4 ms·

> Good day, I've received word from the VAC team that this is intentional and not open for discussion on Github. > In general VAC issues are not handled on Git

> Good day, I've received word from the VAC team that this is intentional and not open for discussion on Github. > In general VAC issues are not handled on Github in any capacity and further issue reports on this may result in being banned from the Valve Software issue trackers. This is just incomprehensible from a PR standpoint, even for a company like Valve, especially since people on the thread have brought up legitimate concerns for users that might be caught in the flak.

anonymousab 9y ago
Enough people will say that it's fine because of cheaters. The gaming or software equivalent of justifying bad legislation because of criminals. Based off of the previous DNS false banning debacle, they'll ignore any negativity about this unless it reaches critical mass, at which point they'll say that combatting cheating is hard so give them carte blanche. The GitHub response is merely the "stop pointing out the Emperor's lack of clothes" aspect of the first part.
- gsich 9y ago
  Was there false banning based on DNS?
  - anonymousab 9y ago
    False bans is hard to prove - you always have people claiming it, especially the cheaters themselves - but IIRC they came out and said they were scanning user DNS cache entries and using them as a basis for VAC actions. Gabe's response more or less boiled down to "cheating is a hard problem". I hope I'm not misremembering or being uncharitable. EDIT - I called it a false ban debacle because they was one half of the issue; the privacy implications were equally important.
    - arrivance 9y ago
      I believe you are misremembering: what Valve said within their statement on /r/games is that the DNS entries were being used after the detection of the cheats. Here's a quotation from Gabe's post: >VAC checked for the presence of these cheats. If they were detected VAC then checked to see which cheat DRM server was being contacted. This second check was done by looking for a partial match to those (non-web) cheat DRM servers in the DNS cache. If found, then hashes of the matching DNS entries were sent to the VAC servers. The match was double checked on our servers and then that client was marked for a future ban. Less than a tenth of one percent of clients triggered the second check. 570 cheaters are being banned as a result. [1] [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_an...
      - anonymousab 9y ago
        Ah, ok. Thanks for the correction.
- FRex 9y ago
  Exfiltrating what websites you've accessed. That's basically what a spyware does. What in actual fuck.
  - stordoff 9y ago
    I'm not exactly fine with it, but my understanding[0] is that it did a local check and only send the "bad" domains remotely. Still a privacy leak, but in a different class as bulk-uploading your entire DNS record. [0] Per https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_an...
    - FRex 9y ago
      And my understanding is that Gabe Newell who runs this circus just happens to have claimed so when the milk was already long split. If he is so concerned that Valve will be associated with spyware then he shouldn't have let VAC team create a literal piece of (definition fitting) spyware. Somehow the examples on VAC page say it looks for third party modifications to game files, not rummages through your entire machine. As if they knew it sounds sketchy to users. Even if they are working in good faith they might screw up during one of these raids against my machine (like they did with rm -rf on Linux in the uninstall script) and leak something or save it to some temporary file that something else might pick up. This is still very out of line. I buy games via a proprietary platform that doubles as a DRM while pirates have no DRM, open source torrent clients and verified cracker teams and I'm the one having privacy worries here?
nickodell 9y ago
Innocent users might be caught by this, but so far that's entirely hypothetical. The user that posted this has a pinned repo named "AimTux." The second guy is a contributor to "catbot." Ditto the third guy. One of the people in the thread suggests that he wants to have a TF2 aimbot installed, but it's not for cheating at TF2, honest.
- ianai 9y ago
  Botters can ruin a very fun game completely. It may seem too far, but if a botter self identifies why not take them at their word?
- deusum 9y ago
  Sad that you don't defend the innocent because you deemed them hypothetical.
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    Hypothetical innocents that can be checked for before a banwave goes out vs hundreds/thousands of active accounts cheating and ruining games.
  - dkonofalski 9y ago
    He/she didn't deem them hypothetical. They are hypothetical until a legitimate user that doesn't use bots makes the claim that they were banned for this. According to updates made to this, the username wasn't even the source of the ban so these "innocents" are definitely hypothetical.
- Kr4ken 9y ago
  Innocent users are the only ones that will get caught up by this anymore, the cheaters already worked around this(https://github.com/nullifiedcat/catbot-setup/commit/c2d22ee92d0af11376243ca20c7522e6e7205506 https://github.com/nullifiedcat/catbot-setup/commit/c2d22ee9...). Yes, cheaters were the first to report it because they were the first to experience it.
na85 9y ago
Valve is well known for being immune to the normal repercussions of having awful PR. For some reason, the market forgives them despite having downright hostile interaction with the community on a regular basis.
- adnzzzzZ 9y ago
  >For some reason, Maybe because none of this is relevant and everyone in this thread is getting upset over nothing. No real users have been harmed as a result of this measure (most people in the github issues thread have repos where they own or contribute to cheating software) and it seems to have worked to ban a number of cheaters. Seems like good engineering to me on their part when such a simple solution turns out to be so effective.
  - anonymousab 9y ago
    > No real users have been harmed If they had, they wouldn't know why. That's one of the major parts of the problem - the entire ban system (and appeals process, or rather, the letter memory hole valve deigns to call a process) is opaque, a black box. You don't know why you're banned beyond "cheating/hacking" or "cheating in game X" in the best case. There's then the self-fulfilling silliness with the proclamations of perfection of VAC; you need such a high standard to prove the negative, that you did not cheat, and a ton of luck for them to even consider the possibility.
- pdkl95 9y ago
  > the market forgives them It's not forgiveness; Valve et al know that if they simply ignore the bad PR, people will forget and protesting becomes repetitive and tiresome. This is the insidious power of silence, and why actual change only happens when people refuse to go away until the problem is actually fixed. Without this continuous push back, silence transforms bad behavior into the new normal. Jim Sterling has a great video[1] that explains this problem in greater detail. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6lvDL4cNdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6lvDL4cNdM (warning: contains some strong language)
jaccarmac 9y ago
> even for a company like Valve There is no such thing as too far for Valve, as the community for their games knows well. It's become something of a meme at this point. You are familiar with Gabe calling the host of a tournament out publicly on Reddit, yes?

