14 KiB
Cheating
Cheating means circumventing or downright violating rules, usually while trying to keep such behavior secret. You can cheat on your partner, in games, in business and so forth, however despite cheating seeming like purely immoral behavior at first glance, it may be relatively harmless or even completely moral, for instance in computer graphics we occasionally "cheat" our sense of sight and fake certain visual phenomena which leads to efficient rendering algorithms. In capitalism cheating is demonized and people are brainwashed to partake in cheater witch hunts as part of fear culture, arbitrary drama in fight for attention, trying to monopolize game platforms with bloat monopoly "anti cheat" systems etc. These so called "anti cheat" systems introduce unimaginable bloat and bullshit and provide excuse for things like spying (e.g. monitoring OS processes) and proprietary technology (so that "cheaters can't study the system to trick it") creeping into the world of free software.
The truth is that cheating is only an issue in a shitty society that is driven by competition (even if you disagree). Indeed, in such society there is a huge motivation for cheating (sometimes literally physical survival) as well as potentially disastrous consequences of it. Under the tyranny of capitalism we are led to worship heroes and high achievers and everyone gets pissed when we get fooled. Corporations go "OH NOES our multi billion dollar entertainment industry is going to go bankrupt if consoomers get annoyed by cheaters! People are gonna lose their bullshit jobs! Someone is going to get money he doesn't deserve! Our customers may get butthurt!!!" (as if corporations themselves weren't basically just stealing money and raping people lol). So they start a huge brainwashing propaganda campaign, a cheater witch hunt. States do the same, communities do the same, everyone wants to stone cheaters to death but at the same time the society pressures all of us to compete to death with others or else we'll starve. We reward winners and torture the losers, then bash people who try to win -- and no, many times there is no other choice than to cheat, the top of any competition is littered with cheaters, most just don't get caught, so in about 99% of cases the only way to the top is to cheat and try to not get caught, just to have a shot at winning against others. It is proven time after time, legit looking people in the top leagues of sports, business, science and other areas are constantly being revealed as cheaters, usually by pure accident (i.e. the number of actual cheater is MANY times higher). Take a look for instance at the Trackmania cheating scandal in which after someone invented a replay analysis tool he revealed that a great number or top level players were just cheaters, including possibly the GOAT of Trackmania Riolu (who just ragequit and never showed again lol). Of course famous cases like Neil Armstrong don't even have to be mentioned. { I just randomly found out that in the world of Pokemon tournaments cheating at top level also showed to be a huge issue lol. ~drummyfish } Cheater detection systems are (and always will be) imperfect and try to minimize false positives, so only the cheaters who REPEATEDLY make MANY very OBVIOUS mistakes get caught, the smart cheaters stay and take the top places in the competitive system, just as surely as natural selection leads to the evolution of organisms that best adapt to the environment. Even if perfect cheat-detection systems existed, the problem would just shift from cheating to immoral unsportmanship, i.e. abuse of rules that's technically not cheating but effectively presents the same kind of problems. How to solve this enormously disgusting mess? We simply have to stop desperately holding to the system itself, we have to ditch it.
Anticheating is a totalitarian cancer and has to be ended. Anticheating goes strictly against freedom and anarchist ideas because it requires an authority, a kind of police, surveillance, punishment mechanisms and so on. Technically speaking anticheating can be implemented in two main ways, both of which are highly harmful. First one is the antivirus/DRM way and requires invading the player's computer with spyware that checks he is not running any cheating programs -- this of course comes with ensuring the player is rid of control over his own machine so that he's not able to prevent the anticheating program to do its job, so this is absolutely unacceptable for anyone supporting free software. The other was is mathematical, based on just observing the games and statistically deciding whether the player cheats or not -- this is better in not having to take away the user's freedom over his own machine, however it takes away the freedom to behave however one desires and it dictates you always have to play the same way (and, naturally, is imperfect and comes with false positives etc.). For example a great indicator of cheating in chess is that someone takes the same time to think about every move, it's unnatural and not how normal humans plays, so if someone plays like it he is labeled a cheater. But what if someone WANTS to play like it? What if someone makes it a self imposed challenge to make ever move in exactly three seconds? Anticheater cults says you mustn't do it and you have to conform to how everyone else plays. Similarly they say that it is, for example, statistically impossible for a 1500 rated player to suddenly play ten moves in a row like a 2500 rated player so if this occurs, you're again labeled a cheater and banned. But what if someone is 2500 rated and has been purposefully playing like a 1500 until now to keep a moment of surprise for a difficult opponent? Then we observe the same thing under completely legit circumstances. Now the anticheating cult will even go aggressive on you and they will attack you for breaking their badly designed system (which is designed to abuse you in the first place), they will ban you for trolling and advise you to kill yourself. No fun or diversity of play is allowed in anticheating world, only normality is allowed, otherwise statistics won't work. But people who accept anticheating measures are much more likely to later on accept the same measures implemented in other parts of their life as well (see also slowly boiling the frog).
