Thinking about competitive integrity
Essays on trust, evidence, and the technology behind verified play.
Lobby crashing, untangled
A new entry in the Field Guide. One phrase hides three different problems, and once you can tell them apart, the whole topic gets simple and what fixes it gets obvious.
When a game drops your whole lobby, it can mean three completely different things, and only one of them is serious. We built a plain-words reference that sorts them out, shows where the pattern recurs across the biggest games, and ends on the part nobody leads with: the engineering that already stops it.
The image is the proof
How we drew the Field Guide. Every driver, game, and process wears a mark generated from its own verifiable record, on a two-hundred-year-old anti-forgery craft, so the picture is struck from the record itself, and is beautiful anyway.
We could have built the Field Guide as a table. Most security references are. Instead every entry wears a mark struck from its own record: a driver presses a wax seal, a game strikes a coin, a process is mounted as a specimen. Nobody draws them. The drawing is the proof. This is how it works, and why we thought the people who never get the reference made for them deserved one that was also beautiful.
A field guide to your own machine
Look up anything running on your gaming PC: the drivers, the background processes, the anti-cheat that loads before the game does, each in plain words. Because the gate that decides what loads doesn't check what you think it checks, and the people who never get a reference made for them deserve one.
There is a driver on your gaming PC right now that is on a public list of tools used in real intrusions. There are probably several. The same software that reads your GPU temperature, lights your RGB, runs inside your anti-cheat. This is the story of why that is true, why the industry doesn't tell you in plain words, and what we built so that you can finally see for yourself.