Post Comment - Blue's News

Steam Cracked?

[Apr 19, 2007, 10:30 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

Steam Hacked, Credit Cards May Be Exposed on Gameworld Network reports indications that the Steam system may have suffered a security breach. Some seemingly private information has been posted to a Steam-haters forum, along with a threat to expose further customer data. The breach has not been confirmed.

Post Comment
Enter the details of the comment you'd like to post in the boxes below and click the button at the bottom of the form.

74.

Re: Credit cards

Apr 26, 2007, 09:23

Riley Pizt

Valve cannot, as you appear to be suggesting, modify your install media of old software pre-Steam in order to stop you running a server that these older games can connect to. Actually Valve doesn't have to modify the older games to prevent Internet play if WON support disappeared because they were already written that way. If you run a version of Half-Life 1 which predates Steam, it will refuse to allow client connections from outside the server's subnet in LAN mode (so no Internet-based clients can join), and it will refuse to function in Internet mode if the master server is unavailable (which it is because Valve has the old master server tell clients that Internet play via it doesn't function). Unlike many other older games like the Quake and Unreal series, Half-Life won't function in Internet play mode without continued support from its developer because Valve intentionally designed the game that way. Sure it is technically possible though not trivial to hack Half-Life to bypass these restrictions and setup an alternative master server, but then the problem becomes finding other players with identically hacked versions of the game to play against. The reason why the tens of thousands of holdouts finally migrated to Steam is because Valve did pull the plug on them and disable their previous online play. This comment was edited on Apr 26, 09:45.

Subject

Comment [quote="Riley Pizt"Apr 26, 2007, 09:23]q[Valve cannot, as you appear to be suggesting, modify your install media of old software pre-Steam in order to stop you running a server that these older games can connect to. ]q Actually Valve doesn't have to modify the older games to prevent Internet play if WON support disappeared because they were already written that way. If you run a version of Half-Life 1 which predates Steam, it will refuse to allow client connections from outside the server's subnet in LAN mode (so no Internet-based clients can join), and it will refuse to function in Internet mode if the master server is unavailable (which it is because Valve has the old master server tell clients that Internet play via it doesn't function). Unlike many other older games like the Quake and Unreal series, Half-Life won't function in Internet play mode without continued support from its developer because Valve intentionally designed the game that way. Sure it is technically possible though not trivial to hack Half-Life to bypass these restrictions and setup an alternative master server, but then the problem becomes finding other players with identically hacked versions of the game to play against. The reason why the tens of thousands of holdouts finally migrated to Steam is because Valve did pull the plug on them and disable their previous online play. [/quote]

;) :( :o %) :) :| ;P X| :D More

If you have a signature set up, it will be automatically appended to your comment.
If you don't already have a Blue's News user account, you can sign up here.
Forgotten your password? Click here.

Email me when this topic is updated.

Special Codes

b[bold text]b
i[italic text]i
u[underline text]u
-[~~strikethrough text~~]-
c[code text]c
+[bullet point]+
q[quote text (indented)]q
[quote="Author"]quote text (indented)[/quote]
[url=Link]text[/url]
r{red text}r
g{green text}g
b{blue text}b
m{maroon text}m
s{secret text (shows in the background colour)}s

Forum Rules

Disagree all you want but attacks of a personal nature will not be tolerated.
Ethnic slurs and homophobic language will not be tolerated.
Do not post spam, links to warez sites, or instructions on how to obtain pirated software.
Abusing the forums in any manner that could be construed as 'griefing' will not be tolerated.