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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.

> 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.

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.

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).

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.