Hacked - The Domain That Outlived a Country

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Yes I know, I know it's a TLD. Don't worry, we get to it. In September 1990, a Soviet physicist named Alexey Soldatov registered a domain name for a country that would cease to exist fifteen months later. What happened to .su in the 35 years since is a story about cybercrime, Soviet nostalgia, internet governance, and one man who built Russia's internet — and went to prison rather than hand it over. Hacked is presented by NordLayer. NordLayer is a network security platform for modern teams. NordLayer gives companies centralized control over who can access their systems, keeps every connection fast and encrypted, and requires no additional hardware or complex infrastructure. nordlayer.com/hackedpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 1990, two things happened very close to each other that seemed to me like they would have happened very far apart. Tell me more. The first, the Soviet Union, 290 million people, one sixth of the Earth's land. You've heard of it. Registered a domain name. Dot SU. Soviet Union. It was assigned by an American nonprofit in California as part of like the early,

bureaucracy of this fledgling network you might heard of, the internet. The man who filed that paperwork was a physicist named Alexi Soldatov. He was a guy working at a nuclear research facility in Moscow. He'd built the USSR's first internet on the same kind of institute hardware relcom and launched just like seven weeks prior that same year. That domain is the first thing that happened. The second thing that happened at the same time in history is this dawn of the internet. December 25th, 1991, the Soviet Union that registered that domain ceases to

exist. For reasons that are beyond this podcast, the USSR goes away. It still lives on in the hearts of many, Jordan. And we're going to get to that. It goes away, but the dot-s-U domain did not. So what happened in the 35 years between that registration and today to this domain that like outlasted the country that registered it? Cybercrime? Yes. Political intrigue, you bet. Soviet era nostalgia, a lot of it. And what happened to the man who built it?

And is he still in a Russian penal colony for refusing to hand over the keys? Oh. Interesting twist. This is the story of the zombie domain.su. Brought to you, of course, by our title sponsor. Nordlare. The network security platform for modern teams. But we'll tell you more about that later.

Here, on Hacked. Talk about a theme music. Oh. Scott, how you doing? How am I doing? I'm doing pretty well. A little hectic. Today's been a little busy, a lot of meetings.

Got my brain kind of in overdrive. So trying to decompress to make a fun podcast recording with my friend Jordan. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm back from some travel. We'll talk about all that maybe after the main story and the break. But I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to be home.

And I'm happy to be chatting about this. It's not a domain. It's a top-level domain. Tell me about that. Sorry. I was going to jump in and interrupt you about. didn't want to, but technically the dot SU, the dot CA's, the dot, you know,

EDUs. They're called TLD's top level domains. Usually when you say they register a domain, people think like Google.com. Sure. They don't think dot com. Yeah, yeah. I'll keep calling it a domain for the rest of this entire episode,

but let's keep as I should. As I should. For brevity and simplicity, but I appreciate that clarification. We should start with a guy who registered it. because this is kind of his story. Can we start with something else, though? Like, I just want to say that dotSU is like kind of cool, like especially as like a root user like Sue super user accounts.

But like dot USSR would have been a way cooler domain. Yeah, everyone was getting two letters. Like up here in Canada, we got dot c. But if you could push that and just dot USSR, pretty cool. Yeah, exactly. I actually just did a look and search to see if dot USSR is available as a TLD and it is. If you had enough money, you could register.usSR, which to me is just cooler than dotSU if you're the, if you're, you know, the old Soviet hack. A listener of this show with too much disposable income has the opportunity to do something very funny.

Exactly. Let's start with the guy who kicked this all off, Alexi Soldatov. If you want to understand him, it's helpful to understand where he worked. The Kirchatov Institute was a nuclear research facility on the West. western edge of Moscow. It was named after guy named Igor Churchotov, the physicist who built the Soviet atomic bomb. By 1989, it was home to one of the USSR's most advanced computer networks and to this guy, Soldatov, who ran the computing center at the facility. Important for where this is going, Soltov was not a dissident. He was not even a particularly

political figure. He was a physicist and a systems administrator who figured out pretty early that this global computing network that was being assembled over in the West was going to matter a lot. And in 1990, he used Kurchatov's hardware to build RELCOM, the USSR's first internet. It connected these research institutes in the USSR to each other and eventually to the outside world. So he was an OG internet guy. He was an OG. I like that. I like that.

To the point that the World Wide Web didn't even really exist at that point, like Tim Bernan, Lee hadn't published, he had just published his proposal for it, was still writing the first browser. ARPANET, like the U.S. military network that preceded the modern internet, had only just been like decommissioned kind of right at the same time. This is all happening right in that pressure cooker moment for the internet. The global network was mostly just used for research and academics and Soltav sees it, kind of digs his heels in a little bit, and starts trying to build the thing he thinks it's going to become. Which is why, in September 9th,000, 19th, 1990, acting on behalf of the Soviet Union, Soltov registered the domain.

DotSU with this thing called IANA, which is the internet assigned numbers authority. It's the body based in California that distributes those two-letter, like, codes. Every UN recognized. TLDs. Country gets one. TLDES. We got dot CA. You get the idea. Solitov is the guy that filed the paperwork.

And then 15 months later, super inconvenient. thing happens, the USSR collapses. The other pressure cooker that was going on. Just a little bit. December 25th, 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev resigns. That flag comes down over the Kremlin. The USSR dissolves.

Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. So typically when a country goes away, so does the domain. Like, East Germany got dot DD. I didn't know this. It was retired after reunification. You see this a bunch. Yugoslavia.YU goes away.

DotSU wasn't retired. And the argument was basically like, don't get rid of this, it's working. Fledgling internet, every little website counts, and people were using dotSU. He makes this practical argument to ICAN saying, don't get rid of this thing. There's tens of thousands of legitimate users.

We have universities using this, research institute, scientific networks, you're going to hobble this. thing right when it's getting going. They were all registered under dotSU. It would cause real disruption. You'd have to like at minimum give them time to migrate, but hopefully just don't get rid of them. I can like accepted this argument and they kind of took no action. So two years later, this thing is still growing and Soledotov co-founds this thing called RIPN, the Russian Institute for Public Networks at this institute he works at. And it becomes like the formal kind of registry for

dotSU. This body is important for where this is all going. Two years later, Russia assigns its own new domain. DotRU. And Soldatov's network, this thing he's kind of building on the back of dotSU, is going to administer that too. They're going to administer dotRU and dotSU. He's got a registrar for both of them. He's becoming the national registrar.

Two domains, one for a dead country, both running through this same independent infrastructure. The Internet Development Foundation was this nonprofit co-founded by him and colleagues, his wife's serving as the director. They're taking on day-to-day management of all this, you got to. It's not state-owned. That's super important. It's not government-controlled. It's soldatops. He runs it that way for 30 years.

Through the 2000s, dotSU grows steadily. It becomes like a weird little corner of the internet used by, as I sort of saw it in the research, three. major groups. You've got Soviet nostalgiaists. People that want back to the old way. Exactly. Former researchers who never bothered to migrate. And then the growing number of people who have noticed something very useful about dotSU, which is that it doesn't seem to be anyone really in charge of it. Sure. It's like technically Soltatov with the Internet Development Foundation, but like I said, they're not state-owned or government-controlled. They're not auditing every website. It's privately administered.

Because the domain. I love cybercrime. You said it not me, but I thought it. And because the domain has no clear government owner, think about how this would work. An enforcement request from a foreign authority comes in like, hey, someone is hosting, I don't know, a giant trunch of leaked data, including the vice president's social security number. For a random example that will become relevant in a few moments, that request being like, take this down comes in. it has no obvious landing point. Sure, it just keeps going.

Just goes to an endlessly growing inbox. Yes. He's managing the technical infrastructure, but he's not a regulator, and he doesn't try to be one. The next major milestone in 2011, the administrators of Russia's dot-r-U domain start to tighten their rules, being like this is the government-administered thing

that he's managing. We're an international player. We need to act by the rules. Identity verification. Know your customer. Know your customer. Take down processes, anything for that. It's starting to lurch into catching up with the rest of the world.

Criminal operators, again, this is by 2011. So criminal people like operators who had been using dot are you comfortably for years go, eh, crud, and they start shopping for alternatives, and they find dotSU. According to Group IB, one of Russia's official internet watchdog firms, the number of malicious sites on dotSU doubles in 2012. It doubles again in 2013 as this migration is happening over to dotSU. At which point, like this domain TLD for a country that hasn't existed in a very long time is hosting way more criminal activity than dot RU itself.

In no particular order, it becomes a real huge home for botnet command control infrastructure, like taken over, hijacked civilian computers, fishing sites, loads of them, credential markets, you wouldn't believe what you can find on. DotSU. And it's here that, like, it really starts to regress into the Wild West at this point, because, again, there's no single authority with clean jurisdiction to order takedowns. You make a request to Russian authorities. It might go unanswered if it's about a dotSU. ICAN's authority and responsibility, whatever you want to call that, doesn't extend to the site-level

content. So there's this weird decade-long sweet spot where dotSU is functionally ungovernable. Just, just a domain TLD for play. TLD for hire. TLD for hire. And let's talk briefly about one of those incidents before we take it to the finish line. One that got a lot of heat, so there's a lot of coverage about it, so it was easy to read about, is exposed.su. It's kind of a story of a guy named Eric Taylor. This could be its own whole episode. In March 2013, exposed.s.U publishes what it claims are the personal financial records of 16 people. In no order and not all of them, Michelle Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, director of the CIA, John Brennan, Robert Mueller, former FBI director, and then just sort of

on the fun celebrity side, Beyonce, JZ, Kim Kardashian, Bertney Spears, Paris Hilton, Ashton, Ashton Coucher, Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, Mel Gibson. Boof, a bunch of information. Social Security numbers, home addresses, credit card details, credit reports. There had been a breach of three major U.S. Consumer Credit Bureau's Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. And this was, I think it was 2013 pretty early to be doing this, posting all of that on this. Dot Soviet Union website. Exposed.

I just tried to go look it up. It's not there anymore. would think not. Because Obama confirms publicly that the authorities are looking into this. This is one of these early data leak stories. The primary hacker linked to the data. There's a few different people allegedly. Is a guy named Eric Taylor operating allegedly?

