UniversalMonk

A man was shot dead inside a home in villa bonita, culiacán. the victim was found lying in front of a small altar dedicated to santa muerte (holy death), the popular folk figure. the shooting happened inside the house, and authorities arrived soon after the gunfire was heard. medical personnel pronounced the man dead at the scene.

The local prosecutor’s office arrived to investigate. they secured the scene, took photos, and began collecting evidence. the victim hasn’t been identified yet, and no arrests have been made. authorities said they’re still trying to determine the motive behind the killing.

Mike Kennedy wanted to save video games. Not from microtransactions or mobile shovelware, but from the present itself. He didn’t want software patches. He didn’t want online updates. He didn’t want DRM. Fuck that noize.

Nah, he wanted cartridges. Plastic. Solid. Tactile. He wanted to drag the spirit of 1992 out of the grave, jam it into an Atari Jaguar shell, and make it dance. Back to the good ole days. Hot Pockets oozing death-lava. Kid Cuisine's Hamburger Pizza flavor still alive and smoking straight from the microwave, baby! Sunny D was orange gold. Beating off to Tiffani Amber Thiessen and Shannon Elizabeth. Ahhh, memories.

But before I unzip and get lost in that tastiness, let’s rewind and talk about Mike Kennedy and his lame-ass attempt at being a cool pirate.

In late 2014, Kennedy, known in retro circles for RETRO Magazine and GameGavel, pitched a dream console. It would run physical cartridges. No downloads. No updates. No nonsense. A digital hermit box. A time capsule you could play.

He bought up leftover molds for the Atari Jaguar. That dead console from the ’90s? Yeah. He was going to resurrect it. Not metaphorically. Dude, he literally used its casing. The guts, he claimed, would be custom hardware. Maybe even an FPGA core. Something that could run SNES and Genesis games. Old-school indie devs would supposedly line up to code for it. Capcom was name-dropped. Sega too.

Bullshit, of course. But people wanted to believe.

The crowdfunding started to cook. Kennedy hyped it up through his RETRO followers, forums, Facebook. No working prototype. Just vibes.

Kickstarter didn’t want them unless they could show working hardware. So they pivoted to Indiegogo, where snake oil has fewer fences. That campaign flopped hard. Barely over $80K raised on a $1.95 million target. No backers got charged. Just embarrassment.

But Kennedy wasn’t done. The moldy dream had a few more mutations to go.

December 2015. Enter: Coleco Holdings. They licensed their name to the project. Now it was the Coleco Chameleon. Retro heads perked up. Toy Fair 2016 was on the calendar.

And that’s when things turned from weird to shameless.

At Toy Fair, Kennedy unveiled the Chameleon inside a clear plastic cube. A prototype. A freakin’ miracle! Finally!

Except it wasn’t. It’s was bullshit.

Musky neckbeards online can’t be tricked that easily. They zoomed into the photos and noticed the internals looked a little too familiar. The ports. The components. The electrical tape.

It was a goddamn SNES Mini, stuffed into a Jaguar shell like some plastic Frankenstein. It ran a multicart through a flash cart. Not custom hardware. Not even close.

Interwebs lit up. Forums exploded. Tech sleuths dissected every angle. The Chameleon was a hoax. But it got worse.

Kennedy posted another prototype photo a few weeks later. This time with the guts visible through a clear shell. Bold move. Too bold. Meh, bullshit too.

This one wasn’t an SNES. No, this time the brain of the console was a cheap DVR capture card. The HICAP50B. Not even a gaming component. Just a glorified HDMI passthrough.

Two fakes. Back to back.

Now Kennedy came clean. Sort of. He wrote a novella-length apology on AtariAge, throwing his hardware guy under the bus. A mysterious character named Sean "Lee" Robinson, who apparently swindled him out of over $10,000, lied about prototypes, and convinced him to show off fake units.

Kennedy said he never opened the boxes. Said he didn’t know what was inside. Said he was duped. Said his only crime was believing too hard in a dream.

