No that's not what he's saying at all. Before you get on your soap box you should gain some basic comprehension skills. Besides like others said, I don't mind Valve spying on my midget porn if it keeps bans cheater's who ruin games. On a similar note learn to have some fun and play the game without cheats.
Thanks for your input ddpruitt. This is the part that I'm referring to:
check was done by looking for a partial match to those (non-web) cheat DRM servers in the DNS cache.
I'll say it again: "Yes, granted, the possibility of a client of yours that isn't cheating who visits or contacts those servers is very, very low, but it's the principle that I'm questioning." If the VAC detects whatever it thinks is dodgy code, and then check the DNS cache and finds entries matching cheat servers, then I would imagine that the probability that the person is cheating is near 100%. Great. Nail the cheaters. They spoil it for everyone else.Don't get me wrong, I'm not against not finding the people who ruin experiences for everyone else. It's the principle of forcing on your clients the restriction of what they can and can't do on the hardware /that they own and probably built themselves/ just so that they can run the software that they paid for that I'm questioning. Unless they change their purchase contract to "pay us x amount of money, don't run y programs and don't contact z servers and then we'll let you play our game" I think that's pretty dodgy.Do we need ways of preventing people from ruining the online experiences of others? Yes.Should we do that by taking away the freedom of use that people have over their own hardware? That's debatable, but in my opinion, no.And for the record, I create non-free, propriety non-open source software as a job.