A report surfaced two days ago on Reddit that claimed anti-cheat software used by video game developer Valve was allowing the Half-Life 2 and Steam creator to spy on its users' internet histories. Now, in a statement also issued on Reddit, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has denied the accusation directly.

The original report said that Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), software designed to stop the use of hacks and cheats in many games available on Steam, was pulling DNS data from its users' computers, before sending it back to Valve, a process that it suggested was designed to allow the company to build a picture of Steam users' browsing habits. Newell, who rarely addresses such conjecture directly, responded to the concerns with a short Q&A.

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1) Do we send your browsing history to Valve? No.
2) Do we care what porn sites you visit? Oh, dear god, no. My brain just melted.
3) Is Valve using its market success to go evil? I don't think so, but you have to make the call if we are trustworthy. We try really hard to earn and keep your trust.

Newell also explained the reasoning for VAC's use of DNS data, explaining that as cheats get more advanced, cheat creators for Steam's online games can charge money for their hacks. Many, Newell said, also create DRM and anti-cheat code for their original hacks, designed to ensure a cheater has actually paid for their cheat. Those cheats "phone home" to an external DRM server that confirms a cheater has paid to use the cheat, a process that leaves a tell-tale trail in the users DNS entries. If found by VAC, then details of the matching DNS entries would be sent to Valve's VAC servers. The details would be checked one final time, and that client would be marked for a future ban.

DNS entries were apparently checked to search for the presence of specific cheats during a 13-day period

VAC's use of DNS data in this manner apparently continued for a 13-day search for "a specific round of cheats," during which, 570 cheaters were banned. The VAC test that checked DNS records for the offending entries is now, according to Newell, no longer active as hackers have already adapted. "Cheat providers have worked around it by manipulating the DNS cache of their customers' client machines."

The apparently inaccurate suggestions of the original report could've been due to misunderstanding. Newell called VAC "inherently a scary looking piece of software," because it was "trying to be obscure," and explained that Valve doesn't usually talk about its anti-cheat efforts "because it creates more opportunities for cheaters to attack the system." But he also said that as VAC gets better at stopping cheaters and the cost of developing new cheats rises, the number of complaints about VAC's nefarious intentions will increase. "For most cheat developers," he said, "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."

Bravely Default works perfectly with this meme ⊟

This is one of my favorite memes to come out of Japan in recent memory, from a Tokyo couple interviewed by a news station about a recent blizzard. Asked how he feels about the weather, the dude goes super cornball and says, “There’s something special in the air about being with your loved one when it’s snowing, so I like it!” Meanwhile his girlfriend (or wife) hides her face in embarrassment, hoping to die that instant.

It’s spawned hundreds of parody illustrations with anime and game characters, but my favorite is this one for Bravely Default — Ringabel and Edea seem perfect here. Big ups to Shishamo for the artwork, and to Snowhalation for posting about the meme on Tumblr.

BUY Bravely Default, upcoming games

Sorry, due to the unusual nature of today's comic, you may just have seen a static image in your feed reader, but you can check out the full comic here!
-Randall

If you ever want to be bored far beyond death, just ask me why I love Sesame Street. I will then begin a damp-eyed monologue about the love and passion that went in, and still goes in, to create something genuinely altruistic, and utterly beautiful. I will perform entire classic Bert & Ernie sketches, looking at you expectantly when you are required to laugh, and then my throat will catch when I express my enormous regret that I can never meet and talk to Jim Henson. Added to my oh-so long list of reasons for loving Sesame Street is Flappy Bert.

… [visit site to read more]

Even in the unassailable heights of the transdimensional RPS tower/luxury cruise liner, we can’t entirely escape Flappy Bird mania. Alec wrote about the wonderful, extremely illuminating Maverick Bird from Terry Cavanagh, and John wrote about Sesame Street, because he is John. And now I too will, with a conflicted heart, contribute to the Internet’s ceaseless parade of flappy fappery. There is a Flappy Bird MMO. Personally, I’m pretty sick of Flappy Bird despite the valuable lessons that can be learned from the way everyone fucked up in regard to approaching it, but this MMO is so preposterous that I couldn’t not post about it. I apologize to everyone, but most of all, I apologize to myself.

… [visit site to read more]

This week, Zero Punctuation reviews The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and has a chat with Nintendo.

So, your bosses have replaced most of the office computers with Chromebooks, but you need those old Windows apps to keep you sane. If the IT folks aren't on top of it already, you may want to tell them about a remote access solution developed by...

