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Anti-Cheat Software Causing Big Problems For Windows 10 Previews (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Windows 10 Insider Preview Slow Ring -- the beta track that's meant to receive only those builds that are free from any known serious problems -- hasn't received an update for months. While the fast ring is currently testing previews of the April 2019 release, codenamed 19H1, and the even-faster skip-ahead ring is testing previews not of the October 2019 release, 19H2, but of the April 2020 release, 20H1, the Slow Ring is yet to receive a single 19H1 build. This has prompted some concern among insiders that perhaps the ring has been forgotten about, and it has even caused a few complaints from companies that are using the Windows Insider for Business program to validate new Windows releases before their launch. Without Slow Ring builds to test, there's nothing to validate, meaning that they'll have to delay deployment of 19H1 once it ships.
Microsoft's Dona Sarkar, chief of the Windows Insider program, explained yesterday what the problem is, and in many ways it's a throwback to Windows' past, before the days of DEP and ASLR and PatchGuard and all the other measures Microsoft has implemented to harden Windows against malicious software: the build is crashing when some unspecified common anti-cheat software is used. Sarkar's tweet says that the software causes a GSOD, for Green Screen of Death; the traditional and disappointingly familiar Blue Screen of Death, denoting that Windows has suffered a fatal error, is colored green for preview releases so they can be distinguished at a glance from crashes of stable builds. Fast ring builds have the same GSOD issue, and indeed, it has been listed on their known issues list for many months. Sarkar says that the fix must come from the third-party company that developed the anti-cheat software. In an update, Ars Technica's Peter Bright says Microsoft has pushed a build to the Slow Ring, number 18342.8, but the GSOD issue remains. "To avoid crashing machines, the build won't be offered to any system that has the offending anti-cheat software installed," Bright writes. "It's not clear why this approach could not have been used months ago."
Microsoft's Dona Sarkar, chief of the Windows Insider program, explained yesterday what the problem is, and in many ways it's a throwback to Windows' past, before the days of DEP and ASLR and PatchGuard and all the other measures Microsoft has implemented to harden Windows against malicious software: the build is crashing when some unspecified common anti-cheat software is used. Sarkar's tweet says that the software causes a GSOD, for Green Screen of Death; the traditional and disappointingly familiar Blue Screen of Death, denoting that Windows has suffered a fatal error, is colored green for preview releases so they can be distinguished at a glance from crashes of stable builds. Fast ring builds have the same GSOD issue, and indeed, it has been listed on their known issues list for many months. Sarkar says that the fix must come from the third-party company that developed the anti-cheat software. In an update, Ars Technica's Peter Bright says Microsoft has pushed a build to the Slow Ring, number 18342.8, but the GSOD issue remains. "To avoid crashing machines, the build won't be offered to any system that has the offending anti-cheat software installed," Bright writes. "It's not clear why this approach could not have been used months ago."
Why does what amounts to spyware get preferential treatment?
What's the point of this article?! If you don't know/want to tell WHICH software you talk about, just STFU!
The solution to this is simple: games shouldn't be loading their own kernel drivers.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Three sides of the same coin.
Surely even malicious software shouldn't be allowed to crash the operating system.
If they are running the anti-cheat software in kernel mode, that seems like a bad idea since it is fundamentally similar to malware.
At least it doesn't give BSOD.
spies on all your processes, don't do your gaming and banking on the same PC.
Part of the plan to lock out steam and others!
Ms wants to make it all locked down MS store / Xbox that they get an 30% cut.
STEAM!
It will be nice to have easy force uninstall for that and other stuff like starforce
I'd prefer an ultra Ultra slow and very stable tested train of updates.
You know maybe even give it a name, a more simplified ui, call it something like windows 7 or something like that.
the reasons that Windows 7 Pro will most likely be my last Windows Workstations (have 2) when it goes EOL.
;)
At that point, I am thinking bye bye Windows/Microsoft everything. So you know what, I don't much care. After all, they really are heading to remote monthly subscription based everything anyway.
I refuse to use any of that kind of stuff in "my" business. Basically, limited accounts to deal with client work. And when the time comes I will let those clients go elsewhere for that work.
Just my 2 cents
"It's not clear why this approach could not have been used months ago."
