Half-Life 2 Source Code Leak [Oct 02, 2003, 5:41 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
A post to the Halflife2.net
Forums by Gabe Newell finally has a comment on the leaked Half-Life 2 source
code, brought to the world's attention by Gamer's
With Jobs and Slashdot.
Here's the deal:
Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.
Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.
Here is what we know:
1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.
Well, this sucks.
What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.
We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.
Gabe
Re : #94
The gaming community DESERVES To be flamed every once in a while. Its fanatacism, mob-behavior, and habit of biting the hands that feed it are a constant source of frustration for those of us that make games for a living
Hbringer,
I know this is an attitude that many game developers seem to have these days, and quite frankly I find it stupendously arrogant. You are not providing me or the community with something vital to my existence. You are providing me with one form of entertainment. It's a very good form of entertainment, granted, but it's just that. Entertainment. If you stopped making games, if the entire industry stopped making games, I'd read more books. Or watch more television. Go to the zoo or the lake more often. Go out to the movies or theater more often.
Maybe once game developers start realising that it is WE, the gamers, who are feeding YOU, the developer, you'll see this attitude from the community change. It'd be real nice for the game developer to understand (like they once did) that WE are YOUR customer, not the other way around. My money pays your rent, yours doesn't pay mine. Many companies in the world understand this, the gaming industry seems to understand it less and less every day. I can't think of any other industry where this EULA bullshit etc comes into play.
Btw, this isn't meant personally towards you, so please don't take it as such, it's a general comment towards game developers who seem to think that the Electronic Arts attitude is the right way to go...
Creston
The gaming community DESERVES To be flamed every once in a while. Its fanatacism, mob-behavior, and habit of biting the hands that feed it are a constant source of frustration for those of us that make games for a living
Hbringer,
I know this is an attitude that many game developers seem to have these days, and quite frankly I find it stupendously arrogant. You are not providing me or the community with something vital to my existence. You are providing me with one form of entertainment. It's a very good form of entertainment, granted, but it's just that. Entertainment. If you stopped making games, if the entire industry stopped making games, I'd read more books. Or watch more television. Go to the zoo or the lake more often. Go out to the movies or theater more often.
Maybe once game developers start realising that it is WE, the gamers, who are feeding YOU, the developer, you'll see this attitude from the community change. It'd be real nice for the game developer to understand (like they once did) that WE are YOUR customer, not the other way around. My money pays your rent, yours doesn't pay mine. Many companies in the world understand this, the gaming industry seems to understand it less and less every day. I can't think of any other industry where this EULA bullshit etc comes into play.
Btw, this isn't meant personally towards you, so please don't take it as such, it's a general comment towards game developers who seem to think that the Electronic Arts attitude is the right way to go...
Creston
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