We are thrilled to announce that we are rolling out Premium accounts for The Old Reader. Since taking over the application in August we’ve made tremendous strides to improve the dependability and speed of the application. We’ve also begun the process of building and releasing heavily requested features and have worked diligently on user support. We believe The Old Reader is now truly a world-class application!

Our next goal is to ensure the long term financial viability of The Old Reader. Hosting, development, and support are not inexpensive and while it’s never been our goal to get rich off of this application, long term sustainability and growth will require revenue. So we explored several models for generating revenues including a premium offering and advertising. In the end, we’d like to avoid advertising as we feel it’s too invasive and runs counter to our strong belief in the open web. So we started working on a premium offering that would allow 90% of our users to continue on with a free account that is largely unchanged from what they are using today.

What will you get with The Old Reader Premium?
- Full-text search
- Faster feed refresh times
- Up to 500 Subscriptions
- 6 months of post storage
- Instapaper and Readability integration
- Early access to new features

What will it cost?
The Old Reader Premium will cost $3/month or $30/year. However, for the next 2 weeks (or up to 5,000 accounts) we’ll be offering the service for $2/month or $20/year and we will lock you into that price for a minimum of the next 2 years. This is our way of saying thanks to our existing users and hopefully getting the Premium service off to a great start.

Do I have to upgrade?
No! 90% of our users can continue on for free just as they are today. However, users with more than 100 feeds will need to upgrade to premium. Otherwise, all functionality will remain available to free accounts. We also offer a 2 week trial period for the premium service and will even allow that trial period to get extended for those still interested in moving to Premium.

We hope you are as excited about TOR Premium as we are. It’s a great value for a service that we know our users will love. Thanks for continuing to support us and thanks for using The Old Reader!

In celebration of the release of Bravely Default, we present the 7 dumbest Square Enix game names so far, in ascending order of stupid.

The biggest battle in history started with a clerical error and cost the 7,500 players involved about $300,000 in real-world money.

This is what Sonic & his strong friends look like now ⊟

Sega announced another 3DS/Wii U exclusive with Sonic Boom, which will accompany a new animated series and toy line, all of which feature the Sonic family’s revamped look. The reactions I’ve seen have ranged from “Sonic Boom will save anime” to women calling off their weddings with Knuckles.

Myself, I’m so divested from the series by now, I’m not even bothered that it looks like King Tut bit the heroes and turned everyone into half-mummies, or that Knuckles went HAM on the weights but forgot leg day. (my favorite reaction has been Kyledk05's: “How the f*** is Knuckles supposed to maintain those siqq gainz with all the cardio he's gonna be doing?”)

Anyway, Sega handed off development to Big Red Button Entertainment (Wii U) and Sanzaru Games (Nintendo 3DS). The games will feature “collaborative gameplay at its core,” and will also ”introduce exploration, combat and a new Enerbeam tether mechanic that will allow the Sonic Boom world to be discovered in totally unique ways.” Trailer after the break:

The Sonic Boom animated show will debut on Cartoon Network during the 2014/2015 season — no idea yet when the prequel games will release. Credit to Liam for the GIF.

BUY Sonic Lost World, upcoming games

More Sonic Boom makeovers ⊟

Damnnnnn, Luigi. What happened to your neck? The Mario group comes from Andrew Dickman, Mega Man from Ryan Jampole, Robotnik’s legs (lol) from Sean Cunningham, and Kirby (awwwww) from Tyson Hesse.

Thanks to Tiny Cartridge readers Dylan Starks and Bururian for sharing these with us in the original Sonic Boom post!

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rainbowbarnacle:

This has been a cat spam. Please imagine all these cats curled up on you in a big pile. Drown in their purrs. I hope your day improves.

The Wall Street Journal reports that renowned actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was today found dead in his New York City apartment. Although neither the NYPD nor the coroner's office has publicly given a reason for the 46-year-old actor's death, The New York Times cites an anonymous officer as stating it was drug related.

Reports from the scene allege that Hoffman was found in his bathroom with a hypodermic needle in his arm, suggesting the actor's death was the result of an accidental overdose. Hoffman had already struggled with drug-related issues in recent years. TMZ reported last May that the actor had checked himself into rehab for prescription pill and heroin abuse after "falling off the wagon" in 2012.

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Hoffman's career spanned a diverse range of roles

Hoffman's career spanned a diverse range of roles across a variety of media, from early work in Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, and Magnolia, to his Oscar-winning performance in Capote. The actor gained many accolades for his work, including Academy Award nominations for Doubt and The Master. The actor also received three Tony Award nominations for his work onstage, including a Best Leading Actor nod for his 2012 turn as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.

