> the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment [...] orders Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents
They already removed the files when the lawsuit was filed.
Obviously, they're not paying the $322 million. The amount doesn't matter because they're not paying anything. What it does enable is seizing their domain names and any other resources that are hosted by companies in the US jurisdiction.
Aren't they widely believed to be Russian? They've been running for long enough that they're almost certainly in a non-extradition jurisdiction and know to stay there.
However, many countries are not that important. The US, EU, and China don't care which countries they have good relations with. And then there are countries like Saudi Arabia, which the US, EU, and China all need.
Well I didn’t exactly make some kind of claim of “no grievance ever,” I’m just saying that it’s not that hard to find countries that have good relationships with the US, China, and EU all at once.
Example: most member states within the RCEP trade agreement (e.g., Australia)
India
Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Turkey all deliberately hedge relations between blocs.
Japan and South Korea are heavily economically intertwined (not conflict-free obviously)
China hates India.
China hates Japan even more.
China sometimes hates South Korea.
The US hates Mexico (and flip flops when presidents do)
America imposed a dictatorship on Chile.
The US has threatened Brazil recently.
The US has also threatened military action against Colombia this year.
Places like Singapore, Nigeria, and Kenya are just irrelevant on the global stage. Singapore is great for money laundering and nobody sees them as a threat to their own sovereignty due to being a tiny little island that's completely dependent on its neighbors for food and water. When you're a big country with a big economy, you get enemies merely by existing.
The US does not hate Mexico, the right wing party just pretends to hate them in order to appeal to their racist voter base. “Hate” doesn’t result in a broad free trade agreement where over 80% of auto parts manufactured in Mexico are sold to the US and companies like GM assemble the Silverado there.
China hates Japan? Where is your PlayStation made? If China hates them so much where are the economic sanctions or restrictions? I certainly agree that there are disputes and negative public perceptions between the countries, but their economies are heavily intertwined.
We also probably have to exclude threats made by Donald Trump from the discussion since he threatens obvious allies and is generally mentally unstable. Remember how he threatened to annex Canada? Canada is obviously an ally but our fucking moron president doesn’t know that.
Nigeria has over 240 million people, it’s not irrelevant on the global stage. All the African countries I mentioned are of great interest as they reach a developed state.
Fun fact: the Nigerian film industry grossed $6.4 billion in 2024, while the US domestic gross box office was $8.6 billion in the same year.
Calling Singapore irrelevant on the global stage is also laughable. 28th largest GDP in the world, 8th largest per capita. It’s not a Caribbean money laundering center where there’s no local economy. They refine oil, they’re ranked number 2 in biotechnology, 1st in broadband download speeds, 4th in global innovation index, 1st in economic competitiveness,
the list goes on.
Sure, but also the EU is comparably as weak over its member states as the US Federal government was over American states in the Articles of Confederation era. This is how Hungary was able to paralyse the collective response against Russia.
Nevertheless, extraditions based on international mandates are usually respected (terms and conditions may apply, see Greece or Italy). Wanted people often go to Serbia nowadays, to give a successful example.
Indeed. But I did write "will find friendly arms in China and Europe", and Greece, Italy, and indeed Serbia, are in Europe.
The whole continent != nation thing is clearer with the EU != Europe (due to the EU not even being a nation yet) than with the American nation != The Americas.
Even then, don't underestimate rules-lawyering of laws: I wish to suggest that the USA is going down the path of "rogue state", and that extradition treaties may have clauses (either explicitly in treaty text* or implicitly via the European Convention on Human Rights) protecting individuals from the risk of a death penalty, which may end up getting invoked due to the US having the death penalty.
Article 13 (``Capital punishment'') provides that when an offense for which extradition is sought is punishable by death under the laws in the requesting State but not under the laws in the requested State, the requested State may grant extradition on condition that the death penalty shall not be imposed or, if for procedural reasons such condition cannot be complied with by the requesting State, on condition that if imposed the death penalty shall not be carried out.
If there's a loss of trust that the US will honour its obligations, and in other cases besides extradition this has already happened, what then?
> Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms
This is pretty obviously not true? Russia's not going to try to please the us or most European countries, and many fugitives in Russia only angered those countries.