I don't even know if I need to on this one. So I mumble. You'll know when I mumble. He was operating online as Cosmo the God. He was a member of a group calling itself Eugene Nazi. He was 18 at the time. The way they got the information, Eugene Nazi, was like they breached a Russian identity theft service,

which had already compromised the U.S. data brokers. It was a whole thing. Basically, these personal and financial records get exposed, get published on exposed.s.u. They're pulled from that kind of criminal intermediary. Taylor gets identified. He's an American. He gets prosecuted.

He pleads guilty in a sentenced in 2017 at 19 to, I think it was 36 months probation. in federal court. He gets no prison time. He's banned from computers in the internet until he turns 21. There's a whole weird story there where he becomes a consultant

and then he gets accused of a different situation of paying local cops to go after members of the old Eugene Nazi crew. We're going to put that aside. Put that to the side. Talk about that maybe in the future. Exactly. As you mentioned, exposed.osu goes dark.

But it doesn't seem like there was ever like a takedown order. It seems like they just took it down. They're like too much heat. Turn this one down. Turn this one down. We don't need none of this noise. Our botnets and malware for higher services are going to be mad at all the heat this is bringing.

We don't need this. Turn that off. Yeah. It's not making us money. Get rid of it. The other little layer, more on the trivia side, was like the cultural dimension of just like that Soviet era nostalgia. You want to go to a site eulogizing Soviet dictator. Go to Stalin.

You want to go to nashy.su, which is like pro-Kremlin youth group. They need a website. It's there. And then just American IP, Apple. su and Ford. S.U, registered by totally unrelated companies. It's good fun. At its peak, the domain hosted over 111,500 registered sites.

There were legitimate users like universities and businesses and research institutes. There was hardcore cybercrime. There was weird Stalin nostalgia. Yeah, communist organization. It is not one thing. It is like sort of the echo of like a country in a moment and an era and all of it in this government gap that was not yet closed until. We're going to take a big final turn towards a pretty rough finish line. In 2019, Russia passes what it calls the sovereign internet law.

It was legislation that designated. dot SU.RU and the Cyrillic Russian like TLD. dot P-O with a line through it. All of those as part of Russia's official national domain like zone. And under this new law, passed in 2019, these domains would be managed by an organization with state involvement. Soldatav's Internet Development Foundation had no state involvement. It does not qualify.

Negotiations are attempted. According to different sources, the deputy communications minister, I apologize, a lot of Russian names I'm going to try and work through here, deputy communications minister Alexei Sokolov approaches Soltov, our character, about like, hey, do you want to transfer control of this? And Soltatov is like, no. It's just a bold play. Yeah, I feel like negotiations with the Putin administration generally aren't much of negotiations. The pattern's pretty recognizable. When a negotiation fails, a criminal law is sort of conveniently found. The pretext here is that in winding down RIPN's like technical operations,

Solitov and his two colleagues had transferred a block of just shy of half a million like of these addresses to a check holding company, a company he found it called Reliable Communications that they co-owned. Transfer is this giant block of these websites. And investigators argued that this constituted the theft of state assets given that law that was passed in 2019. The alleged damages were 500 million rubles, which is like just shy of 10 million USD. Independent experts have all said like, that's a nonsense legal argument. It was their thing.

They moved. But we're way past that at this point. You don't get to that, you don't get that chance. Maxime Berkatov, like the director of the organization that actually allocates IP adjutant. across Europe and Central Asia has said that, like, no, this was not illegal in the traditional sense of the word. IP addresses, the idea goes, are not property under Russian law. They can't be included on a company's books.

They can't be stolen. So nothing was trained. Like, he makes a very good case that this was not actually illegal. Alexei Plastinov, a member of RIPN's board of directors, acknowledges, like, a conflict of interest in the way it was transferred, but says it's still not criminal conduct. There's other comparable cases, but in any case, Soldatov's charges are filed. There's an investigation, according to two sources independently cited by media outlet, Medusa was initiated at the request of a guy named Andre Lipov.

Andre Lipov is a Kremlin official overseeing information and communications technology, a man who for years had been in a very well-documented feud with Soldatov over control of dotSU. Lipoff has wanted it for years. This law gets passed. He's able to be part of this project of filing these charges to try and claw control back of dotSU. Do we know why he didn't want to release control of it? Like was it inspired by his communist era allegiances? Or was it more like, oh, I make a ton of money with this now and I don't want to give it up?

Porcino los dos. Like, why not both? I think it's, I think it was lucrative. I think the Kremlin targeted the value of these assets. He was sort of moving out of the country to preserve his control of as being around worth $10 million. Yeah. To say.

And also, you think back to 19, like he built this. Yeah, sure. I could see thinking, I really, that part I relate to, I'm like, this is mine. I did this. Whether or not you agree, I can at least empathize with that part of it. trying to move control of them to a check external company. I'm like, oh, that was bold place, sir. But I get feeling a sense of ownership and creativity

and having made this thing because he kind of did. So I think both. I think both. Yeah. He's the steward. The steward is a better word. Yeah. Yeah.

He registered it. Didn't make it, but he registered it. Yeah, he kept it alive, negotiated it. Probably he's got him a lot of power over the years. Well, sort of. criminal investigation is opened in December 2019, kind of within weeks of the Kremlin looking into the Kurchtov institution.

At this point, Soltatab is 67 years old. He's been running the Russian internet for like 30 years. He served as Russia's deputy minister of communications. Again, this guy's not a dissident. He's not even an activist. He's a party man. He's a sysidman. He's a sissidman.

