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The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

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Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#71

Post by nowarninglabel »

_delirium wrote: post #64
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any toddler knows it's wrong to steal a candy bar. I'm pretty sure every teenager smart enough to do so knows it's wrong to hack into a company's network, download their corporate secrets and distribute them to the internet. Deterrance is absolutely the point of punishment. What he did was a white-collar crime. There's a perception in society that you can get away with certain extremely harmful things, like hacking o…

I don't think jail terms are based mainly on financial damage caused. Mugging someone for $50 is punished relatively severely because people are afraid of violence, not really because of the $50 loss. Shoplifting $50, which scares people less, will rarely get you any jail time at all (unless it's a repeat offense).

Quite true, indeed the biggest financial thefts may even go completely unpunished: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-stre...

Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#72

Post by shadowpwner »

chaosmachine wrote: post #57

I was in a similar position once, many years ago, in the early days of the web. I had managed to get parts of the source code to a popular online game (no real hacking here, they left a tarball in an open directory I stumbled upon), and being a foolish young kid, I decided to brag about my insider knowledge of unfinished features on a website. A few weeks later, the company contacted me with a job offer... they just…

Out of all the ways they could have caught you, a job offer? That's hilarious.

Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#73

Post by jessedhillon »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #35

Am I the only one who thinks what he did was not only criminal but morally wrong, and that he deserved to go to prison for a long time? I realize that everybody likes to call themselves a "hacker" because they can program a computer, but this is an actual black-hat hacker. There are bad guys in the world and he's one of them. He wrote malware. He stole source code and gave it to the world. And this wasn't some evil c…

You seem to divide the world starkly into black and white. A fallacy that is common to people who think this way is the either-or, or False Dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma) fallacy.

Despite your first sentence, where you try to introduce some nuance to your argument, your other statements suggest that you don't have any room in your schema for people who commit damaging, non-violent crimes but express remorse for them. Essentially remorse is less important (if at all) to you than the fact that someone, somewhere was damaged in some way.

Many people here have expressed the opinion that yes, this kid f-ed up real bad and damaged/destroyed Valve's reputation significantly. But no, there isn't a need to lock him up, because it wouldn't serve a purpose.

If the purpose of the lockup is only to punish him (for punishment's sake), which you seem to be intent upon, then yeah it makes sense to give him 10-20 years despite a marked shift in his personality and outlook on life. To me, it seems like a horrible waste of money and of everyone's time to punish him so severely given that he's already had a change of heart, has the beginning of a successful career doing legitimate work, and he didn't commit any violence.

Also, we have the benefit of hindsight here: Valve went on to be an even bigger success after this, as HL2 + Steam is practically a money printing machine for them.

Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#74

Post by true_religion »

psykotic wrote: post #65
ars wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, they are quite rare in the US as well, and the US is a LOT larger than Germany.

> Oh come on, they are quite rare in the US as well, and the US is a LOT larger than Germany. Yes, if "a LOT larger" means 3.5x larger. Germany has 82 million inhabitants and is the most populous country in Europe.

A lot larger as in landmass. People pay attention to what goes on in their geographic area, regardless of its population.

For example, a beating in California isn't going to be as troubling to a resident in Vermont. They'll simply say "different state, different police force". On the other hand, a beating in Berlin is going to trouble someone in any part of Germany.

Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#75

Post by true_religion »

kd0amg wrote: post #62
true_religion wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were treated as seperate instances since the crimes were committed against people in X jurisdiction. That's applicable in this case as well since the Valve folk are in the US jurisdiction.

If the instances were partitioned between those three jurisdictions, then it isn't really an example of avoiding double jeopardy limitations by changing jurisdiction.

Right, I guess what I'm getting at is that neither case (the one in the article and the one I mentioned) was about Double Jeopardy because the police could partition the crimes to different jurisdictions.

Legalistically, its correct but ethically it means that police can try you multiple times so long as they narrow the jurisdiction on the first attempts. For instance, a car chase that crosses multi-jurisdictions can result in multiple trials (and consecutive sentences) even though its really just one offense.

Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#76

Post by moe »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #68
moe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacking Valve. Damage: $250,000,000 Bullshit.

What's the correct figure, then?

$0.

I doubt their competitors will learn awesome secrets from their code-base and I doubt the pirates will compile their own binary instead of just using the standard DVD-Rip.

Yes, they embarrassed themselves. But they have nobody but themselves to blame for not investing in security.

And, as ramidarigaz points out, it was even free PR for them.

Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#77

Post by ztan »

zx76 wrote: post #46
ztan wrote: post #11

I found the story to be quite tragic. This kid really saw the people at Valve as his heroes. Valve knew this and totally abused of that fact. They tricked him and was planning to hand him to the FBI, despite the fact he was (still is) their biggest fan and that the leak was accidental. I would have really hired him if I was in Gabe's position. He had both passion and skills. I think he would make an awesome YC applic…

Once, when riding through a neighbor's land as a shortcut to a far piece of his own ranch, Theodore Roosevelt and some of his men came across a stray calf. The rules of the range were that any stray calf would be branded with the mark of whoever owned the land on which the calf was found, and everyone carried branding irons of his neighbor's for that purpose. Roosevelt built a fire, but one of his men put Roosevelt's…

This is a nice story however I don't think the same principal should apply in this case. You have to look at intention of the behavior to judge ones character like Roosevelt did. In Roosevelt's case the intention was clear, the guy took away from another and knowingly disregarded the loss the other guy suffered. It's this character of hurting others to benefit self that made the behavior bad and immoral.

In this kid's case, information was copied. The intention was not to take away sacarce resource for self benfit. He got the source simply because the act of looking produced a copy. Not because he was trying to seek self gain. You should not equate the two and pass the same judgement of character simply because we tend to label both acts as "theft." They are completely different. I really think there should be another word to distinct between these different acts.

Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#78

Post by cookiecaper »

ztan wrote: post #26
T-hawk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you hire somebody that already stole something major from your very company?

If the article was 100% accurate, then I would have due to this particularly unusual circumstance. The kid was too naive and handled the situation poorly. The leak in fact was purely accidental. I think if he had contacted Valve and gave them the source code instead of to the guy who leaked it, the whole thing would have had a very different turn out. The kid recognized what he did was wrong and regretted it. That wa…

He'd probably be a good hire now, but his confession to Gabe was only a few months after the incident. If you knew it was a naive kid that didn't understand the boundaries, that alone is enough reason to wait a few years before you hire him. People who think it's cool to swap your company's proprietary information with untrustworthy outsiders should be avoided.

Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#79

Post by burgerbrain »

die_sekte wrote: post #37
atourgates wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the rash of "OMG the police barged into my house, shot my goldfish and raped my star wars collection" type stories I've been hearing, is it safe to assume that the German police are quite a bit more sensible than their American counterparts? The whole experience sounds rather civilized. The police let Gembe get dressed, eat breakfast and smoke a cigarette before bringing him down to the station. And when…

Germany neither has a War on Drugs nor a meth problem. There have been highly criticized raids in Germany, but there are fewer raids per capita in Germany, and in Germany police-citizen interaction is less violent (no automatic assumption that that driver that was just pulled over is armed, for example).

"War on Drugs nor a meth problem"

You say that as if the first does not cause the second. America's 'war on drugs' is the cause of the problems, not an excuse.

Re: The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

#80

Post by RyanHolliday »

Tichy wrote: post #67

What I don't get is why the police had to wake them up with a gun pointed to his head. Is this standard procedure for hackers, or criminals in general? Is it because some time ago it was decided that hackers are terrorists? Suppose I cheated on my taxes (which I would of course never do, but I think many people consider that fair game), would the police also wake me with a gun pointed at my head?

Well, Mitnick was kept in solitary because they were afraid he could start a nuclear exchange if given access to a phone. I think a bit of paranoia is common procedure for hackers because what they do seems like magic to most people.

As for the taxes, that's entirely dependent on your behavior. There have definitely been stand-offs between tax protesters and armed law enforcement personnel.

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