[quake3] Re: gpl anticheater

[Jamie Wilkinson]

This one time, at band camp, fs wrote:
>Sorry if I've become tiring to some of you but I'd like to see those
>ideas that come from the gaming community (it's not just me that
>thought about it) to be dismissed only if they are really impossible.

I was going to stay quiet, but I wanted to stop you before you went too far
down the boring licensing path.

At a fundamental level, you're talking about DRM for games.  Cory Doctorow
wrote a short piece about why open source DRM can't work here:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/24/drm_ssl.html

There's some fundamental computational theory that prevents you from
solving this in the general sense anyway -- enough that you can get away
with it in a closed source environment but the moment you open up your
protocols and algorithms you can't trust anyone.  The only way to do it
safely is to do it all on the server -- and then you're starting to get
complicated with things like behavioural analysis.  I'd much rather spend
that time with people I trust on a private server :)