Because it's a lie.
go play the original COD Modern Warfare, Not even sure if you can actually, but last I heard (2014...ish?) it was less a game and more an exercise in how far you could push online cheat engines. There were accusations that Activision ignored the cheaters so people would move on to the current release (now with more Microtransactions(c) ).
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Because cheating is rampant in online games, and anti-cheats are needed to even have a modicum of fair play online. Unless you're one to believe the only way to play online is consoles only and basically the PC should be discarded as a gaming device.
Play on PC with people you know from outside the game who can be trusted not to cheat.
I would jump ship off win 10 so fast. It has to be the worst OS since Vista. I mean if it were a pure OS it would be great as it does some things really well. But since MSFT decided that windows won't be just an OS anymore it tries to do things it should not do. I don't need my OS to spy on me or update at inopportune times.
>_ the traditional and disappointingly familiar Blue Screen of Death, denoting that Windows has suffered a fatal error, is colored green for preview releases so they can be distinguished at a glance from crashes of stable builds.
That's how you know you're using Windows' stable version...
I have a few tools that require licences and the licence checking software occasionally breaks when their is a windows update. I would prefer it if the makers of the tools actually gave an update when windows broke things as opposed to thousands of developers scrambling and wasting hours on these problems.
Yet another item to throw in the "don't give a flying fuck bucket." puTTY is essential, the rest is just filler.
... the fix must come from the third-party company ...
Yeah, right. Like it is the third partys task to ensure processes do not interfere with each other, use right ranges of addresses and do not poke kernels eyes out. In my view this is the primary task of Microsoft, if they want to call Windows an operating system. I do not know what the unspecified program from unmentionable company is doing, but it is the OS task to catch that and stop the offending process, not die itself. Windows 10 is a joke on humanity.
Well, it could have, but I assume that Microsoft alerted the company involved and had expected a fix to be released.
What's not clear to me is why Microsoft has failed to provide a workaround for this. The only reason I can think of is that the software has a vulnerability which is deliberately asserted.
Don't forget: anti-cheat is key to online games that rely on online economies chased with real world dollars. If anti-cheat breaks, there's gonna be some severe heartbreak for the heartless.
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It's a test build, it's even states that the build shouldn't be used for day to day operating. And isn't the problem here the anti-cheat software, so shouldn't THEY fix the reason why that particular version of windows is crashing (unless ofcourse they are using the API's as they should be used and not do something they shouldn't)?
For reference, Peter Bright from Ars Technica, who now says that Microsoft should do more testing before it releases Windows updates, is the same Peter Bright from Ars Technica who just a few years ago praised Microsoft for reducing costs by getting Windows Insiders to do a lot of the testing that used to be done in-house.
What a schmuck.
Yeah, sounds like windows. Slow ring . . .
Those cheapskates at Epic wanted a bigger cut of their sales, so they decided to release the game all by themselves rather than use Steam to distribute. Well, now it's biting them in the ass.
Since Epic didn't want to play nice with Steam, they lost their chance at using Valve Anti-Cheat, and instead had to go with BattlEye anti-cheat. Sure, people can break both, this *is* a cat-and-mouse scenario, after all, but the two biggest differences between BattlEye and VAC are that one, VAC doesn't break your operating system, and two, VAC runs on Mac and Linux and doesn't false-positive the lack of Windows as a "cheating tool", thereby isolating your market to people running insecure operating systems.
If you need an operating system to be fundamentally broken and insecure in order to write anti-cheat software for it, you're a fucking idiot and should be blackballed from the games software industry. Don't give me any crap about how stopping cheating is hard. I know it is. What isn't hard is writing software that respects the user who installs it and the system it's installed on.
Disappointment... So many comments not identifying the real solution.
Anti-cheat isnt a solution, there is nothing to fix except the game devs fixing their own stuff.
Never trust the client, no matter the system. Throwing in an "anti-cheat" package on your game doesn't stop it from happening. I've seen it so many times.
Fresh game with anti cheat. It prevents most basic cheating.. until someone releases the cheat app, and all havoc breaks loose. After a few months, game dies as devs play whack a mole trying to ban "Cheat.exe" and "NewCheat.exe" from running in background.
If a user says it teleported across the map, trying to setup something that says the user CANT say they teleported is the wrong answer. The correct answer is: having the other players say they CANT teleport, and kick them from the server for doing something so obvious.