Send it to me, I consider a processor incapable of playing Valorant to be a free upgrade

I would be very interested to know how they are able to identify a specific CPU. The article speculates but does not answer this question.

The fact that this is even possible is a security nightmare.

OK, I've done a bit more digging and pieced it together. Acknowledgement to @dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world for prompting me to try (again) to find a command that might do it among other things.

IMO, this sort of information shouldn't be in processors in the first place, but apparently it is there and needs admin/root access to, well, access it.

... and the game in question requires kernel-level anti-cheat, so of course, it has the necessary access.

The command for Linux is sudo dmidecode -t processor, which dumps a lot of info including an ID field, which is supposedly the CPU's specific identifier. It can be grepped for or otherwise filtered out.

My own Ryzen gives 8 hexadecimal pairs, so it's a 64-bit value.

I would not know that that was unique to my specific individual processor if I had not been told, but I'll assume that at least part of it is not unique between Ryzens of the same calibre. (I won't be posting any of it for comparison, for obvious reasons.)

So the upshot is, if you don't want to be identified right down to your CPU, don't run programs as root if there's any chance of them phoning home.

This is so dumb. as if there was no reasonable way to detect cheating without these super invasive anti-cheat monstrocities.

Ah classic Riot games, investing all the money in anti-cheat while their launcher lacks basic functions like "download throttling".

No idea how Steam keeps winning...

Happened to a coworker with CoD 2019+ with a Facebook marketplace rig. Was also not being smart, and after he got his account banned and not realizing what was going on, he got his brother to log into his account as a sort of test, and also got that account banned.

That's a whole lot of bullshit just to start a game. Pass.

The article says because he installed the chip and launched Valorant, his other PC components such as his motherboard are not also blocked.

He can’t play a Riot game unless he buys an entirely new computer.

Wow, that sucks. I don't even know if you could get your money back for the CPU in that case, as the seller could just claim it wasn't him. Doesn't sound like Riot is being that cooperative in such cases either.

Phillip Koskinas, Riot’s Head of Anti-Cheat, writes on X that hardware bans last for a maximum of four months and apply exclusively to the game in which a cheater was caught.

Now we have a name. He probably thinks he is doing the Lord's work with kernel-level anticheat, and we should all be grateful for his awesome contributions to gaming 🤣

What's wrong with this website. I don't see the button "reject". I'm not gonna accept whatever that is just to read this.

Meanwhile I play(ed) on a VM and would frequently have to fight with support over: no, fuck you - unban me. Virtual hardware isn't a valid reason to ban every few months. It worked. It was bothersome - so I quit playing. Ample free time for games that weren't user hostile.

The odds of this happening are so low, but at the same inevitable.

Funny. Sucks for the buyer.

Oh, something about a game that doesn't work on Linux. What are the most direct competitors to Valorant that work on Linux? I'm gonna go play those out of spite.

Even if I'd ever switched back to Windows, no kernel anti-cheat would ever be allowed without some kind of isolation. It is just another data theft tool that happens to also include half-broken anti-cheat. I'm sure gaming companies have already started selling data for profit.