He dropped links showing Robinson's record. Felony grand theft. Jail time. Grifting history. He practically begged for forgiveness. He even asked people not to cancel RETRO Magazine because of this whole mess.

But by now, nobody cared. The retro scene had already made its memes. Burned its bridges. Buried the Chameleon.

In the end, no console was made. No games shipped. No dreams realized. Just fake hardware. Bruised reputations. A whole lot of cautionary tales.

Kennedy offloaded the Jaguar molds to AtariAge, hoping they'd be used for something real. He vanished from hardware dreams. RETRO Magazine limped along for a while, then died quietly.

And the Chameleon? It became a punchline meme before memes got cool. The mascot for vaporware. The kind of scam where the road to hell isn’t just paved with good intentions. It’s duct-taped to an SNES motherboard and passed off as innovation.

Mike Kennedy was almost a badass. He could’ve been a folk hero. If he’d dropped the act, if he’d just said fuck it and pirated the stuff outright. Dump the ROMs. Hack the FPGA. Throw it online with a wink and a middle finger. Burn a few carts, sell 'em out of a duffel bag, vanish before the lawsuits sniffed his trail. That’s pirate shit. That’s subversion. That’s punching up.

But he didn’t. He wanted to be a visionary, but he played it like a startup guy with a nostalgia kink. No code. No console. Just branding and wishful thinking stapled to an empty shell.

He wasn’t a pirate. Pirates deliver. They crack locked files, duplicate the sacred, and pass it on. Not for glory. Not always for cash. But because the idea deserves to breathe. Because someone said you can’t have this, and a pirate said watch me.

Kennedy? He wanted you to buy back your memories. From him. He was a capitalist dressed in a thrift store hoodie, praying that retro gamers wouldn’t check the receipts. A wannabe messiah hawking vapor and plastic. No payload. No rebellion. Just a mausoleum to his own childhood, carefully monetized and full of ghosts.

The retro community wanted to believe. But belief needs more than molded shells and Facebook posts. It needs circuitry. Sweat. Code. Truth.

Next time someone promises to save gaming with nothing but a clear case and a press release, open the lid, brah.

When Piracy Had a Kiosk at the Mall: Power Player Super Joy III

“You wouldn’t download a car, would you, fuckers?”

Okay, I would. Hell, I will the second someone makes it possible. But it turns out that the meme phrase came from a real anti-piracy ad campaign that tried to guilt-trip an entire generation. The original line was, “You wouldn’t steal a car.” Slapped onto a thousand DVDs like a pre-movie sermon, it played in the shadows of living rooms and late-night rentals. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a TV. You wouldn’t steal a movie.

You wouldn’t steal the socks from your best friend’s sister, then sniff ‘em and jerk off into them.

Except you would. Maybe. Well, at least I did. No kink-shame!

Apparently Yonatan Cohen didn’t really give to much credit to the feels of the anti-piracy campaign from the early 2000’s either. He went off and decided that a mall kiosk was the perfect place to go full Robin Hood.

Unfortunately for him, “The Man” doesn’t really love Robin Hood. In December 2004, the FBI raided two kiosks at the Mall of America in Minnesota and storage units tied to Cohen’s business, Perfect Deal LLC. They weren’t looking for drugs or guns.

They were hunting knockoff Nintendos. Specifically, the Power Player Super Joy III, a bootleg console shaped like a janky N64 controller, preloaded with 76 barely-legal NES games and marketed with subtle claims like "76,000 games in one!"

Cohen bought the knockoff rigs wholesale out of China for around $7 to $9 apiece. Then he flipped them in U.S. malls for $30 to $70. Pure capitalism, but not the suit-and-boardroom kind. This was capitalism with a folding table and a kiosk, a one-man supply chain trying to make rent while corporate America clutched its pearls.

It wasn’t subtle, but it was profitable. Each console contained copyrighted titles from Nintendo’s golden years, and selling them made Cohen a target.

