Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Pluralistic.net column, “Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster” about the way that gamers were sucked into the coalition to defend trusted computing, and how the Crowdstrike disaster has seen them ejected from the coalition by Microsoft:

As a class, gamers *hate* digital rights management (DRM), the anti-copying, anti-sharing code that stops gamers from playing older games, selling or giving away games, or just *playing* games:

https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1x7qhs/why_do_you_hate_drm/

Trusted computing promised to supercharge DRM and make it orders of magnitude harder to break – a promise it delivered on. That made gamers a weird partner for the pro-trusted computing coalition.

But coalitions are weird, and coalitions that bring together diverging (and opposing) constituencies are *very* powerful (if fractious), because one member can speak to lawmakers, companies, nonprofits and groups that would normally have nothing to do with another member.

Gamers may hate DRM, but they hate *cheating* even more. As a class, gamers have an all-consuming hatred of cheats that overrides all other considerations (which is weird, because the cheats are *used* by gamers!). One thing trusted computing is pretty good at is detecting cheating. Gamers – or, more often, game *servers* – can use remote attestation to force each player’s computer to cough up a true account of its configuration, including whether there are any cheats running on the computer that would give the player an edge. By design, owners of computers can’t override trusted computing modules, which means that even if you *want* to cheat, your computer will still rat you out.

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(Image: Bernt Rostad, Elliott Brown, CC BY 2.0)