Soon after Sony's aggressive pursuit of hacker George Hotz -- and potentially in an act of retaliation -- other hackers shut the whole PlayStation Network down and made off with millions of users' data.

Microsoft seems to have learned a valuable lesson from that ("don't incite hackers"). During a keynote presentation at the Bank of Ireland Business Week, MS's Ireland General Manager Paul Rellis revealed that the company is dealing with a 14-year-old who hacked Modern Warfare 2 not by suing him, but by working with him. According to the Herald, Rellis said that Microsoft was helping the youngster "use his skills for legitimate purposes."

It's a happy ending in this case, but we doubt this will work every time. If you get all up in big companies' systems, you're still a lot more likely to end up with police confiscating your computer than with a cool internship.