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Comment by lrem | Hacker News Reader

There's a presumption that open source code has been looked at by independent researchers. "Many eyes".

In contrast, source code of games is a trade secret. It is being worked at by famously overworked developers. And companies in the industry are known to sit on vulnerability reports for months or years.

Don't ever install games on a machine you use for work or identity.

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It’s very hard to believe that games are unique here.

Could you clarify what you mean by identity please?

I think they mean a machine you use to identify to do something official, like banking or interacting with government.

I never put on my gaming computer things that I use to identify myself with important entities:

- Banking.

- Insurance.

- Main Google account.

- SSH keys.

- GPG keys.

- Pictures of any important documents.

- Digital copies of any important documents.

Basically: the moment you start installing games on a computer, assume it makes its contents world read/writeable.

Can you link to any examples of this happening in the past? Like oops I installed The Sims and Starcraft and now my C:\ drive is on Shodan. With mobile games that sort of thing probably happens all the time since mobile apis are designed to let apps do it. But I'd be surprised if something like an EA game was responsible. The worst I've heard so far is a bug where Steam will `rm -rf` your home directory because Valve doesn't understand UNIX.

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