Does this mean league of legends is a weapon
Weapon of Mass Distraction.
Psychological Warfare for sure
I mean it installs a rootkit on your computer that gives them full control over everything including what you type, hear, and see as well as the ability to record what you’ve previously typed and said. It could at any moment also fully disable your computer (as well as millions of other computers) rendering them useless.
Just because they haven’t used it that way, don’t assume they can’t or won’t.
Do they send this data over the network? Or is the data only used by the software installed on the machine?
They can do whatever they want. Operating systems are effectively divided into two partitions, privileged kernel space and user space.
When you run a kernel level anticheat what you’re really doing is running a custom program in the kernel space. It effectively becomes part of Windows.
This means that anything that an operating system can instruct hardware to do, that program can do. It can read your files, check your email, print letter you wrote to your crush in Word but “deleted” because it was embarrassing, log every key you type, turn on your webcam, listen to the microphone, download explicit or illegal imagery, upload your hard drive to the NSA, disable your computer fans, etc
You really only want to run this stuff if it’s from a trustworthy vendor and even then it’s completely defensible to object to running one of these programs.
Currently these things have yet to be caught doing any of these things, but that’s because they haven’t been instructed to, not because they can’t.
Microsoft are going to significantly limit what can run in the kernel (including anti cheat) after the Crowdstrike issue. A side-effect of that should (hopefully) be better Linux compatibility.
I remember reading that and I very much hope it is truly what they end up doing. As of now though, that has yet to materialize.
It’s going to take a while since all the software that uses kernel-level code has to adapt. Windows has very good backwards compatibility, but this would be a non-backwards-compatible change, so it’d require a lot of planning.
I guess what I’m saying is if this information was being sent across a network, that would be detectable.
I guess what I’m saying is if this information was being sent across a network, that would be detectable.
If you are constantly monitoring 24/7/365, sure. We don’t know how often it would send it if it does, it would require reverse engineering and intense monitoring. Also, even if they aren’t doing it now doesn’t mean they can’t easily add it in a patch.
It’s generally not worth trusting IMO.
Sure, but by then it could be too late for the vast majority of people.
It’s not super relevant if nobody is looking for it/it’s hard to detect even if you are and plenty of damage can be done prior to detection.
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I mean, there’s always been speculation that Vanguard is spyware. There’s absolutely no need or justification for always-on cheat detection.
What speculation? It’s literally spyware. You are giving it full low level access to your processor.
Don’t get me wrong, Vanguard is BS, and I quit playing riot games because of it. However, simply having low level access isn’t sufficient to classify it as spyware, otherwise drivers would be spyware. I still haven’t seen any evidence that it currently does anything nefarious with that access, which means it’s quite unlikely it’s being used for mass surveillance.
To me, there are 2 problems: 1) It could be used for targeted attacks, and the likelihood anyone would find out is much lower than in a widespread surveillance scenario. 2) It could be used to deploy a massive bot-net.
I think the US reclassification here is precautionary in nature.
Exactly. I avoid kernel-level anti-cheat not because of any known spying they do (and honestly, anything w/ user-level privileges can read all your personal data), but that they add yet another attack vector for a bad actor. I highly doubt Vanguard gets as much security scrutiny as drivers, for example.
Yep, agreed. It’s the potential for exploitation that’s the main issue.
And the lack of a reason for vendors to put security first. “It’s just a game” or whatever, so they’ll do the bare minimum to keep the money flowing.
Drivers, on the other hand, make or break a sale, because it makes the product look bad. So if a driver gets exploited, customers are likely to buy from a competitor. If that happens w/ a game, players will get pissed but keep playing the game.
Except drivers are designed to interact with hardware and to make it usable, kernel-level anticheats are designed to specifically scan/block/etc software. They are pretty different with their intended purposes, even though they offer the same/similar invasiveness.
A weapon against sanity, yes.
Chemical weapon, maybe.
Weapon of mass-debation
Gosh I feel like I’ve heard Tencent has a stake in some other company that isn’t mentioned here yet.
what was it . . . hmmmmm
I’m really not sure which one you mean, because they own interest in a ton of companies.
Tik Tok is what they’re referring to
I was thinking of reddit
Tik Tok is the only tencent company I know if that’s been labeled a national security risk.
They also have a stake in all these companies…
Legaue of legends
Epic games
Ubisoft
From soft
Activision blizzard
WeChat
Funcom (Conan games and an upcoming Dune game) and Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile) as well.
Wtf they own 100% shares of GGG? https://app.companiesoffice.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/1887410/shareholdings
Well idk about supporting POE2 now. Or should I not care?
Activision Blizzard
I think the MSFT buyout eliminated their stake in ABK?
