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Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

#61

Post by boeingUH60 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #4

Stuff like this is why I’m glad Ken Kessey’s “one flew over the cuckoos nest” become popular and helped remove government mental hospitals from being a serious consideration in the USA. This kid needs to be cultivated, not institutionalized. (Edit: never mind, seems he IS a menace to society)

The mental hospitals were closed. Now the mentally ill are largely homeless or in prison.

They closed something bad and brought no alternative because it’s easy for a politician to score points by appearing to solve problems in the short term but providing no long term solutions.

Re: Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

#62

Post by ipaddr »

hackerlight wrote: post #52
Nextgrid wrote: post #15

Life in prison for non-violent crime clearly sounds like revenge and sour grapes. The big guys clearly don't appreciate having their insecurity being exposed this way (keep in mind none of these hacks required any significant technical skills), and too many people would lose face. Something had to be done, so here it is. The disparity of this punishment compared to what is usually given out for similar crimes (in the…

I don't see violent crimes as necessarily the worst. Crimes that steal from large numbers of people are arguably worse than many types of violent crime due to the sheer magnitude of lives that got destroyed. If you destroy 10,000 regular lives through fraud you deserve the worst punishment in line with murderers. Although this guy's long sentence isn't only because of what he stole from Rockstar, my commentary is not…

Murdering 10 is okay compared to shutting down a video game company for a few hours?

Re: Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

#63

Post by Nextgrid »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #45

Life in prison for up to $10m in damages? At first I thought the number must be off by a factor of 10. I couldn’t help but see Dr Evil for a moment. These are at best property crimes, and while the sums are non trivial, sentencing children to indefinite imprisonment for a nonviolent crime against a megacorp is unconscionable.

> against a megacorp

That's the only reason he's punished. A lot more than 10M gets stolen regularly across various online scams but nothing gets done about those since they primarily target the common man and not a large, culturally-relevant company (I'd argue his targeting of BT/EE has a lot of influence in the outcome).

Re: Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

#64

Post by crazygringo »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #49

There is an expectation here that this person will react to being arrested and imprisoned with patience ; yet patience is not expected from literally anyone else involved . It's abundantly clear that he is not being punished for harming people . He is being punished for not playing along . "Refusing to play along" is one of the most well known symptoms of Autism. This person is being punished for neurodivergence. I'm…

> yet patience is not expected from literally anyone else involved.

Can you explain? The whole process has seemed pretty patient on all sides. This wasn't some overnight decision.

I truly don't understand what you're trying to say, or how "patience" is relevant here at all.

Re: Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

#65

Post by dharmab »

gdsdfe wrote: post #50
kreddor wrote: post #8

> Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone. That's quite a feat. > Rockstar Games alone told the court that the hack cost it $5m to recover from plus thousands of hours of staff time. Either the kid is a genius or Rockstar really don't value their security much. Or maybe a bit of both?

shouldn't they at least try to use this kid for good instead of locking him up ? but then who know maybe a 3 letter gov agency will take him to a bunker somewhere

He's violent and uncooperative:

> The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage.

The TLA aren't hurting for talent these days either.

Re: Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

#66

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

imglorp wrote: post #51
jvanderbot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA, and given prior hacks, he's very skilled.

Someone should hire him as a white hat. Maybe they have some kind of custodial guardianship where the employer can monitor him staying clean.

It's tough though, how do you know that they won't use those skills against you? The individual seems relatively unstable and violent, even saying during a sentencing hearing that they'll continue to do illegal breaches whenever they can.

Would be great to have them on the "good" side, but would probably take a lot of energy and resources as well.

Hopefully this story will have a somewhat happy ending, because it seems to not end yet.

Re: Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

#67

Post by ryandrake »

theshackleford wrote: post #44
mettamage wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to me, it's a slippery slope. Want to give someone a life sentence? Cool, all you need to do is to stamp the autism label on them and put them in a secure hospital and convict them for a crime that would get like 5 years in prison. The point is not the details (I'm obviously not a laywer or anything remotely related to that), the point is that it seems to be a slippery slope.

> Cool, all you need to do is to stamp the autism label on them and put them in a secure hospital and convict them for a crime that would get like 5 years in prison. Good thing that’s not what happened then I guess.

The article specifically says:

> He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger.

So he's confined for life. Confinement is confinement, whether it's a prison or hospital.

This definitely seems like a case where the government found a "backdoor" to allow them to get away with confining someone for life, even though they probably couldn't do through the normal criminal justice system because the punishment doesn't suit the crime.

Re: Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

#68

Post by loeg »

DonHopkins wrote: post #10
A_Duck wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline glosses over "The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage."

[flagged]

That sentence is not talking about the headline hacker (Kurtaj).

Re: Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

#70

Post by Nextgrid »

dharmab wrote: post #43
Nextgrid wrote: post #15

Life in prison for non-violent crime clearly sounds like revenge and sour grapes. The big guys clearly don't appreciate having their insecurity being exposed this way (keep in mind none of these hacks required any significant technical skills), and too many people would lose face. Something had to be done, so here it is. The disparity of this punishment compared to what is usually given out for similar crimes (in the…

Did you read the article? > The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage.

How much would that get someone on the street committing the same crimes? Maybe probation or a couple years of jail at most? That's what I'm comparing it to.

If we were routinely jailing people that had trouble controlling their emotions and had propensity for violent outbursts we'd have a lot more people in jail, so I don't believe this alleged violence was really what got him this sentence.

Similarly, how much would someone get for scamming/hacking/social engineering a small company or individual? Well that one is easy to answer: nothing - this behavior has effectively been decriminalized in the UK.

So neither his crimes add up to such a sentence.

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