News & Gossip VII: For Blood and Headlines

I do not support life imprisonment for anybody, let alone some 18 year old, no matter how actually shitty he is

you seem like a fiscally conservative guy muaad perhaps you might be interested to learn how expensive it is to imprison people for life! even more expensive to kill them, too!

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if you’re aware of a more ethical way of becoming a billionaire i’d like to hear about it

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I wrote too much

I understand the rebel theme of this news, hacker vs evil corporation and the medias try to rewrite it then related other harmless game leak case, but in fact, it’s the case about blackmail Rockstar, after he got refused, he leaked the clips. Even though at that moment, many cops next to his room.

Arion Kurtaj, 18, who is autistic, was on bail for hacking the software firm Nvidia and BT/EE and also in police protection at a Travelodge hotel when he continued his hacking and breached Rockstar Games, the company behind GTA, a court heard.

Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj, carried out his cyber attack using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel television and a mobile phone. He broke into the company’s internal Slack messaging system to declare: ā€œIf Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code.ā€

Here is his reply

A mental health assessment used as part of the sentencing hearing said he ā€œcontinued to express the intent to return to cyber-crime as soon as possibleā€, adding: ā€œHe is highly motivated.ā€

He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger, Southwark crown court heard on Thursday.

ā€˜no matter how actually shitty he is’. According the mental health assessment, he’s totally broken. Meanwhile, the hospital ban is not an unconditional life sentence. He will be release until doctors let him free.

you can suspect the doctors for possibly torture him and the hospitals can’t treat him and will only make him worse like Arkham, but consider the current situation, the judgement is trying their best to get balance for protect public, warning hackers and save him.

and another member of this group got different judgement which I even think it’s very tolerant, consider they deleted all the hospital record in Brazil after they sold it, especially during the covid-19 (very wicked).

they actually not push these kids too hard, no matter how actually shitty he is, but at least, when they looks like start to reflection their crimes, the judge is very tolerant

Another Lapsus$ member, who is 17 and cannot be named for legal reasons, was found guilty in the same trial of two counts of fraud, two Computer Misuse Act offences and one count of blackmail.

He was sentenced to a youth rehabilitation order at Guildford crown court in Surrey on Thursday.

As part of the order, he will have an 18-month supervision requirement, a six-month rehabilitation requirement and a three month intensive supervision and surveillance requirement.

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in game forum, Gabe Newell?

i dont know how to explain that locking a teenager up for life is a disporportionate punishment for leaking videogame source code. in fact, a huge portion of people on this website probably dont acknowledge copyright laws or ip, certainly would never be convinced that their enforcement could ever be ā€œjustā€

this is not a tangible or quantifiable form of harm. totally vibes-based numbers probably made up by rockstar pr to justify a human rights abuse. dont know what else to call it. he leaked screencaps from gta vi he didnt conduct an electrinonic warfare attack on a nuclear power plant

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I don’t know what the punishment should be or if he has any possibility of release if he changes his tune or anything, but there’s also the repeated blackmailing part, that’s not great. Oh and dumping personal data or whatever.

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some have more practical experience with institutions than lovecraft or batman. i recommend you listen to them

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i mean ultimately the kid is being locked up for the mistake of not knowing how/being able to mask his intentions (by which i do not mean it is his fault) and a state that does not know how to react with anything other than brutality to such a youth

edit: obviously this is also a doubling down on the idea that law enforcement and the state are primarily geared towards protecting financial interests and this kid just speaking frankly about his intentions is incensing them to make an example or some other such nonsense

it’s theater to make every else cower in fear of intelluctual property

furthermore, it’s state punishment of neurodivergence

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I forgot link of the blackmail part and what the judge consider, IMO Rockstar pr is not decisive, hack and blackmail again and keep crime under police protection while on bail is the worst evidence for him.

In sentencing hearings, Kurtaj’s defence team argued that the success of the game’s trailer indicated that Kurtaj’s hack had not caused serious harm to the game developer and asked that this be factored into the sentencing.

But Her Honour Judge Lees said that there were real victims and real harm caused from his other multiple hacks on individuals and the companies he attacked with Lapsus$.

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in other words they made 0 dollars and 0 cents

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it’s DeFi in crypto, every rookie hacker know how to wash their money by DEX.

but I guess in the end, I can’t have the strong empathy on criminal or zero trust of authority like you and you can’t believe most of criminal organization in age of crypto are youngster.

maybe? microsoft got rich because bill gates’ dad was an eminent contract lawyer and he was in a position to introduce hard-ass licensing schemes to the nascent personal computer industry and was canny enough to stifle and undermine competition. gaben took his share of those spoils and used them to put himself in a position to collect rent on the sale of nearly every pc game. granted steam is a good product overall and represented an improvement over the previous state of pc games distribution. however valve hoarded the rent they collected through their platform rather than investing it back in to prevent it from being used as a fascist recruitment tool, child gambling addiction vector, money laundering system, etc etc. is an absentee landlord better than a thief? depends on the circumstances

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The actual shittiness of the institutions is the real problem, I think. The ā€œindefiniteā€ sentence is kind of a distraction here, because it’s basically until he stops saying he’s going to keep doing crime. In the abstract, that seems like the ideal kind of sentence: prevented from committing crimes just until you’ve been credibly convinced not to commit any more crimes.

Obviously the ā€œcorrectionalā€ institutions we have in real life are bad at their jobs and good at indiscriminate brutality, but that’s the problem with them, and we’ll make them functional and humane long before we make them go away.

In a functional society it would be intensive training in living with neurodivergence; like, appreciating that people are watching you when you’re on probation.

e: god that’s a lot of words to say ā€œi’m a liberalā€

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i think it’s foolish hypocrisy if posters on a gameing forum think that these kind of crimes should be punished—if leaking some gta screenshots earns a life sentence does sharing a snes romset get the royal air force sent to your house???

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i do think Nintendo would kill people if they thought they could

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blackmailing a megacorp is praxis tbh

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but he didn’t commit crimes because they specifically asked the jury for a finding only on the act, not the necessary criminal intent. from the bbc:

Doctors deemed Kurtaj unfit to stand trial due to his severe autism so the jury was asked to determine whether or not he committed the alleged acts - not if he did so with criminal intent.

instead of a finding on the mens rea he gets indefinite deprivation of personal liberty until a psychiatrist decides he’s no longer a danger. i don’t think we can reform away the possibility of abuse on the psychiatrist’s part any more than we can know he won’t reoffend to a degree of certainty for his release

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Autistic people (including me, hi!) who don’t even do things society calls a crime are in fact always at risk of being locked up too even! I was tremendously lucky I wasn’t in the school system long enough to be catalogued and tortured to make me ā€˜normal’ by societal standards. There is no guarantee they will ever let him out, and there is very little legal recourse when you are imprisoned for being autistic.

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