ogurechny

Without the full info hash, they can probably keep lawyers away. Unlike BTDigg. You are one step away from the hash anyway, there are other online and offline databases.

a) This is not hard evidence, even though it is mostly correct.

b) ISPs do not need to rely on some random server on the other side of the world watching a tiny amount of requests, they see the user traffic directly.

c) ISPs do not have the legal authority to investigate or penalise anyone, or even peek into private communication.

d) As we all know, c) is just a show, and governments and corporations routinely offer helpful services to each other under fake legal covers and self-lobbied decrees that make both sides seemingly not responsible for anything.

It depends on applications and users (home, mobile, corporate). Some anecdotal evidence suggests that 2/3rds of user pairs can't connect without a relay server with all the tricks deployed (NAT traversal, IPv6 when available, client side port guessing for certain predictable NAT implementations), in other case it is 9 out of 10, or almost everyone. However, if you and your friend can't connect, what are the benefits of knowing that 100 other users succeeded?

That's why WebRTC supposes that the service provides some TURN relays from the start, and any commercial application comes with its own relays or uses third party infrastructure. That's why when you see any mention of “peer-to-peer” in this context, it actually means “which percent of monthly traffic on average we can offload”.

Notice that those are stats for unique data transmissions between one user and another. When data is not unique (same live video segments to many users), we can have one-to-many sharing, and the percentage of offloaded data can grow much more. Candidate selection for reliable seeding role is non-trivial, though, and it might only make sense when the swarms are big enough to contain enough peers that accept incoming connections.

As other said, quite a lot of those services exist. When they don't provide TURN servers, they have questionable utility (but can be used in the same local network). When the author does host a server for others, you obviously don't want to shove gigabytes of data into it (and the safe bandwidth limit is usually too slow for that anyway). Network connections do not seem to be the main problem, writing the client code properly, and in a way compatible with multiple browsers and unexpected events does.

If you have a non-recurrent need to transfer some data, and no server at hand, Syncthing volunteer-run relays seem to have some capacity available.

International politics are fake. There is a gentleman's agreement that secret services can kill “traitors” and “enemies” anywhere as long as no one objects (or the objecting country is not important enough anyway). The hirelings get the fake documents that are perfectly known to the officials to be the token of non-diplomatic immunity, and also allow them to pretend they were once again fooled by the bad foreign state. In Skripal case, killers spent the day before waiting for some agents to appear at the location to tell them to go sightseeing somewhere else. Nothing happened = UK was OK with what they were doing. Only after the fact British officials started to create a scene, and what they were worried about most was the fact that Russian officials have sold the “special” passports to way too many “irrelevant” thugs and oligarchs who wanted to be untouchable when travelling abroad (hence the leak of the existence of those passports, and silent confirmation that they were respected by so-called free and lawful countries).

You need to understand that those “above” are dumb bureaucrats playing dumb bureaucratic games. This is how societal selection works in current historical period.

As for this case, Kadyrov (or his inner circle) is known to be emo about any critic, and has been successfully killing the Chechen refugees in Europe for decades now. Ukrainians also seem to operate freely, which is a bit ironic when you remember that Ukrainian agents were taught in the same secret military schools Russian agents graduated from, and that Ukrainian oligarchs have mansions on Côte d'Azur and similar places right next to mansions of Russian oligarchs. I sometimes worry about their travel logistics in such complex times. Poor creatures!

Some people use My Little Pony characters as avatars, some use history books characters and propaganda poster characters. It means nothing in itself, people rarely stick to what they preach.

If you think that dumb nostalgia about “good old times” and complete ignorance/acceptance of any murders if they are considered state-sanctioned is somehow different in your own country (any country at any time), you must come to conclusion that some people inherently have lesser “quality” than others based on papers that they are given at birth by this or that organisation calling itself a state. Problematic, as they say.

You look like you are completely unaware of the wave of big and small early nineties games that used flat shaded 3D renders for art, sprites, and full motion video segments. Unlike fully textured polygons, they could be rasterised quickly on older or entry level Silicon Graphics workstations (or cheaper alternatives, but with more sweat). It was one of the distinctive styles of that era.

Step 0 is missing: having a great taste. One look at the video example is enough to figure out that the author keeps things in balance and in style. Explanations of why pixel grid mismatch looks wrong, or why mismatch between texture density and geometric complexity (in both ways) looks horrible, or why smoothing does not blend with pixel art are then made in retrospect.

Some details are a bit too cool for 1993, though, and assume high frame rate (won't work that well at low fps). Smooth weapon animations with a lot of frames, tiny per-pixel effects on bullet holes and flash sprites, smooth movement and object position calculations that use precise math instead of fast rough estimates resemble Chasm: The Rift or Quake (the concept of idle animations, e. g. objects moving in the starting view of difficulty selection room, assumes that there is some performance to waste on details that make the world less empty).

There is a dozen of existing Quake ports ready to run the moment you feed them the game files, and you recommend a version re-implemented on top of Xash3D, which is a GoldSrc-compatible engine. Why?

Next step is implementing 2D sprite engine. Then 3d sprite engine. Then OpenGL commands. Then getting Crysis to run on the IBM PC.

Laws do nothing without people who believe in them (just like they believe any other idol), or profit from them, or make an excuse that they are getting paid to enforce them, therefore “it is OK”.

People should be pre-conditioned to lose their marbles at the mere idea of someone being naked, and rush to the saviours in power as a consequence. It is not universal, there are many places where people are not trained by hyper-sexualised culture to treat children as sexual objects first and foremost (of course, it's always because of some “other” maniacs “everywhere”). That does not mean that those places are “better” or “safer”, just not that crazy.

In simple terms, viewers taught how to feel by the Jerry Springer Show (and by that I mean all “respectable” globalised media together, the difference is superficial) put on the cork hats, and dictate how everyone else should act. All while being 100% sure they are “progressive”, unlike those “savages”.

Obviously, certain people really like that they can keep any international hosting company, or business in general, on a leash, and they like it to be that way forever, so it's essential that you keep supporting the hypocrisy.