anonymousab 9y ago

Enough people will say that it's fine because of cheaters. The gaming or software equivalent of justifying bad legislation because of criminals. Based off of the previous DNS false banning debacle, they'll ignore any negativity about this unless it reaches critical mass, at which point they'll say that combatting cheating is hard so give them carte blanche. The GitHub response is merely the "stop pointing out the Emperor's lack of clothes" aspect of the first part.

gsich 9y ago
Was there false banning based on DNS?
- anonymousab 9y ago
  False bans is hard to prove - you always have people claiming it, especially the cheaters themselves - but IIRC they came out and said they were scanning user DNS cache entries and using them as a basis for VAC actions. Gabe's response more or less boiled down to "cheating is a hard problem". I hope I'm not misremembering or being uncharitable. EDIT - I called it a false ban debacle because they was one half of the issue; the privacy implications were equally important.
  - arrivance 9y ago
    I believe you are misremembering: what Valve said within their statement on /r/games is that the DNS entries were being used after the detection of the cheats. Here's a quotation from Gabe's post: >VAC checked for the presence of these cheats. If they were detected VAC then checked to see which cheat DRM server was being contacted. This second check was done by looking for a partial match to those (non-web) cheat DRM servers in the DNS cache. If found, then hashes of the matching DNS entries were sent to the VAC servers. The match was double checked on our servers and then that client was marked for a future ban. Less than a tenth of one percent of clients triggered the second check. 570 cheaters are being banned as a result. [1] [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_an...
    - anonymousab 9y ago
      Ah, ok. Thanks for the correction.
FRex 9y ago
Exfiltrating what websites you've accessed. That's basically what a spyware does. What in actual fuck.
- stordoff 9y ago
  I'm not exactly fine with it, but my understanding[0] is that it did a local check and only send the "bad" domains remotely. Still a privacy leak, but in a different class as bulk-uploading your entire DNS record. [0] Per https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_an...
  - FRex 9y ago
    And my understanding is that Gabe Newell who runs this circus just happens to have claimed so when the milk was already long split. If he is so concerned that Valve will be associated with spyware then he shouldn't have let VAC team create a literal piece of (definition fitting) spyware. Somehow the examples on VAC page say it looks for third party modifications to game files, not rummages through your entire machine. As if they knew it sounds sketchy to users. Even if they are working in good faith they might screw up during one of these raids against my machine (like they did with rm -rf on Linux in the uninstall script) and leak something or save it to some temporary file that something else might pick up. This is still very out of line. I buy games via a proprietary platform that doubles as a DRM while pirates have no DRM, open source torrent clients and verified cracker teams and I'm the one having privacy worries here?

