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On the removal of Come Back Alive

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Re: On the removal of Come Back Alive

#321

Post by jacquesm »

slim109ya wrote: post #216
b112 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see downvotes, but history is an excellent predictor. Russia is held in an iron grip. The public can not, and will not successfully rise up. Any threat to Putin is either dead, or jailed. Now, with these restrictions and sanctions, another country, a long time friend of Russia, China, also undergoing trade restrictions, will clearly work with Russia even more closely. Do people really think that China and Russia do…

If China really wants Taiwan then now's the time to do it. North Korea might as well take South Korea while all this is going on. Now I'm starting to think the world is descending into chaos. Or has it always been that way?

With brief interludes of quiet, yes.

Re: On the removal of Come Back Alive

#323

Post by exikyut »

praptak wrote: post #166
piokoch wrote: post #19

If anyone wants to support Ukraine defense directly, please use: https://ukraine.ua/news/support-the-armed-forces-of-ukraine/ or https://ukraine.ua/news/donate-to-the-nbu-fund/ this is a bit of a hassle, as UA government agencies can accept donations only through wire transfers, but that's just a few clicks in the banking app anyway.

Anybody can confirm whether ukraine.ua is legit? Their SSL certificate is issued to sni.cloudflaressl.com, which says nothing about whoever owns ukraine.ua. I'd say this one looks a bit more legit: https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/natsionalniy-bank-vidkriv-sp...

Googling the IBAN (UA458201720313281002302018611) finds search results [1] from sites including treasury.gov.ua [2], mil.gov.ua [3] and 24tv.ua [4]. I currently see only 23 results for the IBAN code, but I blame this on the newness/novelty of the information and a suspicion that Google's keyword indexing engine doesn't particularly like rare/unique terms (both when parsing queries and tokenizing page content).

Googling the USREOU [4] code (00034022) leads me to discover [5] that this code maps into an open-data public register that several search/scrape services [6,7,8,9,10] identify (with the help of Google Translate) as the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. A cursory examination suggests that all of these services seem to 100% corroborate each other.

The MFI (820172) is a very simple/common query/construction that returns junk/irrelevant results without further context. I wondered if this number being incorrect would cause a transaction to irreversibly "commit" but not go to the correct destination (or anywhere), so I tried to understand its significance. It's a Monetary Financial Institution code [11], part of a European banking standard that Ukraine participated in until it very recently switched to IBAN in 2020 (!) [12]. Critically, while the format of an IBAN (International Bank Account Number) seems (my speculation!) to be up to the implementer to format (seemingly within some loose guidelines... again, speculation), the way Ukraine is doing it is they are embedding the MFI code into the IBAN: UA45𝟴𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟳𝟮313…. Thus the MFI is provided by the MOD likely for bureaucracy purposes, and if it is needed at all it is encoded redundantly into the IBAN in any case. Yay.

**Disclaimer**: I encourage challenging and fact-checking the rationale presented here before proceeding. (The registry information [6..10] is honestly mildly interesting.)

Thankyou for coming to my Wikipedia comment (this was fun!), dodge the citations as you go past :P

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=UA45820172031328100230201861...

[2] https://www.treasury.gov.ua/ua/dopomoga-na-materialno-tehnic...

[3] https://www.mil.gov.ua/dopomoga-na-materialno-tehnichne-ta-m...

[4] https://24tv.ua/ru/finansovo-podderzhat-ukrainskuju-armiju-o..., https://24tv.ua/mzs-otrimalo-bagato-zvernen-za-kordonu-shhod...

[4] https://www.allacronyms.com/USREOU - "Unified State Register of Enterprises and Organizations of Ukraine"

[5] https://www.google.com/search?q=00034022

[6] https://youcontrol.com.ua/en/catalog/company_details/0003402...

[7] https://opendatabot.ua/c/00034022

[8] https://dozorro.org/profile/UA-EDR-00034022/5/role1

[9] https://clarity-project.info/tenderer/00034022

[10] https://izi.trade/tenders/companies/00034022

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_Financial_Institution...

[12] https://about.pumb.ua/en/info/iban

[13] https://bank.com.ua/en/news/zaprovadzhennya-mizhnarodnogo-no...

[14] https://www.iban.com/banks/privatbank

[15] https://en.privatbank.ua/iban

Re: On the removal of Come Back Alive

#324

Post by Sebb767 »

cloverich wrote: post #82

Does Patreon have ties to Russia that are relevant here, or is this purely a principled move based on their terms?

