Valve co-founder Gabe Newell cleared up the confusion about claims stating the gaming system allegedly records the browsing history of its users.
In a statement on Reddit, the managing director of the Valve corporation Gabe Newell addressed the rumors claiming the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) system records the domains of sites users visit and send them back to the company. (Click here to read the rumors on Reddit)
"Trust is a critical part of a multiplayer game community - trust in the developer, trust in the system, and trust in the other players," Newell began the statement. "Cheats are a negative sum game, where a minority benefits less than the majority is harmed.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)."
"VAC checked for the presence of these cheats," Newell explained. "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."
Newell went on to confirm the company does not record browsing history, they do not care about the porn sites gamers visit and they are not an "evil" company.
"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," the Valve head stated. "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."
You can read Newell's full statement on Reddit here.
