Let em figure it out. Wasting their time is a core strategy in reducing their impact and will to continue cheating

I certainly didn’t share it myself but it’s possible my old boss did!

TBH, in my very personal opinion the third party anti-cheat apps are like 50% placebo. Just makes people feel better. They are very protective of their “secret sauce” but I can say none of them are anywhere close to perfect. The thing they’re best at is taking the easy stuff off our plates so we can focus on the more difficult problems of hardening the game itself and analyzing telemetry.

Right I’m saying I always thought that was an optional feature, determined by the person who created the petition. I don’t think it’s a universal requirement for all change.org petitions

My understanding is that signing a petition and creating an account aren’t necessarily linked, and it’s up to the person who created the petition whether verification is required.

Yes! I LITERALLY just set up my stuff there a few days ago for TSA Precheck and CBP because I’m heading to Japan next month. I love what they’re doing.

As it ever will be, much as it may pain our moral sensibilities.

Re: CoD - I loved it. Laughed my ass off. Absolutely a big fan of creative approaches to getting cheaters to tell on themselves. I proposed something similar to my team when we had a problem with players manipulating the position of objects in the world so they were directly in front of the player: add an object of the same type inside map geometry and attach a “kill volume” to it, so it was like a landmine. Move the object in front of the player and they instantly die :P Wish we’d done it but couldn’t get the level designers’ time to implement it unfortunately

One we did do though: back when the product I worked on was on PS3 one of the big problems was hacked consoles spoofing platform entitlements (the thing that tells the game what purchases they should have access to). So we added an entitlement that couldn’t be acquired in any legitimate way, and gave you a specific item in game. Then we just checked player inventories once a week for anyone with that item and banned their account, their console, and any account that played on that console for a meaningful amount of time. Did the same thing with an item you could only get to by clipping through geometry. Even put the word “intrusion” in the item’s name haha.

The cheats are so technically complicated at this juncture that the creative stuff is often the most effective. I mean, people are literally voluntarily installing hypervisor rootkits to run the cheats, so they can talk to their drivers below even the kernel. It’s so hard to come to with technical solutions to a problem like that that doesn’t wind up costing massive server processing power to validate every input.

Funny you mention the robocall thing… I’m literally leaving a company that works on that problem (though not as their primary business) Wednesday. It was a short stint - mostly because they are resistant to solving massive technical debt problems and I’m not trying to doom my future self - but what I witnessed was…depressing. Getting anything done was like pulling teeth, and that’s with the recent FTC pivot to taking this stuff more seriously. STIR/SHAKEN is a reasonable start but it still has almost no teeth behind it.

I’m with you on the identity issue. I mean, if we’re being really honest, the only people losing out by not implementing strong personal identification verification are the legitimate end users because the threat actors have gotten so unbelievably good at fingerprinting user behavior. And it’s only going to continue getting worse. With ML growth as unfettered as it is, there is nothing we can do. So I’d much rather take the reigns and make identity verification a robust feature instead of a bug we can’t squash.

You’re not wrong, but this isn’t really a security matter, it’s an “apparent uniqueness” matter. Their goal, I assume, is to satisfy critics enough that a given petition’s participants are sufficiently unique while keeping the barrier to filling out the form as low as possible. So they end up in a situation where neither of perfect, but they’re both “good enough” for what the business needs.

I dealt with this in the anti-cheat space: my goal was never to remove all cheating, because that’s too expensive (insanely so). My goal was to make the public believe they weren’t playing against cheaters too often. If the solution was forcing the cheaters to perform at a level that was just below the most skilled human players, that was actually a success, because if the players can’t differentiate between cheaters and pro players, then they can’t effectively determine how prevalent cheating actually is.

Part of me hated that we had to treat it that way, but another part of me understood that if I pushed too hard on “eliminating cheating” my department would become more costly than it was worth and they’d pivot away from gameplay that needed anti-cheat at all

Security professional here. This is legit a good call on their part. It’s because those types of addresses won’t bounce emails but aren’t necessarily in your control; it’s very, very easy to spam those petition forms with mail@ for a million real domains without bouncing the emails, making them seem legit.

You own your domain, obviously, so it’s really as simple as creating a forwarding/alias address of “changeorg@domain.tld”. If creating a forwarding/alias address is that much of a problem for you I suggest that you likely shouldn’t be hosting your own email in the first place.

Your laziness isn’t a good reason to be upset with a company taking steps to reduce their security overhead significantly

If you were ever taught that when driving you should have your hands on the wheel at “10 and 2”, they changed that lesson for the same reason: airbags would push your arms up and away from your body, breaking your arms or dislocating shoulders.

They now recommend “8 and 4” instead so your elbows are pushed mostly down and back into the seat cushion

They also stopped teaching people to turn the wheel “hand over hand” for the same reason. If your arms are crossed when the airbag goes off it’s a bad time.

Instead, you’re supposed to keep your hands on the bottom half of the wheel, sliding one hand around the wheel in the opposite direction of rotation as the other hand turns the wheel. So if you’re turning right, i.e. rotating the wheel clockwise, you would start with your right hand at 4 and left hand at 8. Then, as your right hand is rotating the wheel clockwise - down and left, from 4 to 6 - slide your left hand from 8 to 6 where it will meet your right hand. Now switch grip so your left hand is rotating the wheel - left and up, from 6 to 8 - while sliding your right hand back to 4 from 6. Repeat.

Can you tell us what you’ve tried already?

I have used FoxIt for a long time but might be considered “overpowered” and not sure how it does in tablet mode

There is no question that most myths and legends were originally an attempt to convey facts, theories, or guesses into the future.

Humans are built to be pattern matching machines and prediction engines; it’s one of the big survival traits we developed through evolution and we’re better at it than any other species we know of.

BUT objectively speaking we were still really, really bad at it. Yet that doesn’t stop us from trying.

So we tend to do the best we can with the information we have available at the time.

As others have said, “physics” - and science in general - is by definition immutable. It is the thing that can be tested with specific predictions that always turn out to be correct. If I can perform an experiment today, and you can perform the same experiment 100 years from now, and (adjusting for environmental factors and measurement accuracy) we get the same results, and we can repeat that over and over, that’s science.

But our understanding, our knowledge of it, can change as you say. That doesn’t make physics less true, it just make our knowledge of and ability to describe physics less accurate.

We can trace so many stories - including modern religions - to origins that attempt to explain our limited observations in the past. They were our best effort at matching patterns and predicting outcomes in the world around us. And the inaccuracies, the limitations don’t mean we should stop believing the things we think we understand today.

It just means that we must recognize new information when it arrives as testable data, and incorporate it into our current understanding, relegating the wisdom of the past to history.

So, you don’t mention anime or anything and thus the instance I run, https://urusai.social, probably isn’t a great fit BUT…

Our feeds are absolutely bursting at the seams with the type of content you say you enjoy. I recommend checking out our public timeline and looking at the servers of the users that show up there. A lot of them are very geeky: https://urusai.social/public