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.

I was cringing the whole time reading about the interrogation. I can imagine this whole thing would have ended so much worse for Gembe if he had actually gone for that job interview. Just try and compare Gembe to Weev, you might start pining for good ol Schönau im Schwarzwald.

It is justified what you did was illegal and not cool but they had the chance to turn it into something positive.

Plus, there was no way Gabe could have known that Axel was 1) truly apologetic or 2) wasn't the one who also published the code publicly. And even if it was known, the fact that he shared it with friends showed that he didn't seem to care that much about protecting it.

That being said, I do work in the security industry and understand that Axel's motivations weren't evil or anything. Gabe still did what he should have done.

Then again I'm sure he was really pissed so I can't blame him for doing what he did.

Maybe the kid who did it wasn't actually sorry; maybe he was hoping to get more access so he could steal more stuff. That's a way it could hurt.

Maybe bringing the kid who stole your team's work and demoralized everybody isn't going to do great things for the company morale; that's another way it could hurt.

Giving people second chances is great and all, but it seems silly to say "[it] wouldn't have hurt"; it could have very easily gone wrong.

That presumes you are 100% confident that the guy is completely remorseful and will no longer do anything wrong. Given past behavior, why should Valve have had that confidence?

'prison' and 'punishment' aren't synonyms. Make someone work their ass off to repay a crime IS punishment. As is locking them up, but by doing that, you severely decrease the chances of that person ever being a productive member of the society again.

Of course, should that person break the terms agreed upon, then I guess prison time is warranted as an additional punishment. And even in this case, with non violent criminals, in a setting where they can still work.

Prison is fantastically expensive, not particularly effective, and severely degrades the offender's life.

Restorative justice is much cheaper and more effective at fixing the offending behaviour, and the results of that behaviour.

Prison should be left for violent or unrepentant recidivists.

Nobody knew everything would turn out OK back before HL2 was released.

There are no buts here. Non-violent offenders shouldn't be arrested at gun point. And it's not just a matter of scaring someone, it's a matter of public safety. I don't get why whenever an issue like that comes out, there is always someone jumping to defend dangerous practices like that.

And this guy also stole people's software keys.

If they were talented coders, they could've found less destructive ways to make money. But he decided to go the greedy route.

Let me guess: you are a US citizen, or anyway live in a country where developer positions abound. Well, not everyone is. Some people live in small towns where the cool programming positions are adapting invoice management software for small businesses.

Also this was before Freelancer.com, before code.org. And he was a boy, he couldn't just relocate. Also, before the App Store.

This is exactly the curiosity that people who enter the InfoSec world feel, coupled with real skills. Often too much skills and too little to do to start.

Then you stumble upon a IRC channel and a world of challenges opens in front of you.

By the way, he asked Valve to hire him. Maybe he just didn't find "less destructive ways to make money" yet.

Don't judge if people are oppressed (or better, repressed) if you have never been, please, either because at that age YOU had the occasions or guidance, or because you hadn't that curiosity or talent.

That's a legitimate programming job. Cool software rarely makes money. Cool software that makes money (game development) doesn't pay very much.

Then you stumble upon a IRC channel and a world of challenges opens in front of you.

A book is far more challenging, because in an IRC channel you're a fish in a small pond. Eventually you grow to be the biggest fish, or forever limit yourself to being small. What a book can't give is peer recognition. But peer recognition is a vain motive, and vanity is rarely lucrative. A book also can't answer questions, but you can use IRC or a website like stackexchange for that.

If anyone reading this has personal experience flirting with blackhattery, please carefully consider what you're doing and why you're doing it. (And if you'd like someone to talk to, please feel free to shoot me an email. I'd like hearing about your experiences and your thoughts.)

Peer recognition is critical when starting at that age. Also careful consideration is not exactly common.

I'm in no way alleging that it is a reasonable way to go for a mature professional, but I acknowledge the charm it has for the young high-schooler that is being "taught" Excel at school and being told not to fiddle with that weird black terminal.

These boys and girls should not have their lives destroyed by a harsh punishment for their curiosity, that in a different setting would have been highly rewarded. I can totally picture myself doing the same errors in different conditions.

Btw, management software is a legitimate programming job of zero interest to security people. Just different curiosity fields.

    * Hack into a remove computer server/friends PC.
    * Broke a WEP/WPA wifi network to gain access
    * Performed MiTM to see what kind of data can sniff
    * Performed brute-force dictionary attack without being asked.
    * Shared illegal digital material with friends

* Scraped website and used the data for some other opportunity

The difference is not access, it's the inherently nonviolent nature of digital. It's easier to get a kid to care about not hurting others than about not hurting an abstract legal entity like a company.

Your thinking must be stuck in the last century. By the time I entered the game industry 13 years ago, salaries were already on par with the software industry at large. My first full-time position was in 2003 and paid $85,000/year. Based on the numbers I've seen, game programmers currently earn significantly more than web developers with an equivalent amount of experience, despite the wage-inflationary effect of the VC money faucet.

