To date no one have found a shred of evidence that Intel ME or AMD PSP is used as a backdoor for anyone despite having existed for 16 years and it's not that people haven't tried to find any

except this is not a valid argument

i have just posted about the ludicrous huge gaping hole in 1st-gen Intel ME security that could let anyone do anything with vPro machines without the OS even being able to detect the action, so there is a public usable exploit PoC and there is no good way to track if it has actually been used in the wild

the only thing you can argue is that it was not put there on purpose which would make the ordeal amount to an immensely gross incompetence on the part of Intel... not really reassuring wrt later iterations of the same concept

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i'm glad to read Linus Torvalds is on this board

maybe this gives linux a better fighting grounds to prevent the next wave of Microsoft Pluton coprocessors and boot-to-windows-only BIOS defaults from fucking FOSS alternative OSs from booting and running properly in next-gen x86 devices

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tl;dr: 1st gen Intel ME was a clusterfuck
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=intel+ime+minix+breach [External Link]

the first gen Intel ME (aka IME as referred to back then) listened to a fixed port at the ethernet connection even while the OS wasn't booted into, and even while the main processor was off... but more importantly also while the main OS was running, prior to OS listening and handling anything

it also had a nasty bug allowing anyone who did the correct secret knock sequence to access IME's remote control features without proper authentication

and this was impossible to disable, so all vulnerable devices were doomed to live behind an external device acting as a firewall that blocked access to the relevant port... except this is impossible for an IT dept to do for employees working from home and/or traveling with a company laptop instead of sitting in a company office behind a company-managed network infrastructure (VPNs are in the OS, after IME already did its thing), and devices like the first Intel NUC were sold to home users without the technical knowledge and means to do this for a single device, despite Intel's claims that the chip was only sold to companies so no biggie

not all affected devices received a firmware update to plug the security hole for good... this had to come from each manufacturer for each affected board/device model

hence a pretty widespread mistrust of such remote management features...

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So here's the thing... as long as Valve keeps the original Steam Deck around, it's a baseline hardware target for games to optimize against.

Any more powerful hardware released after that (and any custom built PCs and any miniPCs and any laptops with comparable hardware or better) will enjoy "even better" performance, higher graphics settings, etc... and will benefit from the baseline being low.

The minute Valve releases Steam Deck 2 there is a truckload of devs that will no longer try to get their games optimized for the original Steam Deck, only the new model, because it's so much easier.

Valve created an optional but very enticing target for PC gaming devs, instead of red-taping their store in mandatory norms and contracts like consoles do. They can't pull the rug under PC game devs and start forcing stuff onto them, so this was areally smart move and probably the only viable move to manouver PC game devs into compliance without a fight they couldn't win. It's an uber-carrot without a stick.

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Using someone else's trademark to rake in profit without cutting a deal with the trademark owners is asking for trouble...

...but Valve's official response doesn't even come close to talking about such worries.

It's plain to see they were only acting on the most obvious and glaring issue... any game dev publishing a game that modifies steam itself poses a serious security risk to steam (and qualitity/stability too).

Valve can't take this lightly given the sheer amount of money people put into their steam accounts, how much effort some crooks put into steam account hijacking attempts, etc.

And if they open an exception to one dev, they might be pressed to accept others, and then Pandora's Box would open up.

Maybe somewhere in the future Valve will develop a Steam API for apps that want to dinamically expose multiple Steam Library entries for a single steam app, but honestly this looks unlikely.

It's more likely that people will have to go to a steam app entry, this opens up a third-party games list and lets you launch whatever third-party game. If that steam app can be installed from gaming mode, can be launched and navigated fullscreen and can launch 3rd-party games still in fullscreen in gaming mode without breaking any steam integration features, that's friendly enough for most people looking to enjoy 3rd-party game stores on a Steam Deck

Also any attempt to legaly pressure Valve into allowing 3rd-party games into their main games list on gaming mode is doomed. The law everywhere is ok with the PS4/5, Xbox and Nintendo consoles which completely prevent 3rd-party apps, why would it have an issue with what's already the most open console ever?

ps: plenty 'normal' users have actually gone into Desktop Mode a couple times, as is plain to see from years of posts in the "Steam Deck" Discussions Forum in Steam (i'm talking windows joe who never touched linux and doesn't even usually mod his games here, not just the more engaged gamers that poke at everything when need arises)

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what Valve needed to do is fix the damn filter so it shows linux native games when we ask it to show only linux games, instead of all games, even when Steam Play is enabled

then they can remove the stupid "enable steam play support" option from steam settings without a single drawback

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Quoting: GuestAs far as i know, you still need the steam client to restore those backups, which in a non internet location, if i were to think i can just restore those backups on a PC, I would need to download the steam client on said PC first (Not to mention the client has to download all it needs for its runtime when first installing)

That's Steam's "backup" button you're talking about.

Ignore it, go to the current steam library folder, find the subfolder named with the game's SteamID and zip a copy of it to some backup storage...

...and the proton prefix folder too if it's a windows game.

The game executable should work if run directly, without steam. And if it doesn't, there's Goldberg Emulator to fulfill the game's Steam API needs without Steam too.

After that, only games with actual DRM or a game-specific server component missing will refuse to work.

disclaimer: i pay for my games on Steam and I do not use this method for piracy

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So the games you played didn't have any of those mechanisms, but there were plenty PC games (and software in general) with some sort of DRM (although that name wasn't invented yet at the time) way before the PS3 era (even before the PS1)

Prince of Persia hails all the way back from 1989 with the handbook as a digital copy deterrent

Warcraft II (1995), Diablo (1997) and Starcraft required a RegKey on install and/or first run

You are correct that it was more common back then for a local copy to just work, without need to phone home to activate or with part (sometimes most) of a game being hosted on a mandatory server... but it wasn't always a simple matter of keeping the files or even the original media intact

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Quoting: ArdjeIf Steam dies, your access dies too to games that use steam DRM. Only those DRM free in the steam store that are downloaded already will continue to work.

You'll be happier after following this link
https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator/-/blob/master/README.md?ref_type=heads [External Link]

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Quoting: ToddLAll this license talk makes me miss the days of playing games without worrying about losing access to them. I know GOG exist but I'm thinking more in terms of the physical media days in the PS2 era and before that didn't require network access to authenticate a license to play.

Says the naive young one who never lost the paper cover with the printed cd-key for a PC game, so never had to download a trojan-infested keygen.exe to replay their owned PC Games in the original midia, after a yearly reformatting of Windows.

Or, much older and crazier:

anyone ever played Prince of Persia far enough to get to those rooms with the deadly potions linked to numbers/letters? Those were meant as a way to verify you had a printed copy of the game's handbook (At the bottom of the screen, it should say "Word X Line Y Page Z"... so you grab the handbook and check for the correct letter and drink the non-deadly potion... proceed to next level)

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