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
Hbringer,
Its also DEFINITELY a business! Its there to make money
Which is EXACTLY the reason why I find the current prevailent attitude amongst game developers so repugnant. You're not providing a global cure to all forms of disease, you're just providing a product that some people want to buy, in order to make yourself some money.
And it seems that, a few exceptions noted, most game developers nowadays think that pissing off their customers is the best way to do so. Quite frankly, I'm amazed at the fact the gaming industry is still growing. With the ever increasing "Ship it now, patch it later, maybe" attitude, and the plain sheer arrogance found in a lot of companies, why people keep buying so many games is a damn good mystery.
many game developers would still develop - just on a smaller scale as they couldn't afford to do it as a "day job"
Which might actually not be a bad idea, if you ask me. Every writer in the world has to start out that way (believe me, I know), and apart from Stephen King, no writer in the world bitches at his customers. Remember that "biting the hand that feeds you" bit?
Creston
Its also DEFINITELY a business! Its there to make money
Which is EXACTLY the reason why I find the current prevailent attitude amongst game developers so repugnant. You're not providing a global cure to all forms of disease, you're just providing a product that some people want to buy, in order to make yourself some money.
And it seems that, a few exceptions noted, most game developers nowadays think that pissing off their customers is the best way to do so. Quite frankly, I'm amazed at the fact the gaming industry is still growing. With the ever increasing "Ship it now, patch it later, maybe" attitude, and the plain sheer arrogance found in a lot of companies, why people keep buying so many games is a damn good mystery.
many game developers would still develop - just on a smaller scale as they couldn't afford to do it as a "day job"
Which might actually not be a bad idea, if you ask me. Every writer in the world has to start out that way (believe me, I know), and apart from Stephen King, no writer in the world bitches at his customers. Remember that "biting the hand that feeds you" bit?
Creston
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