Valve Announces Half-Life 2 Code Theft Arrests 545
Ant writes "GameSpot and other sources report arrests were made:
Developer of the much-anticipated and delayed shooter sequel reveals an international wave of arrests has been made.
The Half-Life 2 code theft saga entered a new chapter today when Valve Software announced a series of arrests had been made in the case. According to Valve, suspects in several countries had been taken into custody in relation to charges stemming from the theft of the Half-Life 2 code, distribution of the code, and breaking into Valve's network..."
"other sources"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"other sources"? (Score:5, Informative)
Google attempts to group related articles.
I can't wait! (Score:5, Funny)
I wanna play Jon Johansen!
Re:"other sources"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Whole lot of nothing here... Valve says some people were arrested, the FBI is declining to say anything than that they arrested some people (the agent who was contacted was smart enough not to say any more than that... if the FBI wants to make a press splash on this then they will, but the desk agent in charge (or whatever their designation is) sure as hell can't make that decision).
I'm sure there will be the standard wild speculation, claims from various people that they know someone who was arrested, etc.
And, of course, the continuing claims from the looneys who say that there was no code theft and that the entire story was made up to hide the fact that the code just wasn't ready. I'm not disputing the second half of that -- the code wasn't, and Valve was stupid to say they were on target. But if they'd made the entire thing up, as the conspiracy theorists say, then the FBI would still have arrested people. Except that it'd be Gabe Newell and the rest of Valve management for filing a false report, lieing to a federal officer, and whatever else they could dredge up to charge them with.
Re:"other sources"? (Score:3, Interesting)
The obsolete meaning is property related that you refer to.
The more modern meaning is "The act or an instance of stealing; larceny." Which suits this ok. The alleged perps acquired something they had no right to, hence stealing, hence theft.
Check out the delightful dictionary.com
Re:"other sources"? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'm trying to get at is this: yes, I believe that something was stolen from Valve, and that it involved Half-Life 2. No, I do not believe that it was anywhere near the full source code of the game. Consequently, Valve's claims would then be essentially bunk, unless it was specifically the security chunk of the code that was stolen, which seems mighty convenient. What it all boils down to is that this all happened at a convenient time, which has been established. I didn't have to work yesterday because it was raining in the morning. The forecast said it would storm all day, but instead it really only rained for a couple hours early in the day. So while it was true that tree work would not have been the best idea in the morning, it later became a beautiful day. This is a bad analogy, but the point should be clear.
Re:"other sources"? (Score:3, Informative)
The leaked source compiles and runs. There are no maps, models or content, but the engine works. It wasn't finished, and there are bugs. That's why it wasn't released yet, right?
All people needed to do to create a working HL2 mod was create the custom models and maps.
Re:"other sources"? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, the HL2 leak is QUITE real, you can try it yourself.
More sources... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More sources... (Score:3, Informative)
Those blog link is not referring to HalfLife (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"other sources"? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"other sources"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tom's Hardware had a blurb:
Who needs security when you have rabid fans. Perhaps companies should post rewards for tips leading to convictions.Re:"other sources"? (Score:5, Funny)
Just look how well thats worked for Microsoft & SCO. :)
I guess they closed that leaky Valve? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I guess they closed that leaky Valve? (Score:2, Funny)
Isn't it ironic that they've been arrested for stealing a game who's main character is named 'Freeman'?
Re:I guess they closed that leaky Valve? (Score:5, Insightful)
Freeman, if anything, is a reference either to slavery or the 'Dune' series. There's no real relationship with the idea of a free game or intellectual property theft.
What might have been ironic is if the game were entitled "Unstealable" or something, but even that would be a stretch at best.
Re:I guess they closed that leaky Valve? (Score:4, Insightful)
copyright infringement.
The problem here is not that someone stole some CD or could break into some computer, but that the code was distributed.
There would have to be such a thing as intellectual property, from which its legitimate owner could be deprived, in order for theft to happen.
Re:I guess they closed that leaky Valve? (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone either broke physically into their building, broke electronically into their servers, or illegally duplicated a legal copy (which is defined by law as theft), so no matter what Valve had something stolen from them.
Next time you want to make a snide comment about the lack of 'intellectual property', you do me a favor and suggest at the same time why any programmers should be paid. Is it for their labor? Then no programmers should ever have 'rights' to their code, right?
Umm... just on the legal side. (Score:4, Interesting)
1) There was never any legal copy. There was one original held by Valve, and lots of illegal copies made.
2) Even though the result of stealing a CD and pirating a CD is pretty much the same (less the cost of packaging), they go under different laws.
Pirating is illegal. Stealing is illegal. That does not imply that pirating is stealing. This reminds me of a play by Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754): "A stone can not fly. 'Mor Nille' can not fly. Thus, 'Mor Nille' is a stone."
IP is a nonsense concept, because it doesn't say if it's copyright, patent, trademark or otherwise. Likewise IP theft has no meaning in any legal sense, it's a buzzword for the media. It's trying to ascribe attributes to copyright violations that simply aren't real.
Kjella
Re:I guess they closed that leaky Valve? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course there is a problem with breaking into someone's property, stealing stuff and breaking even electronic stuff. What I tried to say is that the fact that matters _in_this_case_ is not theft itself, (a small damage for the company, and maybe a big crime, punished with years in jail in most places) but copyright infringement (a big damage for the company, in this case) , which is not a form of theft, because no one is deprived of their property. You could say thet they are deprived of potential profits, and be right, but that is not intellectual property theft.
Intellectual property has no specific meaning itself, because it is usually applied to many concepts that have little to do with each other (patents, trade marks, trade secrets, copyright, property). Although it is actually used in many places, that term is confusing, because leads to the incorrect assumption that they are all the same, and that they are property, while they share little with each other, and with the concept of property. That leads to the general public to make assumptions about copyight by analogy to property, or to patents, while that would be wrong. Copyright infringement has its own laws everywhere.
Re:I guess they closed that leaky Valve? (Score:4, Interesting)
To ilistrate this, think of putting icing on a doughnut, then try and pattent or take owner ship of this idea. You can't. Now think of making a pice of software that does a specific thing,in a specific way. You can own the device it created but not the idea of making the device.
In this case the device is a specific game that plays a certain way. You can own the game (a device or copy writen work) but not the idea of making a game. Once the game is made into a device or a work, it is physical and not intelectual hence the argument that always ensues trying to colorfully state the differences and as always, someone will goto the extream in one direction or the other.
If you noticed, the parent made the conection of it not being intelectual property and refered it to a physical object like copy right instead. Now the oposite extream has been made were someone can't figure out that copyright or physical property has value and then claims to make an argument about those that don't believe in the way they do live in some alternate reality. In short,the reality is when looking at the way it is being used, both are the same thing and aren't intelectual at all but physical instead.
Re:I guess they closed that leaky Valve? (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder if... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I wonder if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a bloody chance. It's pretty clear that they just capitalized on the source code leak as an excuse to slip the release date. There's really no way they could sit on a game for nine months reworking the code to break compatibility with potential cracks for the leaked code. It's neither that long of a project, nor an justifiable use of man-hours.
The game is just way behind schedule.
Re:I wonder if... (Score:5, Insightful)
After all (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, you have inside knowledge that people working on the project would have, and you just happen to know how long reworking all of Steam from scratch due to its leak would take, not to mention redoing Half-Life 2's network code.
Seeing as how Counterstrike is such a bastion of non-
Re:After all (Score:5, Informative)
Re:After all (Score:4, Interesting)
if this was leaked, yes it would take a long time to rework, but it wasn't THAT broken, they decided to release counterstrike:conditionzero via it and no one seems to have said anything.
flat out they are simply behind on their game - BUT they are paying the bill for it, not their publisher remember. valve pays 100% of development costs out of their pocket and gets really good royalty rates from their publishers as a result. This is the trick.
by looking at their E3 2004 video, it is pretty easy to see how the game could be behind schedule - it could be called 'biting off more than you can chew'
Re:After all (Score:5, Interesting)
So what you're saying is that there was a private key in the HL2 source which was compromised by the code release? And somehow, someone is expected to not have pulled this from memory? Your example doesn't make any sense, and certainly doesn't justify calling my comment "fucking stupid". But, I guess you know it all.
If their goal is just to prevent wallhacks and aimbots before the game goes gold, and not to prevent them in general, then there is already no point whatsoever in buying HL2 unless you plan to play only on LAN or single player, because that means it will likely be hacked up just as much as half-life. Their goal should be to devise technologies that proactively prevent wallhacks and aimbots.
Thinking that there is no such thing as inherently secure is absolutely ignorant. There are ways to do things which are inherently insecure, and there are ways to do things which are inherently secure. Another way to put it is secure by design. We see endless security updates for microsoft products because they are legacy code bases and they need constant band-aids because they are doing something inherently insecure. The same is true of buffer overflows on Unix systems, if you don't use/create functions which are vulnerable to buffer overflows, you won't have buffer overflows. Yet, people keep doing it. I am at a loss to explain it, but I can at least explain the results of their failure to take security into account.
A secure cryptosystem is secure even when the source is released. A game should be the same way, and it is; if having the uncompiled source code makes the game insecure, it doesn't - the game was already insecure.
True, the need for security means moving more processing to the server. It may even mean the end of games which can use a non-dedicated server. Further, the server may need to be as CPU-intensive as the game itself, and maybe even moreso. But, that is a price which I (and millions of others) will be willing to pay if it actually brings a game resistant to cheating. You can rent time on professional gaming servers, and people all over the world have enough money to run full time servers. A game with no cheating will itself likely have allure enough to draw in business to replace any lost through people not willing to pay for the anti-cheating features.
There is no such thing as entirely secure. There are, however, right and wrong ways to do things.
Re:After all (Score:4, Insightful)
A.) The user needs to know how the system works to operate it, thus making the system insecure to anyone who has ever been a legitimate user.
B.) The system can be reverse-engineered, at which point the attacker will understand the system - thus breaking any security.
C.) Obscuring the method of security prevents any security review, therefore making it impossible to know if the system is secure or not.
In an obscurity-free security system you create a system where even if how it works is known security hasn't been comprimised. A good example of this would be key based cryptography. If two people who are communicating using a key based cyrptosystem (such as RSA, Blowfish, DES, etc) keep their keys safe, their message cannot be read by an attacker - even an attacker who knows how RSA works. If they reveal their keys, then anyone can read their messages - but the cryptosystem itself won't be broken; other people who have not revealed their keys will still have security.
Now you seem to be claiming that since the keys have to be kept secret that key based cryptography is "security through obscurity". That's misusing a well-defined english phrase - which properly refers to the first class of security systems that I describe above.
Re:After all (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, the aimbots actually work by reading and manipulating the program's memory state, and therefore have more information to work with than the user would have. Given that, there are a number of ways to secure games from that class of attacks, the simplest with current technology being PunkBuster.
An example of another techniqu
Re:After all (Score:3, Funny)
> You can't go spoogeing every bit of information you have on the general public's face and expect them to not do anything with it.
Course: NETWORK SECURITY 201
Instructor: Asia Carrera
Re:After all (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, no. There is one other option: strong hardware DRM, with severe criminal penalties for anyone producing a DRM circumvention device...
And actually, that's the way online gameplay is going. Half-Life2 would NOT have obscurity anyway, regardless of the code leak. The hackers would just need a few extra days to reverse-engineer the machine code before writing the cheat-modules.
Instead, most shooting games today are moving towards a solution like PunkBuster [evenbalance.com],
Re:I wonder if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder if... (Score:3, Interesting)
And that's what bugs me.
Re:I wonder if... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I wonder if... (Score:4, Funny)
They kind of had to. You see, the code that was stolen composed most of the core of the game; and they had to find and arrest the thief so they could get their code back. Only once the stolen property is returned to its owner can the development continue.
there's some bash.org logic for you ;) (Score:5, Funny)
<NES> lol
<NES> I download something from Napster
<NES> And the same guy I downloaded it from starts downloading it from me when I'm done
<NES> I message him and say "What are you doing? I just got that from you"
<NES> "getting my song back fucker"
Release Date? (Score:5, Funny)
Karma Karma Karma Karma Kameleon (Score:5, Informative)
The Half-Life 2 code theft saga entered a new chapter today when Valve Software announced a series of arrests had been made in the case. According to Valve, suspects in several countries had been taken into custody in relation to charges stemming from the theft of the Half-Life 2 code, distribution of the code, and breaking into Valve's network.
Valve CEO Gabe Newell credited gamers with providing the information that led to the arrests. "It was extraordinary to watch how quickly and how cleverly gamers were able to unravel what are traditionally unsolvable problems for law enforcement related to this kind of cyber-crime," he said in a statement. "Everyone here at Valve is once again reminded of how much we owe to the gaming community."
However, while Valve announced the arrests today, it was unclear when they actually occurred. Valve's statement on the matter--e-mailed to the press today--quoted Newell as saying, "within a few days of the announcement of the break-in, the online gaming community had tracked down those involved."