The government didn’t just slap a fine on him. They made him an example. In April 2005, Cohen pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement. By November, he was sentenced to five years in federal prison, lost hundreds of thousands in property, and got the added humiliation of having to run mall magazine ads warning others about the crime of piracy. He had to pay for the ads as part of his restitution. His mug was in the ad. His crime laid out like a cautionary tale. It was digital pillory.

But here’s where the story gets a little warped. Cohen wasn’t a hacker. He wasn’t running around cracking encryption or spreading ransomware. He was selling plastic boxes full of 8-bit joy. Ancient (at the time) ROMs of Super Mario, Duck Hunt, Contra. The kind of stuff that’s been cloned, remixed, and uploaded to archive.org a thousand times over these days. Back then though, Nintendo’s legal team treated it like digital arson. (Actually Nintendo still does that, they go hard on pirates.) The feds rolled in like it was national security.

Nine days after Cohen’s guilty plea, the FBI busted four Chinese nationals connected to a much larger piracy ring and seized 60,000 more Power Player units from warehouses in New York and New Jersey. But Cohen was already cooked. He kind of became the poster child for IP enforcement.

What made him vulnerable was scale and visibility. He wasn’t hiding in darknet forums. He was out in the open, selling knockoff joypads to middle-class shoppers hunting for last-minute Christmas gifts. A digital gray-market peddler in the age of moral panic.

Was it legal? No. Was it theft? Well, that’s the real question.

In the same era, game companies were battling over clones. Games like Zuma versus Puzzloop, lawsuits about lookalike mechanics and half-borrowed sprites. A lawyer named Gregory Boyd wrote that copyright law covers not just the idea of a game but the way it looks, plays, and feels.

Which is fine on paper. But when you apply that hammer to a guy selling 20-year-old games out of a folding table in a mall, it starts to feel a little like overkill.

Cohen didn’t invent piracy. He didn’t build the Super Joy III. He just sold it. But he was the one in arm’s reach, and the ad campaign was already rolling. You wouldn’t steal a car, remember?

What he did wrong, more than anything, was give people access. Unauthorized, unlicensed, dirt-cheap access. The same thing millions of us were doing in silence with LimeWire, torrents, and burned CDs. He just did it where the FBI could see him.

Five years. For selling childhood. For selling nostalgia.

That’s the part no one wants to talk about. This wasn’t about protecting code. It was about protecting control. Yonatan Cohen broke the unwritten rule of the digital age: you can steal, but you better not get caught making it easy for others. Unless you’re on Wall Street.

And yeah, maybe he wouldn’t steal a car. But he’d damn sure sell you Mario on a knockoff controller. And for a lot of kids in 2004, that was close enough to magic.

Sources, for those who still believe in paper trails or give a shit:

Wikipedia, bitches!

BootlegGames Wiki: Power Player Super Joy III

Vintage Computing: EGM Advertisement: Sell Famiclones, Go to Prison

The Gospel of Phiber Optik or, How to Get Thrown in Prison for Knowing Shit

It begins like a lot of the old-school kick-ass digital legends, with a phone line and a curious teen. Tho I wanna say that I was a curious teen too, but just not curious in any productive way. I was too busy thinking about girls, jerking off to my step-mom’s underwear, and trying to survive the dull ache of being a loser in a town where nothing ever happened.

Sometimes I wonder how different it could’ve been if someone had handed me a clue, or a keyboard, or a reason to dig deeper. Brothers, I had the spark, but no kindling. Just a lot of static and the sense that I showed up too late. I shoulda started my Universal Monk “let’s piss off Lemmy every day while I hack into my OLPC and try to install Linux Puppy on it in the background!” persona way before I got old.

But fuck it, let’s talk about Phiber Optik.

In the early 1980s, Mark Abene, a soft-spoken kid from Queens, New York, discovered that the boring ass sound of a dial tone held secrets. Abene’s first contact with computers came around the age of nine, inside a department store where he would hang around while his parents wandered the aisles. The machines were just sitting there, blinking and waiting for someone curious enough to poke them. His first personal system was a TRS-80 MC-10, a tiny rig with 4 kilobytes of RAM, no lowercase letters, a 32-column screen, and a cassette deck that hissed and clunked as it loaded and saved programs. Like a lot of machines back then, it hooked up to the family television, turning it into a crude but functional portal to somewhere else.

