> I might have a talk with David. I might say, ‘Listen, I’ve figured out it was you. Do I not seem approachable? Why are you and I not having a conversation about this?’
Talk about an absolute terrible way to approach someone who went public about a sexual harassment claim. From just this article I don't think I'd feel comfortable talking with this dude about anything serious going on.
absolutely terrifying power play from someone who wants you to know both, that they can identify your anonymous activity and that they're unhappy with you. It just stifles further whistleblowing
Yes, that was the line where my bullshit detector went to over 9000.
"Obviously, my job is to protect the organization, but ‘protect the organization’ takes on different meanings to different people. To me, ‘protect the organization’ has always meant: protect your people from bad things."
I have no words to express how far from the truth this is. The only lawyer who protects you is the one you hire. The company lawyer protects the company from you.
100% that even if that situation were to arrive, it would never go down that way anyway. It's a complete fantasy they have in their head about how they're not the corporate stooge they actually are along with everything else this guy views about himself.
The kid likes Pokémon so much he decided to look around the game and discovered some info, and this guy decides to call the kid up and harass/bully him so everyone will know that you don't just look around in his executables.
Exactly, that is clearly an engineering issue and this guy only called because he knew it was a child, this guy is so small and insignificant he had to use BULLYING AND HARASSING a child to make him legendary. Lawyers are the worst, man.
The whole "oh I have totally pure motives for wanting to identify someone saying they're being sexually harassed" angle was a little more concerning. It's wild so many comments thusfar are about that and not about the blatant bullshit around why he hunts down sexual harassment victims.
Yeah, the lawyer's description of the approach there sounded a little off, and that part of the discussion overall sounded... incomplete.
I believe that his job was to protect the company.
Knowing the truth of the situation might be one of the first things they want, but that's not the only thing on their mind and influencing their actions.
That was strange. I had to reread it to confirm that he's just talking about some random kid looking at the publicly-available game data files, not an employee or anyone else with special access.
>‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
What a complete piece of shit. Threatening a child and his parent because the child dumped some memory and found some file. He also knows that there is exactly zero chance for any legal actions towards that kid (and of course it is not his decision in any case), nevertheless he, the super helpful lawyer, gets to make threats however he wants.
Genuinely disgusting. How do these people live with themselves? "Honey, today I made a kid afraid he was going to jail, because he copied some file of something we sold to him, how was your day?".
I thank god I never became a lawyer. They are $300+/hr thugs for hire whose only mission is to bully you into complete submission until you pay to make them go away.
Unfortunately there is no lawful way to penalize someone for being an absolute piece of shit, since being a piece of shit is totally legal. Shame doesn’t work: people don’t even feel or respond to shame anymore. You can’t punch them, even if they deserve it. So lawyers like this just live their shitty lives, threatening children and sleeping soundly at night on mattresses stuffed with $100 bills.
This guy’s actions are 100% in line with Nintendo’s policies. They actively hate their fans. There is a legal way to punish Nintendo: Stop giving them money, and make sure everyone knows that the reason why is that you don’t do business with bullies.
Boycotts almost never work. Yet, somehow we keep reaching for that ineffective tool whenever the discussion of corporate bad behavior comes up. Vote With Your Wallet sounds nice, but just doesn't actually work in reality.
Bud Light and the generally chilling effect on corporate "progressive messaging" (or however someone would choose to phrase it) their boycott has had would like a word with you.
Boycotts work quite well, but you have to have a sufficient base of customers to participate — and it helps to avoid spurring counter-boycotts: Chick-Fil-A's business increased after some chose to boycott them. It also helps when the company's product is commodity swill that's easy enough to rotate out (Bud Light) vs. a generally positive customer experience (CFA).
Threatening people to make them behave a certain way is actually illegal, even if that threat is legal action. Especially if you are trying to stop someone from doing something well within their rights, knowingly abusing your privileged access to the law as a lawyer.
> Threatening people to make them behave a certain way is actually illegal, even if that threat is legal action
No, its generally not. Every legal demand letter is a threat of legal action intended to produce a desired behavioral outcome in the target. Needless to say, issuing a demand letter is not generally itself illegal.
> Especially if you are trying to stop someone from doing something well within their rights
Threats of either actions which are themselves illegal (prohibited violence) or threats with illegal purposes (suppression of protected rights) are often illegal,but that's a lot narrower than “Threatening people to make them behave a certain way is actually illegal”.
