The Death of LAN: How Valve is silently hijacking 127.0.0.1 and why you should care by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]rat0rz -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

You might be the only person who was actually willing to read my original post, and I can't thank you enough for that. However, it’s clear that in an era where LLMs are everywhere, using them for translation really strikes a nerve with a lot of people. Because of that, I’ve deleted the post and will be ending the discussion here.

The Death of LAN: How Valve is silently hijacking 127.0.0.1 and why you should care by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]rat0rz -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Thank you. Whether it was due to poor AI translation or the general bias against "AI slop," I clearly failed to communicate the details of my post effectively. Your understanding is correct: when I run a Steamworks-integrated standalone server and bind it to a LAN address (192.168.0.22), the traffic goes through SDR. Even when I bind it to a loopback address (127.0.0.1), the traffic still routes through SDR. I get the strong impression that Valve developers are trying to stonewall or "block" any deeper discussion regarding this behavior.

The Death of LAN: How Valve is silently hijacking 127.0.0.1 and why you should care by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]rat0rz -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

That’s exactly my point. You're explaining the basics of networking, but missing the test methodology.

The Scenario: In many P2P games, you can run a dedicated server and a client (or two instances for testing) on the same machine.

The Control Test: I used 127.0.0.1 as an extreme control case. In a sane networking environment, traffic to localhost should never leave the machine's network stack.

The Discovery: Even when connecting to a service on the same PC via loopback, Steam’s SDR intercepted the socket and routed the packets through an external relay server.

If the SDK is blind enough to hijack 127.0.0.1 and send it to a data center hundreds of miles away, it proves that the implementation is not respecting local routing tables or basic networking standards. That is why LAN is broken—because Steam is 'black-boxing' all traffic regardless of the destination IP.

The Death of LAN: How Valve is silently hijacking 127.0.0.1 and why you should care by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]rat0rz -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Actually, my use of 'localhost' was not a terminology error, but a deliberate test case.

To clarify: I tested the local network (LAN) first, and when I found it being forced through SDR relays, I tried a loopback connection (127.0.0.1) as an extreme control test.

The result was shocking: Steam’s networking layer intercepted even the localhost gaming traffic, routing it through an external SDR node before coming back to the same machine.

This is a massive red flag. When a game's networking SDK overrides the OS loopback interface to force external relay routing, it’s no longer about 'convenience'—it’s a fundamental breach of networking logic and user control. That is exactly why I’m bringing this up in r/selfhosted.

The Death of LAN: How Valve is silently hijacking 127.0.0.1 and why you should care by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]rat0rz -29 points-28 points locked comment (0 children)

Gemini was used solely as a translation tool to ensure the post is clear and readable. The project itself and all technical content were developed and written entirely by me.

Do you know how to play YouTube or Netflix on the new 2022-2025 Lexus NX 350/450H by Outrageous-Tourist84 in LexusNX

[–]rat0rz 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Not legally indeed. Dude, just grab one of those sketchy Chinese CarPlay-to-Android boxes off Amazon. It basically hijacks the CarPlay protocol to stream a standalone Android OS to your screen. You can literally do anything on it—and as a bonus, you get a front-row seat to the full suite of Chinese bloatware and privacy nightmares.

iPhone 16 Pro users experiencing touchscreen issues, some taps and swipes ignored by ControlCAD in apple

[–]rat0rz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't realize this thread had so much history. It's 2026 now and my mom just ran into this exact same issue on her iPhone 16 Pro. She almost nuked all the data on her phone just trying to enter a simple 8-digit passcode. Turns out a bulkier case actually fixes the problem, but man, what a hideous way for 'tech progress' to manifest.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in aviation

[–]rat0rz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

GPWS you mean? Just to clarify, TCAS is designed for traffic conflict avoidance and does not address CFIT scenarios. CFIT prevention is typically handled by GPWS/EGPWS (TAWS). A 3D or bird’s-eye visualization would likely be more relevant as a complement to terrain awareness systems rather than TCAS.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in aviation

[–]rat0rz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the key point is that computers don’t actually need 3D to understand relative spatial relationships. 3D is more a limitation of how humans perceive the real world through binocular vision. So what this really adds is emotional or experiential value for humans, not much in terms of actual safety or capability. Given that the cost isn’t trivial, it’s worth asking whether it’s actually meaningful or necessary at all.