Perhaps US may extradite some ordinary US citizens, but for example when some member of the US military kills in another country someone by driving drunk, USA will immediately smuggle him from that country, so that he will not stand trial in a foreign court for his crime.
That's not how politics necessarily works. Russia oil and already existing infrastructure into Europe means that Europe has huge incentives to continue trading eventually.
That's also better than Russia focusing delivering their resources to China for good.
There's unlikely to be any thaw within Putin's lifetime. Putin is 73. What happens after that? Opportunity to be a clean slate.
Before the war, upper-class Russians had it good. Freedom of movement to the West. Russian money was popular in Europe, now it's got a Chernobyl toxic glow to it. It wouldn't be so bad to go back to 2010 Russia before Putin threw all of that away on territorial expansion and irridentism.
We've got army block, FSB block, technocrats, bureaucrats and oligarchs. The usual (more or less) story.
The real problem is - we don't have system that scales horizontally. So when Putin goes people will have to deal with the vertical system he created for himself.
The problem here is this "for himself" part.
For this system to work you will have to be a new Putin (at least for some time) and for this you will have to enforce your decisions and shape your new system. Top to bottom.
Best thing that can happen to Russian (realistically) is that the power will be given to technocrats.
They are not neccesarily more liberal, but they have real education, they do understand a thing or to about economics, open borders, sharing of knowledge etc.
They won't be able to quickly change Russia, but given some time they can reshape it step by step.
Alas - we have FSB and Army blocks, high level of corruption and millions of people who see people like Putin as the best choice. They don't need progress and responsibility. They need their empire back even if they are just peasants with serfdom included.
Slightly OT: How is it possible that the operators are unidentified? Surely someone must own the domain and pay upkeep for that? Wouldn't that expose at least one of them?
Yes your honor, we've identified one Big Bird of 123 Sesame St as being affiliated with the operators of the site based on the registration data.
The only reason you have to tell the truth is if you want to reduce the risk of arbitrarily losing control of the domain, such as having a chance to contest any abuse reports that might be filed against you.
What does "finding them" even means in this context? There are many hacker organizations located in Russia that are much worse than Anna's Archive. From my understanding those also operate websites / platforms to offer services.
Well clearly that’s false?
Not all crypto transactions are traceable for example. And since they haven’t found them, that seems to disprove your statement doesn’t it?
ultimately it will depend on their opsec. i do think it shows that opsec strategies and tech can have a use case that is not morally bad (at least not in a straightforward way). so the good research done in this field is actually justified
> Starting in April, Android Developer Verifier will be installed on devices.
so they're rolling out a system app that will call home to check whether any sideloaded apps have been "verified" with the developer's government ID? and this process will happen regardless of whether the user has enabled the "advanced flow" in Developer settings?
Good of a reason as any to go google-less on my Graphene pixel, I guess. But man it sucks, mostly for all the people who can't. I can manage my financials and 2FA from my laptop, that was my last real reason to have google play installed, but it's just a convenience. (I know it's mandatory for others.)
I wonder how that sys app will be handled in GrapheneOS's google play sandbox?
That essay about being licensed to use a debugger was supposed to be an absurdist over-extrapolation for the sake of making a deeper point about software freedoms ... right? Seems more like they're using it as an instruction manual.
i don't love the HTML response for "payment required" endpoints, not least because it just asks the agent to install an arbitrary NPM package for "full wallet connection and payment UI". seems so easy to exploit maliciously - what's to distinguish genuine payment instructions with crypto stealers
excellent story, it was both interesting and mildly terrifying. to think that one day software could be malleable seems so wrong to me - you would think having deterministic results is important for programming - and yet with "vibe coding" that really seems to be where it's going.
Not really. The lower tiers are only less efficient on platforms that require purchase through an app store or other payment processor that takes a large cut. Buying through a gift card or through the Roblox website or non-Microsoft Store PC app gives more Robux for the same price <https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux>. These increased rates are also balanced to prevent the lower tiers from being less efficient: the package for 800 goes to 1000, whereas 10 000 goes to 11 000.
> the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment [...] orders Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents
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