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A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history
- account42 15d ago> This weapon, seen in a newly revealed Portal 2 prototype, was previously seen in Half-Life 2: Episode 3 footage released by Valve. Fun fact, you can get all the normal Half-Life 2 weapons in normal Portal using the `impulse 101` cheat command in the console (probably requires enabling `sv_cheats 1` before).
- abdullrahmantar 11d ago[dead]
- xnx 17d agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497110
- HelloUsername 17d agoDiscussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498002
- ilt 16d ago@dang - may be combine these discussions although one has no comments yet.
- cwillu 16d ago"@dang" doesn't do anything; email the address in the footer if you want to propose something to a mod.
- hananova 16d agoGiven how often dang replies to an @dang post, he clearly has a running search for it. Expecting us to go out of band is ridiculous and won't happen.
- cwillu 15d agoIt's not ridiculous, and it happens regularly.
- HelloUsername 15d ago> Given how often dang replies to an @dang post, he clearly has a running search for it Huh how do you know somebody didn't email them the hn comment containing the @dang ?
- charcircuit 17d agoLeak homepage: https://steam2.download/ https://steam2.download/
- edoceo 17d agoHow can they (host, domain owner) not get sued?
- hhjinks 17d agoSteam.com was for the longest time unrelated to Valve, which is why you'll find Steam under steampowered.com instead.
- flexagoon 17d agoIt's still unrelated AFAIK. From what I remember, the owner refused to sell the domain, and then eventually asked Valve for a huge fee that they refused to pay. So now the domain is just unused.
- inigyou 17d agoThat's what happens when you name your project after someone else's domain. A usual part of starting a project now is picking an unused domain name.
- dewey 17d agoUsing a dictionary word for your project will never be easy, but what often happens now is to just not get the .com domain (Likely taken), or prefix with "get" and then later hope that you can time it right so that you can afford the clean .com domain...but not be famous enough that the buyer would want to get some crazy amount for it.
- account42 15d agoI really wish using random dictionary words wouldn't be so popular.
- haunter 17d agoYeah the long forgotten Steam release of League of Legends is also in the files (it was only available for like 5 months) Might not be the most interesting game in the leak but old versions of live service games are almost impossible to come by https://steamdb.info/app/20590/ https://steamdb.info/app/20590/ Downloaded it to extract all the old assets but it still needs an encrypted depot key >error!! -- extract: missing depot key!, pass --key if you know it though Some people reported that "--key 0000000000000000" or "--key 0" works on some depots... well not here
- WorseIsBetter 17d agoGood question. Probably in a jurisdiction Valve can't touch, or they're just indexing stuff without hosting the actual files. Either way, it's risky. Valve's lawyers are definitely already on it
- giov4 17d agoIf it will be really seeded forever that would be a great way of archiving for posterity! btw interestingly from the leak homepage: "To the operators of browsers/indexers: please look into caching or mirroring the blobs, as a large volume of requests at this point are coming from these, which seem to be impacting downloads for everyone. It's a 15 GB directory that would save the time of many people. Many people should have them all downloaded by now. We are facing pretty severe link oversaturation. If you managed to download something please try seeding them on the torrent and/or sharing the original files on third party services to spare us some load. The more torrent seeds the faster and more viable it shall be."
- gosub100 16d agoI think there could be a market for distributed cloud storage: the client promises a coin payment for $X, in return for storing Y mb/GB of encrypted data. The way to prove it is still there is by sending periodic hash checks of random segments of the file. If the correct match comes back, a portion (rent) is paid to renew the storage. Upon retrieval, the final sum is paid.
- MyelinatedT 16d agoThere is Filecoin, which sounds somewhat similar conceptually to what you describe (albeit with the standard blockchain caveats).
- pigeons 16d agoHow is filecoin looking for surviving IPFS's great decline?
- Dylan16807 16d agoFilecoin was really weird on top of the standard caveats. I couldn't even figure out how to directly use and earn it. And all the straightforward options to touch filecoin were brokers offering free storage based on incentive programs. Storj is a much more straightforward implementation. So is Sia, I think.
- shevy-java 17d agoMy harddisc is only 2TB!
- prmoustache 16d agoThanksfully bittorrent clients allow you to only download the files you want in a particular torrent.
- BoxwoodSeed 16d agoGood excuse to become a data hoarder, but bad timing giving the pricing situation.
- account42 15d agoWell its not as bad as RAM or GPUs. You can still get almost e.g. 28 TB disk for around $1k which makes it a comparatively affordable hobby considering what you can end up spending on many others.
