So there's this huge debate about what Valve are doing by sending your browsing data to VAC servers

mrk

mrk

mrk

Man of Honour
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
105,935
Location
South Coast
It's in relation to this: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1s0hb3n

Now I don't have a huge deal of beef with this, it's in an effort to build profiles on cheaters by the looks of it but in usual fashion people are up in arms. "How dare Valve monitor my dns cache!" and stuff of that sort.

So... Anyone uninstalled STEAM yet? :p I prefer to continue running with gloves of urgency to help the team in TF2 and not really worry too much about it.
 
Gotta say, I use the GRU as well :o




Also, I will not uninstall steam, I don't really care if they see which sites I've visited. :p
 
My gaming PC is separate to the systems I use for web browsing etc. but even so they should not be uploading DNS cache data IMO thats an intrusion of privacy (I don't actually care personally either way but its bad form IMO). I noticed with some browser crash dumps now they are sending much more information about your browser state including recently visited URLs if you submit a dump - but atleast that asks you for confirmation before it uploads.
 
It's bad and I bet the reason it wasn't publicised was because too many people won't understand the why.

It's a necessary evil IMO, we all know what it's like playing with cheaters (look at DayZ :p) - It kills the fun.
 
From what I understand they are simply checking the last days worth of your DNS cache. Md5 checksumming it and then comparing it to a list on their servers for known hack sites. This is in fact what AV software does.
 
There is nothing to it

As someone who reverse engineers things for fun, and can read the C "pseudocode" generated via decompilation pretty easily, I am going to have to disagree with the assumptions made in this post. First, there's no proof this is from Steam, I've poked around a few of the DLLs since I saw this and am unable to find anything even remotely close to what this does. Second, this method does NOT send anything to Valve. This method grabs the DNS cache, yes. And it MD5s the entries, then it stores it. This method itself does nothing more with the hashes. For all we know VAC could be doing a LOCAL scan of the list, and comparing it to an internal list of "known" cheat subscription servers. Until someone posts details of exactly where in Steam this is (What DLL is all that's required to verify), and the calling method that supposedly sends this information to Valve, I would take this with a very massive grain of salt.
Click to expand...
 
This is pretty bad , even a few minutes of some light web browsing will
yield a massive amount of data

It is pretty bad they have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar
 
Whilst I have nothing to hide this kind of intrusion on my privacy is starting to get annoying. It really is inexcusable although does it mean i'll uninstall Steam no, does it highlight to me that even if this really annoyed me am I stuck with steam unless I wanted to lose hundreds of pounds worth of games? Yes.

If nothing else this is going leave me seriously thinking about how much I rely on Steam. If I wanted to close my account now I couldn't without losing all my games even though I've bought and paid for them... :(

Hmmmm....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom