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Phatbot Trojan Suspect Linked To Half-Life 2 Code Theft?
Thanks to Gamers With Jobs for its story claiming possible links between the theft of the Half-Life 2 code and the Phatbot trojan writer, following the arrest of the alleged Phatbot creator in Germany last week, as the site claims, regarding "Axel G., 21 years old and known under the nick 'Ago'", that "German IT news mag Heise.de did some investigation [German-language link] and according to their research Axel G. probably also was heavily involved in the Half-Life 2 code theft that happened more than 7 months ago", pointing particularly to an IRC log, available on a Half-Life 2 leak page since late last year, which has Ago allegedly saying "[Download speed] suxx, especially from valve to germany... i coded myself my own sourcesafe client to get it at full speed... i only used a simple null-session to a pc in valves net, that wasnt directly controlled by valve."
Let me guess, he also blew up the World Trade Center?
May we never see th
<Unknown__> hostmask of Ago on the 11th of october: frb9-d9bb4a51.pool.mediaWays.net
<Unknown__> earlier this week
<Unknown__> in a private channel....
<Unknown__> the person having access to the beta, sources and other released stuff
You know, it sounds as if they could have dug this up from IRC server logs. Now, obviously it's quite *possible* to log all channels on an IRC server (it still boggles the mind that IRC clients don't have encryption support as standard), but I wasn't actually aware that this was being actively done -- and it would have to be in order to snag this from a minor, private channel well in advance of anyone knowing who the responsible parties might be.
That's a bit Orwellian.
I've never actually looked up whether AOL's privacy policy says anything that would keep them from logging all ICQs/AIM messages, but that could be quite a valuable storehouse of information as well. The only mainstream IM protocol that I know of where clients support end-to-end encryption as standard is Jabber.
May we never see th
Give me a break, of course it was stolen. He was not authorized to copy the source code. And it's not akin to someone taking a picture of the Mona Lisa, it would be more like someone taking a picture of blueprints to an automobile. That would let them build the same product, even though it is clearly IP for the original owners.
Well, the founders of valve did used to work at Microsoft, so they probably either felt loyalty to their old employer, or had used it at MS and were used to it.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
The code is of course copyrighted, meaning that he broke international copyright laws. That is kind of illegal.
Even Microsoft don't use SourceSafe.
It's that bad.
Seriously. I'm really at a loss to why Valve blamed the delays on the code theft. Valve didn't actually lose anything -- even if the cracker had trashed their code repository, they could've just grabbed the code from Kazaa.
Isn't murder the act of taking one's life and not returning it? That is theft in my book :)
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Isn't murder the act of taking one's life and not returning it?
Yes, but it was only half of a life, not an entire one. Also, half life 2's official logo has the 2 written as a power. So, one could argue that it was only a quarter of a life that was taken.
Why was that modded funny? It's true! When I was there, any self-respecting group used SLM (Source Library Manager), aka "Slime". Only a few random groups in consumer division used VSS.