Mental being too nice for his own good.
I'd be willing to bet money on this being worth thousands to certain companies and countries. He could have easily sold it to a shady group of chinese hackers, and probably made enough to buy a new house. 150 million monthly users is a lot of people to spy on. Hell some of the entertainment companies would probably pay a lot to essentially destroy one of the largest copyright infringement enablers out there (though I guess it would be a bit hypocritical for Dan to do that?).
Though I suppose doing that would likely mean he'd have to move country etc, and with a baby I doubt that would have been practical.
Anyway, those news sites damning him are quite frankly just showing white hats the thanks they get. Don't release info, get a joke of an amount from the company, and a poop load of bad press. Frankly the media and companies should be supporting, and promoting, this behaviour, because in the end it's OUR computers that are at risk when the hacker decides, duck it sell it to the bad guys. Frankly when a hacker gets a password database, it should be the company paying the hacker off, not the thousands of users who get their banking accounts raided.