He's kind of an insider. This investigation into him opens. It runs for four and a half years. And in July 22nd, 2024, a district court convicts Alexei Soldatov of abuse of power. His business partner is convicted in the same case, and Solitov is sentenced to two years in a general regime penal colony. Soldatov is 72 years old by this point. He's taken into custody the same day as the verdict is delivered. He's transferred to a penal colony in the Riazon region, south of Moscow.

You don't want to go there. In the weeks that follow, Soltatov contracts a lung infection. He's moved to a prison hospital. Things don't get better. On a visit from his wife, he's like losing consciousness and collapsing. Prison medics are looking at him.

Transfer him back to his cell. Right around here in September, one of the big quotes that got me looking into this story was his son, Andre Soltatov, who tells him a journalist, my father, Alexis Soltatov is dying in prison. He's terminally ill. He's been in jail since July 22nd.

People start calling for this. this guy's release. And the rough irony of all this is that in February 2025, while he's in this penal colony, ICANN sends a private letter to the dotSU administrator. The domain, this letter from ICAN states, is going to be phased out. The target date is 2030. So the, the TLD that he's in prison for having moved around and tried to preserve his control over is being phased out while he's in a Russian penal colony for allegedly trying to kind of steal it. Yeah. It's rough.

I looked up the average life expectancy in Russia because I know it's quite low. 68. So to be, what is he? 72. 72. In a Russian penal colony. Yeah. Not great.

Not great. A twist. A twist is common. Okay. DotSU is removed from the ISO 31661, this international kind of code standard. The dotSU registry has publicly denied that any retirement is planned. They're saying it's still going to keep operating. but domains are kind of starting to get taken down and transferred all over.

Alexei Soldatov, who had registered this thing in 1990, he kept it running and independent for 30 years, who refused to give it to the state, was convicted on these charges, and he sent to this colony. But a happy-ish ending. On May 13th, 2025, 10 months after his conviction,

several months after his son tells the world, like, this guy's going to die in a penal colony over this, Andre Soldatov, his son, posts again. his father's prison sentence had been converted into a large fine and Alexi Soldatov was now home. Money, money, money changes everything. Money talks. When in Russia, make sure you have money. And now this domain that he had built and kind of kept independent for 30 years and went to prison rather than surrendered is scheduled for retirement in 2030.

And he will potentially be there to see that final chapter close of a very strange story that he started. The closing down of his life's work. I'm sure he did many of the things, but it's a fascinating, weird story about the history of the internet and this guy and the law. It's an interesting one. I find it most intertwined because, you know, the USSR obviously broke up, stayed quasi-communist, even though it just became a rampant capitalist oligarchy state. And I'm sure, I'm sure had he been a part of the oligarchs code and paid the right people, it would probably have been just fine. Just like everything else in Russia, it seems like, make sure that everybody, all the party men get their peace and everybody's, you will be allowed to do as you would like. It's like, don't steal from the coffers.

I think that that that choice to transfer the control of the TLD and that tranche of addresses out, I think that would be viewed as sort of like skimming, skimming from the wrong pile. You know what I mean? Totally. Nope. Nope. Nope. No, no, no.

No. You got rich and powerful administering this thing, but it does not belong to you. You can't do that. And it gave the other guy a sort of a toll hole. They'd been in this beef that I couldn't find a ton about the beef other than there had been one. And he was the guy who finally kind of got a leg up on Solitav. So it's a really interesting story. It has like Death of Stalin vibes to me of these two men just like beefing for years.

as the internet is being built around them until finally one of them does something that the other one's like, you done fucked up. Totally. You didn't pay the right people and I paid the right people and now it's mine.

Now it's mine and now you're in a penal colony. Oh, you got a lung infection? Like it's, you can kind of see the anger between these two men and the way it all plays out. Oh, man. Yeah, Russia, fascinating.

Like, if you haven't read the book Red Notice, I'd recommend reading it. book about the collapse of the USSR and capitalism moving in. I know it's being made into a TV show or movie or has been made into a TV show or movie, but highly recommended. Really? Yeah. No.

Good book. This sounds fascinating. It's an interesting moment in history. And I was shocked to find out that it was kind of happening at the beginning of the dawn of the internet. Like I intellectually know those things happened at about the same time, but they feel like they should be much further apart in history to me. Yeah. Well, they are far apart, but they're also very connected. Like 1989 to 1990. Like one, like kind of happening at the same time.

Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, you're talking about the registration and the breakup. Yeah, I was thinking the registration and the closure. Yeah. Yeah, very, very. Yeah, USSR. I can't believe nobody's registered that as a now that it's no longer. It's like not really a country-based TLD, but like if you could register it as like you're, you're, you're. own unique TLD. I feel like a lot of people, you know, as communism is growing and socialism across the world, I could see dot USSR having like some, you know, legacy homage elements. I think if you were trying to rebrand, you probably wouldn't want to go with dot SU. It's a, it's a really interesting story. I do want to at some point dig into that kind of side story of Eric Taylor who used this Soviet domain to post this leaked information in this as part of a beat. Like there's all these weird little stories branching out of it because it was this little corner for such a long time.

Totally. Just gab this pseudo legitimacy of like a for a TLD that really was uncontrolled, unregulated. Yeah. Unreasonable. Yeah. Should we talk about our new title sponsor? I think we should. This episode is being brought to you by our new title sponsor, NordLair, the reality of running a modern team.

