"Remember that the purpose of laws is to protect our private property from unlawful search and seizure--theft. The irony here is that while some people see nothing wrong with hackers searching and seizing Valve's property, they think its terrible that the FBI might search and seize the hacker's property. It's pretty funny when you think about how hypocritical that viewpoint is."


It's not hyporitical at all. You are presuming that the man that was searched was guilty. What if he is innocent? Should he not be PRESUMED innocent?

It's a shame someone took Valve's code, but what's worse if if they then turn around and destroy the life of an innocent man who had nothing to do with the crime. I'm protecting HIS rights, not the rights of a criminal.

In addition, Valve's source code is intangible. It was not stolen. It was copied. They still have access to it. This man on the other hand no longer has access to his computers. So he is worse off than Valve is now.


"If this person's computers were seized, there is no corroboration that it involves Valve at all. He might have "photochopped" the search warrants to include mention of Valve simply to cover up the fact, among his friends and associates, that his property was seized for other purposes, such as common computer credit-card fraud, or something similar."

That is pretty damn far fetched.


"Finally, a good concept for you to consider is that the value of your neighbor's private property is determined by the owner of that property, and nobody else"

That's funny, because when we were moving, the moving company damaged my television, which I had been given, and so did not have a receipt for, and they managed to pull a number out of their ass for how much it was worth. And then scrwed me by saying it was worth less than the deductible.

So no, you don't set the value of the property you own. The government and insurance companies do.

Uh, I'm a programmer, and I'm not much impressed with steam. In fact, it's just the sort of app one could easily code in visual basic.

What does steam do that's so great?

Steam has some encryption stuff.
It has a list of games.
It can launch said games.
It can download games that it doesn't have yet with trickling downloads.
It can display simple gif ads.
It can connect to a central server, check that your key is valid, and then give you a list of all servers currently connected.

This is SIMPLE. It is a few weeks worth of work.

It is much harder to code the networking code for a game. That has to handle packet loss, high pings, and low bandwidth.

Steam on the other hand uses TCP, does not need to worry about lost packets, and high pings have no effect on it.

Wheoever wrote steam did not need to worry about converting floating point vlaues into fixed point bytes and ints to save bandwidth, they didn't need to worry about which data should be run via simulation and which should be manually controlled by the server, and he sure as hell didn't have to deal with trying to make a server handle 16 players simultaneously over a modem without getting bogged down by bandwidth usage.

"But VU Games had one, big glorious selling point: Half-Life 2. That one game was going to rescue Vivendi by either boost its earnings for 4Q03 or giving it a much bigger selling price for the unit than it was really worth.

Then came the break-in."


So you blame the break in for that?

Wrap your head around this. What if Valve hadn't USED the break in as an excuse to get a much needed six more months of development time, and instead had kept COMPLETELY QUIET ABOUT IT.

I'll tell you what if.

Valve could have quietly dealt with the breakin. They could have fixed up the Steam code in a couple days so that hacked keys would not work, and so that the values in the netcode were mixed up from what was expected, and still pushed the game out on time. Simple.

As a result of BEING QUIET, they would NOT have had the story on every news website on the planet instantly, and far fewer people would know about the code being out there as a result. With this FBI thing, a ton more people now know that the code is out there.

And the stock price of VU would not have plummeted. Because the game would have gone out on time.

I DARE Valve to offer a detailed explanation of what they had to change in the code base and how this translated to a six month delay. There is just NO DAMN WAY that they needed SIX MONTHS to change the netplay and steam code so that it was incompatable with the hacked version. Do you know how much code a team of programmers can write in six months? The game High Octane was made in SIX WEEKS. There's just no way that moving some data around took them six months. They are blatantly lying just to get themselves more time they needed because they were behind schedule and could not meet their contractual obligations.

"Coincidentally, How would you like it if someone stole the work you'd been doing for the past 5 years?"


Unlike Valve, I believe that it's more important to produce a quality product than to try to profit from "trade secrets".

I produce a shadow system for games which I sell.

While I obviously don't want the source code distributed, if it was, it wouldn't hurt my business much. Most people who want to use it would pay the nominal fee I charge.

In addition, when someone asks me how to make a shadow system like the one I've made, I give them a full and complete description of all the various optimizations I've done, explaining exactly how it works, and how sophiticated an algorthim it uses.

At which point, they realise that my system is so good that they'd have to spend months writing their own, and they choose to license mine for the nominal fee.

I even give away source code to major portions of my games for free. The only thing I don't really do is give away complete compileable versions of my game code, because I don't want someone producing a game which is 75% identical to mine.

I also share my art, and sound effects, if people ask for them. I am not particularly concerned about people competing with me. The market is big enough for everyone, and nobody is very likely to take my stuff and produce a game which is near identical to my own.

So, to answer your question, if someone stole what I'd worked on the past 5 years and used it, it wouldn't have much effect at all. The chances of them being stupid enough to release an exact copy of my games and attempt to sell them is slim to none. Worst that would happen is they'd have nice shadows and heads up displays and particle effects in their game.

And graphics do NOT game a game. So if Valve is so concerned about some pixel shaders, then maybe they've stopped concentrating on gameplay. And if they fail because of that, that's their own fault, and not the fault of someone getting ahold of their pixel shaders.

"By your logic if I kill your mother, you shouldn't report it because there is a chance the police might investigate a suspect other than me."