Later, after his parents gifted him a RAM upgrade and a 300 baud modem, the real doors opened. Through CompuServe and its wild little corner called the CB Simulator, he found others like him. People who knew how to reach dialup bulletin board systems. From there he stumbled into guest accounts on DEC minicomputers used in the BOCES educational system in Long Island.

These machines ran operating systems with names like RSTS/E and TOPS-10 and they were a whole different universe compared to the TRS-80. Abene saw what they could do and decided to teach himself how to speak their language.

He pulled books from the library and started reading everything he could find on code. What hit him hardest was the realization that he could write something, log out, come back the next day, and it would still be there. His modest little computer setup had become a window, and on the other side of it was a world worth chasing.

Long before the term cybersecurity existed, Abene had already started burrowing into the veins of the American telecom system, decoding its logic not to destroy it, but to understand how it ticked.

His handle became ‘Phiber Optik,’ and in the grubby wire-y underbelly of the hacker scene he was damn near mythic. People talked about him with reverence or anger, depending on which side of the firewall you were on. To the kids trading exploits in IRC tunnels, he was a digital folk hero, one keyboard away from legend. To the feds, he was a glowing red dot on the radar, a walking middle finger to everything they couldn’t control.

What makes Phiber’s story relevant now, decades after his sentencing, is not just his technical brilliance. It is that he represented an ethical spine to a culture the public has long dismissed as criminal.

As pirate and privacy movements claw their way back into the spotlight, fueled by surveillance capitalism, corporate chokeholds, and the slow suffocation of open access, the old bones of Phiber Optik’s blueprint are starting to show through again. What he sketched in the static of the early 90s wasn’t just a kind of road map, it was a warning, half-forgotten, now suddenly relevant as hell.

After all, doesn’t all information want to be free?

Phiber was a member of two infamous hacking groups. First, he joined the Legion of Doom, a group that had already made its mark exploring the digital frontier of the telephone networks. Later, he co-founded Masters of Deception, or MOD, a New York-based collective that was as much a cultural counterpoint as it was a technical one. MOD went deeper into the cracks of AT&T and the broader infrastructure of early corporate networks. They said that their goal was to explore and document, not destroy.

As the Cold War fizzled and the Information Age kicked its boots up on the desk, the suits and corporations realized the growing value of digital systems. The government’s attitude toward hackers hardened. Home computers were no longer toys. They were infrastructure, currency, control. And suddenly, guys like Phiber weren’t curious kids anymore.

In January 1990, the Secret Service kicked in Phiber Optik’s door. He was just 17. They seized his gear and accused him of causing a massive AT&T network crash that had hit the country a week earlier. Phiber stood there while they ransacked his place, accused on the spot of bringing down part of the backbone of America’s phone system. Weeks later, AT&T admitted the crash had been their fault. A botched software update. No hackers involved. Just bad code and corporate silence.

That didn’t stop the momentum. In February 1991, he was arrested again, this time under New York state law, charged with computer tampering and computer trespass. He was still a minor. The legal system was scrambling to define what counted as a crime in the new digital frontier. Phiber ended up taking a plea to a lesser misdemeanor and served 35 hours of community service. The scare should have ended there. It didn’t.

By December 1991, the feds were ready for round two. Phiber Optik and four other members of Masters of Deception were arrested again. In July 1992, a federal grand jury hit them with an 11-count indictment. This time, the charges stuck. The government leaned on wiretaps. It was the first time in U.S. history they had used legally authorized taps to capture the voices and data transmissions of hackers. They weren’t trying to protect infrastructure. They were trying to make a point.

Despite no evidence of damage or theft, Phiber was sentenced to a year in federal prison. Again, no theft or damage. Just knowledge. Just access. But still, they had to fucking put him in a cage. They needed a scalp. He fit the frame. He was the first hacker convicted under the newly expanded federal computer crime laws.

