Comment by sergiosgc
4 years ago
Why can't I tamper with hardware I bought and paid for? It's not theirs to brick, whatever the justification.
I hate that the idea that you rent stuff from companies, instead of buying and owning, is now so ingrained that people defend actively destroying someone's equipment remotely.
You can.
but you bought a Cryptex.
break the Cryptex, it's broken.
We can stop buying electronic Cryptexes, or we can force companies to stop making them.
but from a realistic perspective, the only way to uphold the sanctity of online play, and enforce IP rights, is to have a secure stack, from boot loader, physically integrating the encryption keys with the hypervisor, and to render anything else an inoperable brick.
Lest we have cheaters in console games.
I do agree to a degree, I think "offline mode" should have a legal basis to stand on, but I also like to know that the others in the game are not cheating.
and that is impossible without an inaccessible black box, the Xbox, which is what we bought.
ive seen both sides of this coin.
> but I also like to know that the others in the game are not cheating. and that is impossible without an inaccessible black box, the Xbox
Ignoring the fact that reverse engineering is just a matter or time and pressure, eventually people will start hooking up image recognition auto-aimers to the input/output of these devices... what then? do we enter some kind of minority report era of gaming where you have to get your eyeballs replaced with "unhackable" ones - hope they don't burn out your retinas in an update. Point is, a black box is actually not a complete solution - as long as you can play the game, there will always be a way to cheat.
There are various online FOSS games that are completely open and hackable, where it's very easy to download the source and literally set a condition in the make file to enable "wallhacks" (because that is in-fact a useful debugging feature - talking about ioq3 specifically)... those communities just deal with it the old fashioned way, new players get treated with more scrutiny, admins get good at recognising cheaters (most cheaters are not good at hiding it, and experienced players who would better conceal wall-hacking behaviour etc are less likely to want to play with hacks way anyway). It's far from bullet proof, but so are so called "black boxes" despite their cost to the user.
> do we enter some kind of minority report era of gaming where you have to get your eyeballs replaced with "unhackable" ones
yes.
Retinal fingerprinting with VR. you can jtag your headset, and be locked out.
the answer is "yes", because of market forces.
I want to play against other players, with an assurance that the game is fair.
I will pay money for this. A Company will deliver on this, and those who seek to infringe upon this, will be legally coerced into submission.
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you're confusing cryptography with corporate secrecy. Cryptography can be open (in terms of both specification and implementation - only keys need secrecy). This thread is about closed implementations, which is a different topic (even if those implementations happen to leverage cryptography)
how can you have open hardware, but promise fair play?
you cannot. this is the crux of the matter.
consoles dont have cheaters, PC games do.
consoles are locked, pc's are not.
these are separate ideas, that meet when players do: online.
the only way to hide the code to prevent cheating is to physically embalm it into the CPU, in a way that, if physically accessed, will break the machine, rendering the effort fruitless.
PC's are going that way, the way GPU's are containing more "black box" mechanisms themselves.
consoles were this way from the start, on purpose.
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Yeah, that's why it's hard to make a comment about it.