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Comment by rgower | Hacker News Reader

This kind of invasiveness is standard for good anti-cheat protection. The fine stems entirely from stealth bitcoin mining.

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Standard - Screen captures? I must've been out of the gaming scene for some time now.

Yeah, it's a relatively standard anticheat method now apparently. Makes sense, it kind of works like Hostgator's auto-screenshot employee spyware works. If a screenshot is taken while a player is in-game and there is a radar or if the player can see people through walls, then that's pretty good indication of cheats.

Screen captures while not playing seems excessive. But a screencap while you're playing seems like a quick and easy (albeit manual) way to determine if someone has gotten a render hack past detection. Right?

Still seems pretty invasive to me! Especially considering that platforms like Steam has integrated in-game social networking features like chat, meaning that the game company could potentially pry into your private conversations.

Well the whole point is to be invasive. The idea is to lock down the PC into a console-like platform. Without turning on TPMs, secure boot, and remote attestation, the only way to make sure the user isn't running modified code somehow is to effectively rootkit their system and spy on everything.

The anti-cheat stuff runs as part of the OS, so the company can do pretty much anything they feel like. I'd assume they only bother with screenshots on suspected cheaters, while they're playing. Otherwise it's a waste of effort on their part. But if you don't trust them to handle screenshots possibly containing snippets of IM, then you shouldn't be running their binaries as root.

I hate these kind of arguments.

What OS are you running? If you trust your OS vendor enough to run their binaries as root then you shouldn't be too worried when they screenshot your machine every minute and post the images online so your family can see the kind of porn you watch...

I know that online poker clients have been doing this for over a decade.

when the program is running, yes.

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