Sure, we've all heard Valve's Gabe Newell, and others from Valve, complain about Windows 8 and its potential effects on the world of gaming. Their concerns have yet to prove fruitful, however there is a flip side to gaming on Windows 8.
It turns out that it may be a good means for combating hackers in your favorite games. Francois Piednoel, the Principle Engineer at Intel, detailed some very interesting bits about Windows 8 in a closed-doors event for the operating system. You can thank Windows 8's use of random memory allocation for some of these combative measures.
"As an ex-hacker - I don't do it any more, I live in a country where you can't do this. There's one thing I knew, which is under Windows the game of the hacker was to guess where the next mem-alloc (memory allocation) was going to be, put your code there and wait for someone to call on you. Most of the hackers, this is what they do.
"In Windows 8 they've changed this mechanism, now memory allocation is random. Now if I guess, then I guess wrong 100% of the time. Now to hack, it is much harder.
"All of the attacks you used to do by attacking the driver, trying to make the stack explode, it's gone. And that's a good thing."
"In Windows 8 they've changed this mechanism, now memory allocation is random. Now if I guess, then I guess wrong 100% of the time. Now to hack, it is much harder.
"All of the attacks you used to do by attacking the driver, trying to make the stack explode, it's gone. And that's a good thing."
Obviously, this means that in order to actually be effective, the people using the hacks would have to upgrade Windows 8. Also, there's no saying that this is how all hacks operate, nor does it say that it's a foolproof method for reducing the number of cheaters. But hey, it's a good start!
(via Techradar)