More recently, the actor was cast in the role of Plutarch Heavensbee in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Hoffman was set to reprise his role in the final movies of the trilogy, Mockingjay, but, although filming on the first Mockingjay movie is said to be complete, it's unclear what will happen with the final part. Meanwhile, the long-term fate of his new comedy Happyish, which Showtime only picked earlier this month, is currently up in the air.

Hoffman is survived by his longtime partner Mimi O'Donnell and three children.

Update: Lionsgate now tells Variety that Hoffman had already completed the majority of his scenes for Mockingjay parts 1 and 2. The actor only had a week left to film for the final movie, but it's unclear what the company will do to make up for the lost time. Lionsgate also issued an official statement honoring his memory:

"Philip Seymour Hoffman was a singular talent and one of the most gifted actors of our generation. We’re very fortunate that he graced our Hunger Games family. Losing him in his prime is a tragedy, and we send our deepest condolences to Philip’s family."

I don’t need an excuse to draw the guys from Mythbusters.

Hey! You know what? There’s still time to join Patreon this month and support SFAM! You guys have been amazing so far, Patreon has really turned things around and is making it possible for me to continue working.

If you’d like to see another two guaranteed comics per month, sign up to become a patron today and help us meet our next milestone!

I’m still gathering info for Patreon reward distribution; if you haven’t answered my message requesting your preferences, please do so soon or I’ll have to make a wildly inaccurate guess. Hoping to start getting these out next week.

Speaking of rewards, the Goats Kickstarter rewards are ALMOST done. I have two more pages I need to draw and then we can print the mini, which is the last thing keeping us from starting to ship rewards. I know it’s been a super-long wait but it’s almost over, I swear it. Please don’t lynch me quite yet.

If the recent release of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds has you pining for some classic Hyrule adventures, you're in luck — today Nintendo launched its spiritual predecessor A Link to The Past on the Wii U. The iconic Super Nintendo adventure is available to download now through the console's Virtual Console for $7.99. Of course, this is far from the first port for the game, which is also available on the original Wii and Gameboy Advance, but the added Gamepad support is a nice touch for those looking to do some questing from the comfort of their bed. It's available to download now.

Although both Edward Snowden and his complete stash of documents remain hidden away from the British government, that didn't stop officials from trying to take action: they went after computers at The Guardian containing information leaked by the whistleblower with power tools. Newly released video from the paper shows exactly how editors and GCHQ technicians destroyed countless computers and hard drives, despite knowing the information had already been disseminated around the world. The Guardian will not allow embedding of the video, but you can watch it in full here.

The Guardian appropriately describes the destruction as three hours of "hot, sweaty work" — officials protected by masks used angle grinders, drills with revolving bits, and other tools to take apart the hard drives. One by one, the destroyed pieces were then fed into a "degausser," a tool that destroys magnetic fields and erases data. Officials didn't stop there either: they also asked President Obama to force news outlets to destroy any info they had about Snowden, but the president refused. It was a showy, ill-fated attempt to stop more Snowden news from coming out, and that point is made blatantly obvious in this video. Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson told the paper that it was "the most surreal event" he had witnessed in British journalism.

When Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith officially ended his run on Doctor Who last Christmas, we got our first look at his successor Peter Capaldi (who knows the color of his kidneys but is otherwise a bit of an enigma.) What we didn't see was the costume that will go a long way towards establishing his character. Today, though, the BBC showed us a conspicuously tie-less Capaldi in a snappy red-lined coat. It's less professorial than Matt Smith's jacket and bow tie, more piecemeal than David Tennant's dapper suits, and a long way from Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston's black leather jacket. Capaldi described the costume in a BBC blog post:

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"He's woven the future from the cloth of the past. Simple, stark, and back to basics. No frills, no scarf, no messing, just 100 percent Rebel Time Lord."

The first episode of the new season started filming in early January, but it's not due to air until fall. Even so, we've already seen a few shots of Capaldi (in a nightgown, riding a horse) taken during filming.

Conventional wisdom is wrong. It is not an inevitability that Nintendo must put its games on rival hardware or die. It may even be a bad move.

I hate it when people have opinions that don’t align with my own

So how do the Japanese pass the time when they aren’t cloning themselves, creating ridiculous inventions, dreaming up quirky mascots, taking gym classes hosted by poodle dogs, watching candy coated pop stars or wearing panties on over their faces?

That’s right! They’re lining up to be willing contestants on some of the mind-boggling TV game shows you’ve ever witnessed.

Now we ‘could’ try and attempt to describe what is taking place in the following collection of GIFs from numerous Japanese game shows, but really they defy explanation. Literally anything and everything happens, with no disturbing corner of the writers imaginations left unturned.

