It was not immediately clear what legal authority Trump would draw upon to impose such a ban on the private market purchases of houses. Trump did not detail the policy, the form it would take or the legal changes he was seeking from Congress.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The U.S. president was due to sign unspecified executive orders later on Wednesday.
Anyways, I thought that issues with Americans being able to afford things like housing was all a hoax made up by Democrats?
It's extremely likely that the president doesn't have that power. He can disallow corporations from buying houses on a whim? I don't think so. But PR goodness has already been coming his way from the policy if there is any.
I was given some gold as a gift and tried to sell it, they take a cut off the top and there are no laws regulating how much a coin shop can charge for exchanging (unlike securities). People don't realize it is easy to buy gold, but a LOT harder to sell it. Especially if there is no provenance like an ingot with a hologram vs. a golden eagle. But like a lower poster says, there is a lot in between, but do you remember COVID and how insane people went over toilet paper? To quote william burroughs: "Man is a bad animal".
Because there are a lot of scenarios between total apocalypse and status quo. The USD may collapse partially compared to other currencies and common assets like BTC, gold, silver without me having to defend my home from raiders and trading whiskey for ammunition.
What is an example where gold temporarily replaced a country's currency and it did't go full mad-max? I don't think you have any evidence to back up your claims, but I can just point to COVID and toilet paper to show how slippery the slope can be (replace toilet paper with "food" and play that out in your head). I didn't even mention Zimbabwe (which more closely resembles the Trump regimes blatant corruption) where wheelbarrows of bills couldn't buy bread.
Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games.
Sure, but you still have to make a serious attempt or the experience will be terrible for any non-cheaters. Or you just make your game bad enough that no one cares. That's an option too.
Other options exist but it’s not an option for these real-time games like FPS’s. I get it.
If you don’t need real-time packets and can deal with the old school architecture of pulses, there’s things you can do on the network to ensure security.
You do this too on real-time UDP it’s just a bit trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is really the only options thus far.
But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
> But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed.
Kernel level? The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state. There are now also purely external cheating devices that use video capture and mouse emulation to fully simulate a human.
I miss that kind of media discovery, our modern always-online world tends to smother serendipity.
I don't really miss the time of having to choose games this way. If you lucked out it was great, but you were also potentially putting down upwards of $50+ bucks in 1995 dollars on a game that you might end up really disliking.
Exaggeration warning, but as someone who has indeed spent a bunch of money on games I ended up disliking, I find our current-day inability to cope with disappointment kind of sad.
Sometimes we buy something we don't like, but it's on us, and that's just life.
At some point I think we just took the "satisfied or your money back" mentality too far.
Edit: note this doesn't absolve actual scammers or other bad actors from being crappy people though.
Demos existed, for home computer and PC games anyway. This is why you bought the game review magazines to get the disk (and later, CD-ROM) with demos. For consoles you could often try the game in the shop, or rent them at the Video rental shop. You could even rent entire consoles! I've also returned a few games back in the day.
When it comes to anti-cheat on Linux, it's basically an elephant in the room that nobody wants to address.
Anti-cheat on Linux would need root access to have any effectiveness. Alternatively, you'd need to be running a custom kernel with anti-cheat built into it.
This is the part of the conversation where someone says anti-cheat needs to be server-side, but that's an incredibly naive and poorly thought out idea. You can't prevent aim-bots server-side. You can't even detect aim-bots server-side. At best, you could come up with heuristics to determine if someone's possibly cheating, but you'd probably have a very hard time distinguishing between a cheater and a highly skilled player.
Something I think the anti-anti-cheat people fail to recognize is that cheaters don't care about their cheats requiring root/admin, which makes it trivial to evade anti-cheat that only runs with user-level permissions.
When it comes to cheating in games, there are two options:
1. Anti-cheat runs as admin/root/rootkit/SYSTEM/etc.
2. The games you play have tons of cheaters.
You can't have it both ways: No cheaters and anti-cheat runs with user-level permissions.