- zetalyrae 17d agoTangential, but it's interesting to me that there are "Valve watchers", people who are big on social media for doing Valve analysis and kremlinology. Humans are so cool.
- jokoon 16d agoSorry what's the link between valve and kremlin?
- pwdisswordfishq 16d agoI'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
- jokoon 11d agohey, no threats, please
- Schlagbohrer 16d agokremlinology is an old pre-1989 term for people trying to observe and interpret the workings of a tightly sealed institution. Could be used for Vatican rumors and news, too, for example, or North Korea, etc.
- ramses0 16d agoPentagon pizza tracker?
- mister_mort 16d agoSimilar to that idea of trying to derive stuff from an indirect channel, but much more distant. (There is an obvious link between food consumption and building occupancy.) Stuff like watching the order of names on public lists of attendees for dinner events, etc. If someone disappeared or moved off the top few names, perhaps they're in trouble or have been purged from the party ... or maybe they're just sick this week.
- mmastrac 16d agoIs there a lookup that gives you a title to blob mapping?
- mister_mort 16d agoI think the most interesting thing I've seen from these leaks are the Portal 2 beta content videos. The temporary time-slow mechanic and the beta voice acting have been really interesting to see. The time slow mechanic in particular could have made the game a lot more accessible to gamers with slow reflexes and refocused the game on the puzzle elements.
- anal_reactor 16d ago[flagged]
- account42 15d agoIt really depends. Sometimes it's possible to add optional modes that make things easier for casuals without changing anything from more hardcore players and there is nothing wrong with that. They can always add achievements or some other minor reward for not using those modes so that you can keep showing off your e-peen.
- cindyllm 16d ago[dead]
- TaLiTr 16d ago> A perfect game isn't a game that casts a wide net, a perfect game is a game that satisfies its target audience. Maybe, but that's completely tangential to what the GP said. And aside from that those games with a wide net do have a target audience, that's how they end up in that situation to begin with.
- anal_reactor 16d agoThe game has both puzzle and platforming elements. A similar argument could be made "they could make puzzles easier for people who don't like puzzles" which is silly because one of the reasons why the game got so popular is that people liked the synergy of puzzles and platforming. Either way, I really doubt that Portal 2 suffered from lack of recognition and further improvements were necessary in this area. You'd be way more likely to break something that works.
- guillybarres 16d agoThis is one of the craziest "breach" stories I've come across recently, I feel like it's gone a little bit under the radar considering the size and scope.
- accrual 16d agoI wonder if this will allow for reviving old SRCDS (Source Dedicated Server) versions. Older versions of popular titles like Counter-Strike: Source would still be playable on their original hardware if the old clients + servers were available. As it is now, these games are no longer playable on original early-mid 2000s hardware because Steam no longer supports Win2k/XP, and even if it did, the games themselves have been heavily patched and updated over the years and have higher system requirements. Old clients still exist (even prior to "teraleak"), but the SRCDS versions are gone as far as I can tell. I just think it'd be fun to host retro LAN parties using the hardware and software we had back then, or even just to revisit what it was like to be a server OP in those days.
- antonkochubey 15d agov34 CSS srcds is very easy to find online
- vivzkestrel 16d ago- would be nice to see ubisoft game source codes leak for their 20 yr old games which they have completely abandoned at this point
- thataccount 16d agoFeels more like a kind of closure to an era than it does a discovery.
- austin-cheney 16d agoI did not know what to look for, so I looked at the list to see what is in there and had no idea what I was looking at. I am making a lot of assumptions and don't know how any of this works. * It appears the dats_dates.txt file is a list of depot item contents string sorted by depo numeric identifier. * It also appears the depo identifier is the first underscore separated value on a given line * It seems the more popular artifacts are referenced multiple times in the list due to the quantity of contents and versions associated with a given depo All of that could be wrong, but nonetheless I wrote a small 2minute Node.js script to analyze the list. It takes about 0.03 seconds to execute, on my machine anyways, and produces as output a list of depo identifiers sorted by the frequency in which those identifiers occur in the dats_date.txt file. These identifiers do not always resolve to a game title using the steamdb.info site but several do. Because though because steamdb.info applies rate limiting and then a temporary IP address block. https://gist.github.com/prettydiff/fe1456dbd458b8a376961f4f658c76d5 https://gist.github.com/prettydiff/fe1456dbd458b8a376961f4f6...
- henrycoler 16d ago[flagged]
- rehmano 15d agoRehmano