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xnx 22 hours ago [-]
When the hardware you bought snitches on you, it is clear that you do not own it. Somewhere we got things ass-backward. The human tells the computer what it can/can't do, not the other way around.
eksu 22 hours ago [-]
This is not what is happening. The CPU simply has a hardware identifier, it's not 'snitching' on anyone. This has legitimate uses, can prevent things like the external packaging of the CPU being modified and sold as something else etc.
That some provider / service is limiting access to their platform based off of this is not some libre / freedom issue. It's unfortunate and probably should be tied to something else. The computer isn't doing anything wrong here.
It is an unfortunate situation.
pixl97 21 hours ago [-]
Na, we had this conversation decades ago now and yes unique identifiers on your cpu is your cpu snitching on you because this is exactly how it was going to be used. The manufacturer has no need to put it on there.
xnx 21 hours ago [-]
Right, but I should be able to tell software the CPU id is whatever I want it to be. The hardware is going behind my back and talking to the software without my permission.
2bewithu 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
x1watt 21 hours ago [-]
At least that is one game provider and you can still use the computer for normal usage and other game providers. At Nintendo Switch 2 they will completely block the device from accessing the online game center which is the only chance for downloading games when trying to use a cheat card or similar.
type0 19 hours ago [-]
When your OS snitches on you, you should uninstall it
orbital-decay 1 days ago [-]
That's a well known risk when buying used hardware, although I doubt a blacklisted CPU could do that alone. I used to host a bunch of pretty popular servers for survival games many of which used hardware ID checks, and we had about a dozen people banned due to this in ~5 years. We had extremely thorough investigations and they were 100% clean.
dataflow 23 hours ago [-]
Not sure what well-known means, I don't think I'd ever heard of even the idea of hardware bans until now. Feels like banning a student's notebook because they took notes with it to cheat in school, rather than suspending or expelling the student.
Sohcahtoa82 22 hours ago [-]
Hardware bans have existed for years.
It's really the only solution to minimize collateral damage while trying to effectively permanently ban someone from a free-to-play game that doesn't require ID verification.
Often, the only piece of info they collect from you is an e-mail address used to register an account. If you ban an e-mail address, creating a new one is trivial.
Banning an IP address has too much potential for collateral damage. You end up banning an entire household, or potentially an entire building. If you ban an IP that belongs to a VPN, you can easily end up blocking hundreds or even thousands of legitimate players.
Hardware bans are basically the best (or rather, the least bad) option. I challenge you to come with an alternative solution to be able to permanently ban a player without requiring ID verification or potentially affecting innocent players that can't be easily circumvented.
kadoban 14 hours ago [-]
> I challenge you to come with an alternative solution to be able to permanently ban a player without requiring ID verification or potentially affecting innocent players that can't be easily circumvented.
At least allow hardware+email overrides/allow-list. If someone has a banned cpu and they promise they're not the offender, why not allow them back on _with_ a fixed email address?
If they keep doing it, not like you won't notice by the time they're like "no really, the 4 other guys before me cheated, I bought this cpu from them".
dataflow 21 hours ago [-]
I'm not saying you can't use hardware as a factor in banning. I'm just saying there seem to be better ways of incorporating hardware checks to minimize harm to innocent people.
How about making the hardware ban temporary, like 3 months?
How about making it work when you see a consistent combination of hardware, like mobo and storage?
How about allowing unbanning of the hardware if someone sends you a notarized statement that they bought it from someone else?
Etc.
Sohcahtoa82 16 hours ago [-]
> How about making the hardware ban temporary, like 3 months?
Actually not a bad idea...resort to long suspensions rather than outright permanent bans.
As long as detection and action are swift enough, if a cheater knows they'll be banned within an hour, then they'll likely get bored of cheating just to get banned an hour later every 3 months.
protimewaster 19 hours ago [-]
> If you ban an e-mail address, creating a new one is trivial.
For many people, getting a new CPU is pretty trivial too. They might as well just offer the option to pay a fee to get unbanned at that point. It would reduce waste.
happytoexplain 23 hours ago [-]
Maybe well-known among people whose business it is to buy and sell hardware. I personally have never heard of this, and I imagine a strong majority of normal people buying hardware don't know either.
serf 21 hours ago [-]
Keep in mind that Intel was shipping 50-75 million CPUs a quarter and there are like 280m PCs sold a year.:
I find a lot about this story exceedingly hard to believe.
1) a community of niche players has banned dozens of people due to HWID conflicts between their existing playerbase and their banned players.
2) that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
3) the hardware aftermarket is so small that the same players from within that niche community are swapping components unknowingly.
it' be more plausible for me personally to think that a CPU vendor fucked up on the HWID generation scheme.
gopher_space 20 hours ago [-]
1) The game or service is auto-banning players, not the community.
2) Player fingerprinting isn't CPU-only.
3) The hardware aftermarket contains every flagged component without exception.
The aspect I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the amount of money people will spend to cheat in a game for a limited amount of time. Simple account bans are useless against people who have no problem buying another copy, forever.
From my perspective, the unusual part of this claim is that OP's community hasn't gone invite-only like so many others. Open servers are a labor of love.
orbital-decay 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, many adjacent communities either went private/invite-only or had many geoIP restrictions where it was possible. We insisted on being neutral, having as little rules as possible, and being semi-manually moderated, with a ton of tricks from our side (down to automating tracking the cheating alts). We even punished cheating blame drama and whining by kicking players out of hardcore servers. As a result we had cutthroat and fair pvp from the most dedicated teams in existence (especially in Ark, but 7dtd and Rust were standing out as well).
orbital-decay 19 hours ago [-]
About a dozen, not dozens, over several years! These were global bans by the anticheat, not ours. We had EU servers in 5 games, with hundreds of active players per day on each of the two or three per game. It's not as niche as you think.
>that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
Since HN isn't familiar with the lengths cheaters and admins are willing to go in this cat and mouse game, here's some context: we had a healthy community with non-playing mods monitoring the game nearly 24/7 and wrote a lot of custom observability software, in particular to my knowledge we were the first to attempt eliminating duping in DayZ Mod (ArmA II - everything is client-side!), before DayZ Origins. Each player was tracked and recorded server-side, and observed by mods. I can safely say we never had a closet cheater operating on our servers for more than a week, and obvious ones for an hour. The longest time was a month, it was a highly respectable player, he was truly subtle and it was a big scandal after which he was provided with proofs and banished forever. Half of our server was Russians and about a quarter were Germans, in an era of brazen cheating in both communities, and HWID bans being relatively new (think early Rust/DayZ/7DtD/Ark's Great War and later on SCUM). Yes, there absolutely was time in Russia when it was possible to buy a banned PC on Avito (eBay equivalent). In each case I'm talking about except for one guy, these were highly regarded players (which doesn't mean we trusted them, quite the opposite), and each move and fight between their clans was scrutinized by default, and recorded to be shown later. They came back after global bans and were fully transparent about what happened (they bought used PCs/laptops, not CPUs, and got immediately banned). Since such situations were highly unusual and we had a policy of punishing entire teams, we had to dig into a few days of activity of them and their clans manually, looking at each action and investigating possible info they weren't supposed to have. With all our experience absolutely nothing stood out, and we had to conclude they're clean and let the willing ones return.
That wasn't the wildest thing that happened in our servers.
unethical_ban 22 hours ago [-]
I've been building PCs for myself and on occasion, others for 20 years. I have been playing games for as long. I never knew CPU hardware IDs were used in game permabans.