I don't fully agree with the 1 and 2 dichotomy. For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.
On dedicated servers we had a self-policing community with a smaller pool of more regular players and cheaters were less of an issue. Sure, some innocents got banned and less blatant cheaters slipped through but the main issue of cheaters is when they destroy fun for everyone else.
So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.
Then when people get banned (or probably better, shadowbanned/low priority queued) by player reports or weaker anti-cheat they can't easily ban evade. But of course then there is the issue of incentivizing identity theft.
And I don't think giving a gaming company my PII is any better than giving them root on my machine. But that seems more like an implementation issue.
> For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.
I still had a lot of problems with cheaters during this time. And when the admins aren't on you're still then at the whims of cheaters until you go find some other playground to play in.
And then on top of that you have the challenge of actually finding good servers to go join a game with similarly skilled players, especially when trying to play with a group of friends together. Trying to get all your friends on to the same team just for the server to auto-balance you again because the server has no concept of parties sucked. Finding a good server with the right mods or maps you're looking for, trying to join right when a round started, etc was always quite a mess.
Matchmaking services have a lot of extremely desirable features for a lot of gamers.
Except most anti-cheats started on dedicated servers because it turns out most people are not interested in policing other players.
Punkbuster was developed for Team Fortress Classic, even getting officially added to Quake 3 Arena. BattleEye for Battlefield games. EasyAntiCheat for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft 1 ICCUP 3rd party servers having an anti-cheat they called 'anti-hack'.
You can still see this today with modern dedicated servers in CS2: Face-It and ESEA have additional anti-cheat, not less. Even modded 3rd party server FiveM for GTAV has their own anti-cheat called adhesive.
I would argue a lot of the early anti-cheat was just as much about giving admins and communities better tools to police themselves as it was about automated cheat detection.
Like here's 2006 Punkbuster for Battlefield 2 (BEye might have been made for BF:V but Punkbuster was what I remember being used by servers). [1]
It automatically kicked on cheat detection but it didn't ban. It provided logs for admins to use for bans. It provided a way for admins to give community players the power to kick. It provided a player GUID based on CD key. It provided an online identity verification/registration system (though I don't remember anyone using this). It let admins take screenshots of players' screens.
> So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.
If you think the hate for anti-cheat is bad, just wait until you see the hate for identity verification.
I'm actually rather blown away that you would even suggest it.
Rootkit anti-cheats can still often be bypassed using DMA and external hardware cheats, which are becoming much cheaper and increasingly common. There's still cheaters in Valorant and in Cs2 on faceit, both of which have extremely intrusive ACs that only run on Windows.
At the level of privilege you're granting to play a video game, you'd need to have a dedicated gaming PC that is isolated from the rest of your home network, lest that another crowdstrike level issue takes place from a bad update to the ring 0 code these systems are running
Something that is "frivolous" to you is a passion or even a profession for others. Competitive gaming is a massive market worldwide, and it wouldn't exist without the ability to enforce a level playing field. Not everything has to be a holy FOSS war.
Do you use a separate user to play games? If not it's kinda useless as a user space process can read all your files and memory of running processes of the same user.
Even kernel anti-cheat can be defeated, this is a similar fight to what captchas have.
I can just have my screen recorded and have a fake input signal as my mouse/keyboard.. or just simply hire a pro player to play in my name, and it's absolutely impossible to detect any of these.
The point is to just make it more expensive to cheat, culling out the majority of people who would do so.
But isn't all client-side anti-cheat bypassable by doing image recognition on the rendered image? (either remote desktop or a hardware-based display cable proxy)
Modern cheats are far more advanced than this. Using a DMA cheat, you basically just read the game's memory from a different computer and there's no way for the game to know unless the PCI device ID is known: https://intl.anticheatexpert.com/resource-center/content-68....
