That’s not analyzing the code. Also almost assuredly steam does that. Finally that wouldn’t catch this since it was a back door, as long as the attacker didn’t use it it would not be detected by any automated means.
And it is very easy to detect you’re in a virtual environment and not do those things, or have a date to trigger the changes or something. The game had been out for a while when this happened without any issues. I just dug a little bit and it was opening a back door apparently, so as long as the attacker did nothing at that time it would have been impossible to detect. You had to know that it was malicious to look for it, then it was quite obvious, but with Valve needing to vet millions of games it’s not feasible to do a full scan of every update of every game.
I’m not a us citizen, and there’s a big difference between the government uses my taxes for war to a game will use my money for war. You have no choice over the taxes, but by knowing this and still buying the game, you’re saying that your hours of entertainment are more valuable than people’s lives. And yeah, not buying the game won’t bankrupt the Kremlin, but it’s like throwing gasoline to a fire, you’re fueling the war, imagine someone whose house is on fire and throws gasoline in it because “the fire won’t extinguish if I stop throwing gasoline in it”
The same reason why there are many political parties, or restaurant brands, or even games: everyone thinks that their way is better, or are trying to improve on something that they like.
I get that it can be daunting for someone wanting to start, but just like with other topics you should start with something simple to dip your toes and move on from there. My personal recommendation has been Linux Mint, it has sane defaults, works out of the box for most cases and it’s popular enough (and based on another popular distro) which makes getting help easier.
Trying to pick your distro from the sea of available options might feel impossible, but 99% of the stuff is the same, so picking something that works out of the box for you is a great start, and you can learn what you need to make a meaningful choice afterwards.
Let me give you an example on the sort of differences you can expect: do you think that updates should be delivered as soon as possible or leave some delay to catch bugs/issues? If a delay how big should it be?; How much stuff should come installed by default with your system? Should you get a bare ones system to build up or something at least functional for everyday tasks to adapt?; Should you be able to edit your system files or should they be locked so it’s harder to break stuff?. These sort of questions might seem pointless, but they’re the core differences between Linux distros, and if you’re answer to them is I don’t know/care anything that works out of the box would be good enough until you develop an opinion on the matter.
Yes, things like original email and Nickname are some of those questions because after they change the public might have no way of figuring it out. Notice the support tech asked for those informations and when provided with it he said that he couldn’t verify ownership, this means OP reported wrong information for the identifying questions.
I’m not saying the service is great, asking him to access an email he claims to have lost access is dumb, but everything after that the tech support person did his best, and I don’t think he should have disabled 2FA, since it could be a social engineering attack.
The thing is, and I think you’re missing this, he got those wrong. After being asked for email and Nickname he provides them and the support person says “I’m unable to verify that you own the account”, that means he answered wrong, yes those might be bad questions because some random person might know them, but he didn’t.
Steam remembers my card, so I don’t have to input it there everytime. I get that you wouldn’t want to put your card info somewhere shady, but Steam is not that. Also, most banks nowadays have virtual cards you can use for that sort of thing, some even have one use cards that self destroy after a single purchase. So the safety that PayPal used to offer is not that important anymore.
Ah, if that’s the case then MC statement is kind of pointless, so it’s not them putting the pressure, but you still have to go through the people putting the pressure to get to them. I thought that if you put your card number on steam it had some more direct form of charging than going through stripe.
If this is true then I honestly hope Steam and Itch go “ok, then, PayPal and Stripe are banned from the store as payment forms until we can figure out a way of limiting content you can pay with them”. Honestly I don’t think enough people use either of those payments forms, and even if they do currently they almost assuredly have a card they can use instead, and are more likely to switch payment methods than to stop buying games.
There are lots of games where combat is not even an option, like Life is Strange, Before your eyes (do play this one with a camera and a box of tissues nearby), or Firewatch. But games where you’re expected to fight but can find ways around it the first example that comes to mind is Metal Gear Solid 3, you can beat that game without killing anyone, there’s even an achievement for that and one of the bosses will be particularly easy if you go this route.