> supporting countries or democratic, pro-Western parties/groups that are threatened by an aggressor (e.g. every former Soviet state)
Every one? I am from one of those states, and most of them are even worse democracy-wise than Russia.
The only thing we have over Russia is not going after neighbors' territories, and even that's debatable (see conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan vs Tajikistan).
Your governments do overlook serious human rights violations, though, when it suits them. We had widespread protests in January 2022 that were brutally suppressed by the government, which ended up killing more than 300 protesters (that's according to official figures that are thought to be undercounted).
No fucks given by Western propaganda or government talking heads because several European, US, and Canadian companies have massive investments in our oil, gas, and minerals industry.
About six months ago Macron visited Astana to beg for uranium fuel after France got kicked off from Niger, and a group of political activists tried to seize the rare moment and did everything they could to meet him for a few minutes and talk about human rights violations in our country. You can probably guess the result of that endeavor.
One of the major gas projects (managed by Shell IIRC) ends in 2030, and I have a strong suspicion "human rights violations" will become a permanent theme in our relations right after that moment.
> Every one? I am from one of those states, and most of them are even worse democracy-wise than Russia.
I agree, and part of the cause is that us Western countries don't give a shit. We don't even give a shit about those countries right on our border like Ukraine or Bosnia.
> No fucks given by Western propaganda or government talking heads because several European, US, and Canadian companies have massive investments in our oil, gas, and minerals industry.
Or because they were bought off such as in the case with the massive corruption by Azerbaijan.
> About six months ago Macron visited Astana to beg for uranium fuel after France got kicked off from Niger, and a group of political activists tried to seize the rare moment and did everything they could to meet him for a few minutes and talk about human rights violations in our country. You can probably guess the result of that endeavor.
My opinion of Macron is probably just as low as yours, the only thing the guy can do is talk. All talk, no act.
People talk too easily about countries as if they are a person. I have lived in the east, I have lived in the west: every actual person has problems, everybody thinks their problems should come first, too many people have the tendency to think "outside influence" is very strong and lots of people think they have "the solution" which is different than what their government does.
At the end of the day I think the (boring) truth is that many countries end acting similarly to the average citizen. Including their fears, stupidities, insecurities and knowledge.
Yes, "the west of Europe" does not care as much as some people think about "the east of Europe", same way "the east of Europe" does not care that much about I don't know, Yemen, Myanmar or Sudan (just to name places with horrible conflicts that nobody seems to care about, unless they delay their Amazon package by a couple of days...).
Eh, it wasn't as much a jab against France or Macron in particular, as just an example of the general policy. Pretty much all of Europe (and US, and Canada) behave in a similar way and see us as a well of natural resources to be scooped out dry and then thrown aside. Some people here call it a new form of colonialism. Every country follows their interests and that's fine, as long as we don't hear lectures about this or that thing while those same lecturers behave in a hypocritical way contrary to what they're saying.
Edit: as opposed to China and Russia that pour serious money into large infrastructure projects like the new Silk Road. Russia has only started doing this recently, though. People have their reservations about those countries, but can't help but see the difference between e.g. China that builds railroads and power plants, and Western countries that only suck out money, paying tiny salaries to local workers and circumventing things like air pollution regulations.
Well, the EU could have put a ban on selling riot control gear to Putin's forces back in 2012 when he used it to suppress massive pro-democracy protests in Moscow, not in October of 2022 like they actually did. This set the tone for everything that happened afterwards.
I said this already under a (now flagged and dead) comment, but it's worth repeating — "your" (not your personally) one-sided propaganda and continuing support for Putin (if indirect) have made "you" lose whatever anti-war and pro-West opposition there was in Russia. I only wish we'd seen how convenient Putin is for "the West" a decade earlier. This was particularly obvious in June 2023 during the short and failed putsch of Wagner PMC. If you care at all, you can dig into my comment history from the beginning of 2022 and see how my own opinion has changed. It's a pretty typical example, I think.
