Believe nothing that you read. Cutting short our investigation the recent leaked Beta rumors, Bungie's Matt Soell offered this response to one of our emails:

>A few Hotline folk at claiming there is a Halo beta-demo in
>circulation in that wonderful, wide warez network of theirs.

Totally bogus. You can tell by the d1r2 bit; we don't number them like that.

-Matt

We had wondered if the alleged size of the beta was correct, but Matt was too wiley for us, and didn't reveal that bit of information. Dang. Our thanks to him for clearing this up a bit, and for those of you who downloaded all those halobeta.img.sit files that were popping up on HL servers, better luck next time. Or not...