Man I’m tired.

lemmy yet again falls for the ragebait hook line and sinker

That's right. I'm not lying at all when I say that none of my friends care about privacy. It's actually quite frustrating.

Pretty much nailed it, yep.

A youtuber named Hellfire has been on a spree, basically discovering how fucked up EULAs have been in games for the past 20ish years... well this is all brand new news to him and and his Zoomer / Gen A followers.

There is, as of right now, literally zero evidence that Borderlands 2 has been updated with a rootkit, with kernel level anti cheat, anything like that.

The last update to its game files was 2 years ago.

This is almost certainly them updating the EULA everywhere, the precise timing of this being for some specific arcane legal and business reasons... TakeTwo runs a whole bunch more games than juat Borderlands... namely GTA V...

...

Is this EULA bad? Yes.

Is it much worse than it was before, or what other large gaming companies EULAs have, and have had for... a decade+?

Maybe by a bit, but not really, no.

...

Is Randy Pitchford a dumb idiot asshole?

Oh absolutely yes, but that shouldn't give people the liscense to make completely unevidenced claims about other things.

...

The game does not have a kernel level AC or some kind of rootkit DRM, as many, many people are currently saying it does.

I guess gamer attention span can really hold onto a few keywords and phrases at a time.

... I say this all as person who is vehemently against kernel level AC, who has been pointing out for 4 years, that almost all existing anti cheat systems currently have at least one game that implements their AC, on linux, without using kernel level anything.... it is entirely possible to do AC without kernel level shit, even on linux, and has been for at least 4 years. EAC and BattleEye have supported linux for 4 years, but nearly no game that uses them has actually used this feature/available and offered support.

I am glad that this level of hate is finally being directed at shitty EULAs, but lets at least get our facts straight, or actually provide some hitherto unseen evidence that Borderlands has had some kind of sleeper malware in it for at least the past two years, just waiting to be activated by a TOS update to every single Take Two game.

Some software installers still ask if I want to install for all users, which require elevated permissions, or only for me, which don't. In that last option it will not prompt for elevated permissions as it will use one of my user's folders which I have already all permissions for, obviously.

It's a security measure that's half assed. People are so used to it they just click allow but don't actually look at the prompt anymore. Like I see a lot of people do with cookies on websites.

Damn, its such a shame you can't run a crack in a vm, or on linux via WINE and Proton, aw shucks.

Cry moar, I'll never see your blocked ass again

Yep, I am jumping in with you on this one.

The cell-shaded art style? Not the problem, imo.

The problem is the just astoundingly terrible writing, immensely insufferable characters, and astonishingly brain dead gameplay.

Why have weapon balance ortactically interesting scenarios or any real sense of progression in gameplay when we can just procedurally generate guns and do everything we can to make everything into roughly the same level of bullet sponge with auto levelling?

They are the lowest common denominator of co-op shooter games, made for people who enjoy bombastic sensory overload and near zero prefrontal cortex brain activity while gaming.

So that they can have a back door to as many private computers as possible.

Really ? I though, since you used a though process used in osint.
Osint is open sources intelligences, it is looking for data about something/someone in data available for all

Yup, same here. As long as it's convenient, my friends/family don't care what is taken from them.

People do complain about rootkits, but a reaction on this scale means it might be more fitting for you to reply to the mirror.

... Do you really believe I am Randy Pitchford? Whow, so that's the bar for IQ around these parts ...

No offense, but have you ever read EULAs? Even Windows EULA has a lot of "cut off a finger" provisions. It's invasive, and people are right to complain. People might cry Linux, but when their job requires them to use Windows and abide by that EULA, most will crumble.

Like it or not, most EULAs are legally binding bullshit that more often than not has to be ignored or bypassed outside of it if necessary. How many people are watching YouTube and ignoring their Terms of Service while using adblockers?

This is nothing new in the world of gaming, and to the scale of affecting over 50% of the score of a game for a provision that is often included in other games they have no problem with is what's revealing. A lot of MMOs and many multiplayer games do, but people haven't cried wolf outside of a minority of their community. Pitchford has given his explanation, that it is a matter of the 2K EULA Gearbox has to adopt.

Let’s try this logic on other things. Are all 2K games that have this in their newly updated EULA's being boycotted? Hint: Civilization is a 2K game.

Some things are just obvious when your head is not stuck inside the ass of a circlejerk bandwagon. It's just sad that some people aren't honest with themselves and and are not willing to recognize how easily they are influenced by people who are holding hidden grudges. Too many games are getting shit on because of this, and I say this as someone who is not looking forward to the next Borderlands game until the discounts drop it well below its 80 dollar price tag several years from now while plenty of loud people in this thread will go out to buy it on day one.

LOL. I loved the Borderlands franchise, until Epic made their evil dog shit app store and the Borderlands devs sold out to them. Motherfuck Borderlands forever now. Thanks for the warning so I don't accidentally reinstall any of it from Steam.

and then run whatever modified code it just deployed on the host, yea

Bro get a life, it's not that serious. Evil app store lmao as if they're out to murder you and your family

Would it shock you to know that ALL of these are in the Steam terms of service also?

The only really sus one to me is the forced arbitration clause, and Steam also had that til they were pressured to remove it by multiple legal cases, including a class action brought to them by Steam users just last September. It is only sus because it's outdated - companies are generally removing them now rather than adding them.
https://www.legal.io/articles/5540864/Valve-Removes-Mandatory-Arbitration-from-Steam-Subscriber-Agreement

RE: remaining top 5 bullet points, 3 of the remaining 4 bullet points are uncontroversial bullet points about anticheat. The fourth is banning modding, which is also just a heavy handed anticheat attempt, and not uncommon for online games to add to their ToS to allow banning at their discretion. Either way its clumsy at the least as some mods can be harmless eg HUD mods for colourblind people and deserves some negativity - but not to this level, given everything else is just so boilerplate.

Collected data types: these are all for if you buy stuff with a credit card / paypal / etc off 2k/parent company Take 2. Remember, they sell games with in-game purchases. They also have an app which has location permissions option which is what the precise location is about.

So yes - again, as OP said, this is nothing controversial if you have paid attention to ToS meaning and content over the past 20 years.

Aside from the forced arbitration crap - which Steam, Microsoft, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, Google, AT&T - and hundreds of other major companies all snuck into their ToS over the years, and many have now been legally pressured to remove by consumer rights group. That is stupid because it shows their legal team is behind the times, companies are mostly removing their forced arbitration clauses nowadays because it has been the cause of many lost class actions.

I agree they should expand their review protest to all games in the catalog and not selectively review bomb. Consumers have every reason to impact products success through their purchasing power and reviews. I stopped giving my money to game companies I don't like a decade ago. It means missing some games, but there is so much out there it hardly matters. I don't give a shit about this specific controversy, but I do think people have every reason to use their bully pulpit to attempt to impact consumer habits and therefore at least attempt change, even if they are often unsuccessful.

A game with a malicious crack that can escape a VM running on Windows and get to the main OS?

Sure, possible, but not by any means common.

A game with a malicious crack made for Windows that can... do anything nefarious when you're running it on linux via WINE and Proton?

... Theoretically possible, but I've never heard of this actually occuring.

The same, but also inside another linux OS inside of a Bottle or Distrobox... or full VM... all running on a linux system that is significantly atomized with a read only core-os?

... At that point I am quite doubtful anyone is bothering to make a malicious crack that capable... when 99% of the existing game trainers and hacks that you can find or buy online... only work on Windows.

The crowd of people making game exploits and cheat engines... and the crowd of people making malicious game cracks.... that venn diagram is almost a circle... and 99% of these people do not bother to 'support' linux, in anyway, at all, with anything they do.

Is using any random cracked software ever 100% safe? No.

But neither is say, using a Windows system, with 0 cracks or hacks... but with a MSFT trusted vendor's 3rd party anti malware software... where said trusted vendor is allowed to push an unverified update to their kernel level anti-malware system... that is actually malformed, and then knocks out about 1/4 of every enterprise Windows PCs on Earth for 2 weeks.