Maybe hcaptcha, I've never run into captcha hell with it, unlike Cloudflare and recaptcha. If those two decide you're a bot, you're done, better go change that IP and reset cookies.
All chat platforms (that I can remember) that were popular around that time used proprietary protocols, including ICQ. Everyone I knew preferred third-party clients to the official one, and these clients would sometimes break because ICQ kept changing tiny details in the protocol to try to force users to use the official client. It never worked, of course, because updates that fixed compatibility would usually come within a couple of hours.
I guess not open open, but at least they weren't behind cryptographic walls.
It is an embarassment that in 2024 you still can't send someone an iMessage from a PC or Android phone. Shoot, messaging from a PC in general is hard. No easy SMS access, and even third party apps often have stupid things like "the app is actually running on your phone but you can forward message to some flaky and bloated electron thing on a PC if you really must."
Not from Russia, but pretty close in all senses of the word. It was heavily used in my circles up to about 2010-2011, then started losing market share to other messengers (one¹ of the popular messengers was from the same company that now owns ICQ), and then Telegram came and buried it completely in no time at all.
Certificates are created regardless of whether you ask for them by using features like proxying traffic through CF. Just using them as a DNS service provider is enough for certs to be issued (with "proxy=off" or no A/CNAME records at all, it doesn't matter).
> Just using them as a DNS service provider is enough
With a cname you yield the control of one domain name, by setting an NS record you're literally passing over any and all control to cloudflare.
That's at a level of entering a shop that advertises itself as "diverse" and then complain that the male cashier was wearing makeup...
It's not like cloudflare makes it a secret that their goal is to take care of everything for their users. It's kinda the while point of using cloudflare, because theyre so easily to use... Because they're doing everything for you.
Lots of people use CloudFlare purely as a registar and DNS hoster because they sell domains at cost. Domains are quite expensive already for what they are. This is enough to trigger certificate issuance on your behalf. You don't have to use any add-on features. Maybe even just registering a domain is enough, I'm not sure. I certainly didn't "give them" any certificates, I don't have A/AAAA/CNAME records on several of my domains, and never enabled proxying traffic through the rest of them. The certs have been issued regardless.
I don't see this as a conspiracy theory, though. They want to sell you the whole package and don't want to support freeloaders like me who are only there for the "cheap" domains. That's reasonable, if unfortunate.
I would personally avoid namecheap if you're not based in the US. Back at the beginning of 2022 they cut off all clients from Russia without prior notice, giving everybody a couple of weeks to migrate to another registrar and/or hoster. This created quite a problem and added more work for oppositional news outlets and sites like ovdinfo that were helping people who got locked up for protesting against what was happening. Both groups had enough problems already. Fuck them; once bitten, twice shy.
I checked two domains registered through Cloudflare about a week ago and both have 1-year certificates issued by Sectigo, valid until May 2025. Never enabled DDoS protection or any other features besides editing DNS records.
Every one? I am from one of those states, and most of them are even worse democracy-wise than Russia.
The only thing we have over Russia is not going after neighbors' territories, and even that's debatable (see conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan vs Tajikistan).
Your governments do overlook serious human rights violations, though, when it suits them. We had widespread protests in January 2022 that were brutally suppressed by the government, which ended up killing more than 300 protesters (that's according to official figures that are thought to be undercounted).
No fucks given by Western propaganda or government talking heads because several European, US, and Canadian companies have massive investments in our oil, gas, and minerals industry.
About six months ago Macron visited Astana to beg for uranium fuel after France got kicked off from Niger, and a group of political activists tried to seize the rare moment and did everything they could to meet him for a few minutes and talk about human rights violations in our country. You can probably guess the result of that endeavor.
One of the major gas projects (managed by Shell IIRC) ends in 2030, and I have a strong suspicion "human rights violations" will become a permanent theme in our relations right after that moment.