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And you should check it out at nordlayer.com slash hacked podcast. That's nordlayer.com slash hacked podcast. Thanks again to Nordlayer for their support. I think since we last recorded, the world's largest IPO happened, SpaceX, which is both tech-related, space-related. We all know that the USSR was very intrigued by space. Ties right in here.

SpaceX was public. Not sure what your thoughts are. Went from an insane valuation to an even insane evaluation and has now returned back to the insane valuation. Came public. at like what 150. I think it peaked at like 225. You know, we're in the economics finance corner of Hacked right now,

and that was back at 150-ish. Pretty wild story. I was strongly contemplating buying some put options when it was in the 220 range. We explain what that means for anyone that doesn't know what a put-offish is. Sure, yeah. So you buy the option to sell a hundred shares at a specific price. So one put option is the rights to sell at a strike price. So say I bought $220 puts, I would have the option over a timeline to sell 100 shares of SpaceX for the price that I've said is the strike.

So when it was up at like 220, I was looking at buying some put options. So the right to sell hundreds of shares at $220. So when the price returns back to $150, which it has, I would make the difference minus the cost of the option. You're talking about like a short. You're talking about a short. Yeah. I'm talking about like a margin short. Like instead of just shorting the stock and borrowing it and selling it and then having

to buy it back later, which is how shorts work, I'm using derivatives to like amp it up. To put it even more, explain it like I'm five. Sure. A bet against. Yes. A very, yes, a bet against. You are correct. That I have to pay for the bet.

So there's a price to buying the options, which is the cost. of making the bet and then the bet has a return variable based on how much it shifts, how much the price comes down. My sense of what's happened here is like anytime there's one of these kind of big blockbuster IPO type moments where a company is suddenly available to be bought and sold by Normies like you and me is like there's typically a lot of volatility in those early trading days and it's it's kind of just speculation. This thing is available for the first time and everyone's speculating and so things can go up and down, like very, very fast.

And that's interesting because SpaceX had been valued at this kind of unprecedented scale. As like, however you measure it, it's a multiple of earnings or whatever you look at. It's just, it's a really, really, really expensive company to buy a piece of. It is the highest valued, most, most overvalued company in history, I think. I get why you would bet against that. There's all this speculation and it goes up, up, up, Pop, up, up, up, up, up. And then it comes back down, down, down, down, down.

And this is all still in the early days before this thing enters into indexes. And like there's all a whole bunch of milestones that are still to come for this. There's lockups. Yeah. Employees that have equity can't sell them except for on specific dates. They get released to the market. Even people that were allowed to go into the IPO had lockup agreements. There's, yeah, there's all kinds of stuff happening.

But it, the FOMO, when it hit the retail market, because it's such. a small percentage of the company actually was sold on the public markets. The price jumped so much because there was a bunch of people rushing to get in. They didn't want to miss out. And it quickly shot it from like $1.7 trillion in enterprise value all the way up to like $2.7 or something trillion dollars. Which puts it like in 20, I'm trying to think when Apple was like $2 trillion, $2.5 trillion. It would have been like 2023, 2020. So it's like substantial, massive, like, it was worth more than Amazon was at one point.

SpaceX was? And it's like, yes, correct. Or it was like in the ballpark of Amazon, like within $100 billion of Amazon, which is like employs a million people is one of the largest global cloud system, you know, online retailers. Like you name it, Amazon's got its fingers and everything. And SpaceX is like, you know, we send a few rockets up. We have Starlink, which is cool, and they own XAI and what was Twitter, which is what it is. They flipped their, they had the option to buy cursor, which is like an agentic software engineering ID, and they flipped that on and said, yeah, we'll take that.

So they did an equity conversion with cursor and took them over. But again, their equity was so highly valued that it costs SpaceX almost nothing to buy cursor. So if SpaceX's share price comes down, the cursor guy is going to have got a pretty short deal. But didn't, isn't that exactly what happened? Like, didn't the cursor deal happen during the hockey stick before? Yeah. Bummer. I mean, air quotes bummer.

Be like, oh, no. Your second yacht's a little smaller. But yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The people that found a cursor are, you know. They'll be fine. They'll be just, just fine. Yeah, for like 80 generations.

Yeah, it's like the Instagram co-founder when someone was talking about how much is equity it would have been worth if he'd kept a bigger trunk or something. And it still turned out he walked away with a billion dollars and he just kind of laughs. Yeah, yeah, no, I. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hard to be mad. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of money flooding into a thing and a lot of money moving around. And it's a milestone in the story of a stock market that is frothy and overheated.

I'll leave it at that. Yeah, there's a bunch of cases being made for why SpaceX deserves such a value. You know, there's a lot of discussion that they're going to release a satellite-based cell network. So all of our cell phones will be global. They'll connect to Starlink satellites rather than to local cell providers. You know, a bunch of things like that. Obviously, the merger with Tesla, which is highly touted. A lot of speculation that SpaceX and Tesla will merge and be relisted under the ticker,

Elon. I'm not sure if that's going to happen. But, you know, obviously the humanoid robots, you know, kind of Tesla's advanced robotics goals require the SpaceX XAI goals to kind of hybridize and create fully functioning, you know, AI robots, which, so I'm not sure what's going to happen. Tesla's already a company that carries a pretty high valuation. SpaceX carries the highest valuation. For a company that loses billions of dollars a year to be worth trillions of dollars a year is pretty insane.

