No one has mentioned the thing they’re doing right here:

This led to a shift in hiring strategy. “We had focused almost entirely on software engineering, but we had no one who actually understood this data,” he recalled. “We completely pivoted our hiring toward data scientists, and today we spend far more effort analyzing data than reverse-engineering programs.”

A huge part of the argument from us Linux users has been: These companies say a bunch of stuff, but from the words it seems pretty clear that the maths is off. It would be nice if they actually shared some of the maths, but actually having someone who studied statistics on the payroll is at least some measure of trust.

Having said that, the inflated sense of importance of these companies thinking they deserve root is pretty astonishing:

Kernel-level anti-cheat operates at the innermost layer of the operating system, allowing it to inspect the entire PC. While this offers a broad detection scope, it presents significant privacy and security concerns for users. Introducing this topic as a “controversial slide,” van Dijck acknowledged, “It is invasive, and we agree.”

However, he argued that it is an unavoidable necessity at present: “Cheat software is already doing the exact same thing, reaching the point where cheaters boot via USB drives to hijack the system before the kernel even loads.” He also noted that while Microsoft is enhancing platform security, those measures do not apply to older Windows versions used by many players.

OK, but people who aren’t cheating aren’t doing that. They have banking information on their computers. The kernel code could be exfiltrating that in the normal telemetry (which makes servers a target), or be hacking your invasive kernel module (which is a honeypot). The fact that they’re not even considering that some other game’s anti-cheat could be used as a vector for cheats is, like I said, astonishing.

The cherry on top is the admission that this highly risky kernel module is vibe coded.

He also noted that AI coding assistants influenced their approach. “Thanks to tools like Claude and Codex, solutions that used to take years can now be built in a short time,” van Dijck explained. “The barrier to building custom solutions in-house has dropped significantly.”

Just use the data scientists bro.

Cheats today aren’t like the TF2 cheats some people imagine. The way modern cheats are described is “cannot distinguish from high level play”. To use a hardware cheat as an example, you have a mouse and capture card, and connect that to a raspberry pi, put some software on the pi, then make the pi imitate a USB mouse. Then, whenever aiming near a target, have the pi “lock on” to that target (the pi uses object detection to find targets). You can also make it more or less accurate to make it less detectable. In this example, it’s literally a mouse moving around. Doing something like confirming aim on the server side doesn’t help here.

To explain a (hardware) wallhack, you can plug in a USB-C device into the PC. Now USB-C devices can also use thunderbolt, which is just PCIe, which means it has DMA access to the PC’s RAM, no OS required (the OS needs to permit the device but after “trusting” the device, the device can do whatever it wants). So, you do a similar trick. Capture card + DMA access to the PC RAM. The Pi finds the place where the game tracks objects, finds targets, and places a box around them (so you see the game from the capture card with the box over all targets, including behind walls). Now you might be saying “well the server shouldn’t send targets behind walls”, but even if the server doesn’t do that, it needs to send them a little bit before they’d be visible, and that’s enough of an edge.

Kernel hacks are basically the same thing, but without the expense. You can see a target a fraction of a second before they’re visible, and the mouse can be told to move to the target. This is the same as high level play because people can often predict where someone is going to be, and are very, very good with tracking targets, so it just looks like a good player.

Class traitor.

Yeah, setting up the Servarrs (Lidarr/Radarr/Sonarr + Prowlarr) along with your bt client, then trawling opensignups to get onto private torrent sites.