It's not about who has to pay for the product, it's about who gets to create the product in the first place. There's no idealists rushing in because this isn't a case of 'copying' versus 'stealing.' Regardless of what you label it, the unauthorized distribution of source code that the creator intends to keep secret is wrong because it divides control of the creative process. 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. 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. I have a special email address for people to send information to, If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. We don't know if these are related or independent.

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).Ħ) 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. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.ģ) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.Ĥ) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.ĥ) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.Ģ) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.ġ) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.

Half life 2 sucks