DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO!!! DO THE NEW ONE: this tutorial is going to show you the basics of how to mod any game using chea. The folks behind EasyAntiCheat, a service that stops people from cheating in video games, deal with one of the messiest issues in the medium. People often feel that anyone caught breaking the.

Once upon a time, there was a phone company—or rather, the phone company. AT&T Corp., the venerable 'Ma Bell,' provided nearly all telephone service to nearly all Americans for decades.. until it didn't. The company infamously broke up on New Year's Day in 1984, splitting into the seven 'Baby Bells,' regional carriers that could compete with other long-distance providers for consumer dollars.

The split wasn't just for funsies. The baby Bells were the ultimate result of a settlement between AT&T and the Justice Department, the culmination of an antitrust case that began nearly a decade earlier. It was the first time the feds broke up a communications company for antitrust reasons—and 35 years later, it retains the dubious distinction of being the last.

The decades of deregulation since the Reagan administration have brought us to a whole new era of massive corporate consolidation and the rise of a new wave of conglomerates in sectors that didn't even exist 40 years ago. The growth at the top in tech has been particularly stratospheric: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and a handful of others that have risen since the turn of the century now dominate our economy and our communications in a powerful way.

Critics from all sides, however, now consider today's tech titans to be too powerful, and all four companies have in recent years faced several investigations probing a central issue: antitrust law. Dozens of probes are going on right now under the auspices of dozens of state, federal, and international bodies using dozens of state, federal, and international statutes. What all of these antitrust laws have in common at their core, though, is the concept of playing fair—especially when it comes to the biggest player in the room.

Antitrust 101: More than monopolies

The newest antitrust law on the books in the United States dates to the 1970s; the oldest comes from more than a century ago, passed in response to the behavior of the railroad, steel, and oil magnates of the first Gilded Age.

The Sherman Act of 1890 was short and sweet, as far as laws go. It declared contracts, corporate trusts, or conspiracies 'in the restraint of trade or commerce' between states or nations to be illegal. The Act also outlawed monopolies: 'Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony.'

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Most of the juicy stuff in modern antitrust, however, comes from the 20th century. The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 established the FTC, with the explicit mandate not only to protect consumers from 'unfair or deceptive' acts, but also to 'prevent unfair methods of competition' that affect commerce. Those 'unfair methods' were outlined in a companion piece of law: the Clayton Antitrust Act, also signed into law in 1914, which significantly refined and strengthened the Sherman Act.

The Clayton Act expanded the scope of antitrust law to deal not just with monopolies, but specifically with anticompetitive behavior—basically, tactics that unfairly boost a company into a dominant market position or that unfairly keep a dominant company at the top and suppress competitors. At the highest level, these behaviors basically fall into two big buckets.

The first is growth through acquisition: you can't just buy out your primary competitor if the field isn't big enough for other companies to pose real competition. Consider the mobile market, for example: regulators decided the imminent union of Sprint and T-Mobile isn't anticompetitive, because T-Mobile and Sprint are the two smallest of the four major players. Even with one of them taken out, the market still has three national carriers. (And under the agreement with regulators, there will theoretically be a fourth carrier again. Someday.)

But if AT&T and Verizon, the two dominant US mobile carriers by far, ever tried to merge operators, even the current crop of business-friendly regulators would almost certainly bring that proposal to a screeching halt. A deal of that magnitude would create a company so far beyond the reach of any potential competitor that no current player or new business could ever reasonably be expected to stand a chance of catching up.

The second metaphorical bucket holds the whole category of dominance through unfair dealings, which can be done by one company or as an agreement among several. One kind of unlawful anticompetitive behavior you find here is classic price-fixing. Recently, for example, StarKist was ordered to pay a $100 million fine after it and Bumble Bee were both found guilty of conspiring to fix prices in the canned tuna market, which is largely controlled by three companies.

Unfair behavior can also include a whole array of tactics undertaken by a single company, such as price discrimination, predatory pricing, or certain kinds of exclusivity requirements. These are the kinds of behaviors a federal judge found Qualcomm guilty of back in May, when she ruled that the company's business practices 'strangled competition' with exclusive deals and patent licensing fees that charged device makers even when their products used a different brand of chip.

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In modern analyses, regulators are concerned not necessarily with competition for its own sake, but rather with the negative effects that follow when competition disappears. A market with little-to-no competition tends to see prices go up while the quality of the product and service degrade, affecting not only individual consumers but also suppliers and commercial buyers at every level. A player with an extreme dominant market position can leverage its dominance on suppliers that can affect competition several links up or down the chain.

So who's investigating whom?