So anyway, I just thought it was worth mentioning. I know a lot of people are talking about it. A lot of people were excited about the IPO and trying to get in on it. So, yeah, I just thought it'd be a neat touch in the hacked finance corner. Well, after we get back from the ad waterfall, we should talk about another knock-on effect.

of sending RAM to space for space server farms, which is the Ramaghan back down here on Earth. And the way it's impacting stuff like the steam machine and other little fun gadgets that I'm pretty excited about. Why don't we chat about that when we get back from the break? Let's do it. Starting a business sounds complicated until you actually go ahead and do it. We set up our store. Store.hackedpodcast.com.

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One more time, check out the URL, Shopify.com slash hacked. I started or not in 2013 and we make bike apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially non-technical people. We're able to admin everything on the back end, front end, and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory, I think it would actually be the bicycle. It's the thing that you do the thing on. We run the business on Shopify. Start your free trial on Shopify.com. Every company says AI will make employees more productive.

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No, well, you know, I've gotten older over the years, Jordan, and I love them as much as I did as a kid. just can't find as much time to play them. Why do you ask? You and me both, brother. Well, if you're an adult who likes gaming, you probably have a pretty gnarly Steam library connection of video games. And maybe you were excited about the Steam machine. And now that it's out, maybe you're less excited about its price. And I want to talk about that kind of in connection with RAM and all that good, good stuff. Well, I'm going to, I'm going to instantly counterback with, did you see that Nintendo has released a Switch 2 pricing increase? I did.

pretty much anybody that makes integrated hardware devices at this point are releasing news releases talking about price increases coming because RAM, CPU, memory modules, storage, pretty much anything that AI uses has doubled in price. Yeah. I would go ahead and say that that's not a response or a clapback to what I'm saying. I think we're saying the same dang thing. So Valve launches this thing called the Steam Machine like three days ago, June 22nd. For anyone who is unfamiliar, Valve, it makes a platform called Steam where people buy PC games.

They've started getting into hardware. They made the thing called the Steam Deck, which is a little portable console. Now they're coming out with their version of like a TV-type console, a little cube. They can sit on a desk or under a television. It's PC gaming kind of coming for console gaming has been the sort of story that you've heard. They come up with this little, looks like a little GameCube. In the internal projections, it's a computer.

It's a computer. It's running like Linux. They built a computer that connects to your TV and has a controller to control it. And SteamOS is going to be runable on like in video cards. So you can basically make a PC out of this. What it says it's less like a new thing kind of trying to like blur the lines between a home console and PC gaming, which for a very long time, it felt very separate. And this is starting to try and make that line be really blurry.

Yeah, yeah. The thing that I found interesting about Steam Machine, like obviously you want to talk about the price because everybody was kind of hoping it was going to come into like $6,700, and I think the final price was what, $1,000, $1,99 U.S.D? It depends on the pricing model, $10.49, but you can go up to $1,400, like, depending on you spec it out.

Which is like computer pricing. Yeah, it's computer pricing. It's price of computer. Yeah, exactly. The architecture and design that they went with, Like they're all AMD based. Internally, I know Steam OS prefers AMD right now. I'm not sure about their NVIDIA support.

I'm not sure where it is in the pipeline. They're going to support it with SteamOS. They are. Yeah. I don't know if it's done yet, though. But I know that they fully support all the AMD stack. The Steam box, Steam machine. Machine.

Steam machine is essentially just an AMD laptop wrapped up in a little box. Yeah. Yeah, laptop processor, laptop GPU. Which makes sense. But the thing is, is, like, that makes it, like, to me, the difference is, like, your handheld devices. The Steam deck, lots of the other handheld by AIS, things like that. They're all just essentially AMD laptops built into a handheld with the screen. Very similar configurations to the Steam machine.

Just the steam machine can sit in your media center, plug into the wall. I'm not sure why they went with something that has such a power conservative chip set when they had the option of using bigger components, burning more energy for higher performance. That's the really thing that stood out to me is like why, why did they go with mobile architecture in a situation where it's not a mobile device? The performance I've seen coming out of it, it's like, I'm probably not going to buy one of these.

So I got, I got no horse in this race. But people saying it's like PS5 comparable performance. It's like current gen. That's what they're trying to get to. It's like we're trying to reproduce. Just twice the price. Which is like an interesting play. It's it's leveraging the fact that a lot of people have massive game library.

So there's an economy of like I can play that over here. I don't need to buy the new games for this other thing. There's there's some economy there. And it doubles as a PC. But it is a much harder case to make, you know, internal projections at Valve. And like the number they'd been saying was 750. So we're looking at like a 40%. overshoot when it actually got down to launch.

The quote that they said was it was due to rapidly evolving market conditions. And those conditions were the DRAM prices, it rose like 170% year over year since that November 2025 announcement. So less than a year ago, 170% increase in the value of these things. You then layer on tariffs on top of that. And it's this kind of double squeeze situation. Totally. And is all part of this larger RAM crisis that's going on.