The coolness factor used to play a greater role. I would say it still affects the supply side for QA, design and very entry-level positions in programming. For programmers with any level of competency and experience, its role is negligible.

The consensus amongst my friends in game development is that it doesn't pay well for the amount of work they're doing, but it's what they enjoy doing so they're willing to tolerate it.

I should also mention that I am a bit of an anomaly - I'm an AngularJS expert, which seems to be in extremely high demand right now. I'm making around $160k (including stock compensation), and I may have even lowballed myself in salary negotiations.

To be honest, I had no idea such salaries were to be found in web dev, especially by specializing in popular JS frameworks. Thanks for sharing! I'd be curious to know your location and how much experience you have in Angular. [update: Oh, I see you posted 1.5 years in web dev.... wow, maybe I should reevaluate things]

It seems easy to justify paying well given that immediacy as opposed to a developer spending much more time/money optimizing GPU physics engines whose benefits would not be felt until the game was slightly better than its competition when it is released in a year.

Not necessarily total compensation but defiantly pay / hour.

I know your personal network is extremely large. If you have a lot of knowledge about the topic of gamedev salaries, I'd love to hear more. Since talking about salaries with colleagues is typically verboten, I'm curious how you collected your salary datapoints and what your sample size is.

There's a lot of anecdotal evidence of studios underpaying interns and programmers who are straight out of college, and regularly working people 60 or 80 hours a week. The anecdotal evidence fits my own personal experience, but perhaps my experience isn't representative of the whole industry; maybe I was just unlucky with my first couple studios.

I appended a paragraph to the original post explaining the effect of coolness on first-job salaries. I do think it plays a role there. Companies like EA are notorious for using fresh graduates as a revolving source of underpaid labor. As for long hours, my impression (here I have no survey data) is that it's become much rarer.

I think what happened economically is that by the early to mid 2000s, the main technical challenges of game development had almost nothing to do with anything specific to games. Compare that to the impression of game development you might have gotten from reading Abrash's articles on Quake. Because of that, good game programmers were able to easily get jobs outside of games, and good non-game programmers were able to quickly get up to speed on gamedev specifics. Hence wages equalized. That also explains why wages for designer and artists are still relatively lower.

It's from 2012. Average salary for devs with less than 3 years experience: $66,116. The average for 6+ years experience is $103,000.

Here's a survey from 2001 with 1,801 datapoints: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010715/Salary_Survey_200...

Average salary in 2001 for the same position: about $55,000. For those with 6+ years, it was about $70,000.

It seems like a webdev outside the Valley who has 6+ years experience should be making more than $103,000.

If those surveys are to be trusted, it sounds like your $85k starting salary was about 50% higher than average at the time.

It puts the US average at $84,337. The 2012 averages I can find for web developers are significantly less than that ($60,000-80,000). Part of the problem with these comparisons is that "web developer" is a much wider category.

> It seems like a webdev outside the Valley who has 6+ years experience should be making more than $103,000.

I don't see why, unless you are in a special high-demand bracket of web development. That's a very respectable salary in most areas!

This was in 2004, 3 years after the dot com bubble burst and was getting rosy again. Everyone and their mother's with a blog were making hundreds a month.

Programmers have been peddling shareware since BBS days.

Are you really calling Germany a 3rd world country?

> Some people live in small towns where the cool programming positions are adapting invoice management software for small businesses.

So why is this not legitimate work?

> Often too much skills and too little to do to start. Then you stumble upon a IRC channel and a world of challenges opens in front of you. Don't judge if people are oppressed (or better, repressed) if you have never been, please, either because at that age YOU had the occasions or guidance, or because you hadn't that curiosity or talent.

This is a pretty arrogant statement. Many programmers don't program malware not because they aren't smart enough, they don't do it because it is socially unacceptable and they don't have a criminal mind.

If you feel the need to "learn" about security, don't exploit, trojan, or ddos my server. Do it to your own computer.

I'm about four years older than Gembe, when I was 18 I endured:

Threats of violence, death threats, constant insults (such as 'paedophile', 'baby rapist', 'retard', 'cunt', 'fat cunt', 'queer'), people spitting in my face, prank calls at two in the morning, false accusations (eg. being accused of threatening someone, said someone would regularly say to me "I'm going to kick your fucking head in"). Being called 'cunt' every other day tends to become a drag after twenty years or so.

My 33rd birthday is fast approaching, I still have trouble with other members of society treating me poorly. When most people go to work, they don't expect to put up with threats of being punched in the face. When you complain about your treatment at work, you don't expect to lose your job a week later.

I've spent the last two years learning programming, ten years ago I decided to learn a load of maths (my education wasn't that good). On both occasions the response often was "stick to what you are capable of" or "go and learn something useful instead". Or how about the time someone at the Job Centre decided I was incapable of filling out forms by myself, then filled it on my behalf without my permission, complete with a few silly spelling mistakes.

