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Last Notes

2026-08-09 10:20:20 UTC

⚡️❌ NEW - Proton VPN got caught running price sensitivity tests on its own users, then told everyone it was a stale sale.
Here's what happened. People on Proton's subreddit noticed they were being quoted different prices for the same plan. Refresh the pricing page and VPN Plus shows $2.77/mo at 72% off. Open a fresh incognito window and it's $3.23/mo at 68% off. Same plan, same country, same second. Nothing about the visitor changed.
Proton VPN's General Manager replied that there was no adaptive pricing, that a sale had recently ended, and that the intro prices hadn't "universally refreshed." He called the low numbers an error and suggested people grab them before they got fixed.
Then Windscribe pulled the page source. Every visitor is being sorted into a variant, and the test is labeled in plain text inside an HTML meta tag: ab-test:VpnHpAndPricingVpnPlusSensibility300726. One session returns content="A", the other returns content="B". Two separate pricing URLs, one normal and one flagged test-300726-b. A screen recording shows the price flipping between clean incognito sessions, $3.49 at 65% off, then $2.99 at 70% off.
Expired sales don't do that. Cached pages don't do that. Cloudflare has never once injected a named A/B test into anyone's markup.
Worth being precise about the wording, because Proton was. Adaptive pricing uses your personal data to set a number tailored to you. Price sensitivity testing quotes different people different prices for the identical product to find out how far you can push before sales drop off. The GM denied the first one. Nobody accused them of the first one.
A/B testing prices is ordinary commerce. Amazon does it, airlines do it in their sleep, and almost nobody would have cared. But Proton sells privacy, and privacy is a trust product. The experiment was never the scandal. The denial was.
Run the tests. Just don't call it a glitch when your own code is holding a sign with the test's name on it.
https://blossom.primal.net/a930a209d47e070f10028d267426259517543d34711c2c80f52dd30b3e8cfba5.mp4
https://blossom.primal.net/ededcd3e81efd916a78b15253ecab53526fdf08040f17af83ecf5f2e25f5fd13.jpg
https://blossom.primal.net/3ba42ccf32b94a3c799dd17aad8564ed5d885e6d21408a54a7aa30c2f725faa1.jpg

2026-08-01 16:35:58 UTC

⚡️💬 SAD STORY - This is absolutely heartbreaking.
This BTC holder spent eight years stacking Bitcoin, hoping to build enough financial security before turning 50.
Living in a country affected by inflation and FATF sanctions, he trusted Bitcoin to protect his savings from a weakening currency.
But after his Coldcard wallet was compromised and his entire 2 $BTC was drained.
Years of hard work were wiped out in an instant.
He says he no longer knows if he still believes in Bitcoin and even wonders if he should have moved everything into a Bitcoin ETF instead.
"This Coldcard hack may cut deeper than any Bitcoin loss story I’ve seen since Mt. Gox..."
https://blossom.primal.net/fbab112ebe7f0d57ce0a8e4f030ceaeef2b4eb8ea3238e88b5012658d2b845b4.jpg

2026-05-24 13:59:55 UTC

⚡️🇫🇷 NEW - 41 kidnappings in 4 months: France has become the most dangerous country for owning Bitcoin...
Joe Nakamoto has just released a chilling documentary about these kidnappings in France, amid data breaches and the hunt for Bitcoin holders.
https://blossom.primal.net/1094c51c7c4ddf1886461b15d8c2ae2745d3298d595507a532f9e8897c61345f.mp4

2025-08-22 19:51:12 UTC

⚡️🇺🇸 NEW - Ghislaine Maxwell says claims Epstein worked for any intelligence agency are "bullshit!"
https://blossom.primal.net/8163f1513d7a653c19d9e1a0411af6ba7a732223b712ebb1598a68ba08cc2423.png

2025-08-01 11:36:41 UTC

⚡️🚨 FYI - Facebook once bought a VPN app for $120M and turned it into a surveillance tool that spied on 33M+ users' entire phones for years.
This app helped Zuck buy WhatsApp for a whopping $19B and break Snapchat's encryption.
The name of this Israeli app was Onavo.
It promised to “secure your data” and reduce mobile data usage.
When Facebook bought it in 2013, Zuck said the app would help them connect more people to the internet.
Facebook even promised to keep Onavo running as a standalone brand.
But Onavo operated as a VPN that routed all your phone's internet traffic through Facebook's servers before sending it anywhere else.
Facebook could see:
• Every app you opened
• How long you used it
• Which websites you visited
• And at what time you used each app
What did this mean for Facebook?
It meant that Zuck could see exactly which one of Facebook's competitor was growing popular among people.
Look how Facebook was tracking these apps (revealed in the court later)
By 2016, this data revealed Snapchat was exploding in popularity.
But there was one problem: Snapchat's traffic was encrypted, so Facebook couldn't see how people were using it.
In an email, Zuck says:
It seems important to figure out a way to get reliable analytics about them
Facebook's started "Project Ghostbusters" - named after Snapchat's ghost logo.
They would use "man-in-the-middle" attacks to break Snapchat's encryption.
Within a month, Facebook's engineers built "kits" that could intercept Snapchat's data before it got encrypted.
Facebook created custom client & server side code based on Onavo’s VPN proxy app.
This code included a client-side “kit” that installed a root certificate on Snapchat users’ mobile devices.
Then Facebook’s servers created fake digital certificates to impersonate Snapchat analytics servers to redirect & decrypt secure traffic from those apps to Facebook.
Seeing Snapchat's success, Zuckerberg offered to buy it for $3 billion.
But when Snap's CEO refused the offer, Facebook launched Snap's most famous feature on Instagram - Stories.
But this wasn't just about Snapchat.
Facebook used Onavo to systematically monitor Houseparty, YouTube, Amazon, and dozens of other apps.
Any rising competitor was identified, analyzed, and neutralized.
Apple forced Onavo off the App Store for violating privacy rules.
So Facebook rebranded it as "Facebook Research" and started paying teens $20/month to install it on their phones.
When Apple found out, they revoked Facebook's certificates, breaking ALL of Facebook's iOS apps.
Onavo shows how Big Tech weaponizes our trust.
33 million people installed privacy protection that was actually the most sophisticated corporate surveillance tool ever built.
I'm posting all the screenshots as comments.
https://blossom.primal.net/56f2a16fbedff710d98c50682b9e48b9a9870d11f183710205387209207818fe.jpg