I appreciate the Simpsons reference, but my god not everything has to be a joke all the time. NASA being gutted is a travesty for everyone in every country.

They’ll probably go to the private sector, or land a job at a foreign space agency like ESA.

Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere?

You made the comparison: “Much like every security system”

Source?

It’s out there, my dude. It’s a constant complaint in literally every competitive online game. If people are complaining about it, then it’s not working well enough. This isn’t an esoteric thought either. You ask anyone if cheating is a big issue in online gaming and anyone with knowledge about it will tell you it’s a constant problem that’s getting worse.

What do you mean by system in “full access to the system”?

If you own the hardware and have admin/root access to the OS. Then it’s yours and you have “full access” to everything. And I do mean everything. You can modify the OS. You can read the values of protected parts of memory. And so on.

If you don’t understand what I mean by “full access to the system” in the context of anti-cheat running on your own hardware, then there’s nothing I can say in a short comment to get you up to speed.

Someone still has to discover the exploit.

The cheat and anti-cheat battle is a constant cat and mouse game. The advantage is always with the cheaters because they outnumber the developers 100:1 at the least. Plus they have the will and determination to find ways around anti-cheats. In fact, building security against exploits is by far way harder than finding exploits.

The reality is that client-side anti-cheat is a losing battle.

What you’re referring to is deterrence, and it doesn’t apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn’t ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.

And the efficacy being so bad is the reason why client-side anti-cheat keeps getting more and more invasive to the point of being literally, by definition, a type of malware and system rootkit. And yet it’s still not enough to defeat cheaters, because the cheaters have full access to the system itself.

And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.

Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games

Client-side anti-cheat is useless. It’s not a necessary evil, it’s just evil. The minute the cheater/hacker has direct access to the system, you’ve already lost.

For the longest time I refused to watch the Halo show because I heard that Master Chief takes off his helmet. But then I gave it a shot and it’s a really really good show, and they did the adaptation solid justice.

They made changes where it (mostly) made sense and were truthful to everything else.

They set up a back story that explains how we got a John-117 in the games. Someone who is socially reserved, doesn’t talk much, never takes off his helmet, and prefers to work alone. The ending of the second season was a setup for season 3 to start exactly where Halo 1 started.

The music was phenomenal, cinematography was on point, acting was great, story line was compelling.

I’m normally the person who’s a stickler for not changing a story at all, but the Halo universe was originally told through a game that was more about story beats than actual literary writing. So there’s a ton of room for the in-between conversations and events.

I think the show got an undeserved bad rap. If more people gave it a chance they may have actually liked it.

Halo fans got an actually decent show. Whereas Wheel of Time and Tolkien fans got the abominations of a show we got.

A Halo MMO could have been cool.

Speaking of MMOs or open world games, I wish that Stargate MMO game got off the ground. That would have so much potential.