

9min

Apple's Repair Policies and Trust in Computing

2min

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Pluralistic.net column, “Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster” about the way that gamers were sucked into the coalition to defend trusted computing, and how the Crowdstrike disaster has seen them ejected from the coalition by Microsoft:

As a class, gamers *hate* digital rights management (DRM), the anti-copying, anti-sharing code that stops gamers from playing older games, selling or giving away games, or just *playing* games:

https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1x7qhs/why_do_you_hate_drm/

Trusted computing promised to supercharge DRM and make it orders of magnitude harder to break – a promise it delivered on. That made gamers a weird partner for the pro-trusted computing coalition.

But coalitions are weird, and coalitions that bring together diverging (and opposing) constituencies are *very* powerful (if fractious), because one member can speak to lawmakers, companies, nonprofits and groups that would normally have nothing to do with another member.

Gamers may hate DRM, but they hate *cheating* even more. As a class, gamers have an all-consuming hatred of cheats that overrides all other considerations (which is weird, because the cheats are *used* by gamers!). One thing trusted computing is pretty good at is detecting cheating. Gamers – or, more often, game *servers* – can use remote attestation to force each player’s computer to cough up a true account of its configuration, including whether there are any cheats running on the computer that would give the player an edge. By design, owners of computers can’t override trusted computing modules, which means that even if you *want* to cheat, your computer will still rat you out.

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(Image: Bernt Rostad, Elliott Brown, CC BY 2.0)