The FBI's Northwest Cyber Crime Task Force, the law-enforcement agency overseeing the code theft investigation, also divulged little information. When asked by GameSpot if it had made any arrests, media contact at the task force's Seattle, WA, headquarters said simply, "we did." However, when pressed for more information on the case--i.e. how many people in the US were arrested, where were they apprehended--the agent declined to say anything other than arrests had been made. "Beyond that we can not comment," he said.
News of the Half-Life 2 arrests comes after months of rumors about law-enforcement activity on the case. In January, a number of computer experts in the San Francisco area reported having their hardware seized by FBI agents on the grounds they were involved in the theft. Several weeks ago, unconfirmed reports from Germany said the author of the Phatbot Trojan worm was also involved in the theft. In both instances, neither Valve nor the authorities offered any comment.
GameSpot will have more details on this developing story as they become available.
loading, please wait... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:loading, please wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
It stands to reason that the people that rape others in prison are there for violent crimes to begin with (i.e. actually should be there.
Even if you removed all the people who "shouldn't be there" (exactly who that should be is a different discussion), you'd still have the problem of the violent criminals raping each other. Before you say "but they deserve it!" remember these things:
Re:loading, please wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sexual assault is now a major component of the US criminal justice system. The understanding is that the strongest prisoners will rape the others. It's an unspoken additional punishment that law-enforcement winks at.
This is related to the way that the Iraqi prison scandal got started (the US MP who was court martialed was a New Jersey prison guard in civilian life, remember). Of course, in Abu Ghariab the prisoners didn't start on their own, and needed some prodding to get the idea...
Imagine being raped in the arse repeatedly for "Stealing" some source code...
Or for growing marijuana... no, it's not fair, is it?
Thanks! (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks Gabe, glad to be of service! How about a free copy of HL2 to make up for the debt you "owe" me. No? WTF?
wonder how it will all pan out.... (Score:3, Interesting)
My idea of justice (Score:5, Funny)
Send them to XEN.
Re:My idea of justice (Score:3, Insightful)
It was announced... (Score:5, Funny)
Points of interest (Score:4, Interesting)
2. Good for Half-Life 2 cause that means the fans really like it.
3. A possible sign that Valve should hire more people so they can release it sooner.
4. What moron allows an email to install a keyboard sniffer on his computer. Anti-virus and patches take care of a lot of that. Not to mention the network guys should have caught that one quick.
5. Fire the retarded programmer that lets sniffers get installed on his PC and fire the network guys that didn't stop it.
6. Release the game already
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Points of interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Valve still has the code, the music companies still have their audio.
How on earth is there a distinction? Because one needed another illegal means to get the files, while other it just downloading?
If you call one theft, you have to call the other theft.
Re:Points of interest (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be the charges laid on the hackers would not be theft, corporate espionage, hacking, copyright violations, and such.
Downloading music is much diffrence as its published, someone is offering you a copy (witch is why downloaders are kinda safe and uploaders are not)
Also the money lost by each act is diffrent, vavle has taken a BIG hit in the $$ department because of the "theft", how much (if any) money the RIAA and co lose when a song is copied is debatable and might be a gain.
That is why poeple get all up in arms about P2P being called tehft, but when it comes to valve and sounce code theft they tolerate and join in in calling it theft, its much more like theft and it did cause damage to valve in many ways, unlike P2P.
and it STILL isn't theft, it is a multitude of other crimes, but NOT theft at all.
if this was theft, there would be no such charge as corporate espionage. because all corporate espionage is is "stealing" information and ideas.
Neither is theft. One is copyright violations, the other is corporate espionage/hacking/copyright.
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Insightful)
Mp3's are already ready for public consumption. The public already has access to the song, be it on the radio, a cd in a store, in a friend's car, whatever. By downloading that song you are getting a copy of the finished product that many others already have.
Source code, however, is definitely not in a form for public consumption. Nobody should have the source code unless they're part of the project.
Stealing the source code would be analogous to stealing the band that makes the music, n
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd have to say that copying (and subsequently distributing) the source code was a copyright violation just like downloading an unlicensed mp3. The network intrusion is al
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Insightful)
To interpret "guy in the street" (or "pedestrian") word meaning, we must compare with commonly accepted uses of the word.
Here are two sentences that are widely acceptable uses of "steal" regarding intellectual property:
"She stole my song"
In both cases, it is implied that something similar has happened: the victim was working on a project, and was spied on by another person, who went on to publish that idea and claim it as
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Insightful)
(standard mythical man-month rant elided)
Bottom line: more people at this stage == bad idea.
