state of the ffwd nation?

As you may have noticed, the linklog is getting most of my (relatively limited) update time, recently, and I've moved most of the recommendations I used to make on the main page over there. But a brief state of the nation address, perhaps?

- work at Gamasutra is going good, allegedly. We've really started beefing up the news section to pleasing effect, and this week's MMOG Resource Guide has been pretty well-received. Oh, and my Game Developer co-worker Brandon Sheffield is over at the Tokyo Game Show right now, harvesting some good interviews, hopefully for the site too. Also look for some new columns from curmudgeonly or adorable games industry figures, and further fun randomness.

- on a personal note, me and Holly just took our first step on the property ladder, buying a nice condo near the center of San Jose, yay. It's right next to the Adobe offices (not so useful, unless I need some help with Photoshop), and about 5 minutes walk from Caltrain (very handy, since I'll be taking it up to San Francisco for work.) We don't close for a month or so, though. In the mean-time, we have a long-scheduled holiday to Kauai, Hawaii with Holly's family in a coupla weeks, so don't be surprised if the linklog slows down a little around then.

- Leisure-time has been a little scarce, what with work, condo negotiations, long-ish commutes, typo-fixing on Gaming Hacks, and so on. But there's been a tiny bit of a chance to check out some new games (Guilty Gear XX#Reload, Burnout 3), TV (Spaced, Venture Bros), and so on and so forth.

Half-Life 2 code theft - what really happened?

First, a disclaimer. I was horrified when the Half-Life 2 source code got leaked, and delighted when they apparently managed to arrest the person primarily responsible. So, I wanted to reprint the results of a theory on how Valve's internal network got hacked, and the Half-Life 2 source got out.

This is based on a post made by me to the QT3 forums a few weeks back, and I made some oblique references in a Slashdot Games post, but I couldn't really explain it properly in just 150 words. Other people, particularly heise.de, have made some of these connections before (though the Tangis part hasn't been well-publicized.)

The starting point to explaining things properly was a UK Guardian article published in July, which says that the main HL2 code thief is German, and has Valve's Gabe Newell confirming: "Through conversations with this individual, [we] had convinced him to fly out to us in Seattle for a job interview. The plan was changed so German authorities would do the arrests on German soil."

This fits in with previous rumors that the HL2 thief is the same German guy who coded the Agobot worm, which later morphed into Phatbot, and is a pretty dangerous little remote takeover util.

Furthermore, this seem to jibe with the idea that a certain IRC log called another_log.txt, which was floating around just after the code theft, is the 'smoking gun', and is actually all true. There was a now-defunct site at http://www.gtwy.net/hl2/ which started just after the code theft, and got lots of anonymous tips in, including IRC logs, and this another_log.txt was one of them. Looks like it was all true - a single tipster gave all the information needed to bring down those responsible.

Particularly interesting (and here's the bit you may not have heard before) - in this 'another_log.txt' file, this Ago chap says that he got into Valve's network via "a pc in valves net, that wasnt directly controlled by valve." How does that work? Well, I looked into this a little..

Some versions of that log text file seem to have details removed, but this one mentions the name of the site Ago found: tangis.com. So, turns out Tangis is a wearable computing firm, now largely defunct, but it was run by Dan Newell, an ex-Microsoft employee. I believe that Dan Newell is Gabe Newell (the Valve CEO)'s brother. What's more, according to the older version of the Tangis.com webpage, the offices of Tangis are 'currently located in downtown Bellevue in Bellevue Place - 10th Floor Room 42'.

This is, as far as I understand it, is the actual location of the Valve offices. So at one point, Tangis was operating out of the Valve offices, or their own offices right next to Valve's. It looks like this is the machine the hackers probably got in through - Tangis.com was, most likely, an outward-facing web server that was actually part of Valve's internal network. Ouch.

So, the Agobot creator was arrested in May, but the Half-Life 2 code theft wasn't mentioned then. It's noted in that story that "The arrest of the alleged creator of Agobot didn't come from informants... but from other, unspecified, leads." I think it was the HL2 code theft investigation and another_log.txt that uncovered the fact that the same person also coded Agobot. Valve and the authorities then had to deal with the other people mentioned in another_log.txt, and announced the arrests on June 10th. It would seem natural that Ago used Agobot's IRC-controlled backdoor commands to actually do the hacking - he may have used a buffer overflow trick in an unpatched version of Windows to get onto the site in the first place.

Some of this is speculation, obviously - there will be a trial pending, so I doubt we'll get much more info for now, but I'd love to know if Ago intentionally got in through Tangis.com, knowing it to be part of the Valve network, or whether he was just nosing around and happened to find it (more likely?) But I'll end with the author of another_log.txt's closing words - it restores a little faith in human nature that somebody actually cared enough to turn the leakers in:

'What these people did simply has gone too far and caused immense damage to one of the best game companies around.'

Amen.

Gaming Hacks - Hacking the Place Down?

So, the book is awaiting final proof-reading ahead of an October release, thus it's finally time to talk more about Gaming Hacks, the O'Reilly-published book I've been working on since earlier this year. Some obvious facts - it's in the Hacks Series, alongside fun books like Google Hacks and Amazon Hacks. Like all Hacks books, it contains '100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools' - hacks intended to be intensely practical, in-depth, and, most of all - actually useful.

Though my name is on the front of the book, and I wrote the majority of the darn thing, you'll see a big list of expert contributors listed inside the book. Who dat? Well, we have IF demi-gods Andrew Plotkin and Adam Cadre teaching you how to make an Inform text adventure. We've got the PlanetQuake Speed Demos Archive guys (Morfans and Radix) talking about how to run the perfect speed demo. We've got Penny Arcade's audio-visual expert Stormy talking about getting the best audio and video set-ups for perfect gaming goodness. We have MMORPGdot's Michael Zenke doing an amazing job with tips, tricks, and exploits regarding the MMO genre.

More? We've got Wired News/GameSpot/etc's Chris Kohler helping you to play Japanese games when you don't know no Japanese, guv'nor. We've got Hugh Hancock from Machinima.com and Strange Company explaining how to make neeto machinima. We've got Unreal modding tips from Make Something Unreal award winners Demiurge Studios. We've got shmup tips and tricks from Roger Post of ShootTheCore.com. My editor Chromatic pitches in with some neat Python and DOOM hacks. Heck, we even have an introduction written by Marc Laidlaw, a former interview subject of mine, one-time cyberpunk novelist, and the writer in residence for Half-Life and Half-Life 2 at Valve Software. And that's even missing off a few more worthy contributors, yikes...

Anyhow, you get the idea. I also contribute material on MAME, Visual Pinball, homebrew Dreamcast shenanigans, the Nuon, Elastomania (!), and lots more besides. Because of the breadth and depth of the task, it's been a struggle to do all the diverse material justice, but now I've seen the book come together, I'm delighted. If you're a gamer, then I guarantee you will find at least a few facts in here that you never knew (and maybe even wanted to!) And, heck, when ToastyFrog proof-read it, it made him go and buy a Game Boy Camera - the first, 4-color step to global domination? I reckon. Looks like you can pre-order Gaming Hacks at Amazon for 32 percent off cover price, too. Not that I'm hinting, or anything.