Free "PUBG" on Steam or Good morning, Unicode is here

Lots of us got a free "Measurement Problem" key from dlh.net. As the Steam sale was starting to play trick on us - we've found some "PLAYERUNKNOWNS BATTLEGROUNDS" in our libraries. Or maybe the second PUBG - totally confusing. The multiple Steam discussions posts like "screw those devs" were just a minor visible part of the issue. The latest news has an image with Russian sentence saing "A thousand eyes are watching and creating a digital dossier which can be purchased"

There are 2-3 versions of  "what has happened?":

- Devs gone rogue and after 3 years decided to rip as much money as possible.

- Developer account was sold to hackers (maybe not directly)

- Developer account was hacked and/or highjacked and the developer is clueless about that. The game is from 2016 - considering it is not overwhelmingly successive it's no wonder they don't care about it. After the hack hackers have requested keys for a giveaway, and patiently waited for a several of months. Then they uploaded 3 zero-filled files so that the download matches PUBG size and renamed the project substituting one or several latin letters with Cyryllic lookalikes.

I think it's the last variant and if you ever launched this "measurement problem" - you've got to reinstall Windows just to be sure you don't have some yet unknown malware.

What has really happened this time is irrelevant to the issue we've got. So, what's the real issue?

If you look carefully at both game titles you may find that "O"'s are a bit different in the fake one - but this depends on the font used to display. Thanks to Unicode we may get unpredictable amount of similar issues in the future. Just compare Cyryllic letters to similar-script ASCII:

ABCEHIKMOPTX aceikopxy

АВСЕНІКМОРТХ асеікорху

As you can see - in many cases  it's almost impossible to tell where are the ASCII or where are Cyryllic - so unless we get some workaround from Valve (and other stores) - you should not cluelessly launch something that you didn't have in your library before.

And we desperately need a sandboxing environment for our games - so that they don't deliberately access your e.g. Office documents, private photos and so on - it's really easy to transfer anything over the net without end-user observing difficulties. And  it's not impossible for real devs to perform such actions on purpose. After all, it's just a tiny bit of cash to spend to get to the Steam Store (as well as any other, actually) and the profits can be HUGE.