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The Trap Set By the FBI For Half Life 2 Hacker
eldavojohn writes "You might remember the tiny news that Half Life 2 source code was leaked in 2003 ... it is the 6th most visited Slashdot story with over one kilocomment. Well, did anything happen to the source of the leak, the German hacker Axel 'Ago' Gembe? Wired is reporting he was offered a job interview so that Valve could get him into the US and bag him for charges. It's not the first time the FBI tried this trick: 'The same Seattle FBI office had successfully used an identical gambit in 2001, when they created a fake startup company called Invita, and lured two known Russian hackers to the US for a job interview, where they were arrested.'"
Really, quite old news. This was reported on right after it happened. If I remember right though, Gabe claimed that they had succeeded in tricking the hacker. They did speak with him on the phone
The article mentions that this trap failed. Apparently he suspected something.
Anyway, Gembe was sentenced to probation in Germany for the breach and leak. Interesting that the FBI apparently took this so much more seriously than the German courts.
The group named in the article is "myg0t" not "mygot." They developed some of the first hacks for Counter-Strike (the original). They became so well known in game as cheaters that a lot of servers are set to automatically kick any playing wearing their tag.
When we were getting very close to releasing Half-Life 1 (less than a week or so), we found there were already some projects that we needed to start working on, but we couldn't risk checking in code to the shipping version of the game. At that point we forked off the code in VSS to be both $/Goldsrc and /$Src. Over the next few years, we used these terms internally as "Goldsource" and "Source". At least initially, the Goldsrc branch of code referred to the codebase that was currently released, and Src referred to the next set of more risky technology that we were working on. When it came down to show Half-Life 2 for the first time at E3, it was part of our internal communication to refer to the "Source" engine vs. the "Goldsource" engine, and the name stuck.
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http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Entrapment is when the authorities cause you to commit a crime (that you wouldn't otherwise) which is not the case here since the crime was already committed.
Entrapment is tricking someone into committing a crime. This is more like when the police send out raffle prize announcements to everyone with outstanding warrants and arresting them when they show up.