How will it be installed once the deal closes?
Assuming default settings, the EA App runs a background service with elevated privileges (often as TrustedInstaller on Windows), and automatic updates are enabled by default. That means:
- No user action is required for software updates, including those that install kernel-mode drivers.
- Kernel-level components can be silently updated or extended through routine game patches or EA App updates.
- Any newly introduced or modified driver (e.g., an anti-cheat update) would be signed by EA, but users are not alerted to the depth of the update unless they manually inspect it, which is virtually impossible given the encrypted/proprietary nature of the codebase.
So, once the acquisition closes, any architectural changes to anti-cheat or telemetry mechanisms can be deployed silently as part of routine patching cycles. This does not require a new game release or user intervention.
Has it already been installed?
This is a fair assumption under standard security threat modeling practices.
- EA has already shipped kernel-level drivers (e.g., EAAntiCheat.sys) since 2023, and these are typically installed alongside online multiplayer titles such as EA Sports FC and Battlefield 2042.
- These drivers run with the highest system-level privileges, and the EA App has full access to update them.
- The compiled binaries are not open-source, not auditable, and may include encrypted segments or obfuscated logic, meaning users and third parties have no reliable way to verify what the software is actually doing.
Security best practices assume that any installed kernel-level driver is capable of full system access, including:
- Reading any file or memory region
- Installing persistence mechanisms
- Monitoring user input
- Communicating externally, including via encrypted channels
So yes, if you’ve installed a modern EA game, the capability is already there. The only real change under a new ownership model is intent.
Could this be a concern if the acquirer wasn’t Saudi Arabia’s PIF?
The kernel-level threat model doesn’t change based on ownership, the capabilities remain the same. But the motivations and likely use cases absolutely do.
It is a factual and well-documented reality that Saudi Arabia is:
- An authoritarian regime with little tolerance for dissent
- Known for surveillance and digital repression (including use of spyware such as Pegasus)
- Responsible for state violence, including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi
- Building a significant intelligence and cyber operations apparatus under the guise of technological investment
In that context, PIF’s ownership of a widely installed, privileged software platform, with millions of endpoints and baked-in telemetry infrastructure, is not just theoretical risk, it’s an active national security concern.
It’s reasonable to assume that whatever institutional restraint EA may have had about using anti-cheat for more than gameplay integrity may now be loosened, or removed entirely.
Does this apply to all EA games? Is it properly disclosed?
EA claims that kernel-level anti-cheat is used “selectively”, primarily in high-profile online multiplayer titles. However:
- There is no centralized or transparent disclosure list showing which games install kernel drivers.
- The EA App and installers do not consistently warn users at install time that a kernel-level driver will be added to their system.
- Detection is only possible after installation, by manually inspecting the installed drivers or using tools like Autoruns, Process Hacker, or Sigcheck.
So while it’s technically true that not all EA games use kernel anti-cheat, the lack of disclosure and difficulty in verifying makes it functionally impossible for the average user to know which games are safe, especially given the bundled update system that can install new software silently at any time.
Games purchased outside the EA App (e.g., on Steam or Epic) often still require the EA launcher to run, meaning kernel drivers can still be deployed through those channels.
Well the original title is “Video gamer Electronic Arts to be bought in largest-ever private equity buyout valued at $55 billion” Which only points to “wow this is large exchange of capital”
And the text of the article is just investor-centric propaganda like
"PIF, which was currently the largest insider stakeholder in Electronic Arts, will be rolling over its existing 9.9% investment in the company. "
or meaningless puff like
“The IPO came seven years after EA was founded by former Apple employee William “Trip” Hawkins, who began playing analog versions of baseball and football made by “Strat-O-Matic” as a teenager during the 1960s”
Ultimately concluding with “By going private, EA will be able to retool operations without worrying about market reactions.”
“Hickey is unsure if the transaction is in shareholders’ best interest.”
“The financial backing and resources of the investor consortium should enable EA to increase its focus on long-term growth opportunities that may have been viewed as too risky or expensive as a public company,”
In other words no mention whatsoever of the ethical, cultural consideration nor even touching of the largest stakeholders in the transaction, the IP License Holders and their interest in allowing a foreign enemy nation administrative access to their computer kernel beyond their own user privileges.
This is nothing less than dereliction of duty by this “apnews” company, obviously misdirecting the attention of the reader and quieting their non-sense inapplicable fears such as return on investment levels for the C-Suite and the interest of “Freedom Capital Markets”.
These rootless bugpersons are colonizing our attention, spamming their virulent thoughts to distracts us from real, imminent dangers while our hostile leaders are selling us out to the highest bidder, instead of being lined up against a brick wall next to a deep communal ditch.
