Newsgroup: it.comp.giochi.action
Titolo: Il ragazzo che rubò HL2

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-21-the-boy-who-stole-half-life-2-article?page=1
Per chi non se la ricordasse, ma anche per gli altri. Dategli una letta 
perchè è davvero interessante e lollosa, specie la storia della 
trappola che gli tese il ciccione.
-- 
"La maggioranza è autosufficiente" ha detto Bossi cagandosi addosso. 
(cit.)

 che gli tese il ciccione.
Letta, lol
ma che cretino il tipo però :D

 trappola che gli tese il ciccione.
Lunga vita al Panzone!

 Mi fai un copia-incolla che non posso aprire il link? Grazie...
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Table of contents
Page   Previous 1 2 3 4 Next
The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2
PCXbox 360PlayStation 3
Article	 by Simon Parkin
Yesterday
At 6am on 7th May 2004, Axel Gembe awoke in the small German town of 
Schönau im Schwarzwald to find his bed surrounded by police officers. 
Automatic weapons were pointing at his head and the words "Get out of 
bed. Do not touch the keyboard" were ringing in his ears.
Gembe knew why they were there. But, bleary-eyed, he asked anyway.
"You are being charged with hacking into Valve Corporation's network, 
stealing the videogame Half-Life 2, leaking it onto the internet and 
causing damages in excess of $250 million," came the reply. "Get 
dressed."
Seven months earlier, on 2nd October 2003, Valve Corporation director 
Gabe Newell awoke in the large American city of Seattle to find the 
source code for the game his company had been working on for almost 
five years had leaked onto the internet.
The game had been due for release a couple of weeks earlier but the 
development team was behind. 12 months behind. Half-Life 2 was going to 
be late, and Newell had yet to admit how late. Such a leak was not only 
financially threatening but deeply embarrassing.
After a few moments pondering these immediate concerns, an avalanche of 
questions tumbled through Newell's mind. How had this happened? Had the 
leak come from within Valve? Which member of his team, having given 
years of their life to building the game, would jeopardise the project 
in the final hour?
If it wasn't an inside job, how the hell did it happen? Did someone 
have access to Valve's internal server?
But the question which rang out loudest of all was the one anyone who 
has ever had something stolen from them cannot push from their mind: 
who did this?
Anticitizen One
"I got into hacking by being infected myself," Gembe says today. "It 
was a program that pretended to be a Warcraft III key generator and I 
was stupid enough to run it. It was an sdbot, a popular general purpose 
malware at the time."
The town of Schönau im Schwarzwald, where Gembe was living with his 
father in 2003.
The young German soon realised what he had installed on his PC. But 
instead of scrubbing the malware and forgetting about it, he reverse 
engineered the program to see how it worked and what it did.
This led him to an IRC server from which the malware was being 
controlled. By following the trail back, Gembe was able to track down 
its operator. Rather than confronting the man, Gembe began asking him 
questions about the malware. He had a plan.
"While I have a €2000 Steam account nowadays, at the time I couldn't 
afford to buy games," he explains.
"So I coded my own malware to steal CD keys in order to unlock the 
titles I wanted to play. It grew quickly to one of the most prominent 
malwares at the time, mostly because I started writing exploits for 
some unpatched vulnerabilities in Windows."
"Follow Freeman!"
On discovering the breach, Newell's first thought was to go to the 
police. His second was to go to the players.
At 11pm on 2nd October 2003, Newell posted a thread on the official 
Half-Life 2 forum titled, "I need the assistance of the community."
"Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code," he 
admitted in the post. Newell went on to outline the facts Valve had 
been able to piece together so far.
He explained that someone had gained access to his email account around 
three weeks earlier. Not only that, but keystroke recorders had been 
installed on various machines at the company. According to Newell, 
these had been created specifically to target Valve as they were not 
recognised by any virus-scanning applications.
Whoever had done this was smart, capable and specifically interested in 
his company. But why?
Page 2 →
Point Insertion
Gembe's malware crimes, while undeniably exploitative and damaging, 
were crimes driven by a passion for games rather than profits.