Fromsoft is unfortunate, but I honestly don’t use any of the rest.
I believe discord is also owned by tencent
Tencent likely has a sizeable stake, but is unlikely to hold a majority stake of Discord.
LoL is not a company, the creator and owner of it is Riot Games.
And the owner of Riot Games is Tencent, that and WeChat stick out from the rest of the list because they are owned and developed by Tencent instead of just Tencent owning stock
Again, non of those have been legally banned in the US.
I’m not saying those companies don’t exist? Just answering the question of who the top commenter was referring to, which in my opinion is Tik Tok because it’s the only one being legally banned.
I was just listing things I know tecenet had a holding in… Like everyone else…
They gonna force a sale of League of Legends now?
Do Fortnite next.
Tencent owns 11% of Reddit…
And? 11% isn’t full ownership like the thing I said.
And what DOES Tencent have full ownership of? They dip into almost everything as rich as they need to carry China’s water.
RIOT Games. The thing I started this thread saying…
More likely they would leave the market. That game isn’t really popular in NA but it’s the most popular non-mobile game in Asia
…Are you kidding? LoL has been huge for years in NA. RIOT is an American company that was bought by Tencent. Leaving the market means they lose their entire dev team.
RIOT is an American company that was bought by Tencent.
Sure but it ignores that Tencent gave $20 million to create LoL (first 10 then another 10 to buy out the other investors)
Investing 2 years after the game was first playable by the public counts as “giving money to create it”, now? That’s at least 6 years after they’d have started development.
You’ve ignored reality.
They invested before it was released, what are you talking about?
Tencent paid for it to be made
Edit: upon research you are talking about when Tencent became the owner. Not their investments to have the game made.
Not mentioned in a Washington Post article but
“ Over the summer of 2008, Merrill and Beck’s work seeking funds proved fruitful and the two landed $7 million more in funding from Benchmark and FirstMark Capital venture capital firms.”
/+ 10 mill from Tencent and prior to launch Tencent gave another 10 mill to buy out those investors
You’re probably thinking the “full release” but the game was being played by the public for several years, and was quite popular for over year prior to the “official release”. So, no. They didn’t. Their investment came a full year after I’d already been playing the game.
The game was made already. They bought an existing product.
I can’t find anything suggesting the game was released prior to 2008
Riot released some video at sometime talking about how they had to cram to make the game even playable prior to the sales pitch so I really doubt it was made before that
LoL isn’t popular in NA anymore?
Never was that popular
COD and Fortnite are much bigger with the latter even making sports radio talk
The popularity spike was when MLG needed to fill in the Halo Reach spot due to that game’s lack of appeal
What? League is consistently the top result of twitch. Even accounting for other regions, league is by far one of the largest games people watch in na. Big na streamers pull in thousands of viewers (doublelift, tyler1 for example)
You can listen to Riot themselves
They aren’t bringing in new players, their playerbase is just getting older
Which explains why they’ve made it less mechanical demanding and more about positioning over the years
There’s not way you can say that game wasn’t ever popular. Maybe it’s never been the literal most popular, but it’s definitely had a life as a majorly popular game. Large streaming views, tons of players, etc. I have no idea how it’s doing now, but it definitely had a number of years of major popularity.
Already can’t trust kassadin, don’t need an anti trust
Calling Tencent a “web and gaming giant” is really deceiving here.
It’s one of the biggest tech conglomerates in the world. Tencent invest into literally everything: games, social networks, entertainments, cloud computing, finance, AI, other investments… Tencent owns WeChat, Tencent Cloud, Tencent Healthcare just to name a few and helps CCP with surveilance and censorship through these ownings (tbf they don’t really have a choice, they’re based in China)
100% they are involved in military too so this classification is very much justified.
Don’t they also have lots of stakes in other companies.
Yeah that’s what the comment said
Epic Games for one.
And Reddit
Discord
Why is the list not just every Chinese company? do they not know how state capitalism works?
They do not.
Yeah they do. Fascism is state capitalism. They plan to replicate China.
It’s been state capitalism forever.
We have a puppet coming into the presidency. China will have all the inroads to our government they care to pay for. Tencent and Co. will be a non-issue.
A US social media giant owns the president. I don’t think there going to allow the competition. Muskrat and Fuckerburg have a lot more sway and money.
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Trump has already asked for action on TikTok to be delayed so that he has authority to “address” the situation. Trump doesn’t have to choose between the bribes offered, he’ll gladly take them all at the same time.
As opposed to all of our previous presidents, who refused to be bought by corporate corruption? LoL.
I don’t think they’re making that claim, just that Trump is easy to manipulate and buy off for anyone with the means. Everything is negotiable with him.
