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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..."
Ba-dum - cha!
...Valve was waiting for the arrests before releasing the game.
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Does that mean they can release it on time now? Oh wait...
My user number is prime. Is yours?
He comes and goes... he comes and goooooeeess...
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.
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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."
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?
Send them to XEN.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
That those arrested would be released the same time Half Life 2 is. Personally I think thats a pretty harsh sentence!
1. Bad that people steal code.
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
Police are reporting that one of the suspects, Douglas "Duke" Nukem, had, in his words, been trying to get his hands on some source code like this "FOREVER".
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
"But, your honor.... we were just trying to help Valve meet their release date!". :)
Remembered as the crew who created LessTiff, the Hungry Progammers were raided by the FBI in order to obtain evidence in the Half-Life 2 case. Details of the raid are a real eye-opener.
I wanna play Jon Johansen!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
that there actually exists some code!?
At the time I clicked there was also an article on Tom's Hardware. It managed to have less content than the GameSpot article.
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.
I can't wait until Google news picks up this slashdot article.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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/
...they went into Fry's to try to buy an ATI Radeon 99000 XT+ video card, Intel P5 1.2 THz processor, and a Terabyte of RAM. The arresting agent was overheard saying, "I knew they weren't using that much computing power to play Unreal Tournament"
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.
I dont know... maybe I am just a little backwords in my thinking, but Valve could have used this to an advantage. Think about it. If they open source the engine but not the content, wouldn't that allow everyone to make a better engine (hence, easier patching, more features) but not have the content unless they bought it? To me, that looks like the way to go anyway. I can find a bunch of sourceforge projects that do just that. You need the content, not the engine. Valve should sell the content, not the engine. Stealing the code was wrong, and the theives should be punished, but sometimes a business needs to find an advantage to these things.
"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...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Just having read about the fbi raid, I can't help but think that everyone should keep a few hundred small and/or dead hard drives around. Gotta keep them busy finding your 'stash'. They'd have to use a ream of paper to document all the computer equipment I have at this location.
Of course, I didn't do anything illegal.
-Adam
http://bash.org/?104052
<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"
The current business model is that when the first game for the new game engine comes out, the mod tools to go with that engine ship as part of the game package. Anybody who has bought the game can create new levels or whole new game concepts.
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?
Tom's Hardware had a blurb:
Who needs security when you have rabid fans. Perhaps companies should post rewards for tips leading to convictions.The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
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...
I didn't realize you could be arrested for "theft of vapor"...
Just look how well thats worked for Microsoft & SCO. :)
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
The blog link is not referring to the Half Life raid. If I remember correctly, this blog post was made for a /. story posted a couple months ago about a different matter.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
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
Sure, copyright infringement is wrong, but that still doesn't make it theft! That's like saying rape and murder are the same thing, because they're both immoral too. Or like saying that Black Panthers and Neo-Nazis are the same because they're both militant racists. Or like saying apples and oranges are the same because they're both fruits! Or.... [continue ad nauseum]
They're both wrong. They're both perhaps equally wrong.
BUT THEY'RE STILL NOT THE SAME THING!!!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Steam has nothing to do with the graphics engine, and everything to do with networking. It's Valve's content distribution and matchmaking framework. Click me.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
actually steam is their 'auto update', server browser, master server, and license key authentication system.
;}
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'
Gekido's Lair
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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One point worth clearing up is that the break-in and release of the source code is NOT why we didn't make the original September 30, 2003 release date, nor is it responsible for the fact that we haven't shipped yet. There were some significant costs associated with the break-in (not the least of which was the fact that everybody here was completely freaked-out and bummed), but the main reason we haven't shipped yet is that we have more work to do than we thought and it has taken longer to do than we thought. Gabe gaben@valvesoftware.com
About the leak: some german guy (the same guy who created phatbot, let's call him Hans) hacked into Valve computers. Hans then proceeded to brag about it and give some information about it to some friend of his (let's call him randomdude) over an IRC server operated by some members from a group I will call Entity. Members of entity intercepted the conversation and used the info in it to plant their own trojans on valve's computers, they then proceeded to leak the source and maybe some other stuff. Hans decided that he wouldn't let them have the credit for this and proceeded to release other stuff. Fast forward a few months. Hand emails Gabe and explains that he never meant to leak anything, that he just wanted to take a look at how a game was developped and that he was an amateur game developper himself as well as an expert on network security. He's a big fan of valve, blah blah blah. He explains how he broke into valve's computers and implies that he would like to get a job at valve as a network security asministrator. Follows a long exchange of emails in which he tells them about vulnerabilities still existing in their network and reveals he is german. He then agrees to a phone interview as Valve's people bait him into thinking they are considering hiring him and ends up arrested. I read most of the emails he exchanged with Valve before the arrest and Hans pretty much threw prudence and common sense out the window when dealing with valve. He must be kicking himself now.
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.
I am feeling fat and sassy
In fact, this has actually been done. People did indeed compile the HL2 engine, and insert HL content into it, generating a working sort of demo, including a port of some counterstrike files. Don't get all excited yet, it works, but not as well as a retail game. You can find it on suprnova, and related sites.
So, the HL2 leak is QUITE real, you can try it yourself.
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