Gabe Newell Responds On VAC Reports; “We Do not Care What Porn Sites You Visit”

Rumors started surfacing regarding Valve’s VAC system (Valve Anti Cheat), stating that apparently, this system is actually spying on you, collecting all kinds of information on what you do or don’t do online, basically, just monitoring your browsing history. The rumors of course, were getting out of hand for Valve’s Gabe Newell, so he plainly stated that “we do not care what porn sites you visit”, and also shed some light on how the VAC system actually works, for those skeptics out there, despite Valve’s policy of not talking about it.

Here’s how he said it works.

“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.”

Gabe also said that VAC is so good and effective that hackers will desperately try to attack people’s trust in Valve and its Anti-Cheat system in order to benefit from it.

“There is also a social engineering side to cheating, which is to attack people’s trust in the system. 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. 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.”

There you have it, of course, whether you believe what he says, or whether you still feel like this is all a ruse, is completely up to you; at least give the man credit for standing up to the rumors instead of plainly just turning his back on the consumers, ignoring their concerns. Personally, I choose to believe.