My own thought is that the wealthy corpos absolutely can and do purchase US politicians, but some of them have some philosophical guardrails that preclude stepping over certain issues. That number, however, seems to be shrinking the longer we have politicians who are allowed to get fat off of the people.
K. Which president does that not equally apply to? Could probably count on one or two hands the number congresspeople that can’t be bought.
Equally? None of them to Trump’s degree, by my assessment.
But then, we’re quibbling over degree of terribleness here. I’m not exactly a fan of most politicians or how they have been governing for the last 30 years, so I’m not at all saying things are rosy on the other side.
Could probably count on one or two hands the number congresspeople that can’t be bought.
Absolutely.
Which ones would say it does? Is Biden in your view as corrupt as Trump in that he can and has been bought for practically anyone that appeals to his ego and wallet?
Yes, I believe Biden and Trump to be about as equally corrupt.
Which one was being prosecuted for stealing and selling classified data before the judge he owned threw out the case?
Which one is being sentenced for felonies on Friday?
Which one held a private meeting with Russian spies while in office, then immediately asked for a list of informants, followed a few weeks later by a bunch of informants regarding Russian interests suddenly being killed?
Trump is a treasonous monster.
Yes, Trump is also corrupt.
Love that Blue MAGA always makes sure to qualify it with “prosecuted” and “sentenced.” As if Biden is somehow better for getting away with his crimes. Really shows the level y’all are operating at.
This is laughable
Not if you’ve been paying attention. But if all you watch is propaganda, it might catch you by surprise.
And Xi genocided the uyghurs. Don’t support that regime either, k?
It must be peaceful choosing to be this ignorant
How is being more aware of the crimes of US presidents “ignorance”?
And one of them just retired (Mitt Romney).
LoL. Fucking Mitt Romney? The “corporations are people,” vulture capitalist?
Buffoonery.
I’m talking about Senator Mitt Romney, as in the guy that voted to impeach Trump over Jan 6. He changed quite a bit after losing the 2012 election. In fact, there are a lot of people in Utah that think he’s a RINO, yet he didn’t waver whatsoever in that conviction. He wasn’t the best congressman ever, but he had integrity over that term and was way better than the man he replaced and his partner (Mike Lee) in the Senate.
Ahh. So just Trump Derangement Syndrome. Forgiving these crooks for any and all crimes, so long as they oppose Trump. Madness.
But we beat big pharma…
Oh yeah? Hahaha. When was this? Didn’t hear the news about free insulin.
Hahahaha.
Can’t win capitalism? Fret not, everything is national security and we can throw the rules of capitalism out the window :)
And then the west is surprised at the confused look of the global south when Ursula and Biden mention “Rules based order”…
I mean it’s not like China was open and allowed competition from western companies.
But it us kind of insulting when America did incredible violence to the global south to get them to open their markets only throw it all out the window.
While China is considered part of the global south, its economy is so massive and it is so influential globally it really shouldn’t be.
Edit: Also in China’s case, that was the UK, not the US.
Americans are blind. They think their capitalism is also not state funded. The only difference is that in China corporations are owned by the state, and in the USA the state is owned by corporations. “It’s not fair” yeah, obviously it isn’t, the USA has been imperialistic and monopolistic over the entire global south for the past 7 decades, nobody wants to be playing with your bullshit rules anymore. The “free market” is heavily stacked in their favor, and always will be. Case in point? BRICS are about to move away from the dollar, and the USA immediately goes ballistic saying it will impose tariffs and sanctions and whatnot if we dare challenge their authority. Where’s the free market in that? Where’s the free market when your 2nd in command has said before that the USA will invade and coup whatever country they feel like it in order to get resources? Yeah, we’re not playing your stupid free market game anymore, it’s rigged. And yes, China is part of the global south, they have been so since they were oppressed and enslaved and explored by the global north for decades, they just did a good job of turning around. I wish my country had done as good of a job…
This just in, “Wealthy people everywhere suck ass! More at 11.”
China is state capitalism. Capitalism isn’t losing. The West is losing because China is using state funds to buy up successful Western companies, and as their new owner, has the ability to force them to do China’s bidding.
Meanwhile the West is completely barred from buying a majority stake in any successful Chinese company and even if it could would not be taking it over on behalf of serving the state.
The problem is China plays by its own rules and those rules are heavily stacked against every other nation. That was fine when they were making junk for Walmart; it’s not so fine when it’s highly sophisticated electronics and software (that can do whatever China wants it to in the West) … and to add insult to injury it’s often based on stolen Western technology (since us idiots decided to put the factories that manufacturer the designs there).
