#fuck the gshade dev

[good-death-for-the-lonely]

fuck

i look away for a few hours, and gshade decides to have it's villain arc

welp. time to dust off reshade and try to figure out how to make my screenies look as good as gshade did 🫠

[drk-of-light]

The new glamourer update on ffxiv is so fucking funny bc its so needlessly bitter and passive aggressive, telling me that i dont have certain items when i most certainly do. turns out it does not check your fucking armoire lmfaoooooo

Yea let me consider getting the cloud strife boots via playing the game- oh wait i already did years ago.

[beikonsims]

I know a lot of Simmers out there use GShade, but the news spread quicker in the FFXIV community about it, so I'm dropping it here in case you haven't heard.

Basically, the GShade dev is a petty fucking clown and infected the version 4.1.1. with mal//ware, that shuts down your computer if you use any shader alternatives. There are some threads about it on the FFXIV twitter, but I think this says enough. He supposedly removed it now, but the damage has been done and if you don't want to risk your computer in the future, it is recommended to get rid of GShade and look for alternatives, like ReShade.

[fae-of-the-rose]

So. Gshade

It hit me this morning that hey, Gshade was pretty popular with TS4 players! And they might not know what the fuck just happened so.

TLDR: Just uninstall Gshade, it’s broken and it probably ain’t coming back. See bottom of post for sources and references.

The longer version: so at some point in the last couple of days, Gshade pushed an update that was frankly stupid, requiring some stupid password to get shaders or whatever. A user, NotNite on twitter, decided “eh that’s dumb” and figured out how to get around that, technically without even hacking. (I don’t really understand it enough to explain what they did but.) No big deal! They even showed other folks how to do it!

The dev of Gshade, who in the Final Fantasy XIV modding community was known for being A Jackass, took Personal Offense to this and pushed out yet another mandatory update. This update made it so Gshade, if it determined that you were using NotNite’s program or otherwise running Gshade in a way that it did not approve of...

Would force your computer to restart! Yeah! Yeah! Like malware!

Lovely. And then the dev went on to brag about it, saying it was specifically because NotNite decided to spread their tool around, and said that users should be grateful it was “just” a restart.

Needless to say, this spread and everyone started uninstalling and walking through folks how to make sure you got all the files cleared out because what the hell. The dev did roll back that update, but too little too late.

And then this morning, people woke up to find that Gshade, if you hadn’t yet uninstalled it, was bricked. The github that held Gshade’s code and the DRM that it checked updates for and stuff? Gone. Utterly nuked from orbit.

So yeah. Here is a twitter thread explaining the drama from yesterday, twitter thread about today’s stuff, Gshade to Reshade migration help (though idk if that’ll work now that Gshade itself is gone), and a list of the files to manually uninstall if you go through the uninstaller, boot up the game, and it still pops up. They should be in the folder you installed Gshade to. I cannot help anyone with Reshade or anything else, this is just me getting information out there.

[frownyyy]

ok but y'all do understand how this is STILL bad right? forcing a restart that the end-user did NOT agree to allow is malware. plain and simple. it does not matter if you broke a rule or not. it is taking control of your computer in a way you had not agreed to, and that is malware. that action has malicious intent behind it.

i do not care if you are pissed someone got your code from somewhere else. do not put fucking malware in your software??? the dev(s) who put this into gshade shot themselves in the foot here. just because you theoretically *can* put this into your software doesn't mean you *should* do so.

people aren't uninstalling because they are afraid they will get restarted randomly. people are uninstalling because they do not agree with the placement of malware in their software as a whole. it doesn't matter if i, personally, experience a restart due to reshade. the fact they tampered with their own software in such a way, admitted to it publicly, framed it in such a way as to make the dev team look rational in all of this, and then say "oh haha btw we could have done something even worse if we wanted to xoxo" is absolutely going to demolish whatever trust your userbase had in you and your software to begin with.

anyway, gg to the devs for screwing themselves lmao. please uninstall this piece of crap.

yes, we have seen the post regarding the discord message from gshade devs. no, it does not mean what you think it does. gshade is still very much safe. the wording of the message is being misread and spread as the wrong thing.

gshade devs did not put malware into gshade that can restart your pc upon using the program. gshade devs did not put malware on your system.

what the gshade devs did was put an anti-tampering code into the program, that is completely harmless. similar to overwatch/fortnite/valorant and their anti-cheat systems.

all the program will do is actually trigger a restart if you have gotten gshade from anywhere other than their site, and the program/code been tampered with from that source.

downloading gshade from gshade's website directly is still safe and is not coming with malware. you do not need to switch back to reshade. if you are downloading gshade from gshade and not getting it from a third party that could tamper with the program, it is safe.

[tokidokifish]

basically recently gshade - the shader practically everyone usesd to make ffxiv look a little less… extremely gray - changed its functionality so that if there’s a minor update, you see an annoying pop-up every time you open the program, and if there’s a MAJOR update, it just stops working entirely. it was irritating, especially because you couldn’t update gshade while your game was running, so you’d have to close out of the thing you’d much rather prefer to be doing just to get your colors back. this was something that had been going on and cheesing pretty much everyone off for a while.

