Author: Kyle Orland

A malicious user exploited the somewhat open submission structure of Steam’s Greenlight section over the weekend to briefly hide malware links in cloned versions of legitimate game pages.

Polygon reports that a Steam user going by the handle bluebunny14 posted copies of pages for five games to the Steam’s Greenlight section over the weekend. The cloned pages copied the text, screenshots, and videos of existing Greenlight games, including Melancholy Republic and The Maze, to look exactly like legitimate titles seeking attention in Steam’s fan-voting area. But the cloned versions of the pages also included links to purported “beta version” links for the games that instead linked users to what Polygon calls “a known Trojan.”

After being posted Sunday, the malicious links were reportedly removed by early Monday, and the cloned game pages themselves reportedly removed by Monday afternoon. “Community members alerted us of the situation over the weekend by flagging the content,” said Valve’s Doug Lombardi in a statement. “Our Community Moderators responded quickly by removing all malicious links from the fake Greenlight material and then we banned the submissions. We are taking further steps to deal with anyone involved in posting the links. We’d like to thank those who reported the issue in addition to our Community Moderators, and we encourage everyone to report any suspicious activity in the future by using the flag icon located throughout the Steam Community.”

In this shot, I believe I am batting at a virtual balloon with a virtual hand. It’s much more gleeful than my face suggests.

Virtual reality is in a really weird place right now. We’re still months or years away from any truly mass market consumer product, yet we are still regularly seeing demonstrations of new, game-changing technologies that make everything shown before them seem a little obsolete. I saw it with the first Oculus Rift headset prototypes and later with heavily improved prototypes that have solved early problems with image persistence and quality. I saw it with Sony’s Project Morpheus and the way it integrates hand tracking to great effect through the PlayStation Move.

This week at GDC, I’ve seen it again in HTC and Valve’s Vive virtual reality system and the attendant Lighthouse tracking technology that changes everything about the VR experience. If using other systems is like being trapped in a small, virtual reality cage, using the Vive is like being freed to explore a full virtual reality room.

Full room tracking

Putting on the awkward controller-tether belt, which Valve says will not be in the final product.

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The way Vive’s tracking works is fundamentally different from most other consumer-level VR systems in the offing. The Oculus Rift and Sony’s Morpheus both use outside-in tracking systems, each relying on a single stationary camera to find the position of the headset and, in Morpheus’ case, controllers. The Vive uses an inside-out system, implementing a series of dozens of small sensors on the headset and controllers themselves, pointing out in all directions.