Well, that was quite a surprise. Yesterday, a rumor surfaced claiming that Valve’s Anti Cheat system was collecting your browser history. A lot of people feared that Valve was spying on them, something that is obviously… how should I put it… ridiculous. Valve’s Gabe Newell felt the need to talk about this whole thing and made it crystal clear that they are not getting your browser history and that the company does not care what porn sites you visit.
Gabe claimed that VAC was doing its job and that it was not collecting the players’ browser history. Despite Valve’s policy of not talking about VAC, Gabe made an exception and shed some light on its functionality.
“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.”
Gabe also said that VAC is so good and effective that hackers will desperately try to attack people’s trust in Valve and its Anti-Cheat system in order to benefit from it.
“There is also a social engineering side to cheating, which is to attack people’s trust in the system. If “Valve is evil – look they are tracking all of the websites you visit” is an idea that gets traction, then that is to the benefit of cheaters and cheat creators. VAC is inherently a scary looking piece of software, because it is trying to be obscure, it is going after code that is trying to attack it, and it is sneaky. For most cheat developers, social engineering might be a cheaper way to attack the system than continuing the code arms race, which means that there will be more Reddit posts trying to cast VAC in a sinister light.”
Gabe concluded that they are not sending your browsing history to Valve, that they do not care what porn sites you visit, and that Valve is not using its market success to go evil.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Ahh.. I see online PC gaming hasn’t changed since decades.
It reminds me all the keyboards and mice that were hit by a ‘maximum-rage-uppercut’, because a little idiot, 3 miles away from me, would headshot me, with a simple 9mm.
Once.twice. 10 times in 5 minutes. I stopped gaming the moment where the monitor was being thrown against the wall, after another headshot.
It’s a pleasure to be able to start a killzone shadow fall online game, without being afraid of being killed by 3000 cheaters.
After my comment, a virgin little boy, whose nick name ends with a ’45’ , will come here, will insult me, call me a moron, and will say PC are the best place to play, and consoles are craap.
Well, it’s a trade off isn’t it, PC is an open platform, more hackable, more modifiable and consoles are not. If servers are run right then the admins can just kick the cheaters, but devs stop us from having dedicated servers.
Find a good server in a PC game, it’s as simple as that really. though I’ve got to say, I’d rather play freely than have big daddy Microsoft or Sony calling the shots, even as far as banning campers, how far does it go?
The whole thing of banning campers was apparently just a joke.
The point is that they ‘can’ do it.
I guess that’s true then.
Screw off already and go to consoles you muppet.
I still laugh my ass off at how you say everyone will pirate gta v so better not be a pc version.
Go back to consoletarded land.
Screw off already and go to consoles you pathetic muppet.
I still laugh my arse off at how you say everying will pirate gta v so better not be a pc version.
Go back to consoletarded land you pathetic 15 year old virgin dbag.
What you play shadowfail? Pathetic game, but let me tell you something, just how hacked is gta v on consoles? VERY hacked, now gtfo, pc hackers are banned instantly cant say the same for consoletarded land.
You seem to have a deep hatred for consoles.
you see that guy?
I could show you how he and some other guys are the 200% most annoying consoletards constantly going around and saying at every pc related article that comes up that pc gaming is dead, pc has no games, pc is filled with piracy and its all about consoles.
Now all those things could be dissproved but the likes of him is what consoles are filled with.
Dudebros dbags with limited inteligence that are not trolling but are really that stupid to believe that only their kind exists and everyone else is a “virgin nerd loser”
Console gaming was fine in the past. Now console gaming is pretty much turning horror and stealth titles into action, dumbing down games, dlc, microtransactions preorder exlusives, asking overblown sales to cover overblown development budgets and studios closing down. I dont see anything on the new consoles, they are gloryfied pcs with installs, f2p, mmos and generic samey games with new ways to screw the consumer out of more money. Ps2 was a great console, after that, everything just gets worse and worse for console gaming and you got the dudebros who started casually playing games in 2006,posting bullcrap like the crap he posted above.
Then you see developers being herrassed, well this is the kind of audience they were aiming for when they choose to “appeal to a larger audience” and all those average dudebros outhere, so thats what they got.
I find myself caring about indie games more and more and less and less about AAA games and the dudebros like arnold stallone buying the next cod or gta.
Yes it’s true that hackers are a frequent issue in PC gaming but you are blowing things out of proportion.