The boy who stole Half Life 2 source code (2011)

It's stories like these that's inspired me to start up a new project at oppressed.me. I'm trying to compile a list of hackers and hacktivists that have been imprisoned in order to let the internet easily send them correspondence. I'm also going to ask publishers for donations of older copies of technical books to send them.

A lot of hackers are just kids that make a stupid mistake. During their time in jail, their skills get soft or they'll get hardened by their time there. My hope is to let them know that people on the outside still are thinking of them and to help them keep their skills up-to-date.

I'm a bit overwhelmed with a startup at the moment, but I anticipate the non-profit to be formed and to launch sometime in the fall.

I'm not condoning breaking into the network and stealing source code, but what financial damage did this cause to Valve? The article repeatedly refers to financial damages, but I'm not sure how that is.

I don't feel sorry for malware writers. They are not oppressed and deserve what they got.

And this guy also stole people's software keys.

If they were talented coders, they could've found less destructive ways to make money. But he decided to go the greedy route.

This was an amazing and somewhat sad story. How's Gembe doing today? Based on his near adoration of the Valve developers, it would be fitting if he worked in the gaming industry. Maybe he could set things right by helping to make Half-Life 3?

I still remember the day HL2 leaked. All of my friends and I were in IRC trying to download the damn thing from DCC bots.

I was lucky and got a slot that provided the full 80kbyte/s. I finished the download first, but my PC was pretty old back then so I didn't even bother trying to run it. Instead, I removed my hard drive (my system drive!), picked up a friend and we drove to another friend who had the fastest PC at the time. About 30 mins later all of us (I believe 5 or 6 guys) gathered in a tiny dorm and just stood in awe as we booted up HL2.

There was barely any gameplay present. You could just walk around in some maps and admire the graphics. It didn't matter. If we hadn't been stoked before, we were now.

In hindsight, this all was just an amazing PR stunt. Fun times.