The punishment was widely seen as symbolic. Phiber was articulate, clean-cut, and openly philosophical about the ethics of hacking. That made him dangerous. His case was less about securing systems than it was about sending a message. A warning to those who might try to explore behind the digital curtain without permission.

The trial lit a fuse. What came after was not just fallout. It was a shift. Phiber became the face of a new kind of threat. The hacker. The digital trespasser. The kid who knew too much. The media pounced. Magazines ran articles warning about ghosts in the machine. The New York Times printed his sentencing like it was a mafia takedown.

Today that kind of coverage is common background noise. But back then it hit like an earthquake. Computers were still the realm of hobbyists. Hackers were not yet cool icons or antiheroes. Seeing a story like this break into the mainstream meant the world had started paying attention. Even if it had no clue what it was actually looking at.

Inside the hacker community, he became a martyr for curiosity. Where some hackers sought money or infamy, Phiber was different. He believed in transparency, in challenging authority through knowledge. In many ways, his worldview mirrored what the modern open access and digital piracy movements have adopted.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape looks different but eerily familiar. Information is still locked behind paywalls. Network infrastructure is still protected less by code than by law. The average user remains dependent on gatekeepers for knowledge. Shadow libraries, sideloading communities, and decentralized networks are once again pushing the boundaries.

The ethos that drove Phiber Optik and MOD now animates projects like Library Genesis, Anna’s Archive, and countless torrent communities. These modern movements rely on the idea that access to information should not be controlled by profit motives. That understanding a system deeply is not a threat. That copying is not theft.

Phiber never claimed to be innocent. But he insisted that curiosity was not a crime. He never sold what he accessed. He documented. He learned. He shared. And he did so with the belief that a more transparent digital world was not just preferable, but necessary.

When people talk about the moral framework of piracy now, it’s all about what’s legal and who’s losing money. That’s the surface game. What gets ignored are the roots. The deeper questions. Phiber Optik and the others weren’t just rule-breakers. They were pulling back the curtain and asking who built the rules in the first place. Who benefits. Who decides what we’re allowed to know. They saw the gap widening between the ones who use the machine and the ones who own it. Between those who are fed and those who are kept hungry.

Phiber Optik went back to being Mark Abene and became a respected security consultant. He rebuilt his life above ground. But his impact lives beneath the surface. In Discord forums and dark web mirrors. In data liberation projects and copy-left publishing. In every encrypted message and anonymized torrent. He was there before the internet was sold back to us, back when it was something we made by exploring it together.

Not every hacker is a pirate. But every pirate who copies for access, who shares for freedom, who breaks a rule to question the system, carries the idea of Phiber Optik in their actions. Maybe not in name. But in spirit.

The spark is the same. Curiosity weaponized. Access reclaimed. A middle finger aimed squarely at the gate.

It was never just about phone switches or command lines. What Phiber did and what MOD stood for was proof that systems are built to keep people out, and that anyone willing to understand how those systems work could find a way in.

That blueprint did not vanish. It evolved. The mindset that once pulled secrets from a telecom grid now fuels the mirrors, torrents, and cracks of the modern internet. Bypassing a locked terminal and bypassing digital rights software are cousins in the same bloodline. Digging into AT&T’s infrastructure and scraping paywalled archives both ride the same frequency. The hardware has changed, the language has changed, but the mission is still carved in the same stone.

The kids cracking textbooks and sideloading banned books today may not know Phiber’s name, but they carry his ghost in every act of defiance. Every time they upload something they were told to keep hidden. Every time they share a file just to make sure someone else does not have to go without.

That is the legacy. The culture of piracy did not appear out of thin air. It grew out of old phone lines, library cards, and the belief that knowledge should not come with a price tag.

Sources, for those who still believe in paper trails or give a shit:

Wikipedia, bitches! (nice 90's pic of homie too)

"Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace" by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner (fun book I found on Anna's Archive)

"The Life and Times of Phiber Optik" Wired Magazine (I have actual paper copy of this!)