Gembe sounds to me like he has had it easy.

Nice justification of criminality. "But I was bored and talented!"

Oh dear, who are we to stand in the way of your genius then?

Especially in the case of juveniles, we (as a society) should be understanding of minor indiscretions, and look to guide kids onto a better path. Thankfully the German justice system seemed to get that.

I don't have a black and white view, I just don't buy "I was bored and clever" as a justification for breaking the law.

What is "the law", for who and by whom they are created for?

We need to first realize that there are no such a thing as "The law", and the limits of right and wrong are pretty shady if you think we live in a world that is multicultural and multi-subjective with several different realities and values, all of them valid in their own context..

For me "The law" here, which we supposed that are controlled by the state in our own interests, are actually serving corporate interests.. the same ones the US(at least the people) now are fighting against in cases like the net neutrality..

Whatever "The Law" is, it must serve their own people, and care if the execution of the law are being effective not only for the society in general, but also for the people being convicted by it..

In that context, we need to ask, why "the american society" represented by "the law" thought that kid was a risk to them, in a way he should be in prison for it..

The other aspect is , the culture and the companies created in american soil have to right to use the american law to put a german kid in jail

What values are you defending, when you put a kid the way they did in prison? what this gonna do with the kid? destroy his life? sure!! for what? this kid did marketing to HL2 for free!! Valve made millions of it!!

I think it didnt work for the society in general and less so for the kid.. really America scares me(as a outsider), sometimes the same way a country where i would be in doubt about my human rights being respected.. because of things like this...

I think this is not something to be proud of, but ashamed

I'm merely commenting on how intelligence doesn't lift one above the legal system you reside within.

That's been essentially my entire (for money) programming career and I adore it, taking a crappy manual/outdated process and refining it to create a tool that becomes a core part of a customers business is vastly rewarding to me.

I don't think it's particularly farfetched to expect relatively socially ostracised teenaged boys to not make the best judgement decisions right as they are developing their computer science skills. Most of them end up becoming relatively well-adjusted (within the scope of an introverted computer nerd) people so why not help them in that development?

The fact that you throw the race card down so quickly when it comes to a discussion about crime concerns me.

some people are past the point of rehabilitation and should be in prison.

If we made a serious effort of rehabilitation in the US penal system, then this might be fair. We don't. Prisoners, especially those who commit the crimes in their youth, are screwed under our current system. The younger criminals, like their non-criminal youth counterparts, just don't know or don't appreciate the options available to them regarding education and learning trade skills. We put them into an environment with other people we've given up on and somehow expect that when they get out a year or a decade later they'll be ready to reintegrate into society. They didn't have the skill set going in, and they won't have it coming out. Many of them will continue to live on the fringes of our society, perhaps making a meager living as unskilled laborers. Others will fall into a crowd that keeps them involved in crime or other "antisocial", or however you want to describe it, behavior.

The only good thing that came from him was my nieces and even they didn't really turn out that great due to probably a twisted childhood and weird relation with dad.

"I felt for this guy, because it could easily have happened to me,"

This doesn't explain why we ought treat these crimes as different. But it does explain why we do treat them different. I think.

"What about the people wrongfully on death row?"

What have you been up to over the years? It'd be cool to hear about your career and life in general.

Few people in US prisons [1] deserve what they're getting. It takes a cold-hearted prick to honestly believe what you've written.

[1] While this guy wasn't, the sort of people deftnerd is talking about are.

By the time I was 21, I certainly wouldn't have done something like what he did. But, just a few years earlier, say at 18, yes, I did stupid things. In his position I probably could have done what he did. At that age many "boys" brains just aren't developed enough to truly understand right and wrong.

I'm not saying they shouldn't be punished. But I am saying they definitely shouldn't be punished harshly. In this case he was lucky to receive two years of probation as punishment. Something like that, or perhaps what we call "community service", is certainly more appropriate than throwing him in adult jail with hardened criminals.

Depends what you mean by that. In this guy's case, had he boarded the plane he would have gotten two decades in an American jail, versus two years of probation in Germany. I think he should be held accountable, but somehow, given the nature of the crime and the surrounding context, I think Germany got it right.

  morally right but not condoned by the government.
                    ^^^

Not everybody does it for money actually his motivation was quite clear he liked the games but couldn't afford to buy them legit.

A situation i can relate with given I've been in a similar one.

Nowhere in this article was there a mention of hacking in order to make money.

Fortunately he was apprehended by the German Police, but things would've been way different had took that plane.

[1] There's a great presentation from him on video, including analysis of OPSEC failures from other hacker groups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU

[2] Another timeless classic: "Don't talk to [the] police", which explains why it is never in your interest to talk to the police when you are suspected of a crime (even if you are innocent): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

Not allowed to send books for UK prisoners as it contravenes their new "incentives and earned privileges scheme". Books are a luxury to be earned, apparently. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/24/ban-books-pri...