Enlighten us!
> Other mods exist, mostly for nefarious purposes like crashing other users who're on Quest or the vanilla client.
"Mostly" has statistical implications. Where are you getting this statistic? Do you have any data to back what you're saying? Which are these mods, and what exactly do they do? Are you saying there's a rich ecossystem of software specifically designed to interfere with the experience of Quest users? How do you even know that?
> There's a whole mini black market of "hacks", i.e. client mods built on abusing the VRChat API
This statement makes no sense. What VRChat call their "API" is a backend for wrangling metadata. Access to this backend is available to all user accounts and generally not discouraged. There is a message in the HTTP headers inviting users to apply for a job there.
> as well as some clients which tie into DDoS services that will target specific users in-game > These malicious clients are generally advertised and sold via Discord links in users' profiles. PayPal or CashApp are used to facilitate the transactions.
So these are standalone applications that cost money? Is the money to pay for denial of service botnet time, or a one time cost? How do you even know? And I don't see how a criminal operation of this calibre will be stopped by EAC.
> if you manage to obtain their IP address via exploit or social engineering.
IP addresses are public data and denial of service attacks are a crime wholly independent from any platform. If you already have the user's IP address, anything to do with VRChat and mods seems redundant.
Crashers, many of which are Quest-specific, some of which are world or avatar-based and sone of which are built into mods, are common and extensively documented:
I know about the DDoS services because I followed the Discord links in the profiles of users affiliated with them, some of whom crashed me for sport in public worlds. I pulled their usernames from the logs and looked up their public game profiles. For example (sketchy link warning, may be NSFW):
IP addresses of other users could previously be extracted due to VRChat’s old P2P netcode. This is a security design flaw in an MMO with a community as toxic as VRChat’s. This has now been mostly but not entirely patched (if you join a world with an older type of video player, any user in-world can submit a video URL that your client will directly fetch).
I’m curious why you so energetically promote a false, rosier view of the situation.
EAC does not prevent this in any way, shape or form.
I see what you mean now about abusing the API - they seem to be invite bombing or similar. This is not what DDoS means. If possible, this is definitely a rate limiting issue to be solved on the backend. EAC does not prevent this.
The client in your last link appears harmless at a glance, though maybe if I dug enough into it I'd find something unsavory. Did you look at what it does?
I don't think you have provided any evidence of harmful modding that will be affected by this patch yet. It's easy enough, on the other hand, to locate the github repositories for the hundreds of harmless mods that tens of thousands of community members use regularly, and which you don't seem to know about if you think these videos suffice to describe what mods are "mostly" used for.
Many mods are used for malicious purposes. This doesn’t mean ‘ban mods,’ it means patch the holes bad mods exploit.
You know who has patched some of those holes you're talking about? Modders. There are mods that mitigate crasher avatars.
Most regular users don’t use or know about anti-crasher mods, and in any case the problems are inherent to the game’s design. Fixing those problems should be VRChat’s main goal.
The OP is about VRChat mods. I started talking about malicious mods and segued into bad stuff on VRChat in general, which I think is both relevant and interesting to HN users. If you don’t like it, I encourage you to help remove the bad stuff.
I’m completely uninitiated on VRC, but I do see some artists who have been offering VRC avatars and accessories through external services like booth.pm for couple years by now. Rips and thrown-together pirated models was a huge problem at least initially, and I would imagine would only be helped by mods.
Could this be that VRC is finally moving onto integrating avatar/editor marketplace and locking down on “illegal” avatars as part of that move?
- Change into the avatar.
- Ask the VRChat API (backend) for information on yourself (this requires no special permissions).
- Use the link contained in the response JSON to download the avatar to your computer (it's how the official client obtains it, too)
- Unpack it with literally any Unity asset pack extractor, of which there are several. The asset pack is not secured in any way.
Note how mods are conspicuously absent from all of these steps.
I'm an avatar maker myself, and at this point my stance is that I can't be responsible for people stealing assets from me that I'm not allowed to redistribute, but I'm open to directly giving anyone anything I'm allowed to redistribute, and to teach them how to implement, download or purchase everything else. It's a load off my mind.