presidentjim

Mr. Newell,

During the leak of the Half Life 2 Source Code in the fall of 2003, a group of vigilante gamers banded together with the hope of catching the hackers. This was because we were told by Valve (and you specifically) on the Valve Forums that there would be major game delays due to the leak. We were FURIOUS. The original Half-Life was my favorite game and I was very much anticipating the release of Half Life 2.

There were two of us who were leading the “investigation,” TheAmazingXemo and myself, Gtwy. I was still in high school and had no formal background in any kind of investigative work, but I knew basic HTML and so we did what we could. We started a website known as the "Half Life 2 Source Code Resource Page." At the time, Usenet was a hugely popular file sharing utility and we traced the source code files back to a user who had posted them there. We were able to google his Usenet username and find that he was a member of a clan in some MMORPG and got his full name and contact info from their clan site. He gave up his source as soon as we contacted him as someone from IRC.

At its peak, our website was receiving between half a million and a million hits per day. It was amazing going through all of the anonymous tips and messages from people that came pouring in from all across the globe. And it felt like we were doing something to help.

I know that your company was aware of our website because we were contacted by the FBI and even accused of committing the hack ourselves. I don’t blame you for this course of action, it probably was very suspicious from your vantage point. I was contacted and told to redact the file count and file tree listing that proved the hack was real, which we did.

However, we did successfully identify the hacker, Ago, in our final post, dated October 13, 2003. I don’t know if this was before or after the FBI had already privately figured it out, but I would like to think that somehow we helped the investigation. I know that if they had figured it out, it wasn't public knowledge yet. (Evidence we released can be found archived here.)

Now that it’s been over a decade since the investigation, I was hoping you could shed some light on what happened behind the scenes. I have always wanted to reach out to you about this but I never knew how. Mainly, I just want you to know that our intentions were benevolent and that we were and still are loyal Valve fans. Really hoping you respond to this and even if you cannot, thanks for doing the AMA!

You have no idea how much this comment means to me!!! THANK YOU

Edit: I was never officially contacted by Valve although someone from your office may have emailed me using a hotmail/gmail/etc.

/u/Ikarus3426 there's an easy way out of this... find and purchase an edible hat.

Steve,

Thanks for doing an AMA.

I own a small IT firm (we handle about 20 business computer networks) and TechNet was an extremely valuable resource. We would mostly use it to get ISOs when people lost their CDs or we were doing reinstalls using their completely legal and legitimate product codes. Also, under your leadership, OEMs stop putting Microsoft CD keys on the outside of the computers. This again did nothing to stop piracy but hurt both customers and small tech companies like us who were trying to reload faulty computers.

Down here on the ground in IT - as opposed to in the upper echelons of corporate America - Microsoft took what was a simple way to manage and support Microsoft products and made it into a huge cluster of grey area. In fact, this solution to "stop piracy" has resulted in a mass piracy of ISOs even when legitimate keys are already purchased.

So my question is why did Microsoft go this direction while you were there? Were you involved at all with these decisions? I realize how something so simple as this may not have been seen as a big deal from your perspective, but it was a huge deal for us. Thanks again.

Edit: frustrating. I know he saw this. Oh well.

Everyone made presumptions that they could do all of this stuff in film and novels, but I don't think most of the country realized that they actually could. It's pretty scary when you realize the Tom Clancy books are closer to what's going on than what we read in the paper.