Yay! Do anticheat next!
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If it prevents us having another crappy week thanks to the like of Crowdstrike, good.
It's good to see that M$FT is tackling the important problems:
The sight of a Blue Screen of Death will also be a thing of the past, too. Microsoft is now officially redesigning its BSOD so that it’s black and not blue.
First question which popped into my mind was, "Will they force Defender out as well?"
Or, is Microsoft about to abuse it's position to stifle competition? Again.
Tbh out of the big corpos MS has been one of the least anti-competitive in the past 10-15 years. They like to push their own services with ads within their own services yes but that's not really anti competitive in the truest sense, every company on earth does that.
The biggest one I can think of recently is them having lower rates for Windows Server on Azure vs other clouds. Compare that with companies like Apple, Google who actively attempt to put down other services.
IMO Nadella has been pretty decent in handling that part of MS. Though I don't really have an answer to your Defender question lol.
I imagine that a crowd of people are asking Microsoft what made this idea strike their fancy...
I couldn't care less about this. Get anti cheat ba out of the kernel.
It's a start. After cloudflare, they have all the ammunition needed to start removing shit like.this. Anticheat would be an amazing next move.
Edit: crowdstrike. Oop
Cool. Do anticheat vendors next.
Another big area of Windows that uses kernel-level drivers is anti-cheating engines for games. Microsoft has been speaking with game developers about how to reduce the amount of kernel usage, but it’s a more complicated use case as cheaters often have to purposefully tamper with their machine to disable protections and get cheating engines running.
“A lot of [game developers] would love to not have to maintain kernel stuff, and they are very interested in how they do that,” Weston says. “We’ve been talking about the requirements there, and I think we’ll have more to say on that in the near future.” Riot Games told me last year that it’s willing to follow potential Windows security changes and “recede from the kernel space.”
I fucking called this after the Crowd Strike catastrophe.
MSFT would start massively reworking their entire concept of who actually gets kernel access, because uh, causing a Y2K event is uh, really bad, actually.... and yep, that probably means the kernel level AC paradigm is no longer workable.
Fucking obviously duh, wow, turns out just letting any old 'vetted' vendor submit goddamned kernel level code updates without being strenuously verified each time is a bad fucking idea, wow, who could have guessed??!?
"A lot of [game developers] would love to not have to maintain kernel stuff, and they are very interested in how they do that,"
I don't know if I'm reading it in the way it was intended, but I'm laughing my ass off.
Vanguard is the only thing holding me to windows. Microsoft and Riot pls
I wonder whether solutions like Twincat for industrial PC/PLCs will be affected by this. Interfacing directly with the kernel and replacing the scheduler are, AFAIK, fundamental to making Windows viable for real time use.
An interesting question. Assuming they're only targeting security/antivirus products at the moment (see the discussion regarding anti-cheat) it may be that those applications get a pass for now.
No I think they are limiting kernel access. These are just what moist people know that would use it.
I'm just speculating. It seems like, at least at the moment, anti cheat continues to be able to run as kernel. The article says Microsoft will have more to say on anti cheat "in the near future."
It may be that they don't crack down on the realtime applications as hard, since the number of users impacted is so much smaller. Antivirus and anti cheat are on many millions of machines and are usable by the average consumer. Specialty software may be considered differently, I. E. "You know what you're doing and what risks you're assuming" for the more technical customer.
It will be interesting to see where they go with this.
What about us folks on the drier side of life?
I could see some exception for windows 11 IoT being made, but I honestly don’t know.
Another big area of Windows that uses kernel-level drivers is anti-cheating engines for games. Microsoft has been speaking with game developers about how to reduce the amount of kernel usage, but it’s a more complicated use case as cheaters often have to purposefully tamper with their machine to disable protections and get cheating engines running.
“A lot of [game developers] would love to not have to maintain kernel stuff, and they are very interested in how they do that,” Weston says. “We’ve been talking about the requirements there, and I think we’ll have more to say on that in the near future.” Riot Games told me last year that it’s willing to follow potential Windows security changes and “recede from the kernel space.”
Wouldn’t it have made more sense for them to improve the boot recovery process instead?
If the system fails to boot after a driver update, roll back the update and inform the user on startup.
Almost. We still have an endless number of anti cheat packages that are allowed to run in the kernel.
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