Teen Hackers vs Microsoft, Epic, and the FBI

David Pokora wasn’t the kind of kid who had to try very hard to get into trouble. By the age of three, he wasn’t reading stories — he was playing first-person shooters with more grace than most adults could manage with a controller. He wasn't interested in the aliens or the explosions. What grabbed him was the feeling. Press a key, make something happen. Left-click, and pixels obey. It was a language. One he understood fluently before anyone realized it was dangerous to know that kind of thing. When his family traveled to Poland, he didn’t bring books or toys. He brought a laptop, a brick of a machine he’d use to teach himself programming from scratch. No Wi-Fi. No Google. Just trial, error, and the kind of masochistic joy only a true hacker understands: breaking something a thousand times just to learn how to fix it once.