Eridrus 23 hours ago [-]
Definitely not well known to most people lol.
niels8472 23 hours ago [-]
Big game needs you to install a rootkit to play. But hey you can trust people selling crack^wloot boxes to kids right.
m-p-3 1 days ago [-]
We'll eventually need something like CarFax where you can look for hardware bans for multiple softwares and games before you purchase a part..
wxw 22 hours ago [-]
TIL you can ban CPUs
pixl97 21 hours ago [-]
You can ban anything that gives up a unique identifier
m-p-3 19 hours ago [-]
I think at this point the issue is between the buyer and the reseller. If I bought a CPU and I wasn't able to play a game, I'd ask for a refund and ship back the CPU to them at their expense.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 days ago [-]
When did video games get so serious that we need to do these things? Ridiculous.
bigmadshoe 1 days ago [-]
As someone who has played a decent of competitive games in the past, it is less about them being extremely serious, and more about how much people cheating ruins the fun for everyone else.
For example, a soccer Sunday league might not be that serious, but you still wouldn't want someone frequently running on the pitch with a golf club and whacking the ball into your goal with no consequences.
cronin101 1 days ago [-]
Definitely not frequently, but once or twice a lifetime would provide a measurable uplift.
ElevenLathe 1 days ago [-]
GTA Online has this feeling at times. I always find it a refreshing distraction when somebody comes into a public server with obvious hacks and starts spawning bizarre weapons, vehicles, giving out money, changing the weather or day/night cycle abruptly, teleporting everyone to the same location. It's easy to leave to another server when it gets boring or frustrating, but these are the times when I put out the call on Discord for other non-currently-online friends to join me!
Eridrus 23 hours ago [-]
People buying cheats do not stop at once.
happytoexplain 22 hours ago [-]
In PVP games, it's hard to have fun when there is any non-negligible amount of cheating, even if you're not playing seriously. This comment is a little like saying people who won't let you cheat in a board game are being "too serious". Maybe the more relevant disconnect is that you just don't like PVP games much...?
If on the other hand you're trying to imply that cheating in popular PVP games can be prevented without measures this extreme, as far as I know that's just wrong. It's an arms race and we've been at it long enough that we're at the hardware level now.
sippingabonedry 23 hours ago [-]
When people ruined multiplayer games for everyone by cheating.
orbital-decay 1 days ago [-]
Anticheats started moving into ring0 and became rootkits in early 2000s with nProtect GameGuard, HWID checks started in mid-2000s with myAC (or even earlier? I think myAC first appeared during CS 1.5).
tadfisher 23 hours ago [-]
Those were easily worked around with unsigned drivers or physical hardware. Now Secure Boot is required to run Valorant games, which should be a harbinger for what will happen to your online banking experience if consumers allow this to continue.
orbital-decay 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's why I stopped playing and hosting those games, ESEA Bitcoin mining scandal made me buy a physically isolated gaming machine with constant monitoring, and VM banning in EFT was the last drop. Valorant is the most paranoid and the biggest offender, but the others are close.
Sohcahtoa82 23 hours ago [-]
First anti-cheat I ever ran into was PunkBuster. I don't remember when I first used it, but apparently it was released in 2000.
vjsrinivas 1 days ago [-]
I wonder if it has anything to do with the rise of e-sports and the monetary aspect of "professional" multi-player games?
Eridrus 23 hours ago [-]
No, people cheat at multiplayer games that have no stakes pretty regularly.
This is more necessary with the rise of freemium games where the base account is trivially replaced and so banning people's accounts does nothing.
Not that paid games don't have cheating issues, but there's a limit on how much people are willing to spend getting rebanned regularly.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 days ago [-]
That's one of my theories. Money got involved and here we are. Now games are serious business! Remember when they were just fun?
xeonmc 1 days ago [-]
Esports used to be just fun grassroots competition until Riot Games bulldozed over the nascent self-sustaining scenes and started the rat race of astroturf-bankrolling "professionalized" scenes lacking the foundation of any sort of viable business model, propped up only by VC sponsors. When those ran dry, the Saudi oil funds swooped in to buy up all the tournament rights as part of their sportswashing campaign.
