Slashdot Mirror
Urban Terror Code Stolen
New submitter herbalt writes "The code of the free FPS game Urban Terror (a standalone game based on a Quake 3 mod), has been stolen. The development team, Frozen Sand, at first stated their Git Repository had been hacked, but later issued an announcement stating the perpetrator of the leak was a member of the development team. Frozen Sand also states they have found chat logs indicating there had been 'a plot to get B1naryTh1ef to steal the code so they could sell Urban Terror under a different name on Steam.'"
I had thought it was open source all this time. Huh.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
If Frozen Sand no longer have the code for Urban Terror then it has been stolen. If they still have the code then it has been copied.
1) It sounds like the code was copied. Still wrong, but "stolen" makes it sound like they can't possibly go on with their project, because they don't have the code they wrote anymore.
2) I'm sure it would be easy to work with Steam and say "don't accept any games that come through based on XYZ code" in this case. On the other hand, Steam has given very few shits about extremely iffy projects in the past.
Sell? Really? Last time I checked, urban terror wasn't the most advanced of games. And how does a member of the development team steal the code? It's in a git repo, everyone has a copy of it already.
Played it for a few months back in the day, very fun! Hope they get their day in court.
If you call yourself "B1naryTh1ef", and then steal the source, that just indicates a general sloppiness of character. Sheesh.
Frozen Sand also states they have found chat logs indicating there had been 'a plot to get B1naryTh1ef to steal the code so they could sell Urban Terror under a different name on Steam.'"
Urban Thief.
he got tired of stealing binaries.
I know this is off-topic, but I hadn't played this game in like a decade, and never think about it, but just last night I was sitting thinking about the times I used to play it. Didn't even know it was still around, might have to check out what their doing with it..
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
Information wants to be free!
It wasn't stolen, they just helped themselves to a copy, nobody lost anything!
I mean, a game with such a name...
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
They gotta get a stolen sequel for their stolen first game. Don't worry Frozen Sand, they'll screw up any changes they make so bad that it won't effect your bottom line.
Since when does slashdot care about copyright infringement?
I believe the standalone Urban Terror is based on the GPL'd Quake 3 code. For them to *not* make the code available was likely a license violation.
quick google of the name and i found a github repo that's been up for years.
The officially supported ioquake3 engine by the Frozen Sand Development Team for the game Urban Terror 4.x
so what's the deal?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Now where am I going to find an identikit arena shooter based upon the Quake 3 engine?
Oh wait, here's a short list of a few of them
http://freegamer.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/quake3-total-conversions.html
Come on, the id Tech 3 source code was realised 8 years ago yesterday. Are there really no better engines out there?
Summation 2
and no one ever wondered about this name? talk about hiding in plain sight.
About 10 years ago I worked on a group startup project and we worked on it for a good 3-years. It was a huge investment but we were all different people from around the world, not stationary in a cozy office. We had an alpha on a new game engine and toolkit that had features that wasn't seen (and some that are still not seen) in today's mmorpgs. It was to become a 3D version of Ultima Online basically. Unfortunately the code was stolen from someone living in Sweden and our computers all got jacked. I had a backup on a few CDs but I had horrible luck when I dropped coke on them, causing permanent damage (impossible to recover). We all hated each other because we were blaming each other for this and that, so there was a big internal conflict but managed to find out who it was but couldn't find out where that person was living since we weren't doing anything on contract. We were all young at the time and didn't know better. It's a damn shame because the timing was perfect, it was even before WoW. Incidentally some of the technology we had placed into the game was found in various games that came out a year or two later. We presume that the technology was sold to studios.
"Free" program "stolen"? One of these words doesn't mean what you think it means.
You wouldn't download a crescent wrench, would you?!
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Who honestly cares about stolen source code?
You're giving the game away. For free. The game is free.
THE GAME IS FREE.
My RSS reader doesn't italicize, so I see "Urban Terror Code Stolen"... I was like, "NOOOOO.... uh... what's an Urban Terror Code?"
This sounds too much like a publicity stunt... Stealing the code so they could sell the game on Steam? Leaving literally all traces to point specifically to someone on the team? What kind of wacky idea is that, really? All that was left was naming the archive "leaked by B1naryTh1ef.zip"
Never actually heard of this game before now. I'm sure they could use the attention.
In my country, pre-1923 culture and knowledge is a human right. English from 2013, apart from jargon related to the calculating machines of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, would probably be comprehensible to somebody from 1922.
Until someone comes up with a single word that means "copied against the will of the code's owner"
I've got this crossword puzzle, and I'm looking for a nine-letter word meaning "Copied without author's permission". What I have are
I _ F _ _ _ G _ D
Oh, I get it: INFRINGED
In fact, you're wrong there. Entirely wrong.
Care to cite an example for your second statement?
If Steam wants to keep its safe harbor from copyright infringement lawsuits, it'll need to quickly pull any unauthorized derivative of Urban Terror after receiving a notice of claimed infringement from the Urban Terror team.
They CREATED a copy.
If I make a Victoria Sponge using my own purchased ingredients, just like you did with yours, I have NOT stolen your Victoria Sponge cake, I have MADE MY OWN.
Every time there's a story about copyright infringement, some pro-piracy apologist makes this same damn argument and it gets +5 Insightful.
http://www.dswp.de/old/announcements/frozen-sand-git-repo-breached-stand-by-for-further-news-t7364.html
That's the old version your looking at, a great game none the less... it's just a mod for the idTech3 engine.
