These anticheat systems are not root kits, they do not attempt to conceal their presence from you nor attempt to prevent their removal.

Are they potential security and stability headaches? Yes, as with anything you load into your OS kernel. But rootkits they are not.

Valorant’s Vanguard sucks because the thing insists on running 24/7 and requires a reboot to disable or re-enable. During operation it causes a whole host of issues from blocking programs to causing BSODs - but it sits there in plain sight.

Denuvo anti-cheat’s major issue is for whatever godforsaken reason they decided to bypass ntdll to make some syscalls breaking WINE. Presumably they did this because ntdll can be hooked like anything else, but this speaks of poor design more than anything as the kernel-mode driver should be more than capable of detecting this.

Battleye is...fine. As is Easy Anti-Cheat.

Blizzard’s warden has been a privacy mess over the years with it scanning window titles and reporting them back. But AFAIK it does all of its work usermode.

I’m not a huge fan of the level of access modern anticheat packages have on my system - but with the widely open platform that is PC gaming it’s no surprise that gamers and developers alike want cheaters to be dealt with. Valorant can kiss my ass right now though, at least everything else has the decency to only run when I’m playing a game.

The point is not that I am hurting Sony with my protest of their actions. The point is I am not compromising my values on what I think is right and wrong.

The difference between them and anti-cheats in games are that they installed it without your permission, Sony took existing open source tools (violating the GPL in the process), that while legitimate where often used by black hats to invade and exploit systems and made it into a tool to spy on users, placing a Sony audio cd into your computer would put a rootkit onto your computer. It evaded detention and resisted removal, it would report to them any suspicious activity that they deemed piracy, which they would then turn over to the RIAA to sue you. Their root kit did not protect the single album you put into your computer it spied on all your activity to report back any activity Sony deemed suspicious and again once it was there, you where spied on until you reformatted you drive and installed a clean OS. It was by every definition an intrusion virus and a rootkit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Luckily for me I don't need to consider those things because I don't play games.

But if what you are hinting at is that one should be consistent and refrain from buying not just Sony products but also any others that perform similar stunts then yes I do try to be consistent. However I'm not about to do myself serious harm in the process precisely because I know that I am just one customer out of millions. So I put up with Microsoft because I need Visual Studio for work, I put up with Android because there really is no other alternative ecosystem that supports the applications that I need in the society in which I live.

I rationalize my way out of the problem by buying less of everything on the grounds that I am then simply less likely to have to make such a decision

And they brought their unwelcome tactics into that industry as well. Sony lost me as customer with the PS3 console. The removal of the Other OS feature greatly impacted me. After that I boycott them for 10 years. That time had since passed and I still avoid them whenever possible. They completely lost my trust.