“I’m Universal Monk. You fuckers tried to cancel me, but I’m still here! Ha ha ha ha ha!” by Me

In November 2022, Z-Library, the internet’s underground sweetheart of shadow libraries, got yanked out of the digital shadows and dragged into the goddamn spotlight by the United States government. For years, it floated just beneath the surface, dishing out millions of books to anyone who needed them. Broke students. Underpaid teachers. Porn-addicted shitposting degenerates like me. Researchers locked out by paywalls. Whole classrooms in places where textbooks are a luxury. It was the people’s library, stitched together with torrents and defiance.

Then the hammer dropped.

The Department of Justice came in swinging. The FBI showed up with a global buddy-cop lineup of foreign law enforcement. Hundreds of domain names blinked out like lights in a blackout. The feds even snatched two Russian nationals in Argentina, claiming they were the ghostly masterminds behind it all. Just two people, flesh and bone, dragged into the open for handing out knowledge that corporate publishing kept locked behind gold-plated paywalls.

Suddenly, free books became evidence. And giving a damn became a federal issue. The message was unmistakable: access to knowledge, when it bypasses corporate control, would be treated as a criminal act.

At its peak, Z-Library claimed a database of over 13 million books and more than 84 million articles. Users around the world could access everything from obscure philosophy texts and medical journals to fiction, poetry, and educational materials. The site had evolved from a mirror of Library Genesis into a vast archive and branded itself as the world’s largest ebook library.

It pulled in traffic from damn near every country on the planet. Especially in places where buying a book meant skipping a meal or where bookstores didn’t even exist. It was a lifeline wrapped in a ZIP file. And it didn’t give a single shit about copyright law. None. It ran on need, not permission.

To publishers and the big-name authors clinging to their royalty checks, Z-Library wasn’t a library. It was a threat. A digital F-you aimed straight at their paywalls.

To millions of users, it offered something much closer to a public good. In a world where a single textbook can cost more than a week’s wages and research papers are locked behind forty-dollar paywalls, the idea of sharing books freely was not just appealing, it was essential. For independent scholars, low-income students, and autodidacts with no access to institutional libraries, Z-Library was more than a website. It was a vital tool for survival in a deeply unequal system.

The crackdown unfolded quickly. On November 3, 2022, Argentinian authorities arrested Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova at the request of the United States. Days later, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging them with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud, and money laundering. They were accused of uploading books within hours of release and profiting from donation-based activity that prosecutors framed as illegal commerce. FBI officials painted the pair as pirates exploiting the creative work of others, while the Authors Guild praised the arrests as a landmark victory.

Even so, the takedown left many unanswered questions. For one, Z-Library never fully disappeared. While its main domains were redirected to government-controlled servers, the site remained operational on the dark web. Administrators continued to send out messages and respond to users. This suggested that Napolsky and Ermakova were not the only individuals behind the operation.

Within days, new search engines and mirrors like Anna’s Archive appeared online, preserving the collection and making it clear that the shutdown had failed to stop the flow of information.

The attack on Z-Library was not the first attempt to crush a shadow library, and it likely would not be the last. In previous years, various governments including those in India, France, and the United Kingdom had blocked or seized domains associated with the site. Internet service providers were ordered to restrict access. Publishers filed legal claims across multiple jurisdictions. Each action made it harder to reach the site, but none succeeded in shutting it down completely.

The public statements made by U.S. officials focused on authors’ rights and lost revenue. Yet these same officials offered no solutions for the root causes of piracy. They said nothing about the rising cost of academic journals. They said nothing about the lack of affordable books for students outside wealthy nations. They said nothing about the millions of people who wanted to learn but could not afford to buy access.

For a lot of people, the whole crackdown felt like a sick joke. Copying isn’t stealing. When you copy a book, nothing vanishes. The original stays right where it is. Nothing is lost. Something is shared. In a digital world where making a copy costs exactly zero, scarcity isn’t real. It’s manufactured. Built on locked doors and greed. The gatekeepers call it protection, rake in the cash, and turn anyone who shares into a criminal.

