515
US adds web and gaming giant Tencent to list of Chinese military companies
(www.theregister.com)
Does this mean league of legends is a weapon
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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Weapon of Mass Distraction.
Psychological Warfare for sure
I mean it installs a rootkit on your computer that gives them full control over everything including what you type, hear, and see as well as the ability to record what you've previously typed and said. It could at any moment also fully disable your computer (as well as millions of other computers) rendering them useless.
Just because they haven't used it that way, don't assume they can't or won't.
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I mean, there's always been speculation that Vanguard is spyware. There's absolutely no need or justification for always-on cheat detection.
What speculation? It’s literally spyware. You are giving it full low level access to your processor.
Don't get me wrong, Vanguard is BS, and I quit playing riot games because of it. However, simply having low level access isn't sufficient to classify it as spyware, otherwise drivers would be spyware. I still haven't seen any evidence that it currently does anything nefarious with that access, which means it's quite unlikely it's being used for mass surveillance.
To me, there are 2 problems: 1) It could be used for targeted attacks, and the likelihood anyone would find out is much lower than in a widespread surveillance scenario. 2) It could be used to deploy a massive bot-net.
I think the US reclassification here is precautionary in nature.
Exactly. I avoid kernel-level anti-cheat not because of any known spying they do (and honestly, anything w/ user-level privileges can read all your personal data), but that they add yet another attack vector for a bad actor. I highly doubt Vanguard gets as much security scrutiny as drivers, for example.
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Except drivers are designed to interact with hardware and to make it usable, kernel-level anticheats are designed to specifically scan/block/etc software. They are pretty different with their intended purposes, even though they offer the same/similar invasiveness.
A weapon against sanity, yes.
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Gosh I feel like I've heard Tencent has a stake in some other company that isn't mentioned here yet.
what was it . . . hmmmmm
I'm really not sure which one you mean, because they own interest in a ton of companies.
Tik Tok is what they're referring to
I was thinking of reddit
Tik Tok is the only tencent company I know if that's been labeled a national security risk.
They also have a stake in all these companies...
Legaue of legends
Epic games
Ubisoft
From soft
Activision blizzard
Funcom (Conan games and an upcoming Dune game) and Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile) as well.
Wtf they own 100% shares of GGG? https://app.companiesoffice.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/1887410/shareholdings
Well idk about supporting POE2 now. Or should I not care?
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Activision Blizzard
I think the MSFT buyout eliminated their stake in ABK?
Fromsoft is unfortunate, but I honestly don't use any of the rest.
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Calling Tencent a "web and gaming giant" is really deceiving here.
It's one of the biggest tech conglomerates in the world. Tencent invest into literally everything: games, social networks, entertainments, cloud computing, finance, AI, other investments... Tencent owns WeChat, Tencent Cloud, Tencent Healthcare just to name a few and helps CCP with surveilance and censorship through these ownings (tbf they don't really have a choice, they're based in China)
100% they are involved in military too so this classification is very much justified.
Don't they also have lots of stakes in other companies.
Yeah that's what the comment said
Why is the list not just every Chinese company? do they not know how state capitalism works?
They do not.
Yeah they do. Fascism is state capitalism. They plan to replicate China.
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We have a puppet coming into the presidency. China will have all the inroads to our government they care to pay for. Tencent and Co. will be a non-issue.
A US social media giant owns the president. I don't think there going to allow the competition. Muskrat and Fuckerburg have a lot more sway and money.
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Can't win capitalism? Fret not, everything is national security and we can throw the rules of capitalism out the window :)
And then the west is surprised at the confused look of the global south when Ursula and Biden mention "Rules based order"...
I mean it's not like China was open and allowed competition from western companies.
But it us kind of insulting when America did incredible violence to the global south to get them to open their markets only throw it all out the window.
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China is state capitalism. Capitalism isn't losing. The West is losing because China is using state funds to buy up successful Western companies, and as their new owner, has the ability to force them to do China's bidding.
Meanwhile the West is completely barred from buying a majority stake in any successful Chinese company and even if it could would not be taking it over on behalf of serving the state.
The problem is China plays by its own rules and those rules are heavily stacked against every other nation. That was fine when they were making junk for Walmart; it's not so fine when it's highly sophisticated electronics and software (that can do whatever China wants it to in the West) ... and to add insult to injury it's often based on stolen Western technology (since us idiots decided to put the factories that manufacturer the designs there).
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That's horrible. I should Google for more information so I can avoid using companies involved with the military.
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