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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 you call yourself "B1naryTh1ef", and then steal the source, that just indicates a general sloppiness of character. Sheesh.
Of course it's not wrong to copy code. It's wrong to prevent anyone from copy code. It's unethical. Instead you should share the code with anyone, preferably under an FSF approved free software license.
MPAA officially changed the definition of "stolen."
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
I mean, a game with such a name...
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Until someone comes up with a single word that means "copied against the will of the code's owner", people will use the word stolen. Get over it.
s/Steam/Valve?
Care to cite an example for your second statement? No sarcasm, just curious.
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.
No, it's not "wrong" or unethical to prevent anyone from copying code. Free software licenses require copyrights. Asserting that the owner of source code has no right to control copying of their work via copyright carries with it the assertion that the terms of ALL software licenses - even those 'approved by the FSF' - may be safely disregarded at will.
If you really want to go down that road, then you have no basis to complain when a company takes your GPLv3 code and does whatever they want with it, and contributes nothing back to the community. After all - if you would assert your right to take a copy and do whatever you want with it, they can do the same thing: and they have a MUCH bigger legal team.
All the people using the expression "You stole my idea!" changed the meaning of it long, long, LONG before that.
Copyrightinfringement. There. No spaces, like German. Is that alright with you?
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.
"Pirate" works pretty well, and it's been used in this context for at least 4 centuries
The term "Pirate", in the sense of copying without consent, predates the MPAA. Or movies. It even predates modern copyright (first recorded in 1701, whereas the first copyright act was 9 years later).
Stolen does not mean to deprive another of ownership, it means to take without permission. That's what it has meant for generations.
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
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.
As Frozen Sand have admitted that the culprit was someone on their own team then "leaked" or "pirated" would work well.
Until someone comes up with a single word that means "copied against the will of the code's owner", people will use the word stolen. Get over it.
"copywronged"?
Ezekiel 23:20
How about "jacked?" I always favored that term in regards to digital theft.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
since when do copyright holders care about things like first sale doctrine, right of ownership, or privacy of their customers? You can whine about lack of morality all you want, but these guys are no better than the most ardent richard stallman supporter. In fact, the latter at least has a legit argument for their stance: control over their hardware and property...real property, not fantasy control schemes.
One thing was free. A different thing was stolen. That's really not that hard to understand.
Stolen does not mean to deprive another of ownership, it means to take without permission. That's what it has meant for generations.
I'd wager they know that, but are actively denying said knowledge in an act of mental gymnastics, purely for the sake of attempting justification of their unjustifiable positions.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Gee, it's almost like sometimes people use the same word in different contexts or something. Like, "jerk" can be both a noun and a verb. And as a noun, it can be used to describe an action, or to describe someone who pretends they don't understand what pirating (of intellectual property) is. The word has been used for centuries to describe the ripping off of another's creative work.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
Point? Two wrongs don't make a right.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Some words have more than one meaning.
For example, Somali pirates don't cover ships in wooden boards, nor do they offer them a food and lodging.
If you drive around town in an ice cream truck giving out free ice cream, and someone jacks your truck, you would presumably still go to the cops, right?
My RSS reader doesn't italicize, so I see "Urban Terror Code Stolen"... I was like, "NOOOOO.... uh... what's an Urban Terror Code?"
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.
While I agree to a point, I have to... point out... another phrase you should probably be up-in-arms about: "You stole my idea!"
Kind of hard to -take- an idea from someone, after all...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
you have no basis to complain when a company takes your GPLv3 code and does whatever they want with it, and contributes nothing back to the community.
On the other hand, without copyright, the company would have no basis to complain when someone disassembles the company's modified version, comments it, and distributes it.
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.
And that's exactly how you pirate OSS. Though the FOSS community doesn't usually call it piracy (probably to avoid association with other fine copyright wielding folks like the MPAA and RIAA?), just "license violations".
Though to be fair, the FOSS community doesn't blindly sue pirates either (especially en masse) - they generally go after the commercial pirates - the ones who sell the stolen code (either embedded In hardware or as part of a larger package). Not the small time pirate sharing their latest FOSS binaries with their friends. So there's that aspect as well.
