I try to respond to every genuine engagement. I block trolls, contrarians, and provocateurs because life is too short.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 29th, 2025

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  • If your competitor can put out a model that functions really similarly to yours for $2 less per month, and your entire userbase can just leave and move to them… explain to me why investors would want to pump hundreds of billions into your business to be ‘first to market’? That’s a really dumb thing to admit for Anthropic.

    Who is ‘first to 100 million users’ is utterly irrelevant under a business model where your sole value is Intellectual Property (IP) and that IP can be “illicitly extracted” by a clever competitor without ever hacking into your nextwork or doing anything explicitly illegal.

    I’ve had to explain this to a lot of people who seem to think Anthropic/OpenAI are incredibly valuable companies because “they’ll make money long-term so long as they keep being pumped full of it investment cash to be the first to earn a big userbase”, but that just doesn’t make sense. OpenAI owns no datacenters…zero. Theyre 100% IP. Anthropic “is building” some datacenters, but they exist on paper only so far, so they’re also presently 100% IP.

    Can this obvious scam just collapse already so I can upgrade my PC without a personal loan?





  • The point about ‘educating users’ being dumb is itself incredibly stupid, because the largest element of hacking is social engineering: the letter from a nigerian prince, the zip file from an attractive person with ‘my hot photos enclosed’, to today’s calls from government impersonators (tax agency, immigration), and emergency requests from close known contacts that ‘urgently need money wired to them’.

    Education has gone a long way to improving user response and caution against default trust of unverified contact, which is essentially what the first two points complain about from a technical aspect (default allow). Those complaints are at odds with one-another.









  • To those fretting: there is a wide margin between a legit VPN service and these guys. Interpol are not coming for your paid run-of-the-mill VPN provider.

    I hadn’t even heard of 1VPN prior to this story, and the reason is that they advertise almost exclusively on cybercrime forums - mentioned multiple times in the article.

    The administration/owner of this VPN service explicitly tailored their business to enabling cybercrime. That’s real stupid, because it means you become a legitimate law enforcement target as an accomplice with prior knowledge / facilitator to a crime, and generally explicitly waives your immunity rights as a service provider under legal frameworks like EU DSA.

    Dutch police stressed that this particular VPN service “was considered criminal, because it specifically targeted cyber criminals.”

    First VPN “mainly advertised on the cyber criminal forums known to the police and thus expressly approached cyber criminals as potential clients,” Dutch police said. “The website of the service also stated that any cooperation with the judiciary would be denied, that the service was not subject to any jurisdiction".

    Lol. There is no country on earth that is not subject to any jurisdiction - as the VPN provider and users found out.

    Any legit VPN has a thorough ToS/policy to explain acceptable and unacceptable use of their systems (including any illlegal use like crimes/DDOS/etc), and to cover the legal jurisdiction they fall under and what they do when recieving legal court orders.

    If anything, be pissed that this intentional cybercrime service tarnished the concept of VPNs a little, not that they were pursued and busted. Your legit provider is safe.