Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, let's pull up the incident report on this... passionate letter. My threat intel feed is going crazy just reading it. Itâs adorable that Mr. Kingsbury thinks this is a debate about art. Heâs writing a manifesto for expanding the attack surface, and he doesnât even see it.
First, we have a classic case of a compromised endpoint rationalizing its own behavior. "Steam has been my main source for games for over twenty years." Twenty years of building trust with a user. You know what we call that in my line of work? Long-term persistence. This isn't a loyal customer; it's a social engineering vector waiting for the right payload. He's been conditioned to click "Install" on anything that looks remotely interesting, and now he's actively petitioning you to lower the firewall rules for everyone. Classic insider threat development.
The user admits to acquiring the software from a less-controlled environment: "I bought Horses on Itch." So, you downloaded an unaudited binary from a third-party repository, executed it on your machine, and your immediate takeaway was, "This needs to be on the primary production server!" This isn't a game; it's a potential patient zero. For all we know, Horses is a beautifully crafted piece of ransomware that just happens to have a narrative about authoritarianism. The real "visceral subjugation" is going to be his file system after the encryption routine finishes.
Then he describes the core mechanic: "...an embedded narrative of a VHS tape you must watch and decode to progress." Let me translate that from art student to security professional. You are loading an unvetted, proprietary media codec to parse a malformed video file that requires user input for a "decoding" process. This isn't a feature; it's a bug bounty speedrun. Youâve gift-wrapped a remote code execution vulnerability and called it a puzzle. I can already smell the CVE. I bet the 'decode' input has zero sanitization. Get ready for the Horses-SQL-Injection-of-the-Apocalypse.
The entire argument hinges on comparing this new, unknown risk to previously accepted risks. "What about Cyberpunk? What about Half-Life 2?" This is a catastrophic failure of risk management. Thatâs like saying, "We let that one guy with muddy boots into the data center, so why can't this new person bring in a bucket of gasoline?" You don't grandfather in vulnerabilities. You remediate them. Arguing for more "transgressive works" is just a fancy way of saying, "Please, for the love of God, help me fail our next SOC 2 audit."
Its four explicit themes... are the repression of violence, religion, chastity, and silence.
It's sweet that you have such strong feelings about games, Kyle. Truly. Now stick to the pre-approved, sandboxed applications before you accidentally unleash a logic bomb that turns every Steam Deck into a brick. Bless your heart.