I feel bad about all the attention this is getting. It happened because I asked myself "what can I do to help Ukrainians", and frankly it's costing me peanuts -- Tarsnap doesn't have a huge number of Ukrainian users. (As far as I'm aware, at least, hence my emailing the tarsnap-announce list to encourage other Ukrainians to identify themselves to me.) I didn't mean for this to turn into a publicity stunt!
But while I'm writing -- if you're looking for something you can do to help: Please contact your elected representatives and encourage them to allow visa-free travel to Ukrainian citizens. Ireland has already done this (https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/00aef-minister-mcentee-a...) and I wrote to my MP yesterday to encourage Canada to follow suit. This war is going to displace millions of civilians and while Putin's threats of nuclear war may prevent NATO from defending Ukraine, at least we can step up to help the refugees.
You did good. HN is just toxic and full of know-it-alls experts on war topics.
And the effect is negative - I moved domains out of NameCheap to Russia simply because any other US or EU based registrar can do the same crazy thing and are not trusted.
So Putin's regime actually got more money out of this.
Where were you last Wednesday for instance, hours before the "pacification" took place? Not complaining perhaps, not doing anything.
Not doing anything