If only it were that easy. A conversation with one of them would go something more like this:

“It’s not Trump.”

“Okay, prove it!”

“I don’t need to because THIS IS AMERICA, and it’s INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY.”

“Like the people arrested by ICE?”

“THEY WERE CRIMINALS!”

“Even the 93% without criminal records?”

“THAT’S FAKE NEWS, LIBTARD”

No, no. It makes perfect sense from an investment standpoint. Their actual target audience would love to be able to pay for access to that catalog.

Company profiting from allowing pedos to groom children enacts steps to prevent pedos from grooming children? Like that’s going to happen.

Whatever solution they come up with, I can guarantee that it “accidentally” has a loophole in it.

You can disable UAC (thinking practical, not necessarily security minded - but for an auto login w/o password, what’s security?)

It’s not just the UAC prompt. Any window created by an elevated process will block synthetic input events created by lower privilege processes.

Popups: yes. But then you’d need to actively use other software besides steam. Why would you do that, if using only a controller?

• Game launchers installed as part of the Steam game.
• Driver software automatically installed by Windows.
• Windows itself, sometimes.

Also that can happen in Linux, too.

It depends on your DE and configuration. In KDE with Wayland, you can set it up to strictly enforce focus stealing prevention. The way that works is essentially by only allowing another program to steal focus if it’s the result of some user interaction.

For the logoff or shutdown: Set or createHKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks to 1 to auto kill hanging/not ending processes automagically. Also you can use WaitToKillAppTimeout there to define how long windows should wait before killing the processes (in milliseconds).

The fact that these are buried in the registry… thanks, though. These will be useful. I concede this point.

And regarding bitlocker after a bios update: why would you use bitlocker on such a machine (auto login on boot which would allow access to all files anyways)?

Because it’s the default that is forced onto the user.

Anyways, set or create HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BitLocker\PreventDeviceEncryption to 1 to prevent bitlocker from running after an upgrade. With Pro, you could also leverage GPOs for that.

Call me cynical, but I don’t think this will work forever. Microsoft has been boiling the frog with local accounts over Windows 11’s entire lifetime, at first allowing them, then hiding them, then making the bypass command only work under specific circumstances, etc.

All it takes to destroy the UX is force-enabling BitLocker exactly once, and most of the people using the device won’t know how to undo it (or worse, be locked out without the recovery key)

Also not a lawyer, but in the past, I did a lot of research into how intellectual property works in the United States.

I’ve heard it over and over that trademark owners are legally required to defend their trademarks from potential violators like this, or they can lose the trademark.

This isn’t entirely true. As long as the trademark is actually renewed, it doesn’t need to be aggressively defended.

There are a couple of reasons why they might choose to defend it regardless. One of the major ones is to deter other entities from thinking they too could get away with violating it. An actual, legally-relevant reason to defend it would be to prevent the mark from genericization. That’s when a trademark like a brand name colloquially becomes used to refer to an entire class of products, such as with the Escalator™.

For an example of a company whose trademark was at risk of genericization, look no further than Nintendo. They saved it by defending the trademark tooth and nail while using marketing to reinforce that their product is the Nintendo and not a Nintendo. If people had kept referring to video game consoles as “Nintendos” like they used to back in the 80s and 90s, another company may have been able to successfully challenge the trademark and opened the flood gates for products like the “Microsoft® Xbox 720 nintendo”. Nintendo the corporation is still a bunch of overly-litigous assholes, but back then, they actually needed to be.

In Eminem’s case, it’s probably as a deterrent. Unless people have started referring to Caucasian rappers as “eminems” without me noticing, his brand is at absolutely no risk of being genericized.

“Neither” is also an acceptable answer.

Agreed. The call trace shows it occurred as part of a drm_ function, which is related to the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) subsystem.

There’s a chance it might not be the root cause, but the more obvious answer is that the Nvidia driver managed to corrupt a kernel data structure.

Say what you will about medieval monarchies, but at least those had the good sense to permit a court jester to speak foolishly of the head of state.

Recently?

Please fill in the blanks:

• China’s socioeconomic model is _____.
• In the Russia—Ukraine war, Russia is _____.
• _____ Korea is the more prosperous of the two.

Respectfully, I’m going to have to disagree about stock Windows working fine. There are multiple places where it necessitates having a keyboard and/or mouse connected.

• Interacting with UAC prompts and other elevated-permission windows that block synthetic input events.
• When a popup hijacks focus away from the game window.
• When Steam (or other controller to mouse software) is not open, such as during the logoff screen where you sometimes have to click “Close Anyways”.
• After a BIOS update, when the TPM refuses to unlock and you need to enter the BitLocker recovery key within the pre-boot environment.

am still running Windows on it, but only for one reason: no first party support from SteamOS.

For the most part, it SteamOS isn’t really necessary to get a serviceable desktop gaming experience. Pick a well-supported rolling release distro or a derivative, install Steam and Proton, and games mostly just work.

It’s not perfect, but it’s usable. The only real pain point around gaming is getting HDR working properly.

Closed-source software is a different story, however. Discord’s Wayland support is basically nonexistent and the AFK detection thinks you’re always in front of the computer, suppressing mobile notifications.

If other hardware vendors are going to follow, they have to be using SteamOS or something similar out of the box. Handhelds can somewhat get away with using Windows because of the touch screen, but a “console” experience that occasionally requires plugging in a keyboard and mouse to get past some controller-unfriendly menu or pop-up is just going to annoy users.

A thief doesn’t loudly announce that they just stole something.

Yeah, they’re are. I used sbctl to enroll and manage my own keys, and I chose to include the MS ones to ensure dual booting still worked properly.

Because of that hard-bricking motherboard problem, choosing to not include the MS keys is actually more effort due it being gated behind a flag and a mountain of warnings.

these games only accept the secure boot setup where the root key is that of microsoft’s.

I have a PC where I could actually test this. Custom MOK but with all the MS signatures in the database. I can boot into Windows through the BIOS using only the MS-signed bootloader instead of GRUB or any chain loader, and Windows itself considers Secure Boot to be enabled successfully.

Do you know if it would immediately reject the game from launching, or would I be flagged and banned later as some kind of ban wave?

The latter is something I would prefer to avoid.

Oh, the comment I directly replied to is absolutely justified in its downvotes. I actually meant to reply to a different comment of theirs.

There’s a lot of FUD and disinformation around Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 in general. When it comes to anticheat and those as requirements, people are dog piling IMO. The comments being cynical or exaggerating the security risk of the TPM to the user are getting more upvotes, while the comments that disagree with those are getting pushback.

secure boot enabled with machine owner keys wouldn’t be enough either for these games

They should be able to check which signing keys were used for every part of the boot process. Unless they want to be colossal assholes and check the MOK as well, they could still verify what they need without flagging Linux Secure Boot dual-booters as cheaters.

You quoted the end of my comment, so you must have read this part:

Together, they make it possible for anticheat to tell if something (like cheating software) tried to rootkit Windows as a way to evade detection.

For the threat model of anticheat software, verifying system integrity is not an unusual requirement.

The other reason is that I’m kinda verbose.

Some say, “why many words when few work?”

Others express their freedom to choose exactly to what extent of verbosity and verbiage they consider necessary in order to accurately and effectively communicate their previously-unspoken thoughts either through private correspondence or statements to some subset of the general populace.