Riot Games was also the one that introduced the nanny policing of "if you deviate from the squeaky clean advertiser-friendly image we stipulate, we'll make sure you have no future in the pro scene ever again" tribunal, presenting themselves as the bastion of "pre-eliminating all toxicity from online gaming", which is ironically hypocritical considering their scandals after scandals of toxic workplace culture.
7bit 1 days ago [-]
Esports was serious loooong before Riot games existed.
xeonmc 1 days ago [-]
Serious competition as a fulfilling grassroots activity? Sure it existed before Riot.
Artificially propped-up unsustainable "professionalization" whose eventual conclusion is to enforce spyware on casual participants? That's Riot's gift to the world.
vel0city 21 hours ago [-]
I remember watching Counterstrike tournaments in CPL in the early 2000s and Intel Extreme Masters in 2007.
LoL (Riot's first big "esport" game) didn't really start having large tournaments until 2011. LoL didn't even come out until a few years after ESL started hosting regular professionalized Counter Strike tournaments.
orbital-decay 24 hours ago [-]
Kernel spyware is at least 2 decades old, and manual scrutiny of casual participants is as old as networked competitive gaming and cheating themselves (id games had that from the start!). It has nothing to do with money. Moreover, people are paying north of $1k/mo to cheat in video games.
mmmlinux 24 hours ago [-]
They were never just fun though. there were always hackers and cheaters.
nkrisc 20 hours ago [-]
Because competitive games with a cheater problem are dead games. I understand the desire to prevent cheating, and I think most players of those games are okay with it.
nancyminusone 1 days ago [-]
Probably around the time individual games started to have the term "billion dollars" associated with them in some way.
deltoidmaximus 22 hours ago [-]
We're talking about a free to play (no cost to being banned) game without dedicated servers (no intimate community to police the servers). Cheaters always existed but the business model used exacerbated the problem.
RicoElectrico 1 days ago [-]
When tryhards flocked to ranked games; more broadly in the world with no opportunity for the young people e-sports emerged and they saw it as one.
mrguyorama 18 hours ago [-]
When it became more profitable to sell a 3D model for game's character than it was to sell the actual game.
The only point to these systems is companies wanting a total stranglehold on any way to play the game so that you cannot bypass their skin market.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing any of this, because it costs more to develop a root kit than it costs to just hand out a shitty server exe and let the community figure it out like was common in the past.
rjh29 22 hours ago [-]
The Denuvo hack uses Windows Hypervisor to intercept cpuid, maybe that would work?
Fire-Dragon-DoL 18 hours ago [-]
And this should be illegal. This is blocking resale and creating waste for no reason.
richwater 21 hours ago [-]
Everyone here is talking about how games shouldn't have the ability to do this while not understanding that without it, most online games (PVP specifically) turn into a cheaters paradise and ruin it for all paying customers.
Riot Vanguard has all but eliminated cheaters in Valorant (sporadic instances and DMA hardware can still be used), but the vast (99.9+%) of games are clean because of what they did. Customers place serious value in that.
kasabali 21 hours ago [-]
I understand that and I still say games shouldn't have the ability to do this.
nkrisc 20 hours ago [-]
There are many games that don’t do things like this. In fact I play many games that the developers encourage you to modify and cheat.
richwater 20 hours ago [-]
Then don't download the game. Or run linux and skip the ability to run any online games. I don't know what to tell you.
mrguyorama 18 hours ago [-]
This was not an issue until games chose to omit custom servers "For your protection" of course.
Counterstrike and TF2 have absurd problems with bots and cheats on official servers, but because you can just run it yourself, communities were able to handle those problems how they want, including some of them choosing to utilize rootkit level anti-cheat, but many don't, and don't have a serious problem with cheating.
I remember playing video games where cheating was trivial, and yet they just didn't have a serious problem, because the servers that didn't have someone moderating them and kicking out cheaters were terrible to play on regardless of cheating
tamimio 1 days ago [-]
Same happens on smartphones btw with some apps that take the hardware fingerprint
oliwarner 21 hours ago [-]
So this is bullshit, right? We're all going along like it really happened but it doesn't smell right.
