I can't disagree more. He built malware, and distributed it to steal game keys. Then, he stole and published the hl2 source. It's a lot more than just wanting to play a game early.
I still find Valve's response to a person admitting guilt to be pretty harsh, given that they couldn't have known about unrelated crimes.
This happened to Gaius, in late 90th, for impersonating US president on the hacked White House pabx.
This happened to Casper/leader2 connecting to a shell of military US server after someone on IRC asked him to kee the connection alive.
Back in the day cyber force of USA were fighting for budget, and having hacker arrested and judged in a very advertised way was helping them get more money for their work.
Even if it means to totally disrespect internationnal procedure/law/agreement on dealing with « criminal ».
Once a foreigner puts a feet on US ground, he is totally in the hand of US officials, in disregard of any official treaties and international laws.
Anyone remembering this Russian guy arrested straight from plane when he landed in USA going to make a talk to defcon ?
I had to look it up, but it's Dmitry Sklyarov [1], who worked for the russian-based ElcomSoft, which was known for selling all sorts of DRM cracking programs.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.
> 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. [...] "The person I shared the source with assured me he would keep it to himself. He didn't."
Was this dumb? Yes. I still think Valve could have been more sympathetic. My ire would be for the person who actually leaked the source publicly.
Do you disagree with the article or did you just not believe it? Because, Gembe denied publishing the source code and there was no evidence that Gembe is the one who published it.