Your comment is framed as a disagreement but is actually just an elaboration. Granted, I should have said "can be illegal" instead of "is illegal" to make it narrower. The main point I was trying to make is that abuses of the legal system to coerce behavior are not allowed.
> "A veteran investigator of video-game leaks reveals the tricks of the trade"
Complete lie by the way. The highest revelation is that the found out that some streamer leaked something, because they noticed the leaked photos had the same icons as he did. Besides bullying a kid, this is just irrelevant.
This reminds me of how the head of Riot Vanguard basically just amounts to snitching in Discord servers/forums of paid cheats for info rather than actual technical mitigation.
> When it’s somebody complaining about workplace issues, I don’t really necessarily want to know who it is,
> unless what they’re complaining about is, ‘My boss is sexually harassing me.’ Then I want to know who it is
> because I want to know who their boss is. I’m investigating, not to try to out the person, but to try t
> assess the truth of what they’re saying.
> I might have a talk with David. I might say, ‘Listen, I’ve figured out it was you. Do I not seem approachable?
> Why are you and I not having a conversation about this?’ Obviously, my job is to protect the organization, but
> ‘protect the organization’ takes on different meanings to different people. To me, ‘protect the organization’
> has always meant: protect your people from bad things.
Good grief - do not fall for this shit.
The reason someone like him tries to figure out the identity of a person claiming sexual harassment is estimating and minimizing the liability. How credible are you (to the public, press, investigators, a potential jury), how big a platform do you have, etc. An unlikable, not-stereotypically-attractive loner who has no little social media connections? Not a threat. A person who has a thousand followers, is likable/attractive, etc? Big threat.
The only reason they care about the identity of the harasser is to figure out how big a deal this might be. Manager of some QA testing group? Not a problem. C-suite or Vice President, etc? Big problem, that both legal and PR will be quickly roped in on.
Just like with HR, nobody that works for your employer ever has your best interests even remotely on their priority list beyond getting you to trust them so they can pump you for as much information as possible to sabotage your claims by doing things like creating alibis, destroying evidence, and searching out reasons to accuse you of being a poorly performing / combative employee who is simply a malcontent.
If you've been or are being sexually harassed, your first stop should be an attorney (and in case it's obvious, not one you find via your company's EAP.)
Don McGowan, what a shitbird. Calls up this kid's mom to insinuate the kid has done wrong and raise the threat of a serious criminal accusation. Kinda seems like you shouldn't be allowed to practice law after that. I thought lawyers were supposed to have standards?
It just occurred to me that he doesn't think what he did was wrong, it sounds even like he received professional praise for it.. and thats probably because they all viewed it as a light touch. This was probably seen as easier (maybe even kinder) than the legal threats they would have otherwise started with or moved to.
I am guessing from the brief vague description of the "hack" that they had like cdn.pokemon.com/pokemon/1025.jpg and the kid incremented it to 1026.jpg and found the next Pokémon and that's what was construed as "hacking"?
It's possible that the "hacking" involved extracting data from some binary files making up a mobile or PC game. This isn't as trivial as incrementing an ID, but still should not constitute hacking.
> Back when I was at Pokémon, some kid figured out how to extract the images from the card game. He found an icon from the developer and said ‘Holy s----, I found a new Pokémon.’ This kid included his email, and because of the way Pokémon did account creation, when we got the child’s account, we got the parent information, which included a phone number.
> So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
When you boast about threatening kids, that says a lot about what kind of person you are
What's even worse that this asshole was legally correct, of course he was, one of the bad laws is the passage of DMCA which bans circumventing digital protections. That's how you get bullshit like DVD Jon who was accused of trespassing on his own computer.
What digital protections did the kid circumvent? As far as I can tell he just dumped the game's graphics and found a previously unknown creature among the results. No circumvention of anything whatsoever, just direct access to the data.
If the corporations don't want stuff like this to be found, they should try not putting it into the game in the first place. I guess copyright monopolists who are delusional enough to believe they can publish information world wide and control what happens to it do not have this sort of common sense.
For the record, there's an entire website full of people dedicated to doing what that child did:
> What digital protections did the kid circumvent?
This was my first thought too. While the entire DMCA is misguided draconian bullshit, I'm having trouble figuring out by what tortured logic dumping an image from a game file would trigger it.
I named the DMCA because that was likely to be most recognizable by our most esteemed readers but fine I will elaborate how this shit is everywhere.
In December 1996, the World Intellectual Property Organization
adopted the WIPO Copyright Treaty which is principally aimed at adapting the legal paradigm of copyrights to new technology. Article 11 of the WCT obligates “contracting parties to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.”
I also found that paragraph super weird. Kid played around with the software and found out a new Pokemon was in there but not released, lawyer guy gets his personal information, calls their house and threatens them with computer hacking charges, which seems bullshit as that was reverse engineering, so in many legislations it's not illegal.
I dunno. I usually read HN comments before the article, so I know what to look out for when reading it. But that's not the tone I'm getting here.
>So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
>The kid was live-tweeting it. The tweets were this:
>1.Pokémon just called my house.
>2.What the hell is a general counsel?
>3.I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.
>Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years.
Yeah, the DMCA is bullshittery, but it's a legal weapon that the GC is expect to wield for his company.
He did his job, in a way that had no legal consequences for the kid, and still got the result his company needed.
That seems like the correct way of handling it. Is it ideal from a societal perspective? No, the DMCA should be gutted. But from a practical perspective, this was a win all around.
And the kid was hopefully pushed away from trouble, at least until they were old enough to cover their tracks better.
I mean, you are right but it still feels wrong to see a lawyer bragging on the internet about shutting down a kid that basically just peeked in a toy his parents brought him.
A company made a mistake. A kid found out. So the company sicks the lawyers on the kid? Teaches the kid to not be curious? Does he really believe kids should only sit down and mindlessly consume content,only when a bigcorp dictates it, never walking a millimeter from the path? And then the bastard lawyer brags about it?
My blood boils just reading this. I hope that corporate creep never has any kids of his own.
The Pokémon company, in their own incompetence, leaked information by literally shipping it out to everyone on the internet who cared to download a copy of their game.
A child with computer skills found the data, got all enthusiastic about it and told the world via social media.
This fucking guy called the kid's house and bullied and threatened his family with legal repercussions that would likely not ever materialize.
He threatened a kid whose only crime was loving his employer's shitty game too much with a federal crime. An empty threat at that. "Hacking software, that’s a federal crime". What hacking software? Your own incompetence led to this. Try not sending people data you don't want them to have.
This piece of shit is actually so proud of what he did he brags about it in public instead of keeping it to himself.
This fucking asshole actually got a kick out of watching the kid's live reactions to his nonsense on Twitter.
A child's curiosity was destroyed for the sake of a corporation's profit and control. Using his skills to analyze files? He will never do it again.
Bullying a child and his family somehow made this guy a legend in the Pokémon company.
Nintendo and all related corporations willingly employ people like this guy.
At those firms, shitting all over your customers and their families makes you a legend.
Did I understand all the facts correctly? I need to double check because what I just read made me doubt my sanity.
I refuse to believe this guy is stupid to the point he actually thinks the kid "hacked" the game. I must conclude that this was just a power play from the rich corporation he represents. The real threat was to bankrupt his family with a nonsense court case which would no doubt drain their time and money. Even if they won in court, it would be a pyrrhic victory due to the costs involved. Therefore despite likely having no leg to stand on this asshole leveraged the legal system to bully a child and his family into obedience to their corporate overlord.
I've always suspected this was the real intention behind all the "threats" coming from these corporations. Never thought I'd actually see them not only confirm it but also brag about it in public. What a wortless piece of shit.
The anecdote about setting the lawyers on the kid who extracted the art assets from Pokémon.exe feels like a real ethical low point.
If you’re a lawyer going after children who take the screws out of the backs of alarm clocks then I’m afraid you’re the bad guy. People like that ought to be held accountable by their regional bar association.
It's tempting to feel bad for the kid, but he knew exactly how to not get any threatening phone calls: never unscrew anything. The parents are liable for leaving screwdrivers in accessible places. The inside of alarm clocks are our currency, for God's sake. If you ask me, every screw should have a uniquely shaped slot in the head and come with a single matching drill bit. This reckless screw compatibility situation we've ended up in is terrible for business.
Bookmarking this story as an uplifting reminder that even though I'm awkward and socially inept at times, at least I haven't bragged to Bloomberg about bullying children.
In the answer to "What’s the wildest story of a leaker you dealt with?", is Nintendo claiming that it's a federal crime just to look at icon files in a game you bought that's installed on your computer?
Putting aside the fact this lawyer is a scumbag (surprising no one), it really is amazing how bad leakers are at covering their tracks.
Almost makes me wonder if there's a market for some kind of "Leaking Agency" where we can help people leak information safely in exchange for a cut of any media buys or other income they might get from it.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadTalk about an absolute terrible way to approach someone who went public about a sexual harassment claim. From just this article I don't think I'd feel comfortable talking with this dude about anything serious going on.
"Obviously, my job is to protect the organization, but ‘protect the organization’ takes on different meanings to different people. To me, ‘protect the organization’ has always meant: protect your people from bad things."
I have no words to express how far from the truth this is. The only lawyer who protects you is the one you hire. The company lawyer protects the company from you.
Edit:autocorrect typo
Fuck this guy and this company.
Requesting the parent to share their likely painful memories or else they’ve committed some sin against hn leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
I believe that his job was to protect the company.
Knowing the truth of the situation might be one of the first things they want, but that's not the only thing on their mind and influencing their actions.
What a complete piece of shit. Threatening a child and his parent because the child dumped some memory and found some file. He also knows that there is exactly zero chance for any legal actions towards that kid (and of course it is not his decision in any case), nevertheless he, the super helpful lawyer, gets to make threats however he wants.
Genuinely disgusting. How do these people live with themselves? "Honey, today I made a kid afraid he was going to jail, because he copied some file of something we sold to him, how was your day?".
Sounds like a great success that many would kill for.
/Sarcasm, but still. Meh.
Boycotts work quite well, but you have to have a sufficient base of customers to participate — and it helps to avoid spurring counter-boycotts: Chick-Fil-A's business increased after some chose to boycott them. It also helps when the company's product is commodity swill that's easy enough to rotate out (Bud Light) vs. a generally positive customer experience (CFA).
No, its generally not. Every legal demand letter is a threat of legal action intended to produce a desired behavioral outcome in the target. Needless to say, issuing a demand letter is not generally itself illegal.
> Especially if you are trying to stop someone from doing something well within their rights
Threats of either actions which are themselves illegal (prohibited violence) or threats with illegal purposes (suppression of protected rights) are often illegal,but that's a lot narrower than “Threatening people to make them behave a certain way is actually illegal”.
Complete lie by the way. The highest revelation is that the found out that some streamer leaked something, because they noticed the leaked photos had the same icons as he did. Besides bullying a kid, this is just irrelevant.
[1] info about Vanguard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40242692
> I might have a talk with David. I might say, ‘Listen, I’ve figured out it was you. Do I not seem approachable? > Why are you and I not having a conversation about this?’ Obviously, my job is to protect the organization, but > ‘protect the organization’ takes on different meanings to different people. To me, ‘protect the organization’ > has always meant: protect your people from bad things.
Good grief - do not fall for this shit.
The reason someone like him tries to figure out the identity of a person claiming sexual harassment is estimating and minimizing the liability. How credible are you (to the public, press, investigators, a potential jury), how big a platform do you have, etc. An unlikable, not-stereotypically-attractive loner who has no little social media connections? Not a threat. A person who has a thousand followers, is likable/attractive, etc? Big threat.
The only reason they care about the identity of the harasser is to figure out how big a deal this might be. Manager of some QA testing group? Not a problem. C-suite or Vice President, etc? Big problem, that both legal and PR will be quickly roped in on.
Just like with HR, nobody that works for your employer ever has your best interests even remotely on their priority list beyond getting you to trust them so they can pump you for as much information as possible to sabotage your claims by doing things like creating alibis, destroying evidence, and searching out reasons to accuse you of being a poorly performing / combative employee who is simply a malcontent.
If you've been or are being sexually harassed, your first stop should be an attorney (and in case it's obvious, not one you find via your company's EAP.)
As general counsel he happily admitted to making false accusations of a federal crime against a minor.
This level of comfort and pride in unethical behavior raises the question of what else has Don McGowan done that is improper?
> So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
When you boast about threatening kids, that says a lot about what kind of person you are
Quote from the article: "Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years."
Don McGowan is a legend though, a legendary asshole for being proud of bullying a curious kid that was poking around in legally obtained game-files.
If the corporations don't want stuff like this to be found, they should try not putting it into the game in the first place. I guess copyright monopolists who are delusional enough to believe they can publish information world wide and control what happens to it do not have this sort of common sense.
For the record, there's an entire website full of people dedicated to doing what that child did:
https://tcrf.net/
This was my first thought too. While the entire DMCA is misguided draconian bullshit, I'm having trouble figuring out by what tortured logic dumping an image from a game file would trigger it.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726866/missouri-govern...
b) With the way politics is going in USA I am not optimistic about DMCA reform until the heat-death of the universe.
In December 1996, the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted the WIPO Copyright Treaty which is principally aimed at adapting the legal paradigm of copyrights to new technology. Article 11 of the WCT obligates “contracting parties to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.”
Yes. But not all countries interpret the restrictions on fair-use as aggressively as DMCA/1201 does.
>So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
>The kid was live-tweeting it. The tweets were this:
>1.Pokémon just called my house. >2.What the hell is a general counsel? >3.I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.
>Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years.
Yeah, the DMCA is bullshittery, but it's a legal weapon that the GC is expect to wield for his company.
He did his job, in a way that had no legal consequences for the kid, and still got the result his company needed.
That seems like the correct way of handling it. Is it ideal from a societal perspective? No, the DMCA should be gutted. But from a practical perspective, this was a win all around.
And the kid was hopefully pushed away from trouble, at least until they were old enough to cover their tracks better.
Why do you assume there weren't knock-on effects/consequences to his actions? Or that they were positive (set him on the right track) vs deleterious?
No.
This kid did nothing wrong.
Yet he still felt the need to say these words:
> I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.
He lost some of his dignity that day. He was made to submit. To some rich corporation's will. Despite probably having zero obligation to do so.
I couldn't care less what your job is or what "results" your employer wants out of you. If you do what this guy did, you suck.
A company made a mistake. A kid found out. So the company sicks the lawyers on the kid? Teaches the kid to not be curious? Does he really believe kids should only sit down and mindlessly consume content,only when a bigcorp dictates it, never walking a millimeter from the path? And then the bastard lawyer brags about it?
My blood boils just reading this. I hope that corporate creep never has any kids of his own.
The Pokémon company, in their own incompetence, leaked information by literally shipping it out to everyone on the internet who cared to download a copy of their game.
A child with computer skills found the data, got all enthusiastic about it and told the world via social media.
This fucking guy called the kid's house and bullied and threatened his family with legal repercussions that would likely not ever materialize.
He threatened a kid whose only crime was loving his employer's shitty game too much with a federal crime. An empty threat at that. "Hacking software, that’s a federal crime". What hacking software? Your own incompetence led to this. Try not sending people data you don't want them to have.
This piece of shit is actually so proud of what he did he brags about it in public instead of keeping it to himself.
This fucking asshole actually got a kick out of watching the kid's live reactions to his nonsense on Twitter.
A child's curiosity was destroyed for the sake of a corporation's profit and control. Using his skills to analyze files? He will never do it again.
Bullying a child and his family somehow made this guy a legend in the Pokémon company.
Nintendo and all related corporations willingly employ people like this guy.
At those firms, shitting all over your customers and their families makes you a legend.
Did I understand all the facts correctly? I need to double check because what I just read made me doubt my sanity.
I refuse to believe this guy is stupid to the point he actually thinks the kid "hacked" the game. I must conclude that this was just a power play from the rich corporation he represents. The real threat was to bankrupt his family with a nonsense court case which would no doubt drain their time and money. Even if they won in court, it would be a pyrrhic victory due to the costs involved. Therefore despite likely having no leg to stand on this asshole leveraged the legal system to bully a child and his family into obedience to their corporate overlord.
I've always suspected this was the real intention behind all the "threats" coming from these corporations. Never thought I'd actually see them not only confirm it but also brag about it in public. What a wortless piece of shit.
If you’re a lawyer going after children who take the screws out of the backs of alarm clocks then I’m afraid you’re the bad guy. People like that ought to be held accountable by their regional bar association.
With an electricution mechanism perhaps?
https://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-video-games/pokemon-tradi...
Revealing tricks of the trade might be... leaking.
Almost makes me wonder if there's a market for some kind of "Leaking Agency" where we can help people leak information safely in exchange for a cut of any media buys or other income they might get from it.