Nowadays if memory access is needed, you are looking at having to find a way to load a custom BIOS or UEFI module in a way that doesn't mess with secure boot. Even then, certain anti-cheats use frequently firing interrupts to find any unknown code executing on any system threads.
As someone who grew up amazed at Reaper bot for Quake, I'm surprised we don't see a rennaisance of making 'multiplayer' fun by more expressive, fallible, unpredictable bots. We're in an AI bubble and I don't hear of anyone chasing the holy grail of believable 'AI' opponents.
This also has the secondary benefit of having your multiplayer game remain enjoyable even when people's short attention spans move on to the next hot live service. Heck this could kill live service games.
Then again, what people get out of multiplayer is, on some unspoken and sad level, making some other person hurt.
Cheaters are increasingly sophisticated and hard to detect. It leads me to think if we put the effort in, we could emerge the same dynamism and fun, maybe even moreso.
Today, no. Very simplified but the broad goal of those tools is to prevent manipulation and monitoring of the in-process state of the game. Consoles and PCs require this to varying degrees by requiring a signed boot chain at minimum. Consoles require a fully signed chain for every program, so you can't deploy a hacking tool anyway; no anti-cheat is needed. PCs can run unsigned and signed programs -- so instead they require the kernel at minimum to be signed & trusted, and then you put the anti-cheat system inside it so it cannot be interfered with. If you do not do this then there is basically no way to actually trust any claim the computer makes about its state. For PCs, the problem is you have to basically trust the anti-cheat isn't a piece of shit and thus have to trust both Microsoft and also random corporations. Also PCs are generally insecure anyway at the hardware level due to a number of factors, so it only does so much.
You could make a Linux distro with a signed boot chain and a kernel anti-cheat, then you'd mostly need to get developers on board with trusting that solution. Nobody is doing that today, even Valve.
Funny enough, macOS of all things is maybe "best" theoretical platform for all this because it does not require you to trust anyone beyond Apple. All major macOS programs are signed by their developers, so macOS as an OS knows exactly where each program came from. macOS can also attest that it is running in secure mode, and it can run a process at user-mode level such that it can't be interfered with by another process. So you could enforce a policy like this: if Battlefield6.app is launched, it cannot be examined by any other process, but likewise it may run in a full sandbox. Next, Battlefield6.app needs to login online, so it can ask macOS to provide an attestation saying it is running on genuine Apple hardware in secure mode, and then it could submit that attestation to EA which can validate it as genuine. Then the program launch is trusted. This setup requires you to only trust Apple security and that macOS is functioning correctly, not EA or whatever nor does it require actual anti-cheat mechanisms.
I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!
Games that sell a battlepass or have ongoing MTX are an minority of the video games available.
There are plenty of games available that are priced similarly to books and there really isn't a question as far as which will provide more entertainment.
For instance, I recently purchased the Mass Effect series for $6. I should be able to easily get 100+ hours out of that set of games.
The Republican party is explicitly against any government intervention to simplify tax filing for Americans, so it makes it hard for improvements as they currently control the government.
It also means its hard for Democrats to improve as well since removing any improvements in filing are some of the first things Republicans push to undo when the come into power.
To a lot of people, Russian is just a state of mind. It simply means that you disagree with them, or the regime that they support. Also, the mods on reddit are overwhelmingly these people, banning all opposing opinions, or banning people for being Russian, or Iranian, or Chinese, etc...
Pretending that there aren't concerted efforts to exert political influence on Reddit isn't helpful, and comes across as pretty disingenuous.
All governance in the western world has become weak as hell. You only need a few bucks to corrupt anything, unless somebody with a few more bucks is already corrupting it.
Yes, corruption and bribery exist exclusive in "western" governments. Thankfully "eastern" governments are completely immune to these issues.
And I know, "I never said those exact words!" but that at was the obvious intention.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The U.S. president was due to sign unspecified executive orders later on Wednesday.
Anyways, I thought that issues with Americans being able to afford things like housing was all a hoax made up by Democrats?
Why craft policies to address a made up issue?
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