His favourite game of all was Half-Life. In 2002, like so many fans of 
the series, Gembe was hungry for details about the forthcoming sequel. 
That's when he had the idea. If Gembe could hack into Valve's network, 
he might be able to find something out about the game nobody else knew 
yet.
A socially awkward loner who had endured a tough upbringing, he would 
gain status in the community of gamers he had adopted as his family by 
offering up such insider information. It was worth a try.
"I wasn't really expecting to get anywhere," Gembe says. "But the first 
entry was easy. In fact, it happened by accident.
"I was scanning Valve's network to check for accessible web servers 
where I thought information about the game might have been held. 
Valve's network was reasonably secure from the outside, but the 
weakness was that their name server allowed anonymous AXFRs, which gave 
me quite a bit of information."
AXFR stands for Asynchronous Full Transfer Zone, a tool used to 
synchronize backup DNS servers with the same data as the primary 
server. But it's also a protocol used by hackers to sneak a peek at a 
website's data. By transferring this data, Gembe was able to discover 
the names of all the subdomains of ValveSoftware.com.
By July 2003 Newell knew the team wasn't going to make the September 30 
release date, but he had yet to tell the community that.
"In the port scan logs, I found an interesting server which was in 
Valve's network range from another corporation named Tangis that 
specialised in wearable computing devices," he says.
"This server had a publically writable web root where I could upload 
ASP scripts and execute them via the web server. Valve didn't firewall 
this server from its internal network."
Gembe had found an unguarded tunnel into the network on his first 
attempt.
"The Valve PDC had an username "build" with a blank password," he 
explains. "This allowed me to dump the hashed passwords for the system. 
At the time the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich offered an 
online cracker for hashes, so I was able to crack the passwords in no 
time."
"Once I had done that... Well, basically I had the keys to the 
kingdom."
Entanglement
At this point, Gembe wasn't bothered about covering his tracks. So far 
he had nothing to hide. But he wanted to ensure he would remain 
undetected as he explored further.
"All I cared about at that point was not being thrown out," he says. 
"But I had access to an almost unlimited amount of proxy servers, so I 
wasn't worried. My first job was to find a host where I could set up 
some sort of hideout."
Gembe began poking around for information about the game. He found 
various design documents and notes about the game's creation. This was 
what he had come looking for. This was why he was here.
As the weeks rolled by, Gembe realised nobody at Valve had noticed he 
was inside the company's network. He began to push a little harder.
Soon after the leak, images of the characters in compromising positions 
were distributed online, much to Newell's dismay.
That's when he hit the payload: the source code for the game he had 
been waiting to play for so many years.
The temptation was too great. On 19th September 2003, Gembe hit the 
download button and made off with Valve's crown jewels.
"Getting the source code was easy, thanks to the network performance of 
the Perforce client, but the SourceSafe client for the game data was 
horrible," he explains.
"Because of this I coded my own client that basically had its own 
transfer mechanism over TCP, detected changed files by hashing them and 
transferred the changes.
"The game didn't run on my computer. I made some code changes to get it 
to run in a basic form without shaders or anything, but it wasn't fun. 
Also, I only had the main development trunk of the game. They had so 
many development branches that I couldn't even begin to check them all 
out."
To this day, Gembe maintains he was not the person who uploaded the 
source code to the internet. But there's no denying he handed it over 
to whoever did.
"I didn't think it through," he says. "There was, of course, an element 
of bragging going on. But the person I shared the source with assured 
me he would keep it to himself. He didn't."
Once the game was on Bit Torrent, there was no containing it.
"The cat was out of the bag," says Gembe. "You cannot stop the 
internet."
← Page 1
Page 3 →
Yesterday
"A Red Letter Day"
The response of the community to Newell's plea for help was mixed. 
While many expressed their sympathy at the theft, others felt betrayed 
by Valve for being led to believe the game would be ready for its 
scheduled launch in late 2003.
Despite a few leads, nobody was able to provide information about who 
might have perpetrated the crime. The FBI became involved in the 
investigation but also drew blanks.
