Don’t get me wrong, Vanguard is BS, and I quit playing riot games because of it. However, simply having low level access isn’t sufficient to classify it as spyware, otherwise drivers would be spyware. I still haven’t seen any evidence that it currently does anything nefarious with that access, which means it’s quite unlikely it’s being used for mass surveillance.
To me, there are 2 problems: 1) It could be used for targeted attacks, and the likelihood anyone would find out is much lower than in a widespread surveillance scenario. 2) It could be used to deploy a massive bot-net.
I think the US reclassification here is precautionary in nature.
What speculation? It’s literally spyware. You are giving it full low level access to your processor.
Don’t get me wrong, Vanguard is BS, and I quit playing riot games because of it. However, simply having low level access isn’t sufficient to classify it as spyware, otherwise drivers would be spyware. I still haven’t seen any evidence that it currently does anything nefarious with that access, which means it’s quite unlikely it’s being used for mass surveillance.
To me, there are 2 problems: 1) It could be used for targeted attacks, and the likelihood anyone would find out is much lower than in a widespread surveillance scenario. 2) It could be used to deploy a massive bot-net.
I think the US reclassification here is precautionary in nature.