Be careful who you talk to..

[Munro]

..they may not be who they say they are.

I posted a thread in the official forums here about this which I think is a very serious oversight. There is no email activation on Steam so you can put in anyones email address with no problem and start impersonating them. So far we've got people pretending to be most the Valve staff, Bill Gates, John Carmack and countless others.

I thought this would of been on the top of the list :/

[Pi Mu Rho]

I'm Elvis.

[DarkelP]

good one munro, i hate the way we have perverts and idiots who think its funnt to pretend to be someone there not, its not big or clever at all, its stupid and goes to show how insecure they are in there own self, if that makes sense..

[Magicpants]

Having been one of Munro's 'Victims' i must say it's an incredibly large oversight. He fooled me for ages

I'll get you next time, Gadget...

[BloodyL]

Thanks for the heads up Munro

[|\/|oDdiC(_)$]

those commie bastards!!!!!!!! COZIS! (communist nazi)

This relates somewhat to a question that I am having about Steam: how are they validating people?

I did have Half-Life installed, but I formatted my entire hard drive, getting rid of this installation and having to reinstall Windows. This would have cleared any registry entries that Half-Life had entered verifying that I actually owned the game. Shortly after, I installed Steam 1.0, allowing me to download and install all of the listed games for FREE. As said in this post, you can input any email addrees you like to create a user account, so where are they getting the SteamID's from?

Possibilities:

-IP Address (easily changed for most people)
-MAC Address (can get a new NIC)

I'm sure there are others, but really they have opened the door for exploits. Unless I have completely missed something, it seems that cheaters and other annoying individuals will be able to easily get by any types of restrictions set on them. That can only be bad...

Originally posted by ascetic
This relates somewhat to a question that I am having about Steam: how are they validating people?

I did have Half-Life installed, but I formatted my entire hard drive, getting rid of this installation and having to reinstall Windows. This would have cleared any registry entries that Half-Life had entered verifying that I actually owned the game. Shortly after, I installed Steam 1.0, allowing me to download and install all of the listed games for FREE. As said in this post, you can input any email addrees you like to create a user account, so where are they getting the SteamID's from?

Possibilities:

-IP Address (easily changed for most people)
-MAC Address (can get a new NIC)

I'm sure there are others, but really they have opened the door for exploits. Unless I have completely missed something, it seems that cheaters and other annoying individuals will be able to easily get by any types of restrictions set on them. That can only be bad...

your steamid is from your cd-key, if you install steam and already have HL installed it grabs the key from the registry, if you don't have it installed then steam will ask you to enter your cd-key before creating your account.

[Epsi]

Actually, when you create a Steam account, it gets a SteamID. If you can then play HL with that Steam account is determined by if you entered a valid CD Key for that account.

The SteamIDs are allocated on a sequential, first-come-first-serve basis.

Originally posted by Epsi
Actually, when you create a Steam account, it gets a SteamID. If you can then play HL with that Steam account is determined by if you entered a valid CD Key for that account.

The SteamIDs are allocated on a sequential, first-come-first-serve basis.

yeah, i didn't mean the cd-key was converted into a steamid, but without a cd-key you get no steamid.

[Login_Here]

Originally posted by Xtasy0
yeah, i didn't mean the cd-key was converted into a steamid, but without a cd-key you get no steamid.

And without a SteamId you dont get games either...

[Owskie]

Originally posted by Munro
..they may not be who they say they are.

I posted a thread in the official forums here about this which I think is a very serious oversight. There is no email activation on Steam so you can put in anyones email address with no problem and start impersonating them. So far we've got people pretending to be most the Valve staff, Bill Gates, John Carmack and countless others.

I thought this would of been on the top of the list :/

i have a few confirmed valve members, i found one fake one so far but he admited he was a fake so

This can't be good...


[LH-EDIT] - Your not allowed to post that