Now that Stop Killing Games is actually being taken seriously - maybe we need to take a look at Stop Fucking Around In Our Kernels

I haven’t really been personally affected by it before - I don’t play any competitive multiplayer games at all. But my wife had her brother over, and he’s significantly younger than us. So he wanted to play FortNite and GTA V, knowing I have a gaming PC. FortNite is immediately out of the question, it’ll never work on my computer. Okay, so I got GTA V running and it was fun for a while, but it turns out all of those really cool cars only exist in Online. But oh look, now they’ve added BattlEye and I can no longer get online.

While this seems like a trivial issue (Just buy a third SSD for Windows and dual boot), it’s really not. Even if I wanted to install Windows ever again, I do NOT want random 3rd party kernel modules in there. Anyone remember the whole CrowdStrike fiasco? I do NOT want to wake up to my computer not booting up because some idiot decided to push a shitty update to their kernel module that makes the kernel itself shit the bed. And while Microsoft fucks up plenty, at least they’re a corporation with a reputation to uphold, and I believe they even have a QA team or 2. CrowdStrike was unheard of outside of the corporate world before the ordeal and tbh nobody has ever heard of it afterwards again.

So I think this would be a good angle to push. That we should be careful about what code runs in our OS kernels, for security and stability reasons. Obviously it’d be impossible to just blanket ban 3rd party kernel modules to any OS. However, maybe here in the EU at least we could get them to consider a rule that any software that includes a component running in the OS kernel, MUST justify how that part is necessary for the software to function in the best possible way for the user of the computer the software is running on. E.g I expect a hardware driver to have a kernel module, and I can see how security software needs to have a kernel module, but I do NOT see how a video game needs to have an anti cheat with a kernel module. How does that benefit me, the customer paying to be able to play said video game?

  • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nzEnglish
    35·
    13 days ago

    Drag uses person-independent pronouns, which are conjugated and inflected the same way in all grammatical persons. When drag uses drag’s pronouns, they’re first person. And to answer your question, drag has a pet dragon. We’re engaged to be married. It’s @HonouraryDragon@lemmy.nz

      • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nzEnglish
        17·
        13 days ago

        Thanks. A lot of people lived through the “singular they” controversy, where conjugation was a big issue, yet they never fully understood the conclusion that conjugation in English depends on the pronoun, not on the inflection. Latin has different rules, of course, but we’re not speaking Latin. A lot of people are still upset about that fact after all these centuries. They’re usually the kind of people who think the Romans were the good guys, and the Goths who spoke a precursor to English were evil. Fun fact: Adolf Hitler hated Gothic script. He called it “Jewish letters”. It’s funny how Germany changed sides over the whole issue. One minute Germany is sacking Rome, and the next they’re the home of the Holy Roman Empire. The whole “Third Reich” thing was an attempt at claiming a lineage descended from Rome. And of course England and the US spent a long time establishing themselves as the inheritors of Rome too. That’s probably why there’s so many old people who want English to be Latin.