And just for shits and giggles (now I'm really just arguing for the sake of it lol) some choice quotes:
"Over the next month he would tell me many, many things that were hard to believe. I'd eventually be able to confirm half of it. I was left to wonder about the rest."
"I never met him in person, and the only image I've seen of him is the one atop this story, which he says is from an old driver's license photo."
"The eBay auction never went through. SuperDaE would tell me that Microsoft made a copyright claim on it. Microsoft wouldn't comment to me about the auction at all. Dylan now tells me that the eBay thing wasn't exactly what it seemed."
"But when I told Dylan about this, he displayed what I'd come to know as his penchant for icing one tale with a wilder one"
"To convince me he had Homefront 2, Dylan had sent me this, a supposed file directory for the game: *picture here*. Easily faked or the real deal? Dylan used to talk about flying to the States and showing me next-gen games running on Durango. If he had a Durango up and running, he easily could have sent me a screenshot of this or any other game. He never did..."
"Can you really trick Microsoft into sending something as sensitive as a development kit for their next Xbox to a random Australian address? Can you really trick the payment system since, presumably, you don't have the 15,000 Euros for the two development kits you say you got? Dylan never gave me a clear answer for any of that, but he did send me a screenshot of the supposed Microsoft developer online store. You or I can't get the URL to work, not without a game developers' password, something I don't have."
"After the police raided Dylan's house—and that event definitely did happen, according to "Australian police—Dylan told me a somewhat different story. Or perhaps I had misunderstood him. He'd never had the Durangos. They'd been sent to his friend in the United States or at least to a drop location his friend had access to. He was just the face for the eBay sales. He hadn't sold them. It became less and less clear to me what role, if any, he played in accessing them—to the extent that he and the hackers he knew really managed to trick Microsoft into sending that sensitive hardware out.
"I never personally touched the Durango itself," he told me. "I've played through the Durango operating system, but not the original. And was there a third Durango? Dylan told me he helped order and get it delivered to someone on an island. He says that one sold for $5,000 and that he has the bank receipt. I've never seen it."
"Since Microsoft doesn't comment on anything that involves the word Durango, it's only possible to look at Dylan's account of what happened next."
"The extent to which Dylan's account of his meeting with Hawkes is accurate is impossible to ascertain. Dylan shared what he said were texts between him and Hawkes during and right after the visit. (I've included one here. Judge for yourself. *pic of iOS text message woah!*
"Microsoft did not initiate this FBI investigation with this individual, as has been asserted in some of the articles in the media," a Microsoft spokesperson told me. "We take security very seriously and have no evidence of any compromise of our corporate network. We have no further comment on this matter."
"The police didn't address these allegations with us, nor has anyone confirmed that the American who Dylan says was present was an FBI agent."
"Shortly after the raid, Dylan hopped on Twitter, apparently from a nearby Apple store."
Cold, hard facts right?
I suppose this is just me ranting about how absolutely terrible kotaku's journalistic skills are. In the case of specs, being...truthful. And in the case of this thing with SuperDae, their (lack of) investigative skills.