Meanwhile the team at Valve, which had been in crunch mode for months, 
was left reeling by the leak. The game was costing the company $1 
million a month to build and the end was still far from sight. The leak 
had not only caused financial damage but had demotivated a tired team. 
One young designer asked Newell, "Is this going to destroy the 
company?"
At 6:18am on 15th February 2004, Valve's MD received an email with a 
blank subject line from sender 'Da Guy'.
"Hello Gabe," the author began, before going on to claim responsibility 
for infiltrating Valve's network months earlier.
Newell was unsure whether to believe the story at first. But two 
attached documents, both of which could only have been obtained by 
someone with access to private areas of Valve's server, proved the 
sender's claims were valid.
Five months after Half-Life 2 was released onto the internet, long 
after all leads had gone cold, Newell's man had turned up on his 
doorstep.
Sandtraps
Why did Gembe send that email? "Because I was sorry for what happened," 
he says. "I wanted them to know who did this thing, and that my 
intention was never for things to work out the way they did." But that 
wasn't all that Gembe was after. The young man saw a way he could 
create a positive outcome from his crime, both for Valve and himself. 
In a separate email, he asked if Newell would consider giving him a 
job.
"I was very naïve back then," he says. "It was and still is my dream to 
work for a game development company, so I just asked. I hoped that they 
could forgive what I had done, mostly because it wasn't intentional."
To Gembe's surprise, Newell wrote back a few days later saying yes, 
Valve was interested. He asked if Gembe would agree to a phone 
interview.
Gembe had access to Hammer, Half-Life 2's level editor.
The real motivation behind the suggestion was not to discover whether 
Gembe would be a strong candidate for a position within the company. It 
was to obtain an on-the-record admission from Gembe that he had been 
responsible for the leak. It's an old FBI trick, designed to gain a 
confession by appealing to a person's sense of pride.
Gembe had his suspicions but he pushed them to the back of his mind. "I 
hoped for the best," he says. "I was not the brightest kid back then."
He recalls the phone interview being conducted by Alfred Reynolds, 
developer on Counter-Strike and Steam, and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw, 
but says he could be wrong. (In fact, Wolpaw says he had yet to join 
the company at this point.)
"At first they wanted to know how I hacked into the network. I told 
them in full detail. Then they asked me about my experience and skills. 
I still remember they were surprised that I spoke fluent English 
without much of an accent."
The trio talked for 40 minutes. Any sense of guilt dissipated for Gembe 
in the presence of his heroes. But that was nothing compared to the 
adrenaline rush he felt when he received an invitation to a second 
interview. This one would be face-to-face at Valve's headquarters in 
Seattle, on American soil.
Having set the trap, Valve and the FBI needed to obtain a visa for 
Gembe (and his father and brother, as he had asked if they could 
accompany him to the US). But there were concerns about the ongoing 
access Gembe had to Valve's servers and the potential damage he could 
still cause. So the FBI contacted the German police, alerting them to 
the plan.
← Page 2
Page 4 →
Yesterday
Highway 17
It was soon after this that Gembe awoke to find himself staring down 
the barrel of a gun. He got dressed and headed downstairs, escorted by 
the armed policemen squeezed into the small hallways of his father's 
house.
"Can I get something to eat before we leave?" asked Gembe.
"No problem," said one of the policemen.
Gembe reached for a kitchen knife to cut some bread. "Every policeman 
in the room raised his rifle at me," he says.
After drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette, Gembe climbed 
into the back of a van and was driven to the local police station. 
There he was greeted by the police chief. He walked up to Gembe, looked 
him in the eye and said, "Have you any idea how lucky you are that we 
got to you before you got on that plane?"
Gembe was interrogated by the police for three hours. "Most of the 
questions they asked me were about the Sasser-Worm," he says, referring 
to a particularly vicious malware that affects computers running 
vulnerable versions of Windows XP and Windows 2000.
"For some reason they thought there was a connection between me and 
Sasser, which I denied. Sasser was big news back then and its author, 
Sven Jaschan, was raided the same day as me in a co-ordinated 
operation, because they thought I could warn him.
