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Gabe Newell himself gave a nice explanation in a related Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/ http://www.reddit.co

by gruturo 13y ago

Gabe Newell himself gave a nice explanation in a related Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and...

JetSpiegel 13y ago
"This specific VAC test for this specific round of cheats was effective for 13 days, which is fairly typical. It is now no longer active as the cheat providers have worked around it by manipulating the DNS cache of their customers' client machines." Spooky
- shultays 13y ago
  Wow, not because you know, privacy is important. Becase it is no longer effective
  - JetSpiegel 13y ago
    It's tested locally, Vavle doesn't get the DNS queries.
  - AimHere 13y ago
    Right. Gabe isn't admitting to wrongdoing here, since Valve feels that the particular check was limited enough to be a reasonable countermeasure. According to Gabe, this module was not aimed at scraping anyone's web usage or browsing history (not even for game cheat sites), but just to detect whether a machine was likely to be automatically dialing a hack's DRM server, and then sending hashed copies of those, and only those, entries to Valve to flag as a potential cheat. I can imagine that a lot of the gaming community would consider that reasonable behaviour, if it was effective at cutting down on cheats. Whether Valve is telling the truth, I don't know. I suspect so (Gabe seems smart enough not to try lying to the internet, though, so any deception is likely to be that of omission). Whether this is right or wrong is a matter between you and your shaman/vicar/rabbi/mullah/conscience/etc.
    - _delirium 13y ago
      > dialing a hack's DRM server Huh, I didn't realize that nowadays cheat mods charged money and protected themselves with DRM. When I used to dabble in such online games, the cheats/trainers/etc. typically came from the same groups that cracked games' DRM, rather than themselves having DRM. Are there cracking groups that strip DRM from DRM-using cheats?
      - JetSpiegel 13y ago
        Corporate interest ruin everything, even cheats.
  - brown9-2 13y ago
    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. Sounds like first the cheat process needed to be detected on your system, then the DNS cache would be checked. On the surface it sounded like a privacy issue but with these extra details I am having trouble seeing an issue.
gateaumoisi 13y ago
the problem is that their behaviour is not transparent, it's really similar to the censorship some country used against 'bad websites' which in the end was used for a lot of other purposes.
- sharpneli 13y ago
  It's non transparent for the same reason that not all security features in cash are public. If they would tell everything they do it would be way easier to circumvent them. Sure everything will be reverse-engineered eventually but it's a continuous process. They add new ways to detect the cheats and the bad guys try to circumvent them faster than Valve is able to add new features.

by gruturo 13y ago

JetSpiegel 13y ago

"This specific VAC test for this specific round of cheats was effective for 13 days, which is fairly typical. It is now no longer active as the cheat providers have worked around it by manipulating the DNS cache of their customers' client machines." Spooky

shultays 13y ago
Wow, not because you know, privacy is important. Becase it is no longer effective
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  It's tested locally, Vavle doesn't get the DNS queries.
- AimHere 13y ago
  Right. Gabe isn't admitting to wrongdoing here, since Valve feels that the particular check was limited enough to be a reasonable countermeasure. According to Gabe, this module was not aimed at scraping anyone's web usage or browsing history (not even for game cheat sites), but just to detect whether a machine was likely to be automatically dialing a hack's DRM server, and then sending hashed copies of those, and only those, entries to Valve to flag as a potential cheat. I can imagine that a lot of the gaming community would consider that reasonable behaviour, if it was effective at cutting down on cheats. Whether Valve is telling the truth, I don't know. I suspect so (Gabe seems smart enough not to try lying to the internet, though, so any deception is likely to be that of omission). Whether this is right or wrong is a matter between you and your shaman/vicar/rabbi/mullah/conscience/etc.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    > dialing a hack's DRM server Huh, I didn't realize that nowadays cheat mods charged money and protected themselves with DRM. When I used to dabble in such online games, the cheats/trainers/etc. typically came from the same groups that cracked games' DRM, rather than themselves having DRM. Are there cracking groups that strip DRM from DRM-using cheats?
    - JetSpiegel 13y ago
      Corporate interest ruin everything, even cheats.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  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. Sounds like first the cheat process needed to be detected on your system, then the DNS cache would be checked. On the surface it sounded like a privacy issue but with these extra details I am having trouble seeing an issue.

gateaumoisi 13y ago

the problem is that their behaviour is not transparent, it's really similar to the censorship some country used against 'bad websites' which in the end was used for a lot of other purposes.

sharpneli 13y ago
It's non transparent for the same reason that not all security features in cash are public. If they would tell everything they do it would be way easier to circumvent them. Sure everything will be reverse-engineered eventually but it's a continuous process. They add new ways to detect the cheats and the bad guys try to circumvent them faster than Valve is able to add new features.