I 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.
Tangential, 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.
kremlinology is the term for any political intelligence gathering that's all second-order. In the canonical case of the Kremlin it's because it was very difficult to get inside data and even then there were so many moving parts that you needed an expert in just that area who had alot of data like who was having drinks with whom to predict who might be on the out and who might be ascendant.
kremlinology 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.
Similar 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.
If 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."
I 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.
They could also choose to just get sued - they will lose, but the site will be up until that happens (possibly years) if they don't have trigger-happy hosting provider
It'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.
Using 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.
welcome to terarelease - a as-complete-as-possible steam2 content server dump
extractor howto:
for the majority of depots you need to download blobs & dats for wanted version *as well as all past versions*
as the files are stored as deltas inside the dat files, HOWEVER IF you encounter a depot that has duplicate blobs & dats,
that means at some point in time valve did a full reset in which case you need to provide the CRC of the wanted
blob (3rd file name component) to the extractor using --blobcrc, source code for the extractor is also left in this
folder if you want to have a peek at it
examples:
extract /mnt/big/blobs /mnt/big/dats 852 0 | for depots w/o reset
extract /mnt/big/blobs /mnt/big/dats 841 0 --blobcrc 83ced978 | for depots that did reset
win64 build is provided, for linux you have to build it yourself as any kind of binary compatibility is inexistent except for wine
(you are using linux, you should know how to build it yourself right? ...right?)
sharing:
you are very much encouraged to share and mirror/seed this release as possible
SHARING IS CARING
warm n good wishes to all hoarders who had stuff from this collection <3
My own gaming days are over, but I am very annoyed that the big corporations killed libgen effectively (it is not entirely gone, but the old content is nowhere near as it used to be, and Anna's archive is also nowhere near as good either, unfortunately).
I kind of have mixed feelings about this, because from one point of view we're fighting the corporations, but from another, Valve is a major force in pushing Linux gaming so that more gaming can be done outside of big corpo operating systems.
It seems to me that fighting with Valve is like fighting against what we would want to have.
Mind you Valve has done equal amount of bad as well by inventing the whole battle pass system and thus bringing even more FOMO to games, and making unregulated gambling available to millions which is still going strong and surprisingly no one cares about it. There are some lawsuits here and there but they focus on the lootbox gacha element and not the whole gambling market running on the Steam API
Good 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
Yeah 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/
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
I 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.
Tangential, 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.
Sorry what's the link between valve and kremlin?
kremlinology is the term for any political intelligence gathering that's all second-order. In the canonical case of the Kremlin it's because it was very difficult to get inside data and even then there were so many moving parts that you needed an expert in just that area who had alot of data like who was having drinks with whom to predict who might be on the out and who might be ascendant.
>In the canonical case of the Kremlin it's because it was very difficult to get inside data
not anymore, apparently. even random ~~grifters~~ geopolitics experts on youtube now have people on the inside.
we mostly live in misinformation age
don't get fooled that only one side does that
kremlinology 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.
Pentagon pizza tracker?
Similar 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.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497110
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498002
@dang - may be combine these discussions although one has no comments yet.
If 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."
I 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.
There is Filecoin, which sounds somewhat similar conceptually to what you describe (albeit with the standard blockchain caveats).
So, Pied Piper?
Is there a lookup that gives you a title to blob mapping?
Leak homepage: https://steam2.download/
How can they (host, domain owner) not get sued?
They could also choose to just get sued - they will lose, but the site will be up until that happens (possibly years) if they don't have trigger-happy hosting provider
Steam.com was for the longest time unrelated to Valve, which is why you'll find Steam under steampowered.com instead.
Valve owns s.team now, as well. That’ll bring you to the store page
It also acts as a url shortener for their hardware support pages.
s.team/deck, and s.team/machine take you to the appropriate support pages.
It'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.
That'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.
Or if you’re worth a trillion dollars you just literally buy the domain chat.com for over $15 million
Using 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.
in the gaming community there's infinite amounts of cheat devs, mods, leaks like this, etc.
it's not like regular stuff where companies just sue you left and right, this stuff is hard to pursue and usually not worth it
it can get taken down but that's about it
They probably will, that's why it's good to grab the torrent while we can.
The DHT network picked it up already so the magnet link is enough. At this point it will be available forever (as long as there are seeders)
0f3e7a75c0f885dde481054d4bcd8cd14eab51c8
The readme from it:
welcome to terarelease - a as-complete-as-possible steam2 content server dump
extractor howto: for the majority of depots you need to download blobs & dats for wanted version *as well as all past versions* as the files are stored as deltas inside the dat files, HOWEVER IF you encounter a depot that has duplicate blobs & dats, that means at some point in time valve did a full reset in which case you need to provide the CRC of the wanted blob (3rd file name component) to the extractor using --blobcrc, source code for the extractor is also left in this folder if you want to have a peek at it
examples: extract /mnt/big/blobs /mnt/big/dats 852 0 | for depots w/o reset extract /mnt/big/blobs /mnt/big/dats 841 0 --blobcrc 83ced978 | for depots that did reset
win64 build is provided, for linux you have to build it yourself as any kind of binary compatibility is inexistent except for wine (you are using linux, you should know how to build it yourself right? ...right?)
sharing: you are very much encouraged to share and mirror/seed this release as possible SHARING IS CARING
warm n good wishes to all hoarders who had stuff from this collection <3
donos (bandwidth [ shit aint cheap :( ]/seedboxes/estrogen :D): bc1qttqxa2vrfnrs3u3tmuj7dne5j7lptxmc2cy9ah
Long live the resistance.
My own gaming days are over, but I am very annoyed that the big corporations killed libgen effectively (it is not entirely gone, but the old content is nowhere near as it used to be, and Anna's archive is also nowhere near as good either, unfortunately).
> but the old content is nowhere near as it used to be, and Anna's archive is also nowhere near as good either
Not sure what you mean, Anna's Archive includes all of Libgen's content
I kind of have mixed feelings about this, because from one point of view we're fighting the corporations, but from another, Valve is a major force in pushing Linux gaming so that more gaming can be done outside of big corpo operating systems.
It seems to me that fighting with Valve is like fighting against what we would want to have.
> fighting against what we would want to have
One giant megacorp with a benevolent dictator? Well, maybe you want that - but I do not. And we have a couple of examples of how it goes.
Mind you Valve has done equal amount of bad as well by inventing the whole battle pass system and thus bringing even more FOMO to games, and making unregulated gambling available to millions which is still going strong and surprisingly no one cares about it. There are some lawsuits here and there but they focus on the lootbox gacha element and not the whole gambling market running on the Steam API
Valve could shut it down any single day just by disabling trading but hey, that doesn't let you buy a 110m long superyacht (; https://www.yachtcharterfleet.com/luxury-charter-yacht-53601...
Likely bought with anonymous or stolen payment info.
My harddisc is only 2TB!
Good 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