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from the move-along-nothing-to-see-here dept.
Lagg writes:
"We're in a climate where it's easy to accuse a company of spying on you by various means with a distinct possibility that you could be right, but sometimes a reality check is needed. A Reddit user recently posted a thread accusing Valve of writing code for VAC that iterates your DNS cache and sends the hashed entries to their server. The proof provided of this was a prettied disassembly (that was not easily reproducible due to how VAC loads symbols) that showed only that VAC was indeed iterating the DNS cache, which any knowledgeable programmer understands is not exactly an uncommon thing to do, as no socket code was to be seen. Today, Gabe Newell responded to these allegations by confirming that no they do not in fact snoop your cache entries.
There are probably a few things to learn from this, including not trusting a screenshot of code that looks complex without actually understanding what it's doing. A lack of any level-headed investigation is a bad idea and it's important to handle these situations before they snowball into a mob (as Redditors are bound to do)."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mattie_p on Tuesday February 18 2014, @01:48PM
Hey, editor here. Thanks for your feedback on this. I have to admit that 10 days ago I didn't think I'd be here, doing this. Neither did the other editors, but then again, tech writers don't grow on trees. Everything is moving pretty quickly and we're still hashing out some things. Part of that is learning how to be editors. Hopefully we'll get better at this and learn to detect bias or slant in the summary submitted, and either negate it or work around it. Thanks for reading. ~mattie_p