Jurassic Rage have updated with some new renders of Raptor and T-Rex.

Source: Wired News

"Many executives believe that source code is valuable and has to be protected," Calenda said. But in the gaming industry, it's difficult for any company to stay ahead based on programming talent alone.
"In reality, people move from job to job and exchange ideas, and any great coder can do what's needed to produce a particular effect," he said.
One gaming industry executive, who asked not to be named, went even further in minimizing the theft's importance. He noted that rival developers likely would stay away from downloading the stolen code, calling it "(expletive deleted) antimatter."
News of the source-code theft and release began ricocheting around the Net Thursday morning. Early that afternoon, Valve's Newell confirmed the theft in a message-board posting at Half-Life2.net that pleaded for help from the vast online community built around the game and Valve's other products.

Source: eWEEK

The theft of the code, which was made available for download on the Net, came after a monthlong concerted effort by hackers to infiltrate Valve's network. Malicious activity in the Valve network included denial-of-service attacks, suspicious e-mail activity and the installation of keystroke loggers, Newell added.
This theft is only one item on a long list of security-related problems for the Redmond, Wash. software maker this week. Other happenings included the discovery of more security flaws in Internet Explorer and the filing of a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft over such vulnerabilities in both applications and system software. And the company was also stung by a recent report arguing that the dominance of Windows is a hindrance to computing security.
"This is what happens when you have 31 publicly known unpatched vulnerabilities in IE," wrote Thor Larholm, senior security researcher for PivX Solutions LLC, in a posting to the NTBugTraq mailing list. "I have seen screenshots of successfully compiled HL2 installations, with WorldCraft and Model Viewer running atop a listing of directories such as hl2, tf2 and cstrike."

Source: Stephen Murray

We are at it again, with a lot of new concept stuff out:

All of the new media can be found on the media page
(http://c132.halflife-mods.com/media.php). The new things:
1. A sketch of the hunter multiplayer class. (done by Taco241) 2. A mutated Oxymentor, too long under experimentation. (done by Taco241) 3. Two drawings of one of the MP maps, which takes place in a hotel. One shows the place during the day, and the other at night. (done by Cardo, who will be mapping it)

We also have some new music by basoona, Called BAS_01. We will be naming the tracks this way from now on, hopefully we will have a full soundtrack by the time hl2 rolls around.

We are still looking for two more coders! Our MP is going to be quite extensive, so we need the help. Apply to s_murray20@hotmail.com.

Source Timmay

Tonight on English speaking internet radio http://www.HalfLifeRadio.com/, will be having a show tonight on the half-life 2 source code leak. Talking about every thing about it, what we think happened, how it was leaked, what the results will be, good and bad, and much more.

The SnarkPit competition has closed.

There are some exellent entries this year and from not so well known mappers.

To view the entries and vote head over to the SnarkPit

Source: Charlie Cleveland

The NS news page has been updated with a few news tidbits, the most interesting being the release of around 300 new hand-painted textures for use by NS community mappers! Here's a sample to whet your appetite (map by Merkaba):

These textures are only for use in NS maps of course.
Thanks again for your support!

Source: Steam Powered

A Steam update will be released tonight at about 7:00 PDT. The update will take effect automatically when you exit and restart Steam. About 5 minutes before the update goes out, we'll send a message to everyone via Friends.
Here's what's new:

• fixed bug where favorite servers would not get saved to disk if filtered out


• increased max servers listed from 10,000 to 20,000


• fixed 'add friends' and 'game info' dialogs showing up over gameplay in game


• fixed problem with not always being able to re-add friends after removing them


• fixed case where authorization request dialog could appear multiple times from the same user


• fixed chat messages & authorization requests stealing focus and not starting minimized


• fixed auto-away not working


• removed 'about' dialog


• fixed add-on (checkers, etc) invites when in game appearing over the top of the game, instead of just in the gameUI area


• removed unnecessary bind() calls for client UDP sockets


• chat dialogs now add a message into the text whenever the other user changes status


• fixed spurious character in Game Info dialog


• change 'time' info in game info player list to be in hours:minutes:seconds instead of just seconds


• changed game info player list to default to sorting by score, then time

Source: www.halflife2.net

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.

Well, this sucks.

What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. 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.

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.

Gabe
__________________
Gabe Newell

As you've most likely noticed lately, we've had occasional periods of downtime, and a full day of downtime a few days ago. The full-day downtime was due to hardware problems, which have been fixed and nothing was lost. I apologize for not keeping closer contact with our hosted sites, as it's something you should expect from any host.

Right now we are still running into occasional problems with our mySQL server 'freezing', it is not hardware-based nor is it the server overloading. I hate to admit it, but we have no idea what is causing this problem yet. As of today we have implemented a few solutions to stop downtime, by setting up scripts to automate restarting mySQL - which at least solves that part of the problem. Considering we've been at this for 3 1/2 years I'm certain we'll fix it shortly, but I felt with the lack of communication from edgenetwork staff lately that you all deserved an honest update.

In other news, to recap the past few months, we now operate primarily on a Dual Xeon 2.0ghz (with Hyper-Threading too, naturally), with 2GB Ram, and SCSI drives. The move took place in May, not too long after my last global email informing you we would be moving. We performed the move so quickly it almost seemed like a small outage, completed in just under 2 hours. Our traffic has continued to grow ever since, not only that, we've managed to be on the receiving end of better deals and as a result we're planning to expand in any way we can. Including but not limited to, a paid-for web hosting option not restricted to gaming at all. We'll have more news on that later.

I have to say, I'm not sure what I pictured edgenetwork to become when I was 'playing around' with the idea back in early 2000, then with how badly the advertising industry was in 2001 (the 'great depression' for the gaming community), I never thought we'd still be around for 2003, let alone heading into 2004. Some of you have been hosted by us for years, but to all of you I thank for you bearing with us whenever we've had a slight problem or setback, instead of 'jumping ship' at the first sign of trouble. We have a long list of changes/plans we intend to make over the coming months, including an overhaul to our edgewebmaster system, hopefully bringing it up to par with today's standards (such as CPanel), and then beating them :) Including a change to edgefiles, to make it.. better :P Such as mirrors dedicated just to hosted sites, so our mirroring popular files doesn't interfere in what is a requirement to you hosted sites. I hope you all do understand, the requirement for edgefiles is to spread bandwidth usage to save costs, not something we're doing just to be nasty. If anyone would like to suggest something we can do, feel free to let me know.

Thanks for your patience in reading through these ramblings ;)


-------------------------------------------------------
Shawn Harkin
www.edgenetwork.org