With SteamOS cool, there's a bunch of really good, like, kind of more open source projects, Bazite, Fedora-based Linux, you know, very comparable to Steam OS. Like, you can build your own Steam machine pretty easily these days. I know some listeners of the show have messaged me about their Linux-based gaming computers. Yeah, I don't know if this is, I don't know if this is going to be impactful. Like the Steam deck was an impactful product that Valve released. I don't know if the steam machine's going to be as impactful. I think my honest opinion. No, it's fair.

The Steam deck like hit so hard because it put your PC library into a portable form factor. And it sparked all these other companies to start trying to compete in that space. I could see Steam OS being a bigger deal than Steam machine. Because now there's. Yeah. If I'm a PC maker, I can make my home console play. You know what I mean? Like now there's a platform for it.

It's like, no, run Steam OS. same as all the Asus ROG ones started running it. It's like I think the platform is a bigger deal. And then secretly I think that the controller is maybe the biggest deal. Because if you can make a PC and bundle it with that cool steam controller, it gets touch pads and track pads that are so useful for PC gaming back onto the couch, that's pretty cool. And none of it matters if it all costs so much more money than anyone can afford.

Well, like the proton layer, like I don't know if you know what proton is, but Valve built a layer to essentially sit on top of Linux, which allows for compatibility with DirectX games and stuff. That is probably the most impactful thing that they built, because that has launched like Nobara, Bazite, Pop, Catchy, all of the new Linux gaming distros. That's the biggest shot over the bow at Windows, because Windows was always the platform that, like,

if you were a gamer, you had to use Windows or a console. Exactly. And now it's kind of open sourced it a bit. Yeah. There's two stories there. And on that one, it's like Valve had tried years prior to the Steam Deck to do more of the Nintendo model, which is if we build it, they will come.

And that didn't pan out. They didn't have the proton layer. And they said, you make your game for Linux. Yeah. We're going to be the Linux hub and you make it for us. And it just didn't happen. The people that did it. The games were buggy and unreliable.

The migration didn't occur. So they sort of like retreated. and figure it out, okay, we need to make all the Windows stuff run really well on Linux. They invest the time and money. They have more money than God. They build that proton layer. And this is sort of Gen 2. Start with the Steam Deck.

Great value at the time. Its prices since hiked. But I think you're right that the proton layer and Steam OS are maybe the most interesting parts about this, seeing those come to more things, that again, are just going to cost more money. Rams three to six times what it cost a year. ago, raspberry pie costs double what it costs. Like everything costs double what it costs. And I think that there's like an interesting second story with that price increase because we're talking about like luxury consumer electronics here. No one needs a steam machine. Yeah. No. The price of it going up is like,

well, how much are you willing to pay for your bougie unnecessary TV home PC console? If I think about the bottom of the price ladder, that's where it gets really interesting. because like whether I need a $1,500 computer couch console is very different than a person in some part of the world that can afford a $200 Android phone. That's the phone they can afford is the $200 one. CMF, which is a subbrand of the Android manufacturer, nothing. It's their like affordable phone. They put out a $200 phone two years ago, the CMF phone two pro. And they're not doing a pro three.

They're canceling that entire lineup. They basically said that like, if they launched that phone from two years ago, that cost $200 bucks, if they launched today, it's a $400 phone. They cannot produce the $200 phone anymore. It doesn't, that supply chain has vanished. And I think that that is like, oh, that's something they pay attention to is the whole giant chunk of the world that relies on those bottom of the price ladder products. It's like, you being priced out is very different than me being priced out of a game console. Yeah, very, very true, very true. The one thing that really stands out to me here is, you know, Steam had an issue.

Valve, I'll say Valve had an issue with Linux gaming. Yeah. And they went ahead and built Proton. Apple has had, and this is, I'd like, this is be the second Apple ran in a matter of a week's, is Apple, is Apple, on the other hand, has had endless capital. endless time, endless capacity for software engineering, and probably would any Mac users and a lot of the Mac ecosystem would have loved to have attracted and secured this audience. So how did Valve fix it so quickly and Apple's had all this time and hasn't? Same as Siri.

Like I know that recently, since four episodes ago or whenever we'd like crapped all over Siri, Apple's announced that Google Gemini will be coming in and Siri will just be replaced with Gemini, which is great news for any Apple user because Siri's unusable. Why is Apple not taken direction from Valve writing Proton and essentially Proton being an open source solution for running on Linux,

mapped it over to their metal graphics structure and released it? I don't understand why they haven't done this because these new MacBooks and Macchips and Macs and the ability to share V-Ram and have, have, you know, you can have a Mac studio with 500 gigs of V-RAM, which is like unheard of for any kind of gaming development. Apple has the infrastructure to do amazing things in the gaming space and just hasn't done it. They've been kind of doing the thing we were talking about, which is that if we build it,

you will come kind of attitude. Like they have the game porting toolkit, which is a proton-like thing. But it's at the developer level. It's meant to be like you make your, it's so easy now for you. you to make your thing work on our stuff, where Steam is like, we'll make your thing work on our stuff. That's a really big difference in who you're asking to do the work. The device versus the developer.

Totally. Radically different. And if Valve solved it, why can't Mac and Apple solve it? It seems like they have. Because then people build, I know there's open source things that take GPTK. and let people run Windows games inside of it, but it's like a janky open source middleware solution. It's like the technology literally does the thing we're describing the proton layer is doing.

