sp3ctr4l

Agreed, I am genuinely impressed by this, this is unironically a better run, better organized response to a situation like this than most billion dollar + companies that trade on the stock market would pull off.

Absolute kudos and bravo to the itch.io team!

Entirely seriously:

While this is far from some kind of total victory, that a conversation is happening at all is much better than that not being the case.

I am guessing payprocs did not have any fucking clue the extent of backlash they would receive from just being extremely vauge / heavy handed.

Hopefully this can at least result in some more concrete and specific definitions of what they will and will not allow, so that existing platforms at least have an idea of what the actual rules are, and then from there, potentially a more targeted public pressure campaign could manifest.

If itch.io manages to get them to actually clarify the rules, this could lead to other platforms, Steam, Nutaku, etc, also reworking their allowed/not allowed games, now having more clarity and less fear of being totally nuked for violating vague guidelines.

Vibes based legal system, sure, why not?

Broad tariffs are basically a sales tax with many extra steps and massive inefficiencies.

Sales taxes are of course, regressive, they disproportionately harm the poor.

Frame Perfect!

enemy sprite transforms into scrambled eggs

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-07-fbi-national-st-paul-cyber.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/minnesota-calls-national-guard-after-st-paul-slammed-by-digital-attack-2025-07-29/

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/30/minnesota-activates-national-guard-as-cyberattack-on-saint-paul-disrupts-public-services/

So, this actually was first detected on Friday July 25, escalated all the way up to the Emergency Operations Center on July 28 (Monday), state of emergency / near total intranet shut down (they are quarantineing the whole system) on July 29 (Tuesday).

It seems to me that some kind of rather sophisticated threat actor managed to get into the core ... this techxplore article calls it a 'VPN', but it isn't technically a VPN, its a secure access tunnel system that city-gov systems and employees use to talk to each other, it almost certainly is not intended to be geared toward broad internet access/usage, beyond accepting user input from public facing government web portals, such as say, people paying their utliity bills online or trying to submit a business liscense application online, things like that.

This system is sounding like it got fully compromised (as in, low level/high privilege level access was secured), and was either sending data out/in through improper IP addresses, and/or was possibly being hijacked to do some kind of DOS attack ... on itself?

I am having a really hard time finding any exact details on this, but this is my best guess.

Given that the EOC essentially immediately shutdown everything and called in a National Guard Cybersecurity team, it seems to me that there is a high chance this was done by basically a nation-state level threat actor.

It also at least seems like the systems, the data, the hardware, have at least not yet been locked down in a ransomware style move, which... could be largely due to their just quickly pulling the whole thing offline, or could be because that wasn't the goal of the attackers... or some combination of both.

After shitting in the duck pond and fleeing, he returns to his tiny home:

A fuck-off huge, old wine barrel.

Article:

https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/living-pay-cheque-to-pay-cheque-you-are-not-alone-68-of-americans-are-too/3923390/

Source Study:

https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PYMNTS-New-Reality-Check-February-March-2024.pdf

Oh hey, Forbes says nearly 72% of those living paycheck to paycheck have less than $2,000 in savings!

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/

Yeah, this is what an economic collapse looks like, Great Depression 2.0, hold onto your butt, and good luck.

EDIT:

We also have a massive negative net worth problem.

Negative net worth means you have more debt than assets.

Because this is difficult to measure accurately, unless you are a credit bureau....we've got anywhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 3 Americans with more debt than assets, ie, they are de facto debt slaves.

https://www.creditkarma.com/about/commentary/americans-have-a-net-worth-problem-and-its-not-positive

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/whats-your-net-worth-25-of-americans-say-theirs-is-%240-or-less

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-us-households-have-negative-net-worth-will-they-ever-move-from-debt-to-wealth/

These are all from 2 or 3 years ago, I imagine its now closer to 1 in 3 than 1 in 10.

Diogenes stands ready to pluck away the feathers of hypocrisy

Then, suddenly, Diogenes appears, plucks every feather from the duck, shoves it into the faces of those sitting on the bench, screams 'This is no bird, behold, a man!', laughs manically, shits in the duck pond, runs away.

Ba ba ba BA BA BA OOHM MAH MAOW MAOW

Fellow autist here, though I don't think I have adhd:

I was once where you are now.

It can be done.

Entirely unironically:

Believe in yourself, don't be too stubborn or proud, but also don't let the haters get you down, ... and as Johnny Cash once said, "know when to walk away, know when to run."