Source code hackers from " several countries" nicked by cyperpolice. But, er, still no news on Half-Life 2 release date

You may remember waaay back in October that some fiendish hackers managed to nick the Half-Life 2 source code - which resulted in a very early version of the game finding its way on to the net (and various dodgy eastern European market stalls). Well, the cyberpolice were clearly on the case as it' s been announced today that a number of arrests have been made in relation to the theft. Which just goes to prove: don' t do the crime if you can' t do the time. Ahem.

" Within a few days of the announcement of the break-in, the online gaming community had tracked down those involved," says Valve CEO Gabe Newell. " It was extraordinary to watch how quickly and how cleverly gamers were able to unravel what are traditionally unsolvable problems for law enforcement related to this kind of cyber-crime.

" It was very uplifting to see how the community rallied and tracked these people down. Everyone here at Valve is once again reminded of how much we owe to the gaming community." The indentity and, indeed, the location of the culprits hasn' t been revealed though and all we know is that arrests were made " in several countries" .

The news comes on the same day as a report from copy protection experts Macrovision that found that 52% of 2219 PC gamers they surveyed had recently downloaded pirated software. While current estimates on the impact of packaged software piracy suggest a figure of $3 billion worldwide, Macrovision believes the rise in high-speed file sharing pushes the figure substantially higher.

Meanwhile, the devious Metal Gear Solid 3 thieves - who used the more old-fashioned approach of pilfering a game disc from a PS2 at E3 - are still at large.

Credit: gamesrader

You beat me to it!

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&e=1&u=/nm/20040610/tc_nm/crime_halflife_dc

Ahh, yes. we finally found em.

" Within a few days of the announcement of the break-in, the online gaming community had tracked down those involved," says Valve CEO Gabe Newell

sure took us a whlie to hear about it, if they knew who did it within the first few days. I can' t believe that it wasn' t even just the US, but people in other countries are being charged. You know gaming is getting big when something like this happens