By what issue was this epiphany given cause to arise?
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Misinformation, especially that of malicious intent, is indeed aggravating.
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MrBacon stop spamming and stop writing in italic.
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Ok i will be the one who says it, if someone has a key that needs checking post it here
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Steam must make a "Key Tester" or something like that... where you can know everything about that key.
Game, Used, Valid, etc....
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They can brute force even now, but they don't know what they can get.
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The problem being that after a few (5?) incorrect attempts, the system locks you out for a time (15 minutes?). I've done it once accidentally when someone tried to give me a key they hand-typed instead of copied. When I realized what happen I went over and got the key from their computer myself.
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Something to detect people trying random "keys" over and over again and ban em' from "Key Tester" system.
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Are you serious... keys are alphanumeric.
That means there are 221073919720733357899776 (36^15) possible steam codes.
You have no way to know which have been assigned at all, used, etc - plus you don't know what they would be for.
You gonna brute force that?
(By the way, if you were able to try 1000000 keys per hour, it would still take you 25236 BILLION years to try them all. Have fun!)
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how did you get this number?
did you factor in that there are different key formats?
there are even keys without dashes (GT legends) or 3-3-3 keys (SMNC early access)
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Well then there are even more keys :P
The number is alphanumeric probability: 36 (alphabet + 0-9) to the power of 15 (length of code).
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Did you miss the part that trying them all would take 25236 billion years? If you had every person on earth (7 billion) try 1 million keys per hour, it would take 3605 Billion years to scan them all.
This is assuming BILLIONS of users, and that they could somehow try a million keys every hour, 24/7.
With this logic, why not just brute force credit card numbers? CCs have much less variation since they are numeric rather than alphanumeric. Also, a valid CC is more valuable than a random Steam key.
The reason thieves use phishing rather than brute force is because there are just too many possibilities. Even CCs that have the standard 16 digits + 3 digits on the back would have 6131066257801 different possibilities. It would take almost a millennial to scan them all (again, at 1 million per hour - which is likely impossible).
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Well, sometimes it doesn't say you own the game. Sometimes it simply says you activated the game (even when you have it), and makes the key unusable.
I saw it happen to my brother
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If Steam had that feature everyone would bot the shit out of Steam so you can end up having a ton of random generated keys that other people have bought. Don't say it is impossible, if you get the calculations right you might get some keys :P
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Read my post a few posts up about probabilities of success with brute force.
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You can't check if a key is used or not. It will just say you own the game, not if it's valid or duplicate. Stop saying you can check keys or eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelse
i make you suffer
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