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.

If you’re not going to address the contents then I’m putting you on my blocklist

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.

Must we abandon art for it has been poisonned ?

How can you even tell without install ghydra ?
How can normies be expected to know without strong labelling laws or whatever it takes for distributors to actually provide informed consent about their silly little game rootkitting your private computer space ?

So isn’t that tantamount to letting the ghouls purchase culture away from us ?
500 years into the future the only thing we’ll be playing is offline games from 1984-2014
What a sad ending for humans !

Will you do retain this attitude when all of culture has been put behind the dignity-wall and requires a neuralink brainchip for digital rights management purposes ?

What will you do when the last DRM unencumbered piece of entertainment is playing with a bunch of rocks and sticks ?

How do you play Battlefield 1 on TAILS ?

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 use windows 10 and debian 13 on proxmox 9 !

? 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

my nesting partner just licks my teeth clean

The authorities want an homogeneous population, as they also have a limited ability to imagine the social sphere in multiple dimensions, this is why you’re seeing things like the gender binaries. At least that’s just two simulations to run. But gender as spectrum, this becomes quickly untenable for the elites to model for control, they wish the squash the real world complexity into flattened binaries or even uniformity.

Yes, I think you got it exactly right and the audio normalization analogy is correct, at least for sound nerds like us.

Hypernormalization is a dysfunctional response from elites due to their human cognitive weakness. This is why we’re not going back to “King” no single human can bear the complexity of the entire world in their skull mush. They will melt down and genocide the Kurds when it gets too hard for them to conjugate everything. This is why dictators and fascism will do a lot of damage, but have no hope whatsoever for success. They are “rebellion from cognitive weakness”, they violently lash out at complexity itself, at those things they cannot understand. They want to reduce everything to a simple narrative of us versus them and then destroy “them” so only a uniform homogeneous “us” remains. This “us” identical to the ruler, does not require the ruler to imagine “the other” instead they only rule as if everyone else was an identical copy of them. And if anyone disagrees with that, they are “other”.

From that we know the “few” cannot rule the many, but then how do we avoid the traps of design by committee, bikeshedding and the various paralysis that come from complexity beyond human cognition. Concentrations of power are too dumb to rule, but the mob and the market are also dumb and easily fooled, not to mention irresponsible and self-destructive. (The market is burning the planet, right now, it cannot see into the future). The mob is emotional and easily manipulated, often by its own emotions.

I think we need new modes of thinking more advanced than what we had in the 1700s. Something invented with at least the idea of what a computer could do.

You’ll probably want to watch the best documentary on the subject

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7T07WfIhM

I also recommend the following by the same author

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
about advertising and consumerism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6EBpLfLHCA&list=PLC4E798CAE3E10597
about how our own surplus value is used against us

Cloudflare and “challenging the status quo” in the same phrase ?

This is like when legislatures where made to ban plastic straws by the oil and plastic companies.
They knew the backlash would teach legislature to stop meddling in their affairs.

In hypernormalization, making SURE you know they ARE LYING and that IT DOESN’T MATTER is essential.
Because the goal is to make you believe you can’t do anything, so that you give up and demobilize that is their goal.

Whatever happened to the “peace dividend” eh Space research is by and large still military research, ICBMs, spy satellites at least they didn’t make the kinetic tungsten rod weapon

I understand the side-benefits, but imagine if they worked on getting the actual benefits rather than an excuse to develop intercontinental nuclear weapon delivery systems under the guise of civilian space travel using public funds.

More like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW4Gdsnr2Bg