I think the most likely explanation is that the account only came to Patreons full attention due to recent events and (probably) an insane rise in support.

Re: On the removal of Come Back Alive

#325

Post by salawat »

breakfastduck wrote: post #32
cebert wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m so disappointed with their stance here. Russians are slaughtered these folks and they can’t get funds to defend themselves? Sickening.

While I wouldn't have stopped this myself, I think its perfectly reasonable for a crowdfunding website to not want to host campaigns used to purchase military grade weaponry.

Lets be clear. There is no difference between weaponry and military grade. That people entertain the notion is a sign of the softening of language and perversion of meaning by the political classes to justify breaking their own founding document to centralize power (in the case of the U.S.)

There is weaponry, and there is volume. And if you want to completely sidestep these issues, get a mill, some metal, and get fabbing.

Save the squishy little handwringers their conscience. My heart goes out to you folks. Give 'em hell.

Re: On the removal of Come Back Alive

#326

Post by app4soft »

HideousKojima wrote: post #314
app4soft wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know emotions are running high in this thread but asking to educate myself. I hope You would learn something from today's message by Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine on situation where few Ukrainian kindergartens shelled by Russian rocket strikes : > Today’s Russian attacks on a kindergarten and an orphanage are war crimes and violations of the Rome Statute. Together with the General Prosecutor’s Office we…

As horrific as that is, that sort of stuff happens in wars all the time. It's so common that it even has its own fancy word to make it sound less horrific: collateral damage. That said, unless Russia was intentionally targeting the kindergarten (and/or the Russians didn't reasonably believe the kindergarten to be housing enemy troops at the time) I don't really see how that can be treated as a war crime. For the reco…

> As horrific as that is, that sort of stuff happens in wars all the time.

But when it happens in your country, your city, even your home...

I just wish You to not meet war eye-to-eye.

I'm actually looking into war's eyes directly.

Re: On the removal of Come Back Alive

#327

Post by User23 »

dgellow wrote: post #249
yalogin wrote: post #187

I know emotions are running high in this thread but asking to educate myself. Ukraine is not a tiny nation, and Russia is huge. In that scenario how will a small assortment of weapons and software even help them? Do they even need weapons help? Also how can a charity buy that list and supply? Can an organization buy them, feels like that kind of a purchase should be restricted to countries only.

Russia can destroy and invade the country. But occupying a place as huge as Ukraine will be hard. Even with a small set of weapons and fighters defending the territory you can make the place way more difficult to control than it would be otherwise.

I expect they’ll have a pretty easy time in the places dominated by ethnic Russians who welcome Russian rule. I further expect they’ll have a considerably harder time in the non-Russian areas.

Re: On the removal of Come Back Alive

#328

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

Aeolun wrote: post #276
ziml77 wrote: post #171

This title seems designed to cause outrage. In their post, it's very clear why they couldn't allow the account to remain active: "The website of the organization says they use contributions to finance and train military personnel." Individuals should not be funding foreign militaries. It does not matter if the country was unjustly attacked or not.

How so? There is preciously little else you can do to feel like you may make a difference. Not that I believe donating here would have helped, but…

You don't have to donate directly to the military. You can donate to any relief organizations, independent journalists covering the war, etc. There's a lot on the periphery that need donations as well.

Re: On the removal of Come Back Alive

#329

Post by nojonestownpls »

redwood wrote: post #40
breakfastduck wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I wouldn't have stopped this myself, I think its perfectly reasonable for a crowdfunding website to not want to host campaigns used to purchase military grade weaponry.

Freedom. What is being defended here is the right to have a website like this at all. The west has a long way to go to wake up to what's at stake here.

No post body was provided.

Re: On the removal of Come Back Alive

#330

Post by app4soft »

crtasm wrote: post #251
praptak wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody can confirm whether ukraine.ua is legit? Their SSL certificate is issued to sni.cloudflaressl.com, which says nothing about whoever owns ukraine.ua. I'd say this one looks a bit more legit: https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/natsionalniy-bank-vidkriv-sp...

FWIW, https://ukraine.ua/ is linked from https://mfa.gov.ua/ ("Офіційний сайт України" in the footer)

Correct.

Site https://ukraine.ua/ is official Ukraine promotion platform, created & managed by Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.

Site https://mfa.gov.ua/ is official site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.

Here some other related official links (due to Ukrainian gov sites are DDoS'ed periodically):

- https://twitter.com/MFA_Ukraine (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine)

- https://twitter.com/DmytroKuleba (Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine)

- https://twitter.com/DefenceU (Ministry of Defense of Ukraine)

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