If they only bought a CPU and CPUs don't have serial IDs (since P3s and some kooky server CPUs), how could Valorant fingerprint it?
vel0city 21 hours ago [-]
Modern TPMs are fTPMs and are essentially in the CPU package.
Each TPM 2.0 has a unique Endorsement Key (EK).
Thus, every CPU has a unique identifier, which assuming the fTPM is correct (big if), cannot be changed.
uhh.. i dont think amd or intel has even attempted to make a s/n accessible on their CPUs since the big stink in the 90's.
rasz 1 days ago [-]
TPM 2.0 Endorsement Key (EK)
crostlybostly 1 days ago [-]
Video Game has to be one of the areas enshitification is most visible to me.
Unfinished games being released, no LAN, paywalled features, pay to win, games unusable after support ends, etc.
I think we are due for surge of people just playing classic games and boycotting all the new BS that is coming out. Piracy should be encouraged as a check and balance against shitty UX.
nkrisc 20 hours ago [-]
It’s also the least impactful. What’s the worst that happens, you don’t play video games? Oh no.
That some provider / service is limiting access to their platform based off of this is not some libre / freedom issue. It's unfortunate and probably should be tied to something else. The computer isn't doing anything wrong here.
It is an unfortunate situation.
It's really the only solution to minimize collateral damage while trying to effectively permanently ban someone from a free-to-play game that doesn't require ID verification.
Often, the only piece of info they collect from you is an e-mail address used to register an account. If you ban an e-mail address, creating a new one is trivial.
Banning an IP address has too much potential for collateral damage. You end up banning an entire household, or potentially an entire building. If you ban an IP that belongs to a VPN, you can easily end up blocking hundreds or even thousands of legitimate players.
Hardware bans are basically the best (or rather, the least bad) option. I challenge you to come with an alternative solution to be able to permanently ban a player without requiring ID verification or potentially affecting innocent players that can't be easily circumvented.
At least allow hardware+email overrides/allow-list. If someone has a banned cpu and they promise they're not the offender, why not allow them back on _with_ a fixed email address?
If they keep doing it, not like you won't notice by the time they're like "no really, the 4 other guys before me cheated, I bought this cpu from them".
How about making the hardware ban temporary, like 3 months?
How about making it work when you see a consistent combination of hardware, like mobo and storage?
How about allowing unbanning of the hardware if someone sends you a notarized statement that they bought it from someone else?
Etc.
Actually not a bad idea...resort to long suspensions rather than outright permanent bans.
As long as detection and action are swift enough, if a cheater knows they'll be banned within an hour, then they'll likely get bored of cheating just to get banned an hour later every 3 months.
For many people, getting a new CPU is pretty trivial too. They might as well just offer the option to pay a fee to get unbanned at that point. It would reduce waste.
I find a lot about this story exceedingly hard to believe.
1) a community of niche players has banned dozens of people due to HWID conflicts between their existing playerbase and their banned players.
2) that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
3) the hardware aftermarket is so small that the same players from within that niche community are swapping components unknowingly.
it' be more plausible for me personally to think that a CPU vendor fucked up on the HWID generation scheme.
2) Player fingerprinting isn't CPU-only.
3) The hardware aftermarket contains every flagged component without exception.
The aspect I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the amount of money people will spend to cheat in a game for a limited amount of time. Simple account bans are useless against people who have no problem buying another copy, forever.
From my perspective, the unusual part of this claim is that OP's community hasn't gone invite-only like so many others. Open servers are a labor of love.
