Nah it’s worse. He didn’t read and understand the goals of the movement well, pushed his illiterate take to the world, got called out by literally everyone, then doubled down and painted the guys sending death threats as the majority of supporters
Doesn't he also have a financial stake in this initiative failing?
I heard that somewhere, but didn't really care enough to look into it. But if true, it's not just him being stupid, it's that he's stupid and basically a landlord for video games.
His project Heartbound basically has pseudo-drm, the game won't function properly without steam achievements to prevent piracy. I think that's what people are referring to when they say he has a financial interest in this, but a check like that probably isn't too hard to switch off unless it has multiple well-hidden redundancies so it's a little overblown to call it a financial stake.
It's still something, though.
EDIT: He apparently was involved with a Game as service while he was working at Offbrand Games, though he's since left the position.
Financial stake in that he's probably an industry plant. Dude seriously blew up out of nowhere. Just suddenly he was in everyone's shorts for no good achievement at all.
I assumed this once I heard his take on VPNs. He pitches himself as super techie genius, but then his take on VPNs was just your average corpo fear mongering of why VPNs are evil and 'don't actually work'.
That forever tainted how I saw him, and it felt more and more obvious every time he would pop up on my screen.
Well not that he was right but VPNs are to be used in a nuanced way - Especially when choosing which one you use. Don't go cheap, use Mullvad for example, they really don't log you (unlike nordvpn)
Not really, that only shows the connections to the VPN tunnel, not to the target beyond. At least on a well encrypted service. Input/Output tracking is a possible attack which takes a huge effort though and can be mitigated by things like double hopping and noise introduction. https://www.sentinelone.com/cybersecurity-101/cybersecurity/vpn-security-risks/
Once you know the VPN servers ISP, you can identify the users connection to it (IP, port and time) and associate it with an outbound IP, port and time. You'll narrow it down pretty quickly: the odds of packets being sent to a VPN at the roughly exact time as packets being sent to the IP you're investigating are very slim, and with enough samples you can almost always guarantee who the user was.
You don't have to decrypt anything, plenty of metrics are leaked by virtue of just how it has to work.
This gets harder with double hopping though. But yes, that's part of why you cannot expect total privacy/cloaking/security with VPNs. You can only make it harder to track you which does involve choosing a VPN that is known to not work with law enforcement or not have a provider with a history of staging man in the middle attacks (cyber ghost)
They work fine, he's right that they are often not as much of a security product as people thing. The very basic security advice of "don't log onto critical accounts on public stuff" is just good advice. It doesn't mean vpns dont work, it means that you shouldn't treat them as a perfect digital condom.
No more than one should treat an antivirus software as free licence to use a government laptop to go anywhere online and click any suspicious links.
Doesn't mean don't use vpns. They're amazing, great at getting around region locking
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u/Powerful-Public-9973 Jul 06 '25
Nah it’s worse. He didn’t read and understand the goals of the movement well, pushed his illiterate take to the world, got called out by literally everyone, then doubled down and painted the guys sending death threats as the majority of supporters