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Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

TL-DR: 1) don't hack. 2) if you hack, don't get caught. 3) if you hack and get caught, be in a country that you can bribe yourself out of the mess (definitely not Germany!) 4) don't destroy other people's hard work, it's not nice.

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I think 3 should be "Don't email your hack victims with proof of your crimes for a face-to-face meeting."

That one is fundamental! lol

Rule 0: Commit 1 crime at a time.

"Only break one law at a time" is exactly this said another way, yet somehow easier for me to parse.

Fair, but it loses out on the rhyme.

He did so to confess. He has admitted he didn’t want to hide. There’s no strategy to critique here; he wanted to come clean.

I'm guessing he got a better deal than if he had been caught

Only because he lived in Germany and their system was more reasonable about it.

5) never come clean to feds

> 4) don't destroy other people's hard work, it's not nice.

Destroy.. how? The game still exists, Valve still owns it.

Not only they own it but their entire gaming position with Steam is thanks to Half-Life 2 forcing everyone to download it (and pretty much everyone hated Steam at the time).

Actually the beta release of Steam with CSS worked fine and dandy (I recall fun times), but the general release was just plain crap for months afterwards.

I mean it fucked all of the devs morale and the situation of HL2 for months after that. I remember downloading the leak and playing around, it was a shit show.

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