Pheace:
"... There are a bunch of different ways to attack a trust-based system including writing a bunch of code (hacks), or through social engineering (for example convincing people that the system isn't as trustworthy as they thought it was).
Pheace: So Valve are now claiming that people not liking or trusting them is due to the social engineering of hackers, and not just that some people do not enjoy being spied on and told how they can go about doing what they want.
Can they not accept that some people are beginning to see the truth of how bad this world is really getting and how badly behaved many large corporations are.
Pheace: For a game like Counter-Strike, there will be thousands of cheats created, several hundred of which will be actively in use at any given time. There will be around ten to twenty groups trying to make money selling cheats.
The people behind Saints Row 3 sell the availability to cheat at the game. That checks back with Steam to make sure you have the right to cheat at the game. Is that going to get a VAC ban???
Pheace: 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.
Given Steams level of support and the actual ability of these "hackers" how many people will then get banned wrongly? Even worse, when people are wrongly banned will Valve ever bother to check their system is not being abused by people who actually know what they are doing?
Pheace: 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.
Our response is to make it clear what we were actually doing and why with enough transparency that people can make their own judgements as to whether or not we are trustworthy.
If Sony had responded with this when they were installing their faulty DRM / rootkit on peoples computers then it would have been called corporate bullshit. That is all this is.
Worse stating that people who see this as wrong is a complete abuse of their position. They are trying to convince people to follow them to end of the world and bash those who do not conform.
Steam is getting very close to the behavior of the Nazi regime when they began telling youngsters that if they did not go around punishing Jewish people that they were as bad as a Jew.
Pheace: 3) Is Valve using its market success to go evil? I don't think so, but you have to make the call if we are trustworthy. We try really hard to earn and keep your trust.
Why do they not just be honest and tell people. They are not evil, they just wish to have all the information so they can actually control the situation. They already do really, as if you are unhappy you can only really choose to close your account and loose the right to rent all your games with them.