And by your logic, revenge so important to you that it is worth risking the death, or lifelong incarceration, of an innocent man.

Of course, I don't expect someone to not report a murder. I'm just playing devils advocate, because your examples are extreme.

Someone took some source code. Valve did NOT need to delay the game. The game would be pirated anyhow. And you know as well as I do that most people who pirate games can't afford them, and most people want to play the game online and Valve's Steam system protects them against this. I'm sure it did not take them six months to modify the key generator. More like a few hours.

So, why is Valve seeking these pirates? Revenge. It's not like someone stole your TV, and you want it back because your insurance doesn't cover it. Nothing was stolen. Data was copied. People may have gotten ahold of some of their "secrets", but the cat's out of the bag.

So this is only motivated by a thirst for revenge. They can get nothing else from this. I'm sure the guy doesn't have much money.

If this happened to me, and I contacted the FBI and they found out who did it, I would drop the charges. I have no desire for revenge. If the person was wealthy I might make them pay restitution, but I'm not going to put a lowly pirate in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for taking some source code. If you think that the folks at Valve have never pirated anyhting, then you are a fool. And if they have, then it's pretty damn hypocritical of them to then get mad when someone else does it to them. There is not one person on this planet who uses a PC and has never violated a software license agreement. And the FBI shouldn't be wasting taxpayer money on a small time criminal like this.

"If someone breaks into my home, and the police accidentally arrest the wrong person, is it my fault?"


Would you feel guilty if you found out they arrested the wrong person and threw them in jail for 10 years? Or ruined them financially by taking all the data and equipment they need to run their business, as happened to Steve Jackson Games?

If it's not your fault, why feel guilty?

"9 computers in their home office is doing something the law doesn't like."

Yeah because everyone knows hackers type on two keyboards at once, and have nine video displays surrounding them so they can see six banks and three military installations they're hacking into all simultaneously.

You watch too many movies.

Even if this guy is guilty, and he sure doesn't talk like he is worried they'll find anyhting, they raided a ton of other people. They can't all be guilty. And that means that innocent people have had all their important files taken from them, and it may take 2 years to get them back, or they may never get them back. My entire life is on my PC. Emails from family and freinds, photographs of family which are irreplaceable, and my entire buisiness is contained on it, and on backups. If the FBI took my PC I'd lose my only source of income, my only way to support myself, and I'd lose years worth of memories contained in emails and photos, as well as countless peices of artwork I have produced, and code, both of which I would need to get another job.

This makes VALVE the bad guys in my book.

"The gameplay isn't just similar. They basically just pasted Simpsons characters into Crazy Taxi."

And Serious Sam basically just pasted their characters onto Doom.

You can't allow game companies to get away with crap like this. Creativity will stagnate if company X is the only company allwoed to produce games which play like X.

Take Doom for example. Let's pretend that ID software sued everyone who produced a first person shooter that resembled Doom.

Almost all first person shooters which came out immediately after Doom were very similar to Doom in gameplay, and technology. None of those games would have existed.

Additionally, because of the fear of being sued, games like System Shock may never have come to light because their gameplay is also extremely simialr to Doom, but with some extra stuff tacked on.

Now, you as the game developer would have to ask yourself, "Is that extra stuff enough to win a lawsuit?"

But more importantly you'd have to ask, "Can I even AFFORD to get INTO a lawsuit?"

Because even if the other party has no legal ground to stand on, that doesn't mean they can't sue you.

So right now, Id software and their licencess might well be the ONLY people developing first person games. Duke Nukem 3D may never have been created. Serious Sam as well. And hundreds of other games.

The small time shareware developer couldn't even consider taking the risk to enter such a market. They'd have to make absolutely sure that their game is in no way similar to any other game ever created.


"I don't know anything about copyright laws, so that might be ok, and I don't have a problem with it myself, but it is still a blatant rip-off, and if the law is in Sega's favor, they have the right to sue."

And we have the right to boycott them for suing, regardless of whether the law is on their side. Just because the law says something is okay, that doesn't make it right. Slavery used to be lawful too you know.

Sega is suing another game company for making the gameplay of Simpson's Hit and Run too similar to Crazy Taxi. That sort of thinking will severely damage the game industry and should not be promoted. Refusing to carry their demo will help send a message to Sega that such behavior is intolerable.

That game is too hard! I got stuck on the first question! It asked me to pick three things that fags do to you, and I kept trying to drag "The Squits" over onto the kid but it just kept on springing back onto to the list. Anyhow, I can't imagine what the maker of this game was thinking, cause I'm pretty sure fags don't give you greasy skin or make your brain shink. Why aren't there any other obvious choices like "sore ass" or "limp wrists"?

Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features doesn't mean that we too can't not die in a freak kerosene fight accident!

Funny that the ad showing right below today's OOTB is one of those interactive ones featuring crosshairs and a moving target you have to try to hit...

First, I think Blue was totally unjustified in the way that he reacted to that second post.

I don't think that post was intended as a troll AT ALL, and I myself might have asked the very same thing, because that's the first thing I wondered myself when I heard the news.


Also, disabling anonymous posting is annoying.

It's annoying because I don't feel like logging in every time I post. Sites always forget my login, whether by design, or by accident. If I have to request my passsword via email every time I want to post I'll just forego posting instead.

Also a lot of people who work in the industry and might have interesting commentary on a story might not be able to respond with their true feelings on something if it can be traced back to them.