Garry Newman, the creator of the Garry's Mod mod/machinima toolkit for the PC, just sprung one of the best pirate traps in recent memory, tricking those who did not pay for his product into essentially giving themselves up.
Newman recently programmed a little trap in the code of the game, which would generate an error message for anyone playing the game who did not pay for it. That error, "unable to shade polygon normals", quickly became the subject of a complaints thread on the forums of PC delivery service Steam.
Irate users unable to access Garry's Mod soon began posting their error messages in full, which alongside the above line also contained a series of numbers.
Those numbers, however, were not related to the "error". They were that user's Steam ID number, allowing each and every one of them to be swiftly banned from playing the game.
Garry's Mod catches pirates the fun way [Gamepron]