Valve set Steam’s regional pricing recommendations for Poland in October 2022, right when the złoty was at its weakest. The złoty has since recovered significantly, but Valve never updated the recommendations. Since most devs just lazily accept Steam’s defaults, Polish gamers end up with the second-highest game prices in the world - often 20-30% above USD - despite having roughly a third of the average American salary. So they flee to key resellers, which is exactly the outcome regional pricing was supposed to prevent.
deceiver
joined 1 year ago
did you forget to crop the part of the screenshot showing clearly that you literally searched Alibaba for meth by its molecular formula and street name?
most men don’t even make $100k per year
zero chance of this happening
Pathological Demand Avoidance
you’re not wrong, and it’s not really a conspiracy, it’s fairly well-documented at this point
there’s a whole industry of companies called ‘exploit brokers’ and surveillance vendors that sell smartphone compromise capabilities to governments. the most famous is NSO Group, an Israeli firm whose product Pegasus was used by governments worldwide to silently compromise iPhones and Android devices, including targeting journalists, activists, and political opponents. Amnesty International and Citizen Lab have forensically confirmed infections on real devices. this isn’t speculation; it’s documented in court filings and peer-reviewed technical research
the way it works is through what are called zero-days: software vulnerabilities that even the phone manufacturers don’t know about yet. these can be worth millions of dollars on the open market. governments and their contractors hoard them, sometimes for years, to maintain access capabilities. Apple and Google are constantly patching these when they discover them, which is why you see urgent security updates
so the ‘we can’t break into it’ statements from agencies like the FBI are more nuanced than they appear. what they often mean is they can’t break into it cheaply, at scale, without vendor cooperation, not that it’s impossible. they’re usually pushing for backdoors built into the software so they don’t have to rely on expensive zero-days or third-party vendors like Cellebrite
the problem is that any backdoor you build for the “good guys” is also a vulnerability that adversaries can find and exploit. security researchers largely agree you can’t have a backdoor only the right people can use, it doesn’t work that way technically
so your instinct is right. the public debate is somewhat theater. the real capabilities exist, they’re just expensive, targeted, and something governments don’t want to fully disclose because it would reveal sources and methods
it absolutely can! there’s Bypass Paywalls Clean developed by magnolia1234. the reason you don’t see them shared often is that they’re repeatedly taken down from official extension stores like the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons, and platforms like GitHub, due to legal and political pressure from publishers, which pushes them to increasingly obscure and/or questionable hosting platforms that most normal users wouldn’t touch - case in point, Bypass Paywalls Clean itself is currently hosted on GitFlic, a Russian code hosting platform, as it’s been pushed outside the reach of Western legal frameworks
soft paywalls are enforced by JavaScript running in your browser - the server sends the full article content regardless, and then the JavaScript checks if you’re a subscriber and hides or blocks it if not. when archive.today or a self-hosted tool like ArchiveBox fetches the page, it gets the full content directly from the server before any of that JavaScript enforcement runs. the server doesn’t know or care whether you’re a subscriber, it just responds to the request
the archiving mechanism itself is what bypasses paywalls. it archives by fetching pages server-side before client-side JavaScript enforces paywalls
no, archive.today (and similar services like the Wayback Machine) work by fetching the page directly through their own servers, essentially acting as a headless browser that renders the page and saves a snapshot. the archive service itself makes the HTTP request, executes JavaScript, and captures the resulting document object model - no subscriber involvement required
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even if this were true, the group doing this isn’t rewarding sympathizers, they’re just carpet-bombing high-visibility Western targets - they’ve hit Truth Social, Reddit, Internet Archive, Microsoft 365, and now Bluesky. these guys aren’t sitting there reading Bluesky’s moderation policy like “hmm, actually, their stance on Palestinian content is nuanced, let’s move on”