notably despite their massive britches, gshade was built off existing program reshade - it just streamlined the process by having built-in presets. so in light of these mounting annoyances, a young programmer was like “well what’s one more third-party solution?” and built a few tools, but most notably one that patched the update check out of gshade, so you could continue using it un-accosted. and oh, a gshade dev just fucking hated that, so they did what any developer would do:

they inserted malware into their installer

now, if the installer caught you using the patch tool, it would force a restart. the developer admitted that this functionality had been purposefully included as a personal fuck you to the teenage dev that made the tool:

they walked it back real quick and even said they would ease up on the update requirements, since that was what caused the problem in the first place, but the damage was done. the fact they had inserted malicious code into their program as a reaction to a personal beef they were having with a programmer - and did not recognize this as a problem until receiving significant pushback - has pretty much fucking destroyed the trust the userbase had in them, and reshade’s website proceeded to crash under the strain of everyone rushing to download it instead. 💁

gshade really went for broke on that “destroy your credibility as a developer” speedrun huh

[cervidaedalus]

Yeah I wanted to keep names out of this when I initially drafted it this morning an hour from when this began, but thinking about it think people really do need to see what the dev who started all this said about it. Yes, they also admit to being 16 years old at the end of this post.

This is not Gshade devs trying to cut out any and all competition with a line of malicious code.

This was a child being an unimaginable fucking bog dwelling dickweed who wanted to start an internet pissing contest as cocky teenagers sometimes do. A line of code was implemented as way to go after this one person in particular, which was triggered when they tried to release a Gshade updater after taking Twitter complaints about how Gshade updates as the perfect opportunity to one-up their "enemy".

RE: GSHADE MALWARE DISCOURSE

They locked the channels down, but I managed to grab some screenshots of the conversation shown in the crucially lacking in context Twitter screens. I'll share the screens in a reblog because Tumblr keeps breaking when I add them.

So, we all hate art theft, right? We hate when people use our or others' hard work even in bits and pieces (like AI art training) without any credit to us or the artists? We hate when people say "it's online so NYEH" when an artist asks people to respect their work, right? Okay, good.

Gshade is an "improved" version of the Reshade overlay program that makes it super easy to adjust, make, and switch between presets in the game, as well as simplifies the installation process, and adds a few extra features.

However, there was some Twitter outcry about a week ago due to how updates work in Gshade (which was, admittedly, annoying). Another dev decided to break GShade's EULA regarding assets usage because they didn't like some of Gshades functions like the updates.

In my own, personal opinion, both parties aren't great people. If you read the other person's blog post on all this, it's riddled with cockiness and your garden variety internet kid arrogance and seems to boil down to "I don't like Gshade, it sucks, I can do better." They link an archived Twitter where a popular preset creator politely asks for their presets to not be used for this project, they push back against this creator's request, the creator makes a vague and innacurate legal reference in an attempt to try and convince this dev "hey, I said don't use my stuff". The dev mocks this person in their blog post claiming that they're allowed to use the presets because they're in a GitHub repository.

In order to prevent plagiarism of any of Gshade's assets (INCLUDING the presets themselves), the dev added a "killswitch" essentially that, when any attempts were made to access Gshade, its installer, presets, etc without the dev or preshade creators' knowledge or permission, would cause a force-restart. For anyone who doesn't really use Gshade- I feel the need to add that some presets use original art assets and overlays so it isn't just people playing around with sliders. This is actual art that some artists have politely requested doesn't get re-used elsewhere without permission. And no- this isn't like major game companies like Ubisoft implementing DRM, which in context is about big rich corporations trying to prevent piracy. This is like online game anti-cheat software except instead of bans you get a restart.

You cannot trigger this force-restart with Gshade on normal use, it will ONLY happen when trying to run something that accesses and utilizes Gshade or its assets (again, including people's presets). Likewise, from the sounds of it, the killswitch was already regretted and removed in a patch on Saturday- two days before this whole thing blew up today- and it was changed to a line of code that just closes the program.

There is nothing within Gshade which will harm or remain on your computer. There are no keyloggers, other spyware, covert mining, or anything else that remains on someone's computer with the express purpose of doing harm to it. While you can argue semantics here, imo "Program does bad thing if you go out of your way to use it improperly" isn't "malware" or else World of Warcraft and any other online game with an anti-cheat could also be considered Malware.

If you don't want to use Gshade because of the moral implications of the dev taking such a grandiose measures, that's a personal choice. It's 100% understandable to see this as a breech of trust-

-but please stop spreading word that the app intentionally has Malware intended to affect the common user. This was literally an anti-theft measure taken way overboard. To summarize: -Cocky dev personally dislikes some of Gshade's functions and wants to make their own version of it, but use Gshade assets including presets (some of which contain original art) they don't have permission to use using the same busted "well it's on the internet" logic people use to justify art theft and plagiarism. -Gshade devs try to stop this, other dev self-admittedly "trolls" them for a while and ignores preset artists saying "hey I don't consent to using my stuff". -Gshade dev includes a line of code to force-restart the PC of anyone who tries to access any Gshade assets, specifically to fight back against this user. Regrets it and removes it. -Two days after its removal, word gets out that Gshade has this force-restart command. -Gshade dev admits in the Discord that yes, this command was in there briefly. A single screenshot of this admission makes it to Twitter, and the entire program is branded as Malware.

I'll repeat again, neither side was perfect in this, and to add such a harsh command line even if it was targeted at one person in particular was a gross misuse of power. It's perfectly understandable to not want to use Gshade anymore if you don't trust the program, but it's also important to release this overstep wasn't made purely in impulse, and was an attempt to stop someone who was actively trying to disrespect artists and preset designers. I think that's the huge part of all this that's being missed and it's resulting in a lot of people zero'ing in on the Gshade dev and Discord mods as if they're the defacto villains in all this and need to be harassed and ousted from the community.