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Gabe Newell Responds: Yes, We're Looking For Cheaters Via DNS
dotarray writes "Valve has stepped up to answer allegations that the company's anti-cheat system was scanning users' internet history. Rather than a simple, sanitized press release or a refusal to comment on 'rumours and innuendo,' Valve CEO and gaming hero Gabe Newell has personally responded."
Newell or not, not everyone will like the answer. The short version is that Yes, Valve is scanning DNS caches, with a two-tiered approach intended to find cheating users by looking for cheat servers in their histories. Says Newell: "Less than a tenth of one percent of clients triggered this second check, accessing the DNS cache. 570 cheaters are being banned due to DNS searches."
Sorry Gabe, you're not allowed to see my DNS history. You aren't allowed to see GabeNewellNatiliePortmanHotGritsFanFiciton.net in my history. That's not allowed.
Is this search in the TOS, or is it an "unauthorized" search?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The biggest part of his announcement is that this checking is done client side; your DNS history is not sent to Valve. They also only record MD5 hashes that match the cheat sites they are looking for, not your entire DNS history. Finally, they claim to only check for DNS lookups of servers used by the cheat software itself, not just websites where you might read about and download cheats (although in some cases I imagine these could be the same), and use this as a second check after the client has already detected a cheat installed on you machine. So simply visiting cheat software websites without using them shouldn't get you banned.
This is why I don't like the idea that games seemed to have moved away from hosting your own server. Online games were great when you knew the guy you were playing against. There wasn't as many problems with cheating, or perhaps you could agree on which cheats could be used, and the in-game chat was a lot more tolerable. Now that you're just playing against a random selection of people from the internet, I just don't get as much enjoyment out of it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's not an issue of viewing cheating sites; Steam is looking for DNS lookups performed on DRM servers (not the Steam ones). Many cheats are paid-for so, in a cruel twist of fate some might say, they use DRM to check if the cheater has paid for the priviledge of doing so.
gaben himself has said that this tactic only lasted a matter of weeks anyway, until the cheatware started futzing around with the player's DNS cache to avoid these checks.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
They explain that these are non-www servers, so you can't visit them. They are used directly by the apps to find their license servers, it's not the servers where you can download the files.
And if you need to visit cheat sites for this, I would open them in some VM since these aren't the most trustworthy sites.
I don't like the answer, but it could be worse, and it's nice the director answered honestly.
From the actual article: 1)This is no longer in operation, it was only running for a couple of weeks in the constant cat-and-mouse game with cheat developers 2)It was targeted at the DNS for DRM servers which cheat authors used to SELL cheats to PAYING customers. The system simply reported if the MD5 hash matched the DNS for the known cheat DRM servers, once the cheat had been detected during gameplay already. The DRM servers were not running a website.
We tolerate it because cheaters ruin games. If do not want to play the game, or do not want your privacy violated, then do not play games on Steam.
For those of us that do play games, and do play them honestly, this is another step in the right direction. Cheating simply kills these games. I am willing to give up a bit of privacy in exchange for fewer aimbots and wallhacks in the FPS games that I play. If you read the article, or the comments, you would realize that the DNS scanning is a second level of review that takes place when other indicators point towards a person who might be cheating.
Why not just shuffle anyone detected cheating into a separate game room? If they're paying customers, then they can all cheat together, and everyone wins.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Like you I imagine, I've been playing online games for a long time. I even ran a half dozen TFC / Natural Selection / CounterStrike / Half-Life Deathmatch / etc. servers for three or four years. I never found cheating to be common except for CounterStrike. For some reason that game attracted cheaters like crazy. The other games, not so much. Cheating wasn't just uncommon - it was rare.
When PunkBuster and similar products became popular it was amazing how much better I became compared to other players when playing on a protected server. (o:
VAC has, in my opinion, done a very good job overall of keeping up with the cheating crowd. I can't remember the last time I came across a player that I suspected of cheating - and having had to do detection manually by watching player behavior, I'm very confident in this.
There's a few things you can look for manually when looking for cheaters.
Your typical aimbot is easy to detect. Jump into spectator mode or whatever and pick the first person view for the selected player. Instead of the smooth movements a typical player will have, you'll see the player's aim snap to positions on a screen. It's rare to see these anymore because detection is so incredibly easy.
Driver hacks to provide see-through textures, or model hacks that have a long cross through them that extend through walls, are also pretty easy to detect by watching the player. Is someone across the map and scoring head shots through walls? Does he always seem to know where the enemy is? He's using one of these.
The interesting cheat is the second one (wall / model hacks) which allows one to see opponents behind objects, because it's not a mechanical advantage like an aim bot; it's a strategic advantage, an information advantage. It doesn't change the ability of the cheater to aim more accurately; it changes the cheater's behavior. A player without the cheat information will act as if the opponent is not there; a player with the information will.
So, you'll see tactical advances / retreats, shots fired / grenades thrown, etc. that would not occur in normal non-cheating game play. Yes; there will always be the person who gets the lucky what-the-hell shot. That happens.Sometimes more than once. What you need to look for is a consistent pattern over time that cannot be attributed to simply being "good", having a better overall strategy, or having an unusual play style.
I bet that with enough information collected it would be possible to detect this kind of behavior and flag individual players for follow-up manual inspection. It would be a fascinating bit of research, really.
Resource hacks are very dead these days, as information about resources (ammunition carried, money earned, life amount, etc.) are all stored server-side for most games. There's no way for the client to fiddle with that data.
Love sees no species.