Irenes (many)@dysfun sure, but you understand it relies on it in the sense that DRM and anticheat look at it, right? it's not a feature that helps with graphics or anything like that
@dysfun like notionally there was a possible world in which a harder line was taken, and game studios were forced to accept that selling on Linux means not being able to do those things. we don't live in that world, because the kernel did eventually sell out wrt DRM.
Josh Simmons@ireneista @dysfun cpuid isn't something which anticheats will rely on the veracity of either fwiw, it's not a security feature and it's spoofable.
vriska, thief of light 
@dotstdy @ireneista @dysfun i have heard that there are games that check cpuid to only support the steam deck and not other hardware. this is trivially bypassable but they do it anyway
@leo @ireneista @dysfun stuff like that is not unheard of, just because they only test on steam deck and don't officially support anything else. It's a bit silly but not really hard to work around. But that's nothing to do with surveillance or performance. (It can just check the CPU model says aerith)
@dotstdy @leo @dysfun mm. similar stories have played out with browser user-agents, but it would be strange to claim that user-agents have nothing to do with surveillance... if anything, having innocuous uses for it widely-deployed makes the surveillance stronger because it means turning it off comes at a compatibility cost.
we agree of course that the intention is not to surveil, but good intentions don't even count in Horseshoes
@ireneista @leo @dysfun that's not the problem though, cpuid lets you enumerate feature support, which lets you fingerprint, but even without an instruction to enumerate features you can still just try to use them and fingerprint the CPU from that. So you make the non malicious use cases harder, and the malicious folks can keep doing what they already were doing.