Half Life 2 CD keys online

[midspace]

Scouring the Internet for information on other games (having read my fill on the HL2 scandals, and rumour mills), what do I fall across?

Posts on international (non US) news sites, purporting to have Half Life 2 CD keys available before the game is released.

I won’t post links, as I don’t know what else is on this site.

If this is the case (why anyone would claim to have such numbers when they don’t have them is beyond me, unless they are scabbing money of unsuspecting noobs), then it’s as I had earlier mentioned in my own posts. That the stolen source code was likely to contain the algorisms used to verify CD keys when starting Half Life 2, as well as connecting to online play.

Valve should certainly look into this portion of their code, even if they don’t believe that piece has been compromised.

And on an off topic thread, has anyone noticed an increase in the last two months, the number of worms, virus’ and junkmail plastering the Internet?

 

[The Dark Elf]

You'll find that many sites will use tags and words in their pages using whatever is popular at the time to try get themselves noticed and get more visitors, especially warez sites where how many hits they get per day seems to be sooooo important. You could pretty much type anything you wanted into a search engine and get some fake site that has nothing of the sort on, but it did its job to get you there.. Eg the old classic -celebrity name nude- 99% of them have never been nude in any way, but these sites claim to have them. It's just a scam to get dim witted people to go to their sites

As for the worms and viruses. Yeah its annoying, The worst kind are the ones not many people know about, God drop for example, how many Joe Averages know about that, I've atleast come across one page that managed regardless of protection on this machine to drop a trojan onto the computer via a popup, it couldn't actually call home thanks to the firewall but the point is it got through and nothing caught it, and it was an old trojan, The Thing I think it was called (ironic at the time as I was bitching heavily about sci-fi channels plans to remake the classic film of the same name as a mini-series) There's also the new .hta exploit, very nasty and that almost got me. Result I had to stop .hta files being opened by mshta.exe the exploit wasn't run as thankfully the firewall caught the file it placed (Trj/Hatoy) as it tried to call home to start doing its damage. But the worrying part about that is this particular .hta popup was on a regular website, not a porn or warez site. and I've since read reports that similar ones are on completely above board sites elsewhere too, fortunecity was mentioned at one point... This rate I'm begining to think the only way to stop popups for good is to completely remove all file associations with htm/html files. They'd probably still open if done via IE but popups might finally be a thing of the past, unfortunately java popups in legit sites would probably stop working too. Can't win

I'd worry more about the ones you don't hear on the news all the time

 

[DiSTuRbEd]

Yeah those keys will probably be not useable when Half Life 2 is offically released. I am sure thats one of things VALVe is changing, CD key's and they authentication and so for MP.

 

[Skammich]

yeah, since the algorithm for the cd-keys was *probably* in the stolen source, then most likely they are going to completely change the algorithm, making all those "current" cd-keys invalid.

 

[RoyalEF]

Originally posted by midspace
why anyone would claim to have such numbers when they don’t have them is beyond me

To get people to talk about them and their site, since people are gullible enough to actually pay attention to such ludicrous stuff when the game is out (so you can't test the keys) and if they were hacked frmothe source they likely wouldn't work after release.

However they managed to your attention.