But whether it's music, movies, software (both FOSS and commercial), it can be pirated. FOSS is just unusual in that if you don't accept the license, you still have rights to the software - the ones granted by copyright law. In most commercial software, you have to accept the license.
stolen
the past participle of steal
steal
1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, [...]
That's not exactly what you've claimed.
How is it not? Your definition clearly says "to take without permission" which is exactly what the GP said...
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.
Alright now one for the important part. Distinguish between me copyrightinfringementing my friend's copy of the mp3 he bought last night and the article's copyrightinfringementing to sell for profit in large quantities.
Freejacked?
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.
More like you add some sprinkles to everyones already free icecream then be a dick to everyone and take away the free icecream and expect people not to tip over your sprinkle truck so they can make their own sprinkles.
In German it would be "infringementrightcopy", plus about a dozen extra syllables on the end to show that you really mean it.
Pirate is no better than stolen in this context. They are both loaded terms appropriated by those with financial incentive to make something seem worse than it is.
It seems to me that the best word here would be plagiarism.
Welcome to the English language dumbfuck.
We just refer to it as "the English language". Calling it the "English language dumbfuck" is just redundant.
Stolen does not mean to deprive another of ownership, it means to take without permission.
And what does take mean? When your definition was penned, taking something clearly deprived the former possessor of ownership.
I'll concede that re-using the word "stolen" isn't a terrible choice for this new "take-a-copy" action, but let's not pretend that this is what its meant all along.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
I'll just put this Mark Twain work out there...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
Fair enough.
How about stoalen?
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
It's shorthand for "You stole credit for my idea!", which makes sense
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.
Anon's always seem so legit...
Again, it means to take without permission. It doesn't imply to deprive another of ownership. And the idea of "stealing one's ideas" has existed before any of your fancy digital copies and it meant the same thing then. It is a possible case of what it meant and it has been going on, again, for generations.
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.
Genius. Still holds his own with any modern comedian.
You might be thinking of French (the reason we have NATO - OTAN; AIDS - SIDA; etc.).
German has pretty much the same word order as English (conditions apply of course).
Okay then, "you stole my code" is short for "you stole some of the potential future revenue that I was going to earn from that code".
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.
I realize it's a bit of a touchy subject, but in this case the term "stolen" is correct because the private copy is no longer exclusive. This should not be confused with making a copy of an already distributed work, in which case the original owner has not lost anything (directly) because there was no exclusivity.
Please add multicore support.
Jacking off? Oh, wait...
Free in gratis, but not free in libre.
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!
That seems unlikely, though. More likely the potential future revenue was merely 'destroyed' if anything, eh?
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
You must be a little confused on the law here. If FS was stupid enough to try and sue me for something I didnt do, it would be a /private/ lawsuit. FS is registered in Canada, which does /not/ allow non-profits to register for software licenses. Unfortunately considering the nature of the codebase (Q3's licensing, GPL), the only violation they might try to get me for is NDA violation. I'd love to see them provide more evidence than a few screenshots, but alas I'm not going to get my hopes up.
No, the non-word "alright" is not all right with me.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
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.
Piracy of media doesn't put anyone in mind of a pirate (an even if it did, the popular image of a pirate is of a heroic rebel such as Jack Sparrow). Nobody has ever drawn a parallel to copying a DVD and taking hold of a vessel for ransom.
Plagarism requires they take credit for the creation, which I don't think they have done yet.
"Canada, which does /not/ allow non-profits to register for software licenses."
What does this mean? What. specifically, would a Canadian nonprofit have to do in order to be slapped down for registering for a software license?
--hendrik
How do you figure it is morally wrong to take a copy of something without permission?
I figured the whole "without permission" part kind of made that obvious.
At least, obvious to anyone who isn't a moron and/or thief.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
He doesn't fail to understand, he refuses to acknowledge that he's a thief. Cognitive dissonance via mental gymnastics.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese