Court says an attacker was only required to send malformed UDP packets to a target’s Steam client, which would have triggered the bug and allowed him to run malicious code on the target’s PC.
Source: Valve Patches Security Bug That Existed in Steam Client for the Past Ten Years
By contrast, the current ranking system leads to the popular becoming more popular — once you’re on the top charts, you have increased visibility, which leads to more reviews, which further cements your chart position (as long as you stay inside your semantic rating bucket).
Those of us who want to discover hidden gems really need the search functionality to work with us, not against us. We want a system where the top charts are self-correcting, rather than self-reinforcing. Otherwise we get a situation like Apple’s with frozen charts, shady tactics, and skyrocketing user acquisition costs.
Should SteamOS gain traction among gamers and developers, that could force more hardware manufacturers to extend driver support beyond Windows
via Torvalds: SteamOS will “really help” Linux on desktop | News | PC Pro.
Amen. Getting NVIDIA graphic drivers working is a mind boggling exercise and must be redone with every kernel upgrade. This is one of the reasons I rarely upgrade Fedora — it’s too complicated getting video drivers working well enough to the point a video can be played and the desktop environment looks right.
The Linux version of Steam will likely be at the core of Valve’s upcoming plans for living room-based “Steam Box” hardware, building off the recently unveiled Big Picture mode. The move to Linux also gives Valve more flexibility in working around Microsoft’s Windows 8, which co-founder Gabe Newell has called “a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.”
via Valve officially launches Steam for Linux with massive sale | Ars Technica.