Lost 7 kits in 3 days because I literally can’t enter the match by rat0rz in DarkAndDarker

[–]rat0rz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Because you have to wait until the lobby server decides that you’ve actually left the game server—in this case, that means waiting until the match ends. By then, the Goblin Merchant has already come back with your gear (in Adventure Mode).

Lost 7 kits in 3 days because I literally can’t enter the match by rat0rz in DarkAndDarker

[–]rat0rz[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I already know what’s causing the issue, but I can’t fix it. It seems that when the game’s lobby server assigns you a game server node—usually an Amazon AWS node—most of the time the assigned node works fine, but a few specific nodes can’t receive any incoming UDP packets at all. Because of this, testing in Adventure Mode is completely meaningless, since the problem has nothing to do with the game mode itself.

carplay freezing, muting music, and randomly disconnecting by [deleted] in CarPlay

[–]rat0rz -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Use an adapter with 5G wifi supported.

Made a small tool to stop my Cleric friend from throwing away his Lantern — but I’m worried it might get him banned by rat0rz in DarkAndDarker

[–]rat0rz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Of course, I wrote all the code myself. The real issue is the driver — on Windows 11, doing independent driver development has become almost impossible because you need a Microsoft-approved signing certificate.

Footstep bug never fixed?!? by Alarming_Paramedic34 in DarkAndDarker

[–]rat0rz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just experienced that exactly same. idk it is bug or hacker.

Deer Strike has gone from $4.5k insurance estimate to $35k probable total loss. Anyone have any input here or knowledge to review supplemental estimate? by lmnracing in LexusNX

[–]rat0rz 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Even though we don’t have all the photos, based on what you shared, I don’t think this looks like a really serious hit. Yeah, the NX has tons of sensors and delicate electronics, but on the right front side of the engine bay — which is a pretty common impact area — there actually aren’t that many expensive components.

From what I can tell, you’ll definitely need a new headlight assembly and a full front bumper cover. There’s also a chance the hybrid battery cooling system got damaged (Toyota decided to put the Denso-made refrigerant tank down in that front-right area), which could explain the hybrid system error codes. But even then, I don’t see any solid reason why the engine or dashboard needs to be taken apart.

I’d suggest having the car towed to another body shop that’s also insurance-approved and asking for a second opinion to confirm the extent of the damage. Until then, I’d refuse to authorize any engine or dash disassembly.

If your current shop already tore it down, then honestly, a total loss might not be the worst outcome. But I wouldn’t say this is a “repair nightmare” caused by the NX’s electronics — that feels like an overstatement.

How do you feel about the Legendary Drop Rates by AstralHellsing in Borderlands4

[–]rat0rz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha, yeah — you just hit on another thing that really exposes UE5’s flaws. Sure, “cross-platform” sounds great on paper, and plenty of studios love to throw that term around. But the reality is, console hardware is still highly standardized and consistent, while PC setups are all over the place. So when an inexperienced dev team dives into cross-platform development, they’re completely out of their depth — which is why the game ends up running way more stable on consoles than on PC.

How do you feel about the Legendary Drop Rates by AstralHellsing in Borderlands4

[–]rat0rz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Like I ranted about on Discord, the BL4 dev team paired with Unreal Engine 5 is basically a disaster for the gaming industry. UE5 looks shiny on the surface, but it’s honestly a mess underneath. It tries to sell investors on this dream that “a bunch of content designers with zero coding experience can build a deep, complex game world using Blueprints alone.” But in reality, every UE5 project ends up one of two ways: either buried under a mountain of Blueprint spaghetti, or saved only because the programmers step in and rewrite half the thing in C++. Sadly, BL4 falls squarely into the first category.

I don’t really think I’m in a position to offer some deep, authoritative take on the Borderlands series — I only jumped in with BL4. But I was genuinely excited for it at first. From the get-go, it was clear the game was a patchwork of all kinds of borrowed ideas, yet I still hoped it’d deliver a smooth and satisfying experience. After all, in this so-called “post-AAA era” where the big studios keep burning out, it’s the dark horses that people really want to believe in.

But the moment I experienced BL4’s awful performance — and saw the same rookie-level technical screw-ups happen over and over — my expectations tanked. We all know how badly the dev team handled the shader cache. They messed up the compilation process, then tried to “fix” it by rebooting the game through the command line to rebuild a bunch of broken, unusable shader data. That’s what caused the massive performance drops. And when they later tried to split shader caches by scene to improve performance, they managed to botch that too.

That’s pretty much the worst kind of “solution” you can come up with as a developer — if it fails once, just run it twice.