Concerns about big tech's anticompetitive behavior have occasionally bubbled up for decades. But building pressure seems to have exploded coming into this year, and most major developments in the US seem to have hit just within the past six months:

  • March 8: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) announces a proposal to break up Amazon, Facebook, and Google as one of the policy planks of her 2020 presidential run. (And within a week, she defended the proposal in front of ample tech sector employees at SXSW 2019. 'My view is break those things apart, and we'll have a more robust market in America.')
  • May 9: Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes pens a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times making the case for breaking up Facebook sooner rather than later.
  • June 3: The House Antitrust Subcommittee announces a bipartisan investigation into competition and 'abusive conduct' in the tech sector.
  • June 3: Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets report that the FTC and DOJ have settled on a divide-and-conquer approach to antitrust probes, with the DOJ set to take on Apple and Google, and the FTC investigating Amazon and Facebook.
  • July 24: The Department of Justice publicly confirms it has launched an antitrust probe into 'market-leading online platforms.' The DOJ does not name names, but the list of potential targets is widely understood to include Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
  • July 25: Facebook confirms it is under investigation by the FTC.
  • September 6: A coalition of attorneys general for nine states and territories announce a joint antitrust probe into Facebook.
  • September 6: Google publicly confirms it is the target of a DOJ antitrust probe.
  • September 9: A coalition of attorneys general for 50 states and territories announce a joint antitrust probe into Google.
  • September 13: House Antitrust Subcommittee sends an absolutely massive request for information to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google, requesting 10 years' worth of detailed records relating to competition, acquisitions, and other matters relevant to the investigation.
  • September 25: Media reports indicate the DOJ is also probing Facebook.
  • October 22: An additional 38 attorneys general sign on to the states' probe of Facebook, bringing the total to 47.

Although all four of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are US companies, they operate worldwide, and scrutiny of them is by no means limited to US regulators. Governments and regulatory agencies worldwide, especially in the European Union and its member states, also have several open investigations ofall fourcompaniesin progress.

For most nongamers, the question of whether cheat codes equal cheating seems pretty simple. 'Cheating' means gaining an unfair advantage, after all, usually by breaking some kind of rule. So, yeah, a cheat code is cheating, because you're breaking a rule that others have to adhere to, right? Follows logic. But let's keep in mind that semantics might make a big difference here. What if we called them 'shortcuts' or even — as we might see — 'bugs'? Suddenly, we're not necessarily cheating — we're just taking advantage, instead of stealing an unfair advantage. So before we bang the gavel and declare cheat codes either cheating or fair play, let's discuss what a cheat code really is.

The traditional cheat code is one that you can enter while playing the game. To accomplish this, you either enter the code manually or execute a series of actions during gameplay. Either way, doing so will unlock something previously hidden in the game. This is where the 'cheat' part of cheat codes really comes into question.

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The cheat itself could be lots of different things. Maybe the code gives you a shortcut around the playing field, or maybe it helps you get your hands on a useful tool without having to stumble upon it. It might just be a weird skill — maybe your character is suddenly able to digest gluten! (This idea comes from my most boring video game pitch, the 'Baking for Large Crowds Challenge.')

Now, it's important to note that not all of these cheats are accidental. Developers might build them in for a multitude of reasons. Some cheat codes actually make a game harder, which sounds crazy but is great for game developers looking to keep gamers involved by ramping up the challenge or competition. (In the 'Baking for Large Crowds Challenge,' that would probably mean giving half the people nut allergies and half the people high-protein diets.) But beyond simply doing it for fun, developers also sometimes design cheats to help them with testing. If they're working on a complicated, intricate game, they might need some quick ways to get to other levels or test for bugs in certain places. And, of course, there could just be a mistake in the code that allows a person to jump levels — but that would be pretty unusual with the quality-assurance processes these days.

Why Isn't Cheating In Games Illegal Aliens

In other words, a cheat isn't really the same as a hack, for instance, where a savvy developer (or just someone with programming knowledge) can edit or modify the code of the game to create shortcuts or automate tasks. And that might represent a big difference between what we think of as 'cheating' and what we think of as a competitive way to play the game.

So when we ask if cheat codes are cheating, the answer is a pretty strong maybe. Sure, gamers could be finding an advantage that the game makers didn't intend to include. But they might also be finding a more unique — or even challenging — way to play the game that's been built into the system. Or they might be doing a vague amalgamation of both — which means it's up to the player to decide if they're a cheater or a champion. Cheats for word game 2.

Why Isn't Cheating In Games Illegal To Play

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Sources

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  • McFerran, Damien. 'Code Red: The History of the Cheat.' Redbull.com. June 24, 2014. (May 13, 2015) http://www.redbull.com/us/en/games/stories/1331660993180/the-history-of-the-cheat-code