"My bot used the same vulnerability in the LSASS service that his did, 
except it didn't crash the host system, so I guess they thought I gave 
him the exploit code. Of course I denied this and told them that I 
never write such shoddy code."
After the police began to realise there was no link between Gembe and 
the Sasser-Worm, they moved on to asking him about Valve.
"I could have refused to answer and demanded an attorney, but I chose 
to tell them everything I knew honestly and completely, which I guess 
they appreciated," he says. "The guy questioning me liked me because, 
he said, 'You are not an asshole like most of the other guys.' That 
department has to deal mostly with child porn.
"I guess I was so open with them because I didn't believe I did much 
wrong, at the time."
Gembe was remanded in custody for two weeks. He was released once the 
police were determined he wasn't about to flee, with the proviso that 
he check-in with them three times a week, every week, for three years, 
until his trial.
Our Benefactors
While waiting for his day in court, Gembe worked hard to change his 
life. He finished an apprenticeship and got a job in the security 
sector, writing Windows applications to manage security systems and 
performing database and server administration work.
Axel Gembe's trial lasted for seven hours. No one from Valve was 
present, though someone from the Wall Street Journal turned up. 
Security breach aside, there was no evidence to suggest Gembe had been 
responsible for pushing the Half-Life 2 source code on the internet.
The initial level of Half-Life 2 open in Hammer.
However, Gembe admitted to hacking into Valve's network. The judge 
sentenced him to two years' probation, citing his rough childhood and 
the way he had worked to turn his life around as considerations when it 
came to deciding on the relatively lenient punishment.
By the time of the trial 8.6 million copies of Half-Life 2 had been 
sold, its success seemingly unaffected by the leak of 4th October 2003.
Today Gembe is 28. Nearly a decade on, he is remorseful about the 
Half-Life 2 episode.
"I was naïve and did things that I should never have done," he says. 
"There were so many better uses of my time. I regret having caused 
Valve Software trouble and financial loss. I also regret having caused 
some universities financial harm by using them as speed tests for my 
malware.
"Basically I regret all the illegal things I did at that time... And I 
regret not doing anything worthwhile with my life before I got busted."
What of the man he stole a game from? What would Axel Gembe say to Gabe 
Newell today?
"I would say this: I am so very sorry for what I did to you. I never 
intended to cause you harm. If I could undo it, I would. It still makes 
me sad thinking about it. I would have loved to just stay and watch you 
do your thing, but in the end I screwed it up.
"You are my favorite developer, and I will always buy your games."
← Page 3
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24 January, 2011
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14 December, 2007 [1]
Developer Valve Software
Publisher Vivendi Games
Release Date 16/11/2004
More on Half-Life 2 →
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Comments
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Comments: 1-50 of 196	 Next →
1-50 | 51-100 | 101-150 | 151-196
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Omroth
21/02/11 @ 14:15
#2
+98
Amazing story. I wonder how it would have been different if he'd got on 
the plane.
KevvyMetal79
21/02/11 @ 14:15
#3
+151
I wonder what we would find if someone leaked the source code for Half 
Life 2 : Episode 3.
...probably just an empty file with one comment -
//game goes here eventually.
Bagpuss
21/02/11 @ 14:20
#4
+12
I was one of those who downloaded the leaked build of the game all 
those years ago, and i dont for one moment think it harmed sales of the 
game...just like millions of others i was (legally purchased) 
downloading the game on the day of its release, and the follow ups EP1 
and EP2.
It was just a buzz to have a play with something before most others, 
and its not as if you got the whole game anyway, it was just a couple 
of areas in the game, that didnt even make it into the final release.
Erinan
21/02/11 @ 14:21
#5
+14
Great article, thank you. And has it alreayd been more than 6 years 
since Half-Life 2 came out? Are Valve actually working on Half-Life 
3...?
dwalker109
21/02/11 @ 14:22
#6
+53
A fascinating article. Top stuff!
