Looks like Valve got pretty well buggered. Gabe Newell:

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.

Followup thread pinpointing the leaker?

Familiar names chime in with interesting comments on Technorati’s 1M blog tracking announcement.

Speaking of blogs, Brad Newman is one of the first year CNTV-IMD students that’s caught the blogging bug. Good links on virtual environment / digital media/performance stuff.

Also, he made a good oberservation on the USC Community of Electronic Media Students (or more specifically, the lack thereof).

Building a homemade steadicam?

• $14 Steady-Cam – he’ll also build one for you for $44, check out the QT (1MB) – hotness
• Mini Steadicam Projects – another homebuilt stabilizer, looks like a DIY Steadicam JR
• Do-It-Yourself Stabilizer for the XL-1 (mirror)
• HomeBuiltStabilizers – guess what this site’s about? Good links
• Steadicam FAQ

• Nerve.com: The Unsexy List – Fifty genital-retracting people, places and things
• Modelling a space for group-activity…
• Blog metrics – date-weighted rankings *would* be quite interesting…
• Six Log: Interview with pb
  

  People are experts at what they’re doing. Professional reporters are good at putting things in context, but they don’t have the depth of knowledge in specific areas that the people they’re covering (and often their readers) do. The weblog format provides the structure for people to write about their daily lives–and journalists could look to this as a source of expert knowledge.

• Nausea, Motion & Morning Sickness
• Newsgaming: September 12

What I really need is a blog-all tabs popup/bookmarklet…

(Update: Jesse let me know that bookmarklets can’t look at other tabs, although it might able to cycle through tabs… Will have to look into it; Maybe needs to be a XUL extension? Where in the Moz DOM is the tab info stored?)

• Grammar: Verbs: Lie and Lay
• Security Expert Geer Sounds Off on Dismissal
• CONAN THE FISCAL DISCIPLINARIAN
  

  Or, to summarize our summary: Cut taxes substantially, marginally lower spending by wringing inefficiencies out of the state budget (management inefficiencies of the kind Schwarzenegger is talking about are notoriously stingy as a source of savings), and dramatically increase spending on education. Hopefully Schwarzenegger will use tonight’s debate to explain how this qualifies him as a fiscal disciplinarian, since, to the uninformed eye, it looks like he’s proposing massive deficits.

• Birth of the Nation – from Brad DeLong’s blog; also good: My Favorite Paul Krugman Essay
• SubEthaEdit – still need to try this soon
• Hiveware Enkoder v6.0
• Oblivio: The Experience Machine – I’ve blogged this before… I think
• WeLove TheSCOInformationMinister
• iWebCal – WebCal displays iCal calendars and other vCalendars on the Web
• Ming the Mechanic: Networks for Networking
• Supersphere – still alive! so many good shows online
• Boundary Functions, The Body Language of Proxemics, via jko
• The Poor Man: Shorter Right-Wing Punditry’s Reaction to the Valerie Plame Affair: An Internal Dialogue

DPReview: Adobe Photoshop CS Review

From /., Eric_the_Awful posts:

“It is refreshing to see that P2P United is acknowledging that their members should be more active in educating their users about the consequences of illegal file sharing that is rampant on their networks as well as the other risks these networks pose to personal privacy and security,” Amy Weiss, senior vice president of communications for RIAA, said in a statement. “But, let’s face it, they need to do a whole lot more before they can claim to be legitimate businesses.”

So for the P2P United businesses to become quote legitimate businesses end quote, they should act like the RIAA and the RIAA’s constituents.

1. Sue their own customers.
2. “Offer” their artists (perhaps the programmers in this case?) unconscionable contracts along the line of “You agree to assign the authorship rights of your work to us. You will bear the entire financial risk of the marketing and reproduction of your work. In most cases we will receive the vast majority of the benefits of your work.”
3. “Cook” their books so that any profits generated by their artists/programmers appear in the vaguest possible terms, again avoiding any requirement to actually pay the artists/programmers.
4. Control their customer’s access to new and old works. Make it difficult/impossible for their customers to legally obtain works that aren’t on the “top 40.”
5. Accuse anyone who complains (or offers an alternative) of profound moral sins such as stealing from the artists.
6. Spend profits purchasing lobbying power to protect the above system.
7. Attack any organization or entity that appears to offer alternatives to the customers or artists.
8. Require the artists under threat of financial ruin to use the above system.

Wow. That’s a great way to run a business. I’m sure that the P2P networks would be loved by everyone if they adopted to above “business plans.”

I’ve got a few other words for Amy Weiss, but they are not fit for printing.

Bruce Sterling on Ten Technologies that Deserve to Die:

2. Coal-Based Power
Coal isn’t so much a
“technology” as a whole school of them, all of them bad or worse. Coal
was the primeval fuel of the industrial revolution. Coal powered the
first steam engines, whose killer app was pumping stagnant water out of
coal mines. It powered the railroads, whose killer app was moving
coal.

Find: fast 2-way URL hashing algorightm (1-way [MD5] + LUT ok?) for transparent proxying of remote media (images, etc); must either organize by media-type or retain extensions. Content hashing probably not necessary.

For content hashing, see also: Freenet Content Hash Keys, MusicBrainz TRMid (see Relatable TRM)