The new game is based on the old one in spirit but uses a new engine with much upgraded graphics, and is closed source, although maybe idTech3 based?
I really liked the old game but got banned from the new account system for writing weapon switching scripts, ironic when UrT is itself a big ol' hack, alas the entire site is run by a single overlord with a very dogmatic view on hacking of any kind, so i said screw them i'm sticking with the old one, so i'm not much surprised at this given the group contains those kind of people. They should've open sourced it anyway, the account system would've been enough to handle wallhackers and whatnot.
Interesting :P RaidR is the site admin i mentioned in my last post (no i'm not fond of him, and so are others it seems), here's the email sent from one of the perpetrators
umad? turns out u guys dont own us the community fights back we wont take your s*** u ban us from ur game u hide your codes u run stop its time for the community to take over you let idiots like elf and raider run your servers and you expect security you expect me to run away from a home ipd box i lold. you wont figure out how i got in you wont rid yourselfs of me guess what happens next you loose control no more dictatorship no more closed source only community only success no more fs goodbye fs we wont miss you Link to source removed as it's a criminal act and we can't verify it's free from viruses. good bye
It kind of is a dictatorship, not that it's wrong with a developer in general... but when it's a free game based on an open source engine and the next one is closed... and the admin is a massive dick... yeah i'd wana fork it too.
Would be create an ARM port. did they dump the code anywhere or only stole it for personal gain?
this is by far the lamest story i've read all day. thanks, slashdot.. for WASTING my time.
Personally (and, yes, I'm an AC, BUT I buy my games on Steam) I'd like to see Steam do two things:
1. State that they won't accept the stolen variant of this game, and,
2. Allow, if Frozen Sand agrees, the actual game to be published on Steam.
I like my games FOSS and moddable, if the option exists, but having them on Steam can open up community features such as public achievements, friends, badges, trading cards, etc... If the game is available both ways, it's even better.
They have break relation with ioQuake3 a long time ago. IoQuake3 has not relation atm with this guys. And are against the idea to cooperate with ioQuake3.
Or, they are simply trying to claim ownership of somebody elses code, and they have to make up this story because they don't really have the original.
So the cure for cancer has been stolen now too?
According to his twitter page (also linked on urbanterror.info) he works at Valve: https://twitter.com/b1naryth1ef. If true then it's not like he was doing this for money, they must have pissed him off pretty good.
Mildly hilarious to see this here. In fact, I did not steal the source code, nor leak it. I've already made an official statement (which you can read at the bottom of http://playurt.com/index.php?mod=news&action=view&id=7 that post). If you're really stupid enough to listen to anything Frozen Sand posts on their home page (with the only evidence being "screenshots", and the post being locked to responses) you don't have much going for you. I'm not going to go into the legal implications of what Frozen Sand has done (because I'm still processing documentation with my lawyer) but to say the least, they're in a wee bit of trouble. This basically boils down to FS trying to harassing and defame me after I quit.
The entire source tree for a git repository is in git clone, with the magic sauce of "--mirror" to get the full repository. This is an advantage for open source distributed teams, but not a great methodology for closed source development like this was.
Deeply amusing.
... But over all the free software development methodology tends to lead to collaboration which in turn lead to innovation ...
Perhaps the distribution model is/was innovative but is the code really innovative? It seems that free software is dominated by creating copies/replacements of commercial software. Unix -> Linux. Photoshop -> Gimp. MS Office -> LibreOffice.
There are great chances people have clone most of the branches. They can simply re-create and push the code into Git.
Please add multicore support.
For example, I've been using tabbed file browsing for about a decade now; they've been the default in my desktop environments. I hear the latest version of OSX is going to finally add that. Who knows if/when Windows will. That's a fairly trivial feature, sure. But that actually proves another point about open source versus closed; all it takes is one person to want that feature and to code it, and it's there, and people can use it.
As well, it's hardly like Unix was the first OS, or Photoshop the first image editor, or MS Office the first office suite. Hell, MS Office itself was for many years vastly inferior feature-wise to many alternatives that had histories stretching earlier than it, it just won because of Microsoft's OS market share---the Network Effect is a fearsome and ravenous beast. Few blobs of software are the 'originals', they're copies of copies of copies, slowly iterating (hopefully; sometimes regressing instead, especially in unfree software).
I remember when I first ran Windows 8 and I saw that it had fancy graphs for the speed of file copies, and I had to laugh, since that's been in KDE since the rough early days of the 4.x series. Not to mention that the launcher can parse things I write like "1000 minutes in hours" and spit me out the answer to my question, while Windows 8.x still struggles to even find installed programs (8.1 is a bit better than 8 for the most part, albeit worse in a few ways, and still extremely inferior to KRunner). And there are programs pushing into newer paradigms that make old fogeys like me uncomfortable and wanting to tweet things that end in #lawns, like Tomahawk, and whose website reminds me of the ubiquity of the opensource Bootstrap framework at the moment.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Hope you don't get busted on this one because if so it's a federal crime, means federal time. So you better lawyer up because I'm sure they have more than just a few screenshots. Looks like you a guys little guy and they Love that young sweet ass in prison. Lol
Good Luck
6th|russa
Why must there be a single word?
So that you can explain it to someone else and finish your sentence before he or she interrupts you.
Leaked. And not one comment with the url to the tar.gz or evening hinting what the file name might be. I am disappoint.