nickodell 9y ago

Innocent users might be caught by this, but so far that's entirely hypothetical. The user that posted this has a pinned repo named "AimTux." The second guy is a contributor to "catbot." Ditto the third guy. One of the people in the thread suggests that he wants to have a TF2 aimbot installed, but it's not for cheating at TF2, honest.

ianai 9y ago
Botters can ruin a very fun game completely. It may seem too far, but if a botter self identifies why not take them at their word?
deusum 9y ago
Sad that you don't defend the innocent because you deemed them hypothetical.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  Hypothetical innocents that can be checked for before a banwave goes out vs hundreds/thousands of active accounts cheating and ruining games.
- dkonofalski 9y ago
  He/she didn't deem them hypothetical. They are hypothetical until a legitimate user that doesn't use bots makes the claim that they were banned for this. According to updates made to this, the username wasn't even the source of the ban so these "innocents" are definitely hypothetical.
Kr4ken 9y ago
Innocent users are the only ones that will get caught up by this anymore, the cheaters already worked around this(https://github.com/nullifiedcat/catbot-setup/commit/c2d22ee92d0af11376243ca20c7522e6e7205506 https://github.com/nullifiedcat/catbot-setup/commit/c2d22ee9...). Yes, cheaters were the first to report it because they were the first to experience it.

na85 9y ago

Valve is well known for being immune to the normal repercussions of having awful PR. For some reason, the market forgives them despite having downright hostile interaction with the community on a regular basis.

adnzzzzZ 9y ago
>For some reason, Maybe because none of this is relevant and everyone in this thread is getting upset over nothing. No real users have been harmed as a result of this measure (most people in the github issues thread have repos where they own or contribute to cheating software) and it seems to have worked to ban a number of cheaters. Seems like good engineering to me on their part when such a simple solution turns out to be so effective.
- anonymousab 9y ago
  > No real users have been harmed If they had, they wouldn't know why. That's one of the major parts of the problem - the entire ban system (and appeals process, or rather, the letter memory hole valve deigns to call a process) is opaque, a black box. You don't know why you're banned beyond "cheating/hacking" or "cheating in game X" in the best case. There's then the self-fulfilling silliness with the proclamations of perfection of VAC; you need such a high standard to prove the negative, that you did not cheat, and a ton of luck for them to even consider the possibility.
pdkl95 9y ago
> the market forgives them It's not forgiveness; Valve et al know that if they simply ignore the bad PR, people will forget and protesting becomes repetitive and tiresome. This is the insidious power of silence, and why actual change only happens when people refuse to go away until the problem is actually fixed. Without this continuous push back, silence transforms bad behavior into the new normal. Jim Sterling has a great video[1] that explains this problem in greater detail. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6lvDL4cNdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6lvDL4cNdM (warning: contains some strong language)

jaccarmac 9y ago

> even for a company like Valve There is no such thing as too far for Valve, as the community for their games knows well. It's become something of a meme at this point. You are familiar with Gabe calling the host of a tournament out publicly on Reddit, yes?