In a good society, such as LRS, cheating is not an issue at all, there's no incentive for it (people don't have to prove their worth by their skills, there are no money, people don't worship heroes, ...) and there are no negative consequences of cheating worse than someone ragequitting an online game -- which really isn't an issue of cheating anyway but simply a consequence of unskilled player facing a skilled one (whether the pro's skill is natural or artificial doesn't play a role, the nub will ragequit anyway). In a good society cheating can become a mild annoyance at worst, and it can really be a positive thing, it can be fun -- seeing for example a skilled pro face and potentially even beat a cheater is a very interesting thing. If someone wants to win by cheating, why not let him? Valid answers to this can only be given in the context of a shit society that creates cults of personality out of winners etc. In a good society choosing to cheat in a game is as if someone chooses to fly to the top of a mountain by helicopter rather than climbing it -- the choice is everyone's to make.
The fact that cheating isn't after all such an issue is supported by the hilariously vastly different double standards applied e.g. by chess platforms in this matter, on one hand they state in their TOS they have absolutely 0% tolerance of any kind of cheating/assistance and will lifeban players for the slightest suspicion of cheating yelling "WE HAVE TO FIGHT CHEATING", on the other hand they allow streamers literally cheat on a daily basis on live stream where everyone is seeing it, of course because streamers bring them money -- ALL top chess streamers (chessbrah, Nakamura, ...), including the world champion Magnus Carlsen himself, have videos of themselves getting advice on moves from the chat or even from high level players present during the stream, Magnus Carlsen is filmed taking over his friend's low rated account and winning a game which is the same as if the friend literally just used an engine to win the game, and Magnus is also filmed getting an advice from a top grandmaster on a critical move in a tournament that won him the game and granted him a FINANCIAL PRIZE. World chess champion is literally filmed winning money by cheating and no one cares because it was done as part of a highly lucrative stream "in a fun/friendly mood". Chessbrah streams ordinarily consist of many viewers in the room just giving advice on moves to the one who is currently playing, of course they censor all comments that try to bring up the fact that this is 100% cheating directly violating the platform's TOS. People literally have no brains, they only freak out about cheating when they're told to by the industry, when cheating is good for business people are told to shut up because it's okay and indeed they just shut up and keep consuming.
It's impossible to prevent cheating, contrary to what capitalists want you to believe. As always a capitalist will want to sell you the idea that anything can be achieved by investing enough money, that if they pay 100 experts on cheating and 100 experts on programming, they will create a miraculous algorithm that will catch any cheater. This is just theatre like any other business, we must realize that some things simply cannot be done. Even if you pay 100 experts on mathematics, you won't be able to solve something that's mathematically impossible -- but for the same amount of money you can convince people that you can. Let's continue with chess -- to prevent cheating, two players would have to be seated naked in an electromagnetically isolated soundproof box with no view outside, only with the chessboard. We know we can't do this, maybe we can come close during world championship, a match between two physically present humans, but not so much in over the board tournaments with hundreds of people around, players and spectators, who can freely walk around, go to the toilet, privacy has to be respected, people can communicate with undetectable visual signals, security and arbiters make errors, they're tired, under stress, lazy and negligent, can be bribed (or you may simply bribe a poor cleaning lady to smuggle you a phone to the toilet) and so on. However that's still nothing compared to online chess -- to think cheating can be prevented there is absolute madness and stupidity. All that can be done is to show exemplary punishments of a few blatant cheaters to create the illusion that cheating is eliminated. Cheating can't be prevented, you can only make people not notice them too much by eliminating those whose cheating is too obvious. There can exist no algorithm that will reliably detect a cheater from play alone (or even from a huge set of games), it's mathematically impossible -- like Daniil Dubov said: "the algorithms only detect idiots" and likewise it can be said that the existence of such algorithms only comforts idiots. A smart cheater won't be caught, only the stupidest that copy paste every single move from the latest stockfish will be spotted and publicly executed to assure the audience that "cheaters will get caught", but the smart ones won't be, those that will use the engine only sometimes, in critical situations, who will combine different engines and their older versions so that the moves will never match an output of any single one. There is no way to tell if a player is simply good because he sees the moves with his brain or because he sees them with an aid of a computer. Not even multi angle cameras all around watching the player would prevented cheating, there are thousands of ways to cheat this (feed false video, feed false audio while listening to advice, buy a miniature earbud, anal bead, use Morse code tapping on the floor, let someone wave you signals through the window from the camera's blind spot, let someone communicate you advice through a single pixel on your screen that will get lost in video compression, ...). Of course the capitalist won't let you see the algorithms or his data, he'll say "trust us, we have a good algorithm and we are reducing cheating to minimum", he'll say the details can't be made public so that cheaters won't exploit the knowledge (security through obscurity), but the real reason is simply that revealing the details would show their system doesn't really work. As always, they're only selling you an illusion.
Back in the day of early Internet there were practically no anticheating measures in online games and everything worked -- yes, cheaters did appear, but we must realize that it's not like EVERYONE will start to cheat immediately if there are no anticheat mechanisms. If you swim in a pool, you may sometimes drink someone's piss and if you play online games, you may sometimes meet a cheater -- unless you're a mentally unstable pussy, you can take it no problem. The existence of anticheat mechanisms may itself incite cheating even more by the effect of forbidden fruit, it becomes a challenge (and to some even business) to beat the system. If top 100 places in the ladder are all obvious cheaters, will anyone see any more fun joining them? No. If you have the need to compare yourself to others, just form a group of friends who you know don't cheat and compare your score or ratings among each other, ignore the anonymous cheaters.