21–30 of 99 posts
TL-DR: 1) don't hack. 2) if you hack, don't get caught. 3) if you hack and get caught, be in a country that you can bribe yourself out of the mess (definitely not Germany!) 4) don't destroy other people's hard work, it's not nice.
I think 3 should be "Don't email your hack victims with proof of your crimes for a face-to-face meeting."
The article claims/repeats the claim that this cost valve $250 million, but I don't see how. If the leaked version wasn't very playable the damage can't come from lost sales
Pretty sure the leak also lead them to release the Source engine's code, which was wildly successful.
That boy is now 40
Article is from 2011 (figured that out after I read the whole thing). I wonder if in in the interim anything else happened to Gembe. Somehow, I kinda want to hear he ended up at Valve in a turnaround of events, but I highly doubt it.
I can't imagine Valve would ever hire him, given the lengths they went to assisting the FBI with the fake entrapment style job interview. Also sets a horrible precedent that you can hold the company ransom over stolen code to get a job if nothing else!
TL-DR: 1) don't hack. 2) if you hack, don't get caught. 3) if you hack and get caught, be in a country that you can bribe yourself out of the mess (definitely not Germany!) 4) don't destroy other people's hard work, it's not nice.
Destroy.. how? The game still exists, Valve still owns it.
How f-ed would he be if he flew to the US?
Short version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Underground
Long version: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/
In short they got sentenced to 18 to 24 months of prison.
TL-DR: 1) don't hack. 2) if you hack, don't get caught. 3) if you hack and get caught, be in a country that you can bribe yourself out of the mess (definitely not Germany!) 4) don't destroy other people's hard work, it's not nice.
> 4) don't destroy other people's hard work, it's not nice. Destroy.. how? The game still exists, Valve still owns it.
The article claims/repeats the claim that this cost valve $250 million, but I don't see how. If the leaked version wasn't very playable the damage can't come from lost sales
yeah that is just "let's throw random numbers to victimize ourselves even more". I don't think a lot of people downloaded the unfinished source code, compiled it, played the game and never bought the conplete game. The worst that happened were people making memes with some 3d and graphics assets which didn't cost anyrhing to Valve. Quite the opposite it was free advertising.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't imagine Valve would ever hire him, given the lengths they went to assisting the FBI with the fake entrapment style job interview. Also sets a horrible precedent that you can hold the company ransom over stolen code to get a job if nothing else!
That used to be a running joke within the original hacker (NOT startup-hacker) community
[1] This was before the internet, before there were laws specifically about this sort of thing, and before the public started mistakenly equating "hacker" with "criminal".