Slashdot Mirror
Hacker Who Stole Half-Life 2's Source Code Interviewed For New Book (arstechnica.com)
"Can you love a game so much you must take its sequel?" asks Ars Technica, posting an excerpt from the new book "Death By Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline."
At 6am on May 7, 2004, Axel Gembe awoke in the small German town of Schonau im Schwarzwald to find his bed surrounded by police officers bearing automatic weapons... "You are being charged with hacking into Valve Corporation's network, stealing the video game Half-Life 2, leaking it onto the Internet, and causing damages in excess of $250 million... Get dressed..." The corridors were lined by police, squeezed into his father's house...
Gembe had tried creating homegrown keystroke-recorders specifically targeted at Valve, according to the book, but then poking around their servers he'd discovered one which wasn't firewalled from the internal network. Gembe spent several weeks discovering notes and design documents, until eventually he stumbled onto the latest version of the unreleased game's source code. He'd never meant for the code to be leaked onto the internet -- but he did share it with another person who did. ("I didn't think it through. The person I shared the source with assured me he would keep it to himself. He didn't...")
Eventually Gembe contacted Valve, apologized, and asked them for a job -- which led to a fake 40-minute job interview designed to gather enough evidence to arrest him. But ultimately a judge sentenced him to two years probation -- and Half-Life 2 went on to sell 8.6 million copies.
Gembe had tried creating homegrown keystroke-recorders specifically targeted at Valve, according to the book, but then poking around their servers he'd discovered one which wasn't firewalled from the internal network. Gembe spent several weeks discovering notes and design documents, until eventually he stumbled onto the latest version of the unreleased game's source code. He'd never meant for the code to be leaked onto the internet -- but he did share it with another person who did. ("I didn't think it through. The person I shared the source with assured me he would keep it to himself. He didn't...")
Eventually Gembe contacted Valve, apologized, and asked them for a job -- which led to a fake 40-minute job interview designed to gather enough evidence to arrest him. But ultimately a judge sentenced him to two years probation -- and Half-Life 2 went on to sell 8.6 million copies.
The hacker's actions were a crime both in Germany and the United States. The crime is partly in the jurisdiction of the United States because it was against an American company. Normally it's pretty straightforward to extradite someone given the evidence. It was a courtesy for the FBI to notify German authorities of the plan and provide them with the evidence. I don't see any way the actions of the German authorities were justified to prevent the hacker from being charged and standing trial in the United States. This is a pretty straightforward application of how international cooperation between law enforcement agencies is supposed to work, yet Germany didn't let that happen.
He forgot to repeat "I didn't think it through" when he called Valve, told them he hacked into their server, copying the source code to their product, resulting in the source code for their main product being released publicly, and then asked for a job.
Is there any company where that situation would happen and it ends with "you're hired!"
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The nsa, on multiple occasions.
I guess, that's how much Valve had to pay the makers of the Havoc physics engine, when it was discovered, that they had copied their code verbatim into the HL2 source