Teen Hackers vs Microsoft, Epic, and the FBI

Hackers: Code & Chaos | National Media Archive

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.