I’ve got a few old PCI cards around somewhere. I should pull one of them out and give them a try at this.

Even if it doesn’t look as good, it’ll hopefully include some better APIs that extensions can utilise to improve their experience. E.g. hide the native tabs.

I believe Steve has said that he hates the title/thumbnails too. But Google’s algorithms heavily incentives them, so he reluctantly uses them while maintaining the good quality content.

Software cracks leaving a calling card isn’t unheard of. Companies before have been caught out before with names of cracking groups showing up in their files.

Edit: found the article I was thinking of. Turns out it was Microsoft themselves!

http://www.techpavan.com/2009/05/24/microsoft-deepz0ne-pirated-cracked-sound-forge-windows-xp-audio/

It’s certainly against one of Valve’s rules to use a VPN to access Steam. I’ve never heard of anyone getting banned for it though.