Months after the arrest, reports emerged that Napolsky and Ermakova had escaped house arrest in Argentina. Their whereabouts were unknown, and an Interpol warrant was issued. Meanwhile, U.S. authorities continued seizing domains and targeting infrastructure. Z-Library evolved. It shifted to personal access domains, private distribution systems, and decentralized methods. The people behind it adapted, and so did its users.

Z-Library was not perfect. It operated in legal gray areas. But it filled a need that the formal system refused to address. It offered access where there was none. It provided knowledge without a price tag.

And it asked brought up an important question: who gets to read, and who gets left behind?

Piracy, in this context, was not about greed or laziness. It was a form of resistance. It was a way for the excluded to participate. It was not the opposite of learning. It was learning in spite of a system built to exclude.

As long as the price of knowledge is set higher than what most people can afford, piracy will continue. And it will continue to be justified. Not because it is legal. But because it is necessary.

Inside CRACK99: Xiang Li, Software Piracy, and the Price of Knowledge

In the late 2000s, while most internet users were quietly downloading torrents and cracking Photoshop out of frustration or necessity, a man in Chengdu, China, was doing it bigger, smarter, and far more dangerously—at least in the eyes of the U.S. government.

His name was Xiang Li. Through his website, CRACK99, he distributed cracked versions of some of the most expensive and highly restricted software on Earth.

These were tools used in military engineering, satellite communications, weapons design, and critical aerospace systems. In a world where powerful knowledge was locked behind licensing agreements and pricing designed for billion-dollar governments, Li offered access for a price nearly anyone could afford.

From 2008 to 2011, Li made CRACK99 a reliable black-market marketplace, one that netted an estimated $100 million in sales. His inventory, investigators later said, was valued at over $1 billion.

He did not code these tools himself or crack the protections. They were pirated elsewhere. He simply redistributed them, turning scarcity into availability.

His customers weren’t criminal masterminds. They were engineers, small business owners, students, and even U.S. government employees. Among them was a NASA engineer and a contractor who worked on radar software for Marine One, the helicopter used by the President of the United States.

That revelation rattled national security agencies. It meant classified systems were being developed, at least in part, using pirated tools. It also meant the official channels were either too expensive or too inaccessible, even to insiders.

When access to knowledge is locked behind six-figure software licenses, people will find another way in.

In 2010, Homeland Security and the Defense Criminal Investigation Service launched an undercover investigation led by David Locke Hall, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer and federal prosecutor. For eighteen months, agents posed as buyers, gained Li’s trust, and arranged a face-to-face meeting in Saipan, a U.S. territory in the Pacific.

Li flew to the island expecting a lucrative expansion of his business. He arrived with his mother-in-law and son, unaware he had entered U.S. jurisdiction. At a beachfront hotel, Li handed over cracked software and 20GB of stolen data. When he confirmed he was the man behind CRACK99, federal agents arrested him.

That moment, Hall later said, was the most dangerous part of the entire operation. You never know how someone will react when the illusion collapses. Li, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, did not look like a criminal. But appearances can be deceiving.

After his arrest, Hall tried to soften the impact on Li’s family. He took the boy out for ice cream while agents searched the hotel room. He didn’t feel sorry for Li in that moment, but he did feel for the child, caught in something he couldn’t understand.

Li was extradited to the mainland and charged in Delaware. In 2013, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and copyright infringement. He was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison; one of the longest sentences for software piracy in American history.

While law enforcement saw the case as a vital win against cybercrime, others see a deeper question: If software is priced out of reach, and if even government scientists are turning to piracy, is the problem really the pirate—or the system?

Li didn’t set out to sabotage anything. He simply didn’t believe that tools to build machines or simulate flight should be locked away behind institutional gates. He didn’t care who his customers were, and that scared people. But it also said something damning about how modern knowledge is managed: access to it is a privilege, not a right.

Xiang Li sits in prison, not as a hacker or spy, but as someone who cracked open the paywall and asked why it was there to begin with.