There’s the famous saying that “One man’s trash is another mans treasure” or in the case of cheap Japanese entertainment, one man’s hellish challenge is another man’s gleeful celebration.

Prepare yourself for the weird, the bizarre and a whole lot of W.T.F. Do let us know which numbers you love the most.

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With the right hardware setup, you may no longer need to sit in front of your gaming machine. With a PlayStation Vita, you can play PS4 anywhere in your house. With an Nvidia Shield, you can do the same with a Windows gaming PC. But what if you don't want to buy a multiple-hundred dollar handheld game system to play Tomb Raider in bed? Valve is building a game streaming solution right into its free Steam game platform, so you can sling games from your beefy desktop PC to laptops as thin as a MacBook Air. Late last week, Valve invited a host of new users into the Steam In-Home Streaming beta, and we made it in. Read on for our first impressions.

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Pairing is a piece of cake

The first, most striking thing about Steam In-Home Streaming is how little setup it requires. You don't even need to be in front of both computers to pair them together. As long as both computers are signed into your Steam account and connected to the same network, you'll automatically have access to any game or program in either computer's Steam library. That means you can stream Windows games to a Mac or Linux machine, and Valve is planning to add support for the reverse, too. If you've got a copy of a game that works on both operating systems, you can pick whether to stream it or run it locally, or even start installing it on the remote computer. You can even launch some non-Steam apps, like Adobe Photoshop and Media Player Classic, if you add them to Steam. They don't properly display their menu bars, though.

While some Steam games don't stream right now, those that do launch seem to launch quickly and more reliably than they do on the Nvidia Shield. Streaming quality, however, is harder to measure. Even in this beta state, there's no question that Steam In-Home can technically deliver the clearest, crispest images we've seen from a streaming solution yet, one that are practically indistinguishable from how they look on an actual gaming PC. The problem is that actually getting that quality depends on a complex array of factors.

With a relatively powerful gaming PC (Core i5-2500K, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 660 Ti) hooked up to a pricy $200 802.11ac router over Gigabit Ethernet, and streaming to a 2013 MacBook Air during a Friday commute hour, things were predictably superb. As of the beta, Steam's streaming solution lets you set the bandwidth and screen resolution yourself — unlike Sony or Nvidia — and with a huge 15 megabits per second stream, plenty of overhead, and little interference, games like Devil May Cry looked and felt fantastic from a few rooms away. Nidhogg, a lightning-fast swordfighting game, actually felt playable.

Devil May Cry streaming via a cheaper wireless router. Red and blue spikes indicate poor performance.

Again, though, that's the optimal scenario, and trying the same games with a cheaper 802.11n router or during peak hours made things far more difficult. Where Nvidia and Sony automatically degrade the image quality when bandwidth drops, Steam drops the framerate, and games begin to stutter. You can fix a lot of the quality issues yourself by playing with Steam's bandwidth and resolution settings, but it's a bit of work, whereas Nvidia has a dedicated piece of software that automatically optimizes settings for a playble streaming experience. We also had a few games that seemed to stutter even at lower quality settings, like Tomb Raider, which streams quite smoothly to the Shield by contrast.

Between the problem games and the need for more user-friendly configuration, Valve has plenty of work ahead, but we don't expect that work to stop. In-Home Streaming is a key part of Valve's Steam Machines strategy, because the Linux-based SteamOS boxes won't natively run Windows games. With streaming, Valve's Linux-based video game systems can still play games for Windows so long as you have a Windows gaming box on the same network. But even if you just plan to prop up a laptop in bed, Steam In-Home Streaming already feels like it could be a killer feature. You can't beat free.

Take up your blade, ye merest of mortals. Though in truth, it’s more of a formality than anything, for I shall pierce your heart before it’s even able to flutter in fea- oh, you got me. Aha! But I’m back, and this time I shall deliver a blinding riposte tha- right, my organs. A clever place to strike indeed. But not clever enough, for I shall now throw my sword in the wrong direction and cartwheel intimidatingly away from you. Mind games, you see. Nidhogg is a chess match, friend, and I’m so many moves ahead that you-

Win. You win. Maybe I could stand to become a little better at Nidhogg.

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Nidhogg is to swordfighting what Sensible Soccer is to foot-to-ball. It’s the International Track & Field of sticking people with pointy objects. It’s a two-player multiplayer distillation of a swashbuckling action movie, with every extraneous element burned away until all that’s left is a couple of buttons, a few moves and twice the concentration of drama and excitement.

This is Wot I Think.
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