One sad lesson I learned early on in my software career is, for every ethical stand you are willing to take as a developer, there's always some other developer who is willing set aside ethics or has a different set of ethics. Software needs some kind of baseline ethical standard, like a Hippocratic Oath. A line that we "shall not cross."

I remember my first job out of college, I was asked to write code that caused our software to cheat at a certain industry benchmark. I was very junior, but still realized it was wrong. I finally worked up the courage to tell my boss that I had an ethical problem with doing this and wouldn't do it, and to my surprise, he said "Oh, that's fine! We treat software developers well here. I'll just give you a different bug ticket to work on!"

Jim, a few cubicles down from me had no problem writing the benchmark-cheating code. It's kind of futile.

>> https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

It is worthwhile for us to read and reflect on the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.*

* https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

That one requires a lot of free work. I believe that requiring others to work for free is morally wrong.

Well, someone develops software for nukes, citizen surveillance systems, fraud schemes and technologies for scamming people out of their retirement savings.

If you consider mechanical and chemical engineering there are also people who develop nerve gas agents (usually deployed against civilians), butterfly mines, cluster munitions and incendiary artillery rounds ready to burn your enemies cities to the ground.

Some anti cheating / piracy software that "arguably works" is pretty tame compared to that.

As an iRacing customer, I am glad the anti-cheat they use, exists.

Otherwise, I would be subjected to shitty racers who would ruin every race in the first lap, and cheaters who compete on hacks instead of talent.

I am also sure there are equivalent bad apples in every single gaming platform.

Anti-cheat and DRM are not the same thing, and having community servers with admins greatly reduces the need for anti-cheat. So does not having rewards for winning other than winning.

Some crazy rose tinted glasses here. Back in the CS 1.6 and CS:S days community admins would only catch straight up rage hacks, most aimbots and triggerbots would fly under the radar unless caught by clientside anti-cheat.

But sure, we can pretend that cheaters don’t matter as long as it’s not blatantly obvious to all other players.

We used vote kick to get rid of them. The server would clear quickly if the vote failed so it wasn't a huge issue.

But there was no way for you to know if that person was just really good or using cheats with vaguely legit settings.