For a minute I thought you meant someone else… lol
Toddler version is adorable though! xD
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Blamazon can get wrecked.
I’m not buying squat from them. NOPE! It’s either I go and get what I need, or not at all. Support local small business. Yes.
Sounds like one of those flip-flop hip-hop addicts to me, definitely not an Anarchist…
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If you like Emilia, you should feel bad! Rem is better uwu
Echidnia even better!
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Uff, GPU market is going crazy here right now.
I’ve bought new 5700 XT Gaming OC a little bit more than a half year ago for 430 euros and now people are asking for 650-700 euros for used ones …
Seriously? .
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never said Rem wasn’t best girl 
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I mean…he is quite literally flying their flag.
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can you be a real anarchist if you fly/are “under” a flag 
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That’s actually a very good question. lol
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If it is your own banner…
If it is the banner of your militia…
Anarchy: Without rulers or masters.
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If you know someone that has an NZXT H1 case, they should remove and replace the gpu riser cable in it’s entirety.
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aaand my freakin modem just burned out/short-circuited… right after support closing hours… 
mondays… 
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Some people might actually read that as:
Bastard you here shite dog your lettin’ stop.
lolz
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Often I see people complaining about bots stealing game keys posted online (on forums and such). It triggers me.
Sometimes I also see people claiming bots are guessing keys and stealing them this way. It triggers me so, so much…
Intuitively I know I shouldn’t need to, but curiosity got the better of me this time, so I’ve done the calculations.
First I pulled out some numbers:
There are 49 800 games on Steam*
For each game there are 500 000 keys generated for external distribution**
That gives us 24 900 000 000 keys ready to be stolen.
A Steam key (most of them) has 15 characters (A-Z 0-9).
So there are 221 073 919 720 733 000 000 000 permutations.
So, on average, assuming we only test each key once, we should get one hit every 8 878 470 671 514 attempts.
Well… what if everyone is a bot!?
A couple of weeks ago Valve reported Steam has 120 million users***
Let’s say they’re all trying to steal those keys.
And each of them tries 200 times a day.
And they collectively never repeat any key (a single, omnibot mind).
On average they’ll get a key once every 370 days.
*source: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?category1=998
**source: my ass
***source: Steam had 120 million monthly users in 2020 | PC Gamer
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makes sense
this is very simple to disprove
Steam locks you out by default on activating 50 keys in 1hour
steam also locks out by default if you enter X wrong key trials
steam also increases the lockout on any further wrongful attempt of key entries
(rumour - steam temp bans the account on reaching certain amount of wrongful entries in succession)
that one i kinda think is plausible, since i don’t think it takes much effort to make a skimming bot, but in most instances it’s probably just a driveby user that doesn’t bother saying thanks
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I know, right?
At least the hive mind hypothesis makes sense.
True. Still, there is probably less than a couple thousand Steam users capable of making it (realistically, with some background in automated, functional, headless testing). Most of them know better than to waste their time (see below), a few who’d do it anyway.
No matter your skills, there are some limitations:
- What you can realistically grab and parse are keys in their original form /sans hyphens, and keys with a couple of substitutes (like * = A, # = T8S etc.)
- Parsing text like this is way more computation heavy than you might think (hundreds of milliseconds per page)
- Servers will limit the number of requests they’ll respond to. If we want to achieve automation and any kind of yield, we’re talking about continuously scraping EVERYTHING.
You’ll get the boot before you get a return for the effort.
Yup, that’s my theory.
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i guess it depends on the server tho, tho i’m not disputing the amount of requests or such that it would take
but if Volvo(steam) is any measuring stick, it shows there are some idjits out there that hadn’t thought of that in a while, considering what they allowed previously
^can’t find the thread/article, so it’s gonna be somewhat anecdotally,
but in the earlier years/couple of years ago in steam trading, there was “sum guy” who, i guess tried to apply the what’s it called “high frequency trading/micro trading”? to the steam market. And got banned/his inventory worth like 10k$ or something locked for “poking” the steam servers too frequently, tho as i recall it there weren’t actual “specified” limits to that back then, because you know, Valve isn’t exactly smart/on the forefront of things, so there weren’t any limit/“request denied” thing in place, so he could singlehandedly choke the steam servers @_@ gg Volvo 
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Oh definitely.
I’ve been working in this space for over a decade, and the good enough crap devs/ops put up still boggles my mind.
Still, under continuous siege, they eventually cave and implement readily available, of the shelf/standard solutions. And then it’s fortified.
…until they make some alterations and - again - stick their ass out.
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Even if we ignore the possibility of one person making the script and releasing it online to be downloaded by the other couple thousand, that’s still a lot of people who potentially don’t have the game.
Less than one second per page? I thought you said it’d be computation heavy.
And bots can be coded to send only the right amount of requests (all properly spaced out), so as soon as a new thread pops up, it scrapes and activates all the keys in less than a second, giving humans no chance.
Dang, now I’m triggered, too. I can see how these bots upset you so much.
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