? I see this another post in the community with the same article
No, that post you mention, was posted 2 hours ago
my post https://lemmy.ml/post/36863093/21361452
Was posted 5 hours ago and came first
Certainly, the true reason of the deletion is that my title was too evocative of the underlying consequences of this purchase.
Rather than the establishment-spun neutral titled crafted my the mind washing specialists at the pseudo-journalistic outfit of “apnews”
Who did not seek to cause trouble for shareholders.
I’m sure if pushed the moderators would have rules-based legalese with completely above board reasonnable reasons for the deletion of my post, it’s not even worth asking what they were. they even have catch-all overbroad rules for this exact purpose anyway. We live under the constant crush of censorship even in these nominally decentralized spaces.
A great fire is well over due.
Well, it’s a driver and it runs in the kernel with system level privileges. I imagine as long as it remains installed the computer will be vulnerable to whatever is in there. And it’s undecypherable compiled code so we can’t tell what it is doing. I suspect shady bits will use the TPM cryptoprocessor to hide any malicious code so we’ll never know what is in there.
Even if you uninstall it, it just says it is uninstalled but it’s not like you can verify if it really uninstalled it or just renamed the files to something innocuous.
I will re-install windows entirely as if it had been infected by malware, and I just hope there’s a way in Steam to identify all EA games and block them from every installing even by accident
I remember, it was really terrible, we had severely regimented time schedules controlled by clocks and bell. We had to go there with hours-long bus rides. I remember watching the clock, watching every second tick while one person was talking to everyone about really profoundly boring things which they could not and would not articulate the relevance of beyond an immediate examination and far of idea of “the labout marketplace” in which we would all compete against one another to avoid homelessness and death. I could read on the computer at home about the things they were saying, it was obvious at the time this information would have no practical use whatsoever to anyone but I could not imagine an alternative so I kept going until they gave me some papers after 13 years of this. Of course now I understand why, we were doing appearance of productivity, as training for our future as obedient workers who would do what they were told. The subject of the matter was not the point, it was being moulded into docility. This is why there was no clarity as to what use the information lectured about would have. It only needed to appear to be productive and useful, it did not have to be relevant or interesting as we were a captive audience, fearful of this homelessness situation we would find ourselves in if we disobeyed. This was the social stalemate that kept us from being sent to the mines IMMEDIATELY, we were supposed to be grateful and happy that we didn’t have to work in the field, picking rocks and vegetables in the field with the undocumented immigrants.
We were a captive audience, this is why it didn’t have to be interesting, that was not the point, the teacher tried really hard, I could see it hurt them to be our jailors, they tried to make it fun, but we knew we were in prison even if we couldn’t articulate it. The teaching prison guards had their empathy eventually dried out and shrivel, they tried spending their own money to make it tolerable for us and they were met with disinterested ungratefulness, no recognition from us nor the bosses. The cheerful colourful decorations of our jail cells somehow made things worse, like something was wrong with US for being unhappy with the situation.
The only counter we currently have to state power is leveraging other states, getting them to fight one another until they’re so damage that they let go of their fascistic plans to enslave and tag the entire population. Russia isn’t going to politely send delegate to advocate against total state surveillance, they’re doing it, every state is turning fasch and doing it. They are to embolden, to empowered and they don’t respect of fear the population.
The only way to counter this trend is by distracting them with an existential crisis. They need “something” to save us from, when we are too safe and they are too powerful, they start treating us, as the enemy, as their pets, as their farm animal, cattle, we can’t stop them doing that but we can send them to clash against enemy states to dissipate their violent, dominating, malignant energy
Deanonymization isn’t about age gate bullshit, it’s about doxxing you. Think of the children is and has always been BULLSHIT, children are the enemy, children are merely human shield and Israel shows what is to be done with human shields.
If an entity successfully deploys deanonymizing technology and profits, they will outbreed non-deanonymizing entities.
Therefore, anything that DARES to employs this technology is the enemy and the enemy is to be EXTERMINATED.
Of course, maintain the hierarchy of capital which sees most humans as serving the hierarchy and terminating those who defy “the order” for “their own good” of course, because as the central tenets of this religion asserts, exploitation of capital benefits “everyone”. As in, this meritocracy structure allows anyone to become King Bezos through “hard work”(*).
Since anyone could become king meritocatically, therefore they all benefit from the equal and just potential, to receive “each according to their needs and from each according to their ability” anyone who opposes this system in fact opposes their own interests and those of other, therefore justifying the deployment of unlimited violence to neutralize the threat, for everyone’s interests including the perpetrator.