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Informative)
5... developers shouldn't admin their own systems. game developers are not admin, admin are not game developers.
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Funny)
Right, because good people never get arrested.
3. A possible sign that Valve should hire more people so they can release it sooner.
It don't work that way, son.
Points of interest that you missed (Score:5, Insightful)
7. What moron thinks there's such a thing as 100% security?
8. What moron thinks you can ship software faster just by hiring more people?
9. Maybe the 'retarded' programmer was actually trying to do his job and get the work done as soon as possible, and not reading bugtraq all the live long day or modelling attack trees so he wouldn't get owned.
10. Cut Valve some slack. They are the victims here, despite what some might think.
Re:Points of interest (Score:3, Insightful)
What?? A/V patches wouldn't do anything if it was custom written. And how the heck are network admins going to catch a few tiny URL posts (assuming the logger sent packets via port 8000) in all the traffic a big corporation generates.
I mean, seriously... the moron may not even have had a good email client that let hi
So THAT's who stole it . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Likely plea... (Score:5, Funny)
Details on FBI raid of the Hungry Progammers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Details on FBI raid of the Hungry Progammers (Score:5, Informative)
Use your words carefully (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Use your words carefully (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh, please (Score:5, Informative)
They're both wrong. They're both perhaps equally wrong.
BUT THEY'RE STILL NOT THE SAME THING!!!
The guilty offenders (Score:2)
So this means.. (Score:5, Funny)
did they just arrest some people distributing.. (Score:3, Interesting)
however.. does a game developer house have any responsibility over LYING about the state of the game? to investors, to publishing partners, to customers doing pre-orders... when they had no realistical hope of meeting the deadline(a deadline that they should have set and met 2 fucking years ago anyways).
sure they might have been under pressure to do so but what the hell, they told that the game was basically ready just few weeks before the whole hacking shesbang, in which case the hacking would have been a very big deal obviously. however, pushing the delays reason on it is just.. well, it sucks. they suck. getting hacked makes them suck anyways(would make me think twice in investing).
I'm not intrested in them catching the guys who did the hacking.. I'm intrested in if VALVE can get the game out or not! so, what i'm really intrested in is that if they have or have not coded the revolutionary AI they said they had coded already a friggin year ago(must have really been a kick in the nuts to see that the whole world saw that the demos were scripted, when you said that they werent..).
oh well, I could always buy that strategy guide from amazon.
Re:did they just arrest some people distributing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The first the general public knew about the existence of Half-Life 2 (beyond a few rumours) was not long before E3 last year, a bit over a year ago.
Everyone's a security expert when it's somebody else's computer system that been broken into. Can you honestly say you've never done anything that might have potentially allowed a determined individual access to your private network?
The original Half-Life was over a year late; that year transformed the game from a probable also-ran to being something memorable. Yes, it sucks that the sequel is delayed too, but I'd much rather they had the guts to go against what they've said and fix the problems they obviously saw in what they were creating.
People are endlessly complaining about games being rushed to market, with horrible gameplay bugs or terrible hardware requirements, necessitating a series of patches to make the game halfway playable. I gather a good deal of what Valve has been up to is playtesting the game, making sure it's worth playing and is as good as they can reasonably make it. Weren't there complaints recently about the savegames in Thief 3 being broken? Perhaps that's the sort of thing they're trying to avoid.
Then there are claims of 'scripting' in the leaked demos. Believe it or not, some things have to be scripted. Decent AI might get a simulated soldier to behave realistically and evade or attack the player at appropriate moments, but higher-order behaviours (like, say, breaking a door open) need to be scripted. It would be impressive for a human player to instantaneously figure out all the interactive aspects of a map, let alone a computer-controlled enemy. The scripting for such complex behaviours needs a lot of work to take account of many different possiblities, and it's obvious that Valve didn't include all of them in the demonstration map. But it's not as if the whole lot was faked, like the E3 2000 Halo demonstration...
I've done a bunch of single-player mapping for Half-Life. One of the hardest things is the scripting - not the obvious, scripted sequence stuff, but the behind-the-scenes mechanics which makes the world come alive. AI works for the moment, while scripting is needed to set the scene, and to make the enemies more than simplistic automata. AI drives the scripting, and scripting drives the AI.
But then, everyone's an armchair expert, and AI can do everything, release dates are always reached, and networks are impervious. I'd like to see these experts create a game...
