It should have been Valve doing it! (And that comes from someone hating on Epic and loving Valve, BTW.)

I’ve written at length elsewhere in the topic about how it’s not just the technical implementation, but what this attestation process signifies about control of these companies over your system.

I understand this is one of the weaker arguments I can make in isolation, but it bears asking the question: why is it Epic that’s doing it and not Valve?

I read your comment and I’m familiar with the technology. I’m not insinuating they’re putting anything sleazy in the kernel, in fact I acknowledge there are practical security benefits to it. That’s where a lot of the nuance comes in.

Secure Boot and the TPM help verify the boot process and that it hasn’t been tampered with. I keep mentioning TPM as well because it’s part of the mechanisms already in place with CoD[1], it has remote attestation[2], and has been pitched as a DRM mechanism since at least 2009[3]. This makes a lot more sense in a corporate/enterprise environment where you’re either using a company issued laptop or your BYOD device needs to prove it’s up to a standard worthy of trust to connect and interact with network resources. In this scenario the company has created a secure platform and your device needs to be trusted within it.

But on a consumer level, while you can still argue there’s protection from tampering by malicious parties with the boot process, you have to ask yourself what platform you’re participating in and why. This is the equivalent of allowing the cops to put a camera in your house on the grounds that if everyone is watched it’ll reduce crime. Microsoft (or whatever game developer) wants to know your device can be trusted on their platform and you need to submit to whatever those standards are. Allowing EAC is opening the door to that process. If Microsoft sniffs something out on your PC they don’t like, they can decline to run the software. It gives them right of denial over what your system looks like. They can enforce you to run telemetry scraping services as part of the configuration that must be in place to trust your device.

So while I don’t have any proof that this is being used quite in that manner yet, or even what it might eventually look like, it is well within possibility. And we know the tech industry absolutely has an appetite for it. This is the Sony rootkit scandal from 2005 except now they just tell you they’re doing it instead of trying to hide the fact.

You’re free to make of that information what you will and evaluate how much of a likely threat you perceive any of that to be and if it’s worth the tradeoff. And sorry about the people downvoting you, I’m just trying to get this information out there. It’s complicated and nuanced, I get it.

Valid points, I type from a laptop running proprietary drivers. But I do argue there’s a difference worth considering what Nvidia might be doing with those closed drivers (something that does increasingly worry me given the current state of things) vs. the much more clear intent of what Secure Boot and TPM implementations are outright stating they intend. These are documented DRM applications with direct control over your system, mostly right of denial, over what software you can or can’t run depending on the state it’s in and what they think about it.

It’s not a zero sum game, every choice matters and comes with its own weight. I understand making these philosophical arguments is difficult and tedious, but if you don’t at least make them, there are a lot of people who aren’t ever going to hear them. EAC is the wide open door to demanding you run services, telemetry, and online accounts on your Linux system enshittifying that, too.

I understand why this might appeal to some gamers, I really do. I promise I sympathize, but if you’re willing to run EAC on your Linux install it’s worth asking why you’re running Linux and what you think you’re getting out of it?

At this point we’re starting to see some better gaming performance due to good compatibility layers and Microsoft just repeatedly shooting themselves in the dick, but for me at least a large part of it was escaping that ecosystem that gives them control over your system. Giving them that kernel level access so you can keep playing Fortnite is a devil’s bargain. Seriously, please find a new game and I’m trying to convey that in the least judgmental way possible.

I think it’s gonna be a lot messier than that, actually.

Right now we’re seeing people take on a strong AI stance as a social and cultural value, and things are dividing along those lines. You see it reflected in just about any website that receives content. You either filter out the slop, or you risk becoming a slop website that gets overwhelmed with it (thus the name, slop). Once you’re known as a slop website, you lose value to the anti-AI people.

There’s force behind the AI movement, but it doesn’t have the cultural sway for critical mass. It won’t cleanup easy either, we’re in for decades of messiness, but I don’t think there’s enough force to tip things fully one way or the other, and that’s the world we live in now.