...and thus, the next round of the cat-and-mouse game begins.

Things like this will only make WINE's own compatibility and indistinguishability from Windows increase, so it's not all bad.

this is a game that Wine cannot win simply by virtue of the fact that one can do checksums to validate that Microsoft's non-free code isn't present in the Wine environment.

Intercept calls to those files and return the non free binary.

Purely functional things used for compatibility lock outs are generally not copyrightable, so this might not even be copyright infringement.

> Purely functional things used for compatibility lock outs are generally not copyrightable

I'd appreciate a citation on that.

Just because I make "a copy of the lord of the rings, ripped in 1080p" a requirement to launch the game I make doesn't make a lord of the rings rip legally distributable.

Roblox can certainly require access to a complete copy of a copyrighted file in a windows installation (i.e. by requiring sending bytes from random offsets in it to their server, which could only be faked by having the whole file anyway), and I don't see how that can actually make that file anything but illegal to distribute.

If that did work, well, than I'd like to declare all copyright void since I require uploading an arbitrary copyrighted work to my site to login, so anyone with a copyrighted work can just claim it's for compatibility with my website and thus "not copyrightable".

>, which could only be faked by having the whole file anyway)

that presumption is wrong.

if one was so inclined, and perhaps had a lawyer friend on-call, then one could scatter the copyright material over many files -- none of which constitute the entire copyrighted work -- for the sake of challenge response.

Driver copyright shenanigans have done such things in the past.

There is legal precedent for such:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v.....

I require uploading an arbitrary copyrighted work to my site to login

The keyword that makes all the difference is "arbitrary".

Roblox can certainly require access to a complete copy of a copyrighted file in a windows installation (i.e. by requiring sending bytes from random offsets in it to their server, which could only be faked by having the whole file anyway)

Ironically, Microsoft offers the copyrighted files available in a Windows installation for free download, both in the form of complete ISOs and Windows Updates.

> I'd appreciate a citation on that.

Use of the Sega logo, which is protected under both copyright and trademark, was found to be fair use when used for interface compatibility.

https://m.openjurist.org/977/f2d/1510

I doubt that any non-toy anti-cheat system can run on WINE and not notice that something isn't quite right.

i'm here to tell you, anecdotally at least, that it is quite often that easy.

These mechanisms are looking for certain environmental conditions, not the entire system state.

And for the most part it's the same on KVM.

Yes, unless a game is going with a "proper"/kernel-level anti cheat it likely only does a cursory check. One of my best examples is, years ago, if you had Cheat Engine (and I think OllyDbg) open when launching WoW it would shut down. You could bypass that by editing the window title of CE to something else. Or just launch CE after WoW had loaded.

NVIDIA has/had a hypervisor detection in their drivers to prevent you from using GPU passthrough. It is based on searching for a specific hypervisor ID [1], easily bypassed, I just used "expletiveNvidia" and it worked fine. Also TIL AMD does the same...

In the end most companies are just playing whack-a-mole with simple indicators something "fishy" is going on.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Vi...

Then someone has to investigate it, and make a specific wrapper for this behavior, or, as natives call it, “crack”. Of course, if you have a crack, you won't have the problem (and the developers will also be happy because they won't need to support you).

Where can I learn about Wine internals like these? I would love to debug why applications don't run well in wine, but all I ever find is an out of date wiki page and no clear explanation for how to start debugging these situations.

Maybe I'm not so good at finding the right resources?