Nobody really cares about the rules. While I don’t like capitalism, unfortunately it also starts a new era of imperialism, where the strong ruthlessly conquers the weak, see Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, and China-Taiwan.
One of those is not like the others…
You’re totally right, China isn’t actively sending missiles to Taiwan yet
That’s horrible. I should Google for more information so I can avoid using companies involved with the military.
I wonder what this means for 50 Cent?
He’s on thin ice.
He’s five times better, or worse.
Would Call of Duty be the American equivalent?
Tencent is an investor there too
Lol pretty much every American company should be added to a similar list given how deep they are in the pockets of CIA, etc
Cool whataboutism, this article is about a Chinese company and China, not about America or its mil companies.
It’s not like it’s an insult to say Tencent is involved with the Chinese military, why are you so defensive? Do you think you’re sharing unknown info? I think we’re all quite aware of the US MIC.
Do you seriously believe China and every other country doesn’t keep similar lists already? This is basic ass shit.
Every time anything about China is posted someone like you comes running to tell us all “b-b-but America too!!!” as if that changes a damn thing in regards to the discussion topic at hand.
Pointing out hypocrisy is not whataboutism. Whataboutism is when you bring up a separate topic as a criticism to distract from the original topic. For example, if you make fun of my cooking and I bring up your drawing skills in response, that’s whataboutism. If you suck at cooking and yet bring up me sucking at cooking, that’s just pointing fingers and trying to paint that as a negative for someone else when you possess the same deficiency.
I’m sure the US military already has a list of its own operations. Where is the hypocrisy?
Imo whataboutism is not even a real thing.
That’s just a dumb label made up for use against ussr it was just never intended to be used against US lol. But pointing out that ur opponent has ulterior motives is properly legalTrue, and maybe I’m playing a losing game by arguing within that context, but I did want to point out that even under those conditions the “logical fallacy” doesn’t fit.
Weird. I can’t see the .ml after your name. Must be a Lemmy bug.
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They’re getting downvoted for an unrelated comment not because they don’t believe America has companies that contribute to their mil industrial complex.
that is its own topic, bringing it up here is trying to shift attention away from the topic at hand. Its also topic that should be talked about more, but in its own context.
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it’s whataboutism
It literally isn’t.
It’s pointing out that this is the pot calling the kettle black.
Whataboutism would be like “the US uses its media funding apparatus to keep certain ideas out of public consciousness.”
Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in “what about …?”) is a pejorative for the strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of a defense against the original accusation.
Surely you can see how that’s a different thing when you engage in the exact type of behaviors you’re accusing others of. Surely.
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Aint we got tea companies that make war machines here?
Such as?
One famous example is Corning which mostly does kitchenware and then also huge military contracts for military equipment. But then of course every single US company takes on military contracts from Ford making engines to Singer making sewing machines and guidance systems during cold war lol
So OP is absolutely right. American companies will dip into everything that makes money which is really not a problem tbh and that’s how capitalism is intended to function just a bit funny given that one company makes kitchenware and bullet proof glass for mil vehicles.
Well, looking at the Corning company, they specialize in glass wares/technology in general of which heat-resistant kitchenware is a sector as well as bulletproof glass but also mirrors for astronomy. So this seems more like a parallel than sequential development.
There are some interesting cases of companies who have never before even dealt with large scale production suddenly getting awarded military contracts. But tasking some of the largest machine manufacturers of the country such as Ford and Singer with production of military gear during wartime seems hardly surprising.
And I don’t even question the overall narrative of companies doing whatever makes a quick buck. I was more interested in the specific example of a tea company of all places production military goods.
I think OP might have meant Corning as the “tea company” as there was viral tiktok on this subject of user exploring what their tea cup/glass maker is up to. Though I can’t recall the exact details so take my word with a grain of salt.
hence why this article is not a big deal or dig at China in any way lmao
Why does everything need to be whataboutism’d to America. Yes we also have companies that work with our military, who gives a fuck? This article is simply pointing out that a big Chinese company with ties to lots of social media (Reddit for example) is also mil adjacent.
It’s just a fact, not commentary on China that then makes the US hypocritical.
Why are you making whataboutist comments unrelated to the article? Every fucking country has companies that work with their military, that’s not what the article is about.
I’m just pointing it out bro, nothing more bro, just mentioning it bro, nothing wrong with constantly running negative stories about China bro, not manufacturing anything bro.
I don’t know which company you’re referring to, but I think it’s pretty damn likely that China also classifies them as a military company too. Shit, most western companies are banned in China.
I fail to see the hypocrisy that you appear to be implying.
I only meant to say that it is quite normal for private interprises to dabble in military application
That’s when they become the Outerprise.
