> In general VAC issues are not handled on Github in any capacity and further issue reports on this may result in being banned from the Valve Software issue trackers.
This is just incomprehensible from a PR standpoint, even for a company like Valve, especially since people on the thread have brought up legitimate concerns for users that might be caught in the flak.
The user that posted this has a pinned repo named "AimTux." The second guy is a contributor to "catbot." Ditto the third guy.
One of the people in the thread suggests that he wants to have a TF2 aimbot installed, but it's not for cheating at TF2, honest.
The gaming or software equivalent of justifying bad legislation because of criminals.
Based off of the previous DNS false banning debacle, they'll ignore any negativity about this unless it reaches critical mass, at which point they'll say that combatting cheating is hard so give them carte blanche.
The GitHub response is merely the "stop pointing out the Emperor's lack of clothes" aspect of the first part.
Gabe's response more or less boiled down to "cheating is a hard problem".
I hope I'm not misremembering or being uncharitable.
EDIT - I called it a false ban debacle because they was one half of the issue; the privacy implications were equally important.
Here's a quotation from Gabe's post:
>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. [1]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_an...
[0] Per https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_an...
If he is so concerned that Valve will be associated with spyware then he shouldn't have let VAC team create a literal piece of (definition fitting) spyware. Somehow the examples on VAC page say it looks for third party modifications to game files, not rummages through your entire machine. As if they knew it sounds sketchy to users. Even if they are working in good faith they might screw up during one of these raids against my machine (like they did with rm -rf on Linux in the uninstall script) and leak something or save it to some temporary file that something else might pick up.
This is still very out of line. I buy games via a proprietary platform that doubles as a DRM while pirates have no DRM, open source torrent clients and verified cracker teams and I'm the one having privacy worries here?
Maybe because none of this is relevant and everyone in this thread is getting upset over nothing. No real users have been harmed as a result of this measure (most people in the github issues thread have repos where they own or contribute to cheating software) and it seems to have worked to ban a number of cheaters. Seems like good engineering to me on their part when such a simple solution turns out to be so effective.
If they had, they wouldn't know why. That's one of the major parts of the problem - the entire ban system (and appeals process, or rather, the letter memory hole valve deigns to call a process) is opaque, a black box.
You don't know why you're banned beyond "cheating/hacking" or "cheating in game X" in the best case.
There's then the self-fulfilling silliness with the proclamations of perfection of VAC; you need such a high standard to prove the negative, that you did not cheat, and a ton of luck for them to even consider the possibility.
It's not forgiveness; Valve et al know that if they simply ignore the bad PR, people will forget and protesting becomes repetitive and tiresome. This is the insidious power of silence, and why actual change only happens when people refuse to go away until the problem is actually fixed. Without this continuous push back, silence transforms bad behavior into the new normal.
Jim Sterling has a great video[1] that explains this problem in greater detail.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6lvDL4cNdM (warning: contains some strong language)
There is no such thing as too far for Valve, as the community for their games knows well. It's become something of a meme at this point. You are familiar with Gabe calling the host of a tournament out publicly on Reddit, yes?