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Comment by marklyon | Hacker News Reader

Here's a Reddit thread discussing the malware: https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/7yh4zu/fslabs_a3...

I'm shocked that the company admitted to doing this.

Admitting to the crime is a form of damage control. Someone with a clue figured out what was going on, spoke to the lawyers, and determined that the penalties, if any, would be harsher if they wait for a trial before admitting guilt.

That's all it was. They are in a lot of trouble, potentially, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I am hoping that charges will be pressed, because this is not the first time developers have "booby trapped" pirated software, but it could be the last if justice is served.

All for their DRM scheme.

I still find it interesting how many people don’t realize that generosity could be a valuable part of your product. That growing the industry as a whole may be more important than getting back at people who weren’t going to buy your product anyhow.

I can see generosity working for a single developer but you are not going to build Electronic Arts with donations alone.

Whats wrong with that? Electronic Arts is a cancer on the gaming industry.

Wouldn’t it require one of the users of the pirated version to fill a complaint? If the software wasn’t doing anything nefarious to regular users, just had potentially dangerous code sitting in a dll in a directory, it is hard to justify any damage. Kind of like if I had a function to format the C drive in one of my binaries. It never gets executed but would I be liable for having that function in a binary I distributed.

Yes and it's a safe bet that was going to happen. Since they admitted to it, maybe people will let it go. I would suggest it depends on how much damage was done to real users. There could be a class action.

It would be ironic if a bunch of pirates sued a software developer and won.

Just to be clear, nobody should let it go. Everyone needs to be taught right from wrong in their lives. Publishing malware is always wrong.

> Admitting to the crime is a form of damage control. Someone with a clue figured out what was going on, spoke to the lawyers, and determined that the penalties, if any, would be harsher if they wait for a trial before admitting guilt.

I don't think so. I'd guess a lawyer would've told them to get rid of the feature, delete all collected passwords, never use any of it in the future and most importantly, don't admit to anything. It's rare that a lawyer advises you to admit to a crime. Before they admitted to it no one even knew if they ever used the collected data.

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