Well, between getting doxxed and annihilating any chance he had at getting a lenient sentencing, the more sensible decision would have probably been to sit on his hands and bide time for a couple months lol.

He didn’t just steal content. He then tried to blackmail the company to not release the content he stole.

Also, while you might be able to justify piracy of a released product in various ways (the common argument is that the would be pirate wouldn’t have paid for the product anyway and digital goods don’t have any cost to the developer from pirating them). But when the product hasn’t been released yet, then it has a much bigger cost because the pirated copy is the only option available and thus it can eat into actual sales. The inability to go through with their planned launch (something big publishers will spend millions hyping) and the release of an unfinished product can absolutely have financial damages. It’s hard to recover from a bad launch.

And that’s without getting into the fact that hackers like this don’t usually stop at just leaking video games or the likes. They’ll also often steal people’s personal information. It’s a lot easier to see the moral issues when it’s your information being stolen.

There’s no ethical use of ransomware.

They run Android, so not really standard Linux, but yeah.

So either a remote control or voice control.

Anyway, kid has too much time on his hands, lol.

The article or maybe the comments said he accessed a cloud based Linux service using the FireStick and went to work from there.

Yeah, the theme is “Don’t underestimate Neanderthals, they’re pretty much the granddaddy of Homo sapiens”. Or in short, “primitive, not unintelligent”.

Exploit boogaloo

Counter-counterpoint: he could work as a pentester, where his sole purpose is to just break into things.

Leave the policy making and actual hardening to someone else.

For others like me interested in the exact example; it’s about the difficulty of designing a trash can that smart bears cannot open and dumb tourists still can. You cannot create something too secure if you still want dumb people to use it as well, due to the overlap.

The quote is not really saying dumb people will break / nullify security, like I read in the above comment, but more that they just will not be able to operate it.

seriously, lets put this kid to good use.

That’s only for the plebs that apply through the normal means, not for savants whose skill balances the risk - they can put a few agents to track what this dude is doing, but its much harder to find another guy eith this much skill whos also not a felon.

Also this is all speculation ie I pulled it out of my ass but doesn’t it sound plausible?

It doesn’t sound like he’s been convicted of a crime yet…

I mean sure, if you’re the one applying. If they’re offering they can choose whatever the hell criteria they want.

he doesn’t even present any evidence that this was caused by some failing of the schools

The cynicism I’ve gained over the last 7 years tells me that there’s an agenda being pushed there.

EDIT: To elaborate. I’m not arguing whether “the agenda” the author has is good or bad, but it’s off-base. If you’re reporting on a story, you really should leave your feelings about the story at the door. It’s not like the story isn’t interesting enough! If this were an op-ed, then that’s one thing. But the “sensationalist reporting aside” and “we can’t help feeling sad” and then pointing to… the UK’s education system… it’s clearly not objective. You’re not presenting facts and facts alone, you’re presenting facts with your opinions mixed in.

Just look at what the author invited into his comment section with that:

Not enough male teachers for these lads to confide in and see as role models.

Blatant sexism.

Yes, keep male teachers who are not woke away from kids.

Groomer accusations.

If I had to guess I would pick serious mental illness rather than a failing by the schools.

Disparaging of neurodivergence (neurodiversity? IDK if that’s still the right term). Hacking into companies and bragging about it is something even neurotypical teenagers do.

bigfoot, the loch ness monster, a functional education system. list of things that don’t exist.

Anti-education screed.

As for the energy, I suspect actually getting laid, probably for the first time, would likely help.

Do I even need to say anything about this one?

You caught a lot of downvotes on the original post, but it is reductive. I pretty sane conclusion but educational support probably isn’t the only culprit, issues like this are multilayered and not so cut and dry.

There are career hackers. Pen testing and white hat hacking is very much a thing. I’ve been in software for two decades, some of the most talented people I’ve worked with had similar back stories.

I’d trust him to recover my WiFi password after I’ve forgotten it

Like in the documentary Swordfish

Perhaps but it can also be very much against them. I worked at a huge UK cybersecurity org and if you had any prior malicious or computer misuse past, you would get rejected. Given how small the UK is, even tiny orgs can be connected to government or public sector meaning they won’t want anyone on the books with a questionable past.

fwiw I agree with you in that for the author to include this in their article is pretty weird. At some point it transformed from reporting into an op-ed.

Games can be pretty late in development and not look very good, when you see gameplay demos and whatnot in development games is almost always snowflake examples that they bring up to a “gold” standard just for the demo, which is often why they can drastically change prior to release (see halo 2). From the footage of this I’ve seen it was footage recorded from someone in some QA capacity role trying to show an issue to a developer, so it was absolutely one of the most in development looks you could possibly have, any visuals were essentially fluff at that level of development. They probably have a pretty good idea of what the finished product will look like, but there’s really no reason to put that into a version of the game that’s just testing AI.