Vanguard, the controversial anti-cheat software initially attached to Valorant, is now also coming to League of Legends.
Summary:
The article discusses Riot Games’ requirement for players to install their Vanguard anti-cheat software, which runs at the kernel level, in order to play their games such as League of Legends and Valorant. The software aims to combat cheating by scanning for known vulnerabilities and blocking them, as well as monitoring for suspicious activity while the game is being played. However, the use of kernel-level software raises concerns about privacy and security, as it grants the company complete access to users’ devices.
The article highlights that Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that has been involved in censorship and surveillance activities in China. This raises concerns that Vanguard could potentially be used for similar purposes, such as monitoring players’ activity and restricting free speech in-game.
Ultimately, the decision to install Vanguard rests with players, but the article urges caution and encourages players to consider the potential risks and implications before doing so.
If you ask me, it’s best to treat any program requiring kernel level access that isn’t part of your base operating system or something you created and have full control over as malware. All it takes is one exploit or something of similar nature and some bad actors taking advantage of it before it can be patched for your computer to become fucked.
Well base operating system or hardware driver. There are exceptions, the pps driver for timekeeping makes sense to be kernel level too.
But games developers? No, they have no right to ring 0. I understand they want to protect from cheats, but they’re just moving the battleground to a part of the system that results in blue screens/panics when it fails. And cheat developers will follow them there and even move to the hypervisor if needed, trust me on that.
Not to mention MSI releasing a monitor with built-in AI to highlight enemies for you that almost definitely counts as cheating, yet there’s nothing they can do except ban the hardware all together.
Please tell me this perfectly plausible stupidest-thing-ever isn’t a thing.
This is how I felt about those monitors with crosshair overlays built in. Silly at best, or in games that purposely don’t put a crosshair unless you’re aiming or something, scummy at worst…
It is. Check 3:44
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Check 3:44
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I find this comment funny, given the link I provided was copied from NewPiped.
NewPipe and Piped are pretty different things