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
I guess I can see you view, but I think you should also look at what Valve has done to themselves.
Before E3, the only people that cared about Valve were the ones that felt betrayed by the vaporware of Team Fortress 2. After E3, Valve completely turned around all public opinion by showing off a nearly complete Half-Life 2. At that time, Valve said that they were at the final stages of creating a game they had worked on for almost 5 years in secret. All that was left was completing the levels, which included play-testing, & the bug-squashing.
Everyone was estatic! We were about to play a game that came out of nowhere & was everything we could possibly want & more. It was so damned good that ID software had to completely rethink their new game Doom3 & make it better because Half-Life2 was suddenly there from nowhere to kick its royal ass. This was even better news for gamers, because ID had competition now & that can only mean they'll make an even better game.
Half-Life 2 was slated to appear on the shelves or at least over steam on September 30th. Then we heard about a delay. Then there wasn't a delay. Now there is a delay. And the players feel betrayed again by the lies of Valve.
Steam is a whole other story. People are suspicious of it, don't like it, can't get it to work, or otherwise don't want it on their system in order to play Valve games.
Now Valve is crying about their woes. I don't feel sorry. I think they got what they deserved. Fuck me over once & woe is me. Fuck me over twice & FUCK YOU!
Before E3, the only people that cared about Valve were the ones that felt betrayed by the vaporware of Team Fortress 2. After E3, Valve completely turned around all public opinion by showing off a nearly complete Half-Life 2. At that time, Valve said that they were at the final stages of creating a game they had worked on for almost 5 years in secret. All that was left was completing the levels, which included play-testing, & the bug-squashing.
Everyone was estatic! We were about to play a game that came out of nowhere & was everything we could possibly want & more. It was so damned good that ID software had to completely rethink their new game Doom3 & make it better because Half-Life2 was suddenly there from nowhere to kick its royal ass. This was even better news for gamers, because ID had competition now & that can only mean they'll make an even better game.
Half-Life 2 was slated to appear on the shelves or at least over steam on September 30th. Then we heard about a delay. Then there wasn't a delay. Now there is a delay. And the players feel betrayed again by the lies of Valve.
Steam is a whole other story. People are suspicious of it, don't like it, can't get it to work, or otherwise don't want it on their system in order to play Valve games.
Now Valve is crying about their woes. I don't feel sorry. I think they got what they deserved. Fuck me over once & woe is me. Fuck me over twice & FUCK YOU!
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