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Valve Announces Half-Life 2 Code Theft Arrests
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..."
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.
Please, editors, don't use words like 'theft' in the same way that the RIAA etc. use them. No-one was deprived of code in this incident and so it wasn't theft.
They aren't saying anything more than "Yup we got somebody"
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.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Notice that M$ hasn't made similar announcements about their recent source code theft problems? Probably cause they realize that for every hacker who use it to try and exploit a vulnerability, another hacker will rewrite part of the code and make it better, more stable, and more secure. Heck with Microsoft source code out there, Windows could one day be a stable, secure platform for people to migrate to instead of from
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.
"Everyone here at Valve is once again reminded of how much we owe to the gaming community."
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...
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
(standard mythical man-month rant elided)
Bottom line: more people at this stage == bad idea.
You might be right. But I wonder if the leak might not have caused a lot of chaos at Valve as well. I can imagine angry speeches from bosses, IT staff getting fired etc as a result of the crack. They may have had to realign much of their organization to have a stronger security focus. Certainly plain old delays are common in the gaming industry, but it seems also quite plausible to me that the leak may have played a part.
No, its not. Its not even funny.
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.
"Stumble before you crawl"
when they had no realistical hope of meeting the deadline(a deadline that they should have set and met 2 fucking years ago anyways).
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...
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.
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-cheating, there's no way Valve is taking a long time making sure the net-based Steam client is up to snuff after a source code leak on the Internet!
Thanks for enlightening us, Miss Cleo.
Hm.. there is no such thing as intellectual property theft, more like
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.
I just hate the fact that when developers do get behind schedule, everyfuckingbody jumps at them. Maybe Valve should just be more like idSoftware, with the motto of "It'll be finished when it's finished." That way, they won't have any annoying ass gamers bitching and starting hate crimes against them when they miss a release date. I just think all developers should be like that. Besides, so what if they miss a release date? As long as they are taking their time and make an awesome game, I'll be happy. Sure, I'd want it to come out faster, but I would drop that need over the chance that the game would be improved if kept in development longer. Look at Enter the Matrix... they rushed to hit the release date, missed it, rushed some more.. and made a very shitty game.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
How is it different?
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.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
I'm sure the thousands of lawyers in 'intellectual property' classes, not to mention the lawyers who practice in it, would disagree with you.
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?
"Stumble before you crawl"
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.
valves code wasn't published, and to get it they had to hack (well trick) valve to get it.
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.
Big difference.
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, not the finished product.
band:mp3::souce code:binary
Can someone please tell me why anal rape is so funny to Americans?
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?
I swear this isn't flamebait!
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".
I am just as bummed about HL2 being late as anyone, but what I don't get is why so many people are ATTACKING the developers. They are making a game to sell. Don't you think they want to release it as soon as possible? They announced a release date last summer. It didn't happen. GET OVER IT!!! They don't owe anybody anything except a good product when it ships. If people don't buy it, because they have lost interest, fine. Valve doesn't make as much money, and probably takes steps to prevent this type of thing in the future. My guess is everyone who is bitching about it will buy the game, and be totally blown away. Do you think they will eat a little crow when the time comes? NOPE. They will just be bitching about the next thing.