Let's just be honest here... (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't saying for sure it was the people that stole it.
They aren't saying how they got them.
They are't saying what they took from them.
They are only saying they got SOMEBODY but who knows if it's really the guys or someone that downloaded a copy of the game from some warez IRC site and just redistributed it.
Besides, until we get full details that the game is released/on schedule/delayed it really won't matter too much.
Someone dropped a dime (Score:3, Insightful)
The responsible parties were caught when... (Score:5, Funny)
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a supporter of open source, but "forced open source" by cracking developers' computers and making their data public is just unethical. These people were real black hats; IIRC, they wrote cracking programs for their private use, specifically to crack Valve --- every sysadmin's worst nightmare. I hope crackdowns like this will get more prominent media attention in the future.
After all... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:After all... (Score:3, Interesting)
Couldn't this (the leak)be a good thing for valve? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Couldn't this (the leak)be a good thing for val (Score:3, Informative)
They have a great piece of technology here. They are likely to make as much money (possibly more) licensing the engine to third parties as they are selling HL2
This is how fisrt person shooters have always worked. There are really only three or four good engines licensed underneath a ton of games.
-Adam
Re:Couldn't this (the leak)be a good thing for val (Score:5, Interesting)
Once you have a good mod thrown together, you can release it however you want... but in order for your mod content to be playable your users are going to need a licensed copy of the game engine and that for the most part will mean purchasing the original game.
If mods are really good, they can enter the retail channel by striking a deal with the original game writers. At that point, the original game content is replaced with the mods and sent into retail stores as its own box. Profit for all involved.
It'd be nice if there was an OSS gaming engine of record to make the commercial game engines obsolete, but let's face it... those things are not easy to come up with. Furthermore, I'm not sure a "fair" multiplayer environment can ever be done with open source code... what would there to be to block people who have hacked the engine code to give them an autopilot shooter?
Re:Couldn't this (the leak)be a good thing for val (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, there's no reason for a company like Valve to give away what is obviously worth a (perhaps not so) small fortune on its own. Now, maybe if their R&D work on the engine had come
Perhaps a show of appreciation... (Score:4, Insightful)
As a show of appreciation, how about taking the not so difficult step of porting HL2 to the Linux platform? I could understand if the game was written completely in DirectX, but it supports OpenGL which is fairly portable from one OS to another. Oh well... wishful thinking...
Re:Perhaps a show of appreciation... (Score:5, Informative)
Er... HL2 is written in DirectX. To my knowledge (I never looked at the source leak) it does not support OpenGL whatsoever.
You must be thinking of HL1, which was based on a heavily modified Quake1 engine. That did support OpenGL.
Re:Perhaps a show of appreciation... (Score:3, Insightful)
Has to be said... (Score:5, Funny)
A lesson learned, folks... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, I didn't do anything illegal.
-Adam
Press Release (Score:3, Informative)
I doubt they arrested the real culprits (Score:3, Insightful)
They probably just rounded up people who happened to have the source code on their machines (ratted out by friends/enemies, etc.) and asked them where they got it. If they couldn't name names, they were further scrutinized. If they can't name names (practical joke gone awry?) have the "capacity to commit the crime" (ie, they're techies) they get charged. Follow the names that were named. Repeat until the number of people you've arrested sounds impressive.
This makes great headlines and eases the PHB's nerves, but doesn't really solve anything. The original perpetrator may get away with it scott free, even.
Just inventing details...
So...how can you be arrested for stealing vapor? (Score:5, Funny)
New malicious code! A trojan worm! (Score:4, Funny)
Wow, a trojan worm?! I gotta re-take history class...
Ounishment must fit the crime... (Score:3, Funny)
There's something odd about this. (Score:3, Interesting)
In this case, it's Valve, the company that did something very stupid that allowed their code to get stolen, and not an actual law-enforcement agency, that's releasing all the vague details of the arrests, whereas all the FBI has to say is that "Yes, we made some arrests." No details on who, or where.
That's very unusual. What's up with that?
Source code theft and Half-Life 2 being late (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Source code theft and Half-Life 2 being late (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of the story behind the leak and the arrests (Score:5, Informative)
Copying or theft? (Score:4, Insightful)
How come in Slashdot discussions about music/film piracy, we get hundreds of posts from people arguing that piracy isn't theft, it's "sharing". But in this thread, everyone's talking about how the source code was "stolen".
Re:Steaming pile of... (Score:3, Informative)