I remember reading online that to bait the valve half life 2 leaker/hacker to come to the US for authorities to capture, valve sent the hacker a phoney job offer. At the end of the day, all these smart tech workers want is to get paid for their skills.
For the hacker types there are things like bug bounty programs where they could make money in a legitimate way. The story I linked to though is just regular extortion artists with no discernible skills. I'm not sure how you address that.
man I really got a new perspective on Gabe. Blatantly deceiving the German guy to cause tremendous harm to his life by colluding with the Gestapo even when Half Life 2 was a tremendous success and none of his precious monies were lost in the process, in fact the leak only raised the profile for Half Life 2 resulting in more sales.
I definitely won't be buying Half Life 3.
TIL Gabe Newell is actually very narrow minded and not a nice guy. Hacking and leaking is also bad but it's not clear that the action led to losses when Half Life 2 was a phenomenal success. It's the deceptive tactic of pretending to offer an olive branch and going back on your word. He should be fucking ashamed of himself.
Say someone broke in to your house, rifled through your stuff, and put pictures of your personal things on instagram. Would you not want to press charges?
I'm sure you can see the night and day differences. Gabe just got free PR exposure. He should've kept his fucking word and gave the guy a job but instead he got soft.
Tony Montana said it the best: all you really have at the end of your life is your word and your balls and how well you kept them.