ashpool37

Sorry, I don't see your point. There are plenty of mods that require modification of both the server and the client software, e.g. if new items or game modes are added and the client needs to be able to recognize them. As long as all players on a server agree on the acceptable configurations of both, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to implement it for their own community.

Moreover, restricting mods to only the server side doesn't solve the trust issue: if you don't trust your players, your only option is still to try and enforce their local configuration somehow. The problem with big publishers trying to centralize this authority is their audience will always be too big to trust without enforcing compliance, and relying solely on behavour report and review system will not scale.

Even without any mods, there's a lot of trust required between the client and the server in pretty much any online game. The client has more information that it is allowed to show, and the server often trusts it reports the user's actions faithfully, because enforcing all of that on the server side would be prohibitively expensive performance-wise.

Absolutely. This ties in to the whole Stop Killing Games saga, and my comment was long enough. Suffice it to say widespread push of cryptographically locked-down gaming clients and distros will not make that battle any easier for the little guy in the Linux world.

A more federated future for online gaming is theoretically possible, but seeing how much the Fediverse struggles with the adoption of alternatives to software that most people consider bare basics, I don't think it's the future that the arrow of entropy points to.

For sure, the solution sounds in line with the interests of users who really want to play the protected games, more so than any alternative I can think of right now. I'm supportive of people who will knowingly make this trade-off, especially if they are patient/resourceful enough to maintain a separate gaming environment.

As for the latter part, I know that I myself am too busy and not patient enough, and if I really, really wanted to play a protected game I'd probably just switch to a compliant distro and daily drive it.

The consequences are all the more worrisome if you suppose this arrangement is able to gain any real traction as proposed.

Each participating distro's maintainers will need to publish a compliant distro flavour in binary form in order to remain on the "good guys" key list. Negotiating and implementing the compliance criteria, as well as maintaining the entire thing will all consume additional man hours, which open source maintainers famously have very little of.

If a distro/appliance maintainer is committed to continue to participate, an incentive emerges to gradually push the compliant version as the default, the later possibly the only supported version of their offering. Unhappy users may of course switch, but the more this proliferates the less good places will remain for them to go to. This pattern of enshittification by infiltration and complacency manipulation is the one we see almost everywhere in the modern tech.

Hopefully a well-enough organised minority of uncompromising users and developers always remains in tech, if not in the Linux world then in the BSDs. We will always need to keep our eyes open for the false values masquerading as tech dilemmas like this one.

I'm not a lawyer so I will not get into the legal ramifications of distributing locked-down binary versions of free software. However, it's clear that without obtaining the private signing key a user will never be able to modify that software on their system for the purpose of running the game, which may or may not infringe on their freedoms as provided by the licenses.

The quiet part needs to be said out loud: ensuring "fairness" in online games and letting clients meaningfully remain in control over their hardware and software are two fundamentally incompatible goals. One goal puts the interests of the game publisher and community first, the other upholds the individual clients' interests.

Ideally there should be little conflict between the two, however, modern online games require running sophisticated software locally that encapsulates core game logic. The fairness (compliance) goal demands that this software runs correctly and only conveys information and processes input as designed. The user control (freedom) goal demands that the individual user is allowed to run and modify any software as they see fit, including any game software, meaning that he or she must be able to tamper with the game software behaviour to gain advantage.

Now remember that online gaming is an extremely low-trust environment. Competitive online gaming is often supposed to emulate sportsmanship, thus widespread trust in the games' rules is essential so that players continue to participate. At the same time, building that trust dictates enforcing compliance down to the level of each individual user's hardware. So if you want to participate, you must be willing to give up ultimate control over your hardware and software, even if you believe it's only temporary.

All of this might sound very obvious, tautological even. However, lots of comments on this sound like they come from a place of unawareness of this contradiction. More people need to see that this is not a tech incompatibility issue, but rather a more serious values clash. Linux folks are (still) mostly the ones who prefer more freedom and control over their software, and competitive online gaming asks that they give that up. For a lot of people this defeats the purpose of using Linux in the first place.

Is there a way to provably destroy a piece of information? The closest thing I heard of was the Z-Cash "ceremony" [1]. If there was, we could create messages that are provably and absolutely timestamped.

Another possible way would be crafting the message in a way that requires a low-entropy system, like a living human person, a sophisticated computer, or an immense power source. But, this would only be useful on extreme time scales, or within limited space.

[1]: https://z.cash/technology/paramgen/

Such a timestamp could only be interpreted as a "no-earlier-than" proof. You couldn't use it to prove that the message was created before a certain date, as all existing bitcoin blocks can easily be referenced in any future messages.

In other news: 100% of people who drink water inevitably die