Hunam
21/02/11 @ 14:24
#7
+115
I'm glad the german police stepped in. If he'd ended up in America they 
would have made an example of him for sure. I kinda think Valve trying 
to trick him to going to the US was a horrible move as it's just 
sinister and spiteful as well as the whole job interview ruse. Of 
course this added on top that they were more angry about being shown 
that they were a year behind their release date and yet had said 
nothing makes it all the more worse.
I'm glad the guy turned his life around and I'm also glad he realised 
how wrong he was back then, but if I think I've have a slight bit of 
ire for Valve considering the insidious tactics they used against him 
when he was basically a kid.
andromeda
21/02/11 @ 14:25
#8
-1
bah , the world's slyest marketing exercise ever.he worked for Valve 
all along. You knows it.
Carbon_Altered
21/02/11 @ 14:26
#9
+61
Interesting article - cheers Eurogamer!
DavoTheDiv
21/02/11 @ 14:26
#10
+80
A good read Eurogamer. May we please have some more?
b-tek
21/02/11 @ 14:27
#11
+10
Very interesting article. He seems like a kool guy. And if I was with 
Valve I would eventually give him a job... probably something to do 
with security ;p
Nighteyes
21/02/11 @ 14:27
#12
+43
That was an absolutely thrilling read, very well written.
Kristine
21/02/11 @ 14:28
#13
+31
Really interesting article.
Impressive how the guy turned himself around too.
ucankurbaga
21/02/11 @ 14:29
#14
+13
It is interesting to find out what exactly happened after all these 
years. Seems like the kid didn't have bad intentions other then to play 
the game without thinking about the consequences. I wonder now, what 
happened with Crysis 2 beta leak?!
Murton
21/02/11 @ 14:32
#15
+81
Am I alone in being interested in what Gabe thinks of all this now and 
whether or not he feels any guilt about his attempt at entrapment? 
Something which is technically supposed to be illegal in many civilised 
countries, which is probably why the German police drummed up a quick 
charge of their own to bring him in on and slapped him with probation 
requirements that meant he couldn't possibly travel to America to be 
crucified.
Most hackers want us to think of them as heroes and many in the media 
grant them that wish. There's a delicious irony in the fact that Axel 
Gembe is now going to be the recipient of such admiration not because 
of his talents but because he realised that he wasted those talents 
when he could have been doing something more constructive to someone's 
benefit other than his own. A stark contrast from George Hotz who when 
interviewed years from now, will likely still be a douchebag with a 
victim complex.
cheeky_pete
21/02/11 @ 14:33
#16
+17
Great read indeed there's a great movie in there somewhere.
What Valve did seems ridiculous now but I suppose at the time it seemed 
right before things like leaks were really shown to not effect sales. 
The guy seems to have reformed himself now which I suppose is what the 
police meant when they said "lucky we got to you first" if he did go to 
the US he would have ended up doing some hard time and instead of 
becoming a productive member of society another life would have been 
ruined.
markyHD
21/02/11 @ 14:33
#17
+11
Very well written article.
I guess it shows that motives sometimes are very simplistic, and not 
'Teh Conspirazy'. Just a skint kid with no new games and too much time 
:)
Quint2020
21/02/11 @ 14:34
#18
+8
Brilliant story, great article, thanks EG!
Mkwone
21/02/11 @ 14:35
#19
+3
Very interesting article, and would make for an interesting film i 
think.
Linking in with the geohot thing it seems these people start off with 
good intentions (or rather harmless ones) but their sense of achivement 
results them to tell the world, and thats when things go wrong.
PixelPirate
21/02/11 @ 14:35
#20
+32
Articles like this get the "thumbs up", more investigative articles 
like this and less of the headline grabbing stuff would be most 
welcome!
Fascinating story, it was a good job the German police got there first. 
It sounds more like a talented kid hacker stumbling across a large 
security loophole, rather than some evil mastermind the media (at the 
time) was painting him out to be.
HoriZon
21/02/11 @ 14:36
#21
+2
Would the real Gembe please stand up!
I downloaded the leak back then it wasn't a game tbh it was more like 
the tech demo they used at E3 that one time.
Was fun messing with it though.
Edited 1 times, most recently on 21/02/11 @ 14:37
rotmm
21/02/11 @ 14:39
#22
+9
I just want to echo the comments about how interesting this article 
was. Parkin is clearly one of the best writers in the videogame 
industry today, and this piece was yet another example of that.
Shinetop
21/02/11 @ 14:41
#23
+25
"AXFR stands for Asynchronous Full Transfer Zone"
Huh?
Am I alone in being interested in what Gabe thinks of all this now and 
whether or not he feels any guilt about his attempt at entrapment? 
Something which is technically supposed to be illegal in many civilised 
countries, which is probably why the German police drummed up a quick 
charge of their own to bring him in on and slapped him with probation 
requirements that meant he couldn't possibly travel to America to be 
crucified.
Uh, that wasn't entrapment. Entrapment is convincing someone to do 
something illegal so you can catch them in the act. As such, it would 
have been entrapment if Valve had encouraged him to hack their servers 
and steal the source code.
Edited 1 times, most recently on 21/02/11 @ 14:46
coyote37
21/02/11 @ 14:41
#24
+13
Great article, would love to see more of this journalistic type feature 
on EG, especially if Simon Parkin is going to be writing them
mrdiamond
21/02/11 @ 14:45
#25
+7
Really interesting and well written article. Have to admit, in the past 
I have overlooked the EG articles, but this is the 2nd article in a 
couple of days that has certainly changing the way I read EG. Nice work 
:)
drew327
21/02/11 @ 14:46
#26
+3
Great read, thank you
tnomad
21/02/11 @ 14:46
#27
+21
No hyperbole, that's probably the best thing I've ever read on 
Eurogamer. More investigative journalism please!
SFG_Clan
21/02/11 @ 14:46
#28
+3
Yeah I think we as the gaming community should chip in and hire him
and get us some episode 3
or at least some concept art... a screenshot... ah forget it
Murton
21/02/11 @ 14:50
#29
+7
@shinetop
Entrapment is probably the wrong word, is there a term for coaxing a 
confession under false pretences and without caution? Which is just as 
bad as entrapment in my book. The article gave me the impression that 
Valve were planning to lure the kid to the US and then trick him into 
making a detailed confession in the precense of the FBI, who would then 
arrest and charge him under US Federal Law rather follow internation 
law and file for extradition with the German authorities. Any way you 
slice it Valve was invovled in some pretty shady activity and it would 
be interesting to know if Gabe knew how close he came to destroying 
that kid's life, a life which as we now know has turned out to be quite 
productive.
mcmonkeyplc
21/02/11 @ 14:51
#30
+6
Great article EG. More of this, less of the daily mail type shit. :)
TelexStar
21/02/11 @ 14:53
#31
+5
+1 on the great read. Nice work.
BremXJones
21/02/11 @ 14:54
#32
+17
As awesome as the story is, for those who are tutting at Valve, it's 
worth remembering this wasn't a finished game leak. It was a source 
code leak. In other words, doing it meant Valve had to go back and 
change it so it couldn't just be hacked apart when it was released for 
whatever messed up purposes. We can argue whether or not leaks effect 
sales, but source code leaks certainly increase costs.
KG
spekkeh
21/02/11 @ 14:54
#33
+5
I'm a Phd student in computer science and have no clue what all that 
technical mumbo-jumbo was about. So, er, well done for such a young 
guy.
Also yay for European justice systems and boo for the 'Murikan 
tomfoolery.
HurbleBurble
21/02/11 @ 14:55
#34
+5
An absolutely superb article, I cannot praise it enough.
It's interesting to see in light of modern 'leaks' how sheer, naked 
curiosity lead to the (unintended) release of HL2 and all that 
followed. I have nothing but respect for Gembe in being so candid and 
honest in his appraisal and regrets. It speaks volumes for his 
character, as others have said, how he used it as a spur to turn his 
life around. The greatest shame seems to be his naivety, braggadocio 
and implicit trust leading to his downfall.
