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Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers

bloomberg.com

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Re: Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers

#31

Don McGowan, what a shitbird. Calls up this kid's mom to insinuate the kid has done wrong and raise the threat of a serious criminal accusation. Kinda seems like you shouldn't be allowed to practice law after that. I thought lawyers were supposed to have standards?

Lol and then he brags about it to a reporter. Fucking douche canoe.

Re: Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers

#32
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This guy sounds like a massive POS.

> I might have a talk with David. I might say, ‘Listen, I’ve figured out it was you. Do I not seem approachable? Why are you and I not having a conversation about this?’ Talk about an absolute terrible way to approach someone who went public about a sexual harassment claim. From just this article I don't think I'd feel comfortable talking with this dude about anything serious going on.

Yes, that was the line where my bullshit detector went to over 9000.

"Obviously, my job is to protect the organization, but ‘protect the organization’ takes on different meanings to different people. To me, ‘protect the organization’ has always meant: protect your people from bad things."

I have no words to express how far from the truth this is. The only lawyer who protects you is the one you hire. The company lawyer protects the company from you.

Re: Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers

#33
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a child who has been bullied by adults for legal behavior this hit home with me. Glad there are more people coming forward.

mind sharing the story? else you've contributed little besides seeding curiosity, and a commented form of an upvote

People can comment however they want

Re: Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers

#34
post #9

>‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’ What a complete piece of shit. Threatening a child and his parent because the child dumped some memory and found some file. He also knows that there is exactly zero chance for any legal actions towards that kid (and of course it is not…

I thank god I never became a lawyer. They are $300+/hr thugs for hire whose only mission is to bully you into complete submission until you pay to make them go away.

Worst thing is that to fight a lawyer you need another lawyer, so if taken as a category they never lose.

Re: Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers

#37
What an incredibly tone deaf admission of unethical behavior.

As general counsel he happily admitted to making false accusations of a federal crime against a minor.

This level of comfort and pride in unethical behavior raises the question of what else has Don McGowan done that is improper?

Re: Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers

#38

> "A veteran investigator of video-game leaks reveals the tricks of the trade" Complete lie by the way. The highest revelation is that the found out that some streamer leaked something, because they noticed the leaked photos had the same icons as he did. Besides bullying a kid, this is just irrelevant.

The streamer used publicly available binaries so if there's a leak here, it's on the dev team for embedding assets that they shouldn't have.

Re: Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers

#39
> Back when I was at Pokémon, some kid figured out how to extract the images from the card game. He found an icon from the developer and said ‘Holy s----, I found a new Pokémon.’ This kid included his email, and because of the way Pokémon did account creation, when we got the child’s account, we got the parent information, which included a phone number.

> So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’

When you boast about threatening kids, that says a lot about what kind of person you are

Re: Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers

#40
What's bizarre is that this guy says that tracking down this kid (who btw didn't try to hide at all) made him a "legend" at Pokemon.

Quote from the article: "Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years."

Don McGowan is a legend though, a legendary asshole for being proud of bullying a curious kid that was poking around in legally obtained game-files.

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