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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
I don't care what the guy has done, tricks like this should not be legal.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
Do not go somewhere where I'm wanted. Stay in the countries where there are NO warrants for my arrests.
that's just cruel.
Work Safe Porn
depends ...
Is a kilocomment 1000 or 1024 comments ?!?
If i am supposed to slow down...about telling me how slow
If you are wanted for a crime in some country, you should avoid:
1) Going to that country
2) Going to countries with extradition agreements with that country
If you are dumb enough to go to the country, you deserve to be arrested.
How would I feel if someone tricked dumb American criminals into getting arrested? Pretty good. We could use less criminals on the streets. Feel free.
This isn't exactly a civil rights issue.
Except according to this wikipedia entry it's called src/source because it was forked of the GoldSrc engine and they just shorten the name of the new dir to Src.
Your story seemed to unlikely that I just had to check it up somewhat.
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.
will you arrogant americans stomach your citizens being arrested in set traps worldwide ?
A friend of mine is set to be drafted immediately into their military if he ever sets foot in Turkey, since he was born in a Turkish hospital. That said, do you think he's dumb enough to accept a job interview for a Turkish company? It doesn't matter how delicious it sounds, he's not biting.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
A kibicomment is 1024 comments.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I can use information theory to prove that the answer is infinity...
Information content of library of congress: I(lib) = 1 bazillion bits.
Information content of one kilocomment: I(1kc) = 0 bits.
kilocomments in a Library of Congress = I(lib)/I(1kc) = 1 bazillion / 0 = infinity.
QED
There's a difference between a Kilobyte(1000) and a Kibibyte. (1024)
The Kibibyte was coined to distinguish the former from the latter.
For more information, please refer to this chart: http://xkcd.com/394/
Americans get worse treatment in other countries then visitors to the US do when they come here.
I can say this because I hold citizenship in three countries. And have lived in all three would rather tangle with the american law enforcement then the other two.
When Michael Fay was caned in Singapore for vandalism, the majority of the USA cheered, because he acted like an ass in another country, and he deserved what he got.
I had the misfortune of meeting the prick years later, and he almost got caned again with a pool cue.
But in the US there is a saying. IF you can't do the time, do'nt do the crime.
Nothing arrogant about the way they were caught.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Apart from the HL2 source code being realease into the wild (which I agree was a big thing), the stuff this guy did to get the source code is probably a bigger deal. He compromised Valve's machines. He broke into their network. He installed keyloggers. He hijacked email accounts. He (maybe) initiated DoS attacks on their servers. Even if he did not steal and release the HL2 source code (trade secrets) what he did was pretty damn wrong... and illegal in most places of the world. The FBI, in my opinion, has every right to chase this guy (no, I do not live in the US). Chase the guy, catch him and let him rot in jail. Summary: the HL2 source code release, at this point in time, is not the big deal; it's all the other laws he broke.
I mean, seriously.
Anybody remember that incident? Gave valve a golden excuse for delaying HL2.
It happened 6 weeks or so for the announced release data. And magically, after the leak they needed time to fix "security issues". For more than a fucking year. Because we all believe that the game really was finished at that point..
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I'm from the USA. What's the conversion between kilocomments and shit-tons? Google conversions doesn't seem to have it. I find it odd that they will happily do furlongs per fortnight but don't have this...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Should the FBI not pursue the thief? Valve pays taxes, too.
I love how so many Slashdotters are absolutists about following the law - until someone they disagree with is protected by it.
Don't let your dogma run over your karma.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
What I don't understand is why we allowed some asshole RAM and HDD manufacturers to steal our word?
Speaking as someone who grew up learning that "kilo-" means 1000, what I don't understand why we allowed some asshole CS people to steal our prefix?
well, aywwts4 is clearly a hard drive manufacturer.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Speaking as someone who grew up learning that "kilo-" means 1000, what I don't understand why we allowed some asshole CS people to steal our prefix?
Because base-10 is soooo 1900s. Get with the program.
--
One-one was a race horse, One-two was one too.
One-one won one race, One-two won one two.
(A) It was a joke for the geeks,since we do actually know the difference. I also added the crotchety bit and "Get off my lawn" for emphasis. (B) I don't really care WHAT the HDD manufacturers want to measure in,hell they can measure in ramen noodles for all I care, although I do find it odd that until the "race for 1 gigabyte" they actually reported in base 2.
The problem isn't that,the problem is their damned box labeling! Have you looked for the "its base 10,not base 2" label on a HDD box lately? It has gotten so damned tiny I'm going to have to buy one of those big ass magnifying glasses like they used in WW2 to spot German defense positions from aerial photos just to show that damned label to my customers! If they weren't trying to be sneaky or hide it from the customer,then why not simply put in on the front,right below the main label? Because the last two I bought had it in print that even with my 20/20 eyesight I had trouble reading and one you had to actually pull a sticker off the box to even read it at all!
And as one of the earlier posters pointed out it makes NO damned sense! Because we all know that a BYTE is 8 bits,yes? So anything with BYTE in it should be on orders of 8,NOT ten. So the word simply doesn't work. And as another poster pointed out with the Tb range becoming common the difference is really becoming staggering. And now the size has gotten so huge lying to make it sound bigger is kind of pointless. So why not simply label them back into a form that nearly every OS on the planet uses? After all anything over 1Tb is pretty much a shitload of data,whether that shitload be in base 2 or 10.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Just HDD manufacturers. When you buy an 8GB RAM stick you get 8,589,934,592 bytes of RAM, just like you should. When you buy an 8GB hard drive, you only get 8,000,000,000 bytes of HDD space.
This is what extradition treaties are for, to work out details like this (and BTW, if you represent a nation and are working on an extradition treaty with the US, make sure you specifically forbid the US from engaging in "extraordinary rendition", and specify that any violations shall be remedied by, in the least, repatriating the "rendered" suspect. It should go without saying but it doesn't)
However, there's no issue like that in this case. If someone in the US who has committed a crime in the UK travels there, the UK can arrest and try him and it's all perfectly legal regardless of whether the crime was extraditable or not.
Eh? There's a country where the cops can't lie, at all, to suspects? Do you have any references to that?
In the US they can and do lie about almost anything; there's a few exceptions, like they can't have a prosecutor pretend to be a public defender (which has shown up on TV police procedurals, but I don't know if they've tried it in real life), and they can't threaten extrajudicial punishment to obtain a confession (which alas happens all the time, and the cops just deny it).