Neither Gabe nor Valve seem to come out of this with much credit, it 
must be said. In their defence, they just wanted to defend what was 
rightfully theirs, but the cynical manipulation of Gembe and 
heavy-handedness of the approach smacks more of anger that they had 
been revealed as liars and wanting to hurt whoever was responsible for 
damaging their reputation rather than the game itself. It can be shown 
the leaks had little to no impact upon the game's commercial success 
and in the end probably even raised it's profile within the general 
public rather than just the gaming community.
butler`
21/02/11 @ 14:56
#35
+5
I hope they invested a little money on server security since then...
customfirmware
21/02/11 @ 14:56
#37
+10
Comparing him to geohot would be so wrong, he's seem like a nice 
person. Geohot on the other hand comes off as a nasty piece of work.
Great article by the way Simon.
Edited 1 times, most recently on 21/02/11 @ 15:03
smirny
21/02/11 @ 14:57
#38
+4
This article. +1
siro
21/02/11 @ 15:02
#39
+1
Really good article. I think it depicts lots of the young internet 
criminals out there, who would need to get busted before seeing the 
wrongs in their ways. At least I know I didn't fear anything back in 
the day.
I wouldn't be surprised if that Geohot guy says similar things one day.
Walkerj
21/02/11 @ 15:03
#40
+9
Between this and the WWE article eurogamer pieces keep getting better!
makariel
21/02/11 @ 15:05
#41
+3
Great article!
FogHeart
21/02/11 @ 15:10
#42
+6
If there's something hackers can learn from this experience it's to 
examine your motivations and recognise that there are people you 
consider friends that want to exploit your naivete and generosity.
If you feel you need to break laws and endanger the financial welfare 
of people you otherwise admire, to get praise and encouragement from 
people you don't know in real life, as a substitute for praise and 
encouragement you don't get from people who really should be giving it 
to you, it's time to stop. To quote the Wise Sage of the Eighties, 
Kelly Brock, "People will like you for who you are, not what you can 
give them."
Perhaps it always starts with a talented individual with a 'noble 
cause', which is subverted by his ego causing him to brag about his 
achievements to someone who will exploit him. Geohot, are you there?
Wolf0x
21/02/11 @ 15:10
#43
+3
Very interesting story, great article eurogamer
iago71
21/02/11 @ 15:13
#44
+3
Great article. A very interesting read. More of this anecdotal fare as 
soon as you can please EG. :)
Fellblade
21/02/11 @ 15:15
#45
+14
"Newell called fucking Interpol in on this kid, he's the one who should 
be sorry for being such a wanker."
He's a wanker because he wanted justice for someone who stole a load of 
his company's work and forced them to re-write a load of code? It's not 
like this guy was a three year old who took a cookie without saying 
'please'. He broke into a company, stole their source and assets, and 
then shared them with others.
Edit for minor grammar badnesses
Edited 1 times, most recently on 21/02/11 @ 15:39
j-bo
21/02/11 @ 15:15
#46
+5
good work eg!
markyHD
21/02/11 @ 15:16
#47
+4
@Murton
I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Very shady indeed, 
considering the age of the kid at the time. Perhaps it's Gabe's guilt 
that has led to his binge eating over the last 10 years :D
TearYouAsunder
21/02/11 @ 15:17
#48
+6
Excellent read!
Xabarin
21/02/11 @ 15:21
#49
+7
Very interesting read. More stories like this! :)
up_the_ante
21/02/11 @ 15:21
#50
+5
Cannot believe he thought he'd get a job after stealing 4 years work 
and costing them $250M!
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 wrote:
[CUT]
Grille mazie.



ho letto sino a qui

Dopo dura riflessione, interzoid ha scritto :

hai letto pure troppo

 che gli tese il ciccione.
ROTFL volevano farne caso esemplare con tanto di mobilitazione dell'FBI  e 
poi praticamente lo hanno preso solo perchè si è autodenunciato! La storia 
della trappola del ciccione poi sembra uscita da un fumetto tanto è ingenua.
Mi ha fatto ridere uno dei commenti dei lettori: "se potessimo avere il 
codice sorgente di Episode 3 probabilmente troveremmo un file vuoto con 
soltanto una nota: //codice sorgente qui (eventualmente)"
LOL