>that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
Since HN isn't familiar with the lengths cheaters and admins are willing to go in this cat and mouse game, here's some context: we had a healthy community with non-playing mods monitoring the game nearly 24/7 and wrote a lot of custom observability software, in particular to my knowledge we were the first to attempt eliminating duping in DayZ Mod (ArmA II - everything is client-side!), before DayZ Origins. Each player was tracked and recorded server-side, and observed by mods. I can safely say we never had a closet cheater operating on our servers for more than a week, and obvious ones for an hour. The longest time was a month, it was a highly respectable player, he was truly subtle and it was a big scandal after which he was provided with proofs and banished forever. Half of our server was Russians and about a quarter were Germans, in an era of brazen cheating in both communities, and HWID bans being relatively new (think early Rust/DayZ/7DtD/Ark's Great War and later on SCUM). Yes, there absolutely was time in Russia when it was possible to buy a banned PC on Avito (eBay equivalent). In each case I'm talking about except for one guy, these were highly regarded players (which doesn't mean we trusted them, quite the opposite), and each move and fight between their clans was scrutinized by default, and recorded to be shown later. They came back after global bans and were fully transparent about what happened (they bought used PCs/laptops, not CPUs, and got immediately banned). Since such situations were highly unusual and we had a policy of punishing entire teams, we had to dig into a few days of activity of them and their clans manually, looking at each action and investigating possible info they weren't supposed to have. With all our experience absolutely nothing stood out, and we had to conclude they're clean and let the willing ones return.
That wasn't the wildest thing that happened in our servers.
For example, a soccer Sunday league might not be that serious, but you still wouldn't want someone frequently running on the pitch with a golf club and whacking the ball into your goal with no consequences.
If on the other hand you're trying to imply that cheating in popular PVP games can be prevented without measures this extreme, as far as I know that's just wrong. It's an arms race and we've been at it long enough that we're at the hardware level now.
This is more necessary with the rise of freemium games where the base account is trivially replaced and so banning people's accounts does nothing.
Not that paid games don't have cheating issues, but there's a limit on how much people are willing to spend getting rebanned regularly.
Riot Games was also the one that introduced the nanny policing of "if you deviate from the squeaky clean advertiser-friendly image we stipulate, we'll make sure you have no future in the pro scene ever again" tribunal, presenting themselves as the bastion of "pre-eliminating all toxicity from online gaming", which is ironically hypocritical considering their scandals after scandals of toxic workplace culture.
Artificially propped-up unsustainable "professionalization" whose eventual conclusion is to enforce spyware on casual participants? That's Riot's gift to the world.
LoL (Riot's first big "esport" game) didn't really start having large tournaments until 2011. LoL didn't even come out until a few years after ESL started hosting regular professionalized Counter Strike tournaments.
The only point to these systems is companies wanting a total stranglehold on any way to play the game so that you cannot bypass their skin market.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing any of this, because it costs more to develop a root kit than it costs to just hand out a shitty server exe and let the community figure it out like was common in the past.
Riot Vanguard has all but eliminated cheaters in Valorant (sporadic instances and DMA hardware can still be used), but the vast (99.9+%) of games are clean because of what they did. Customers place serious value in that.
Counterstrike and TF2 have absurd problems with bots and cheats on official servers, but because you can just run it yourself, communities were able to handle those problems how they want, including some of them choosing to utilize rootkit level anti-cheat, but many don't, and don't have a serious problem with cheating.
I remember playing video games where cheating was trivial, and yet they just didn't have a serious problem, because the servers that didn't have someone moderating them and kicking out cheaters were terrible to play on regardless of cheating
If they only bought a CPU and CPUs don't have serial IDs (since P3s and some kooky server CPUs), how could Valorant fingerprint it?
Each TPM 2.0 has a unique Endorsement Key (EK).
Thus, every CPU has a unique identifier, which assuming the fTPM is correct (big if), cannot be changed.
https://andrewmoore.ca/blog/post/anticheat-secure-boot-tpm/
Unfinished games being released, no LAN, paywalled features, pay to win, games unusable after support ends, etc.
I think we are due for surge of people just playing classic games and boycotting all the new BS that is coming out. Piracy should be encouraged as a check and balance against shitty UX.