Yeah, I don’t think this is real. It doesn’t cite anything at all and I couldn’t find anything that corroborates the story (official or otherwise).

Don’t forget the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism

I realize I’m probably in the minority here, but I infinitely preferred blue books over take-home essays. I love learning so I would usually fully engage with lectures and readings, but given two weeks and a blank document my ADHD and perfectionism would drive me up the wall and I’d often take a fat zero on the assignment. On the other hand, if you just shoved a blue book in my face and told me to write a few short essays in two hours, I’d make it happen somehow and then I could walk out of the exam having only endured a few hours of moderate stress instead of weeks of torturing myself.

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.

Since it’s not clear from this write-up, those eye-popping figures (the ones concocted by the Department of Justice) are derived from the prices that the licenses were being sold for by the original companies, so it’s not $100 million in sales but $100 million in “value” (the idea of calculating a $1 billion valuation for the digital “inventory” is even more ridiculous). If you look on the actual crack99 website, you’ll see that most of the cracked software was being sold for anywhere from twenty bucks to maybe a few hundred dollars—this guy was not making millions from this. The government’s sentencing memorandum has the details; this includes the absurd figure of $3,812,241.57 for a single software license of some CAD software called “Catia VR520”, which Li sold to at least one other customer for the princely sum of $100.