I was on DD-WRT back when WRT54G but the DD-WRT devs don’t really get it,
They make the bad compromises, and most of their initial contributors appears to have moved on to OpenWRT.
At this point DD-WRT isn’t just another alternative, it’s very stale while OpenWRT is still evolving rapidly and has the larger contributor community. And they put as much emphasis on performance, bloat reduction and efficiency as they do new features.
I have a 8MB nvram TP link archer C7 and it’s actually faster in the latest version, that’s basically unheard of in all of software !
But don’t the people who get caught, disappear in the gullet of the prison slavery system and never heard from again ? And if allowed the walk the streets again, they know talking about it puts a target on their back and the police will come smash the cardboard box they’re sleeping in at night. And that’s until they start with the involuntary lethals injections for those who “refuse ressources” as Fox & Friends put it
Even if we start pancaking CEOs, the corporation will just replace them. Either zero out their bank accounts, suspend the liability protect, implement corporate death penalty. But don’t act as if the organization itself isn’t guilty. Even if you decapitate the leadership and seize the shares but the organization keeps ticking, the jobs still go on, the profit is still made, the corporation is still alive. Whatever it did, it still survives. If the shares are seized, the government will be even more reluctant to damage it more than just the job loss !
Why don’t we treat them like other criminals.
You’ve done a crime, go to corpo prison for 20 years
Why are we treating corporation, which we “Limit Liability” of the operators already, nicer than we treat humans ?
Like, what happens if you’re found to have done fraud ?
That’s like 5 years in prison isn’t it ?
Don’t necessary put the C-suite in prison, just put the corporation in prison for 5 years. Everyone that works there can work somewhere else during the time out.
Other corporation can fill the vacuum while the criminal corporation is absent ?
Because if not, two things are going to happen.
Way more C-unts are going to get Luigi’d
and/or
I’m going to start a criminal corporation and we’re going to mulch cop-babies for protein.
electronics and industrial supply places, you can rip it off a diode based laser cutter but they’re very chonk, if you’re handy, you’d get just the diodes, lens and then make your own PCB with powersupply. You need adjustable because the light has to be in focus at the distance between you and the camera or else it will be to diffuse to disable the sensor, both too short and too far. You don’t really need a galvo head in this case just mount the pcb on something that can randomnly vibrate the laser in a small radius at the effective distance. You won’t be able to hit the camera sensor steady, you need to paint over it randomnly, with the right focus it will work even on rare occasionnal hits since those sensor are very sensitive to laser light
You’re going to need a rather tight beam to hit that camera and it will only for milliseconds. It would take really bad luck to hit someone continuously long enough through a reflection (drastic reduction in power level by then) to damage their eyesight, plus camera optics are not very reflective of infrared as they need it for night vision, so they’re especially sensitive. But yes, this should be treated with the seriousness of a gun.
ON the other hand, from Project MK Ultra to Echelon to Prism, from Cambridge Analytica to Palantir and the other Tech-Creeps Industrial Complex, on the matter of spying and I think there isn’t such as a thing “going too far”. Not even the dreams of Big Brother could go quite as far as the merciless depravity humanity is about to experience.
Thinking your phone don’t spy on you will be regarded as “quaint” and “hopelessly naive”
It’s AI, the tell tale sign is the use of bullet points.
That doesn’t give /u/dev_null any credibility but they like to be a good little boy that yaps at clouds, cars and AI.
In this case user /u/Samsuma was unsatisfied with my regular meandering writing style so I reformatted my points into a more semantically coherent package to undermine any possible pedants to come in and complain about misplaced commas and semi-colons and start legislating what the meaning of “is” is.
I’m quite confident the logic here in unassailable, and that’s why /u/dev_null didn’t have anything to say but complain about the formatting while being unable to address the substance of my comment.
And nobody can “tell” AI text. You can make it adopt any writing style, the only thing people like /u/dev_null have to go on is em dashes, bullet points and “purple” turn of phrases, which, if I’d really care to get these synthophobes off the scent, I would have, but I was more concerned about giving /u/Samsuma the tightest response I could without spending too long on it.
Because of people /u/dev_null just prowling the internet, I do recommend any AI user simply not disclose AI use, gaslight synthophobes into thinking AI text is not AI, inserting em dashes and bullet points into non-AI text and generally being hostile to people like that because they’re really insufferable.
The reason I’m telling you all this is so that /u/dev_null knows they can duck off and the more they try to bully me the more undetectable I’m going to make it, there’s really not going to be any winner for anyone trying to antagonize me.