I think I'm not that deep in the tech on this, but like it seems all the parts are there for you to just flip a switch and be like, you can just run Windows games on your laptop. Yeah, you can do that now. Dedicate a small team. Give them a bunch of whatever they need and just make Windows gaming a thing. thing. Like, if I could install the new Grand Theft Auto 6, which has been released for pre-order,

on my Mac laptops, on my Mac desktops, on any of my Apple devices, it'd be amazing. Okay. The one thing I will say is the, just to loop back to the cheap chips thing, Android things, is like the quality of those Android Qualcomm, Snapdragon, Amber Nick, retro, like, things that were typically seen as retrogaming handheld. Lots of the better ones now have such advanced capabilities and processing power, memory, things like that. You can get a pretty good handheld gaming device for hundreds of dollars. If you want to spend more and more, like you can get a device that's better than a switch two that can run switch emulation and switch two emulation.

I think that there's an interesting fight in the world going on in this space. and I'm intrigued to see how it's going to wash out. I think Apple really could differentiate themselves here if they made some big investments in it, decided that they were going to become a gaming platform. I know they've always wanted to, but it's like, yeah, like I have SIV 5 or whatever installed on my laptop,

but that was one of the last games for Mac that was released native for Mac, and it's like great. I think there might be, there's an argument you made that they intentionally never will. Because you think about it from their perspective is like if we can get, oh yeah, we're really excited for you to run your Steam library on Mac where we don't get any cut of anything, as opposed to we're really excited for you to convert your game to be Mac friendly. And then you know where it's great for you to sell it?

The App Store, where we get 30%. Like there is a business incentive to only go so far with supporting preexisting Windows titles. Because it's like the more of them we make you convert and sell over here, the more of a cut we get. Yeah, but nobody's doing it. Nobody's doing it. So my argument would be, my argument failed. My argument failed. If I'm going to be a MacBook Neo user and I'm going to have a $5,000 gaming PC,

if I could run all of the stuff from my gaming PC on my MacBook, I might be a MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio user and your marginal revenue per end user goes up because you've lost the fight. Like, Steam installs on Mac Harrow. already. They have it. There's games for Mac on it. It's not at work. Valve is one of the highest revenue per employee companies in the world because they get 30% of all the hard work of all these gaming studios, literally to have the most basic, old, antiquated store app in the world. One which small developers like Jordan relies on. For sure. And I for one think it's sick as fuck.

So, yeah, I don't know. I think that Macs missed the boat on this. If they were to just take the lessons learned from Proton, roll it on a Mac. I think they would see that the marginal expenditure on Mac devices go up as people would be adding more RAM to have more shared memory to play bigger games. Like if you could play Cyberpunk on a MacBook Pro at 60, 80 frames, if you bought the $5,000 version, they'd probably sell a lot less MacNeos and a lot more. Mac pros and the PC market would take a bigger hit. Yeah. It's interesting to think about the Mac Studio moment that we had for like OpenClawn stuff a

couple months ago. It's like you could engineer a Mac Studio moment for gaming. Yeah. If you, if you released the update that turns it into a gaming rig, which is by having that proton layer style thing in it at the same time as I don't know, the most popular game in history were to release in a few months, you could probably like do some real damage. You could probably have people that are thinking about buying this machine or this machine or this machine being like, I'm going to buy a steam controller and a Mac studio because it costs about the same thing as a steam machine. And now I have a great home computer and it can run this game.

It's like we're simplifying a lot of detail here, but it's like you could imagine that moment. You could imagine that working. But like we're not even really simplifying that much because Apple in their quest to have a custom U.S., which we love Apple for custom U.S. UXs. They have the Apple TV UX. They have the iPhone, like UX, they have the iPad UX, they have the computer UX. They already have a UX for TV. Like if you could buy a Mac Mini that was spec high enough to be a gaming console, throw it in your media center, plug it in H-TMI to your TV and grab a wireless Apple controller, which would be beautifully designed and everybody would love. and it immediately knew that it was a TV console and spun up with a UX built for TV,

which they already have built that could then launch games. It'd be an instant contender. The only, all of that is bang, I think bang on, except for the idea that an Apple video game controller would be nice. No, it wouldn't. Because I've seen the magic mouse. I'm like, nope, that's the one part that wouldn't. And I think they know it.

I think they know it in their hearts because every time you see them doing gaming on a Mac, it's always a PlayStation controller in the official photography. It's like they just know. They're like, we would fuck that up. It would have one big button made of glass. It would not function. The system would rip. You're true.

Would rip. You're right. If they really dedicated the hardware design team to designing a proper gaming controller, it would rip. But if they just like release an appleish glass ball that you had to like. infer how to use. Exactly. Yeah.

It would not be good. It was like there was this weird era. This is, we're in the weeds. Yeah. But there was that era a few years ago when all of the big companies were trying to do cloud gaming and cloud streaming services. Amazon had, I think, Luma and Google had theirs. Stadia. They still do.

Is Stadia still a thing? Stadia is dead. There's a dead stadium in my background. Anybody that's the end video. of the Dead Stadium over there somewhere. That's funny. And then Amazon Luna is still alive. Yes.

Anyway, they were all releasing. It was during that era that like all of the controllers kind of just a master on looking like an Xbox controller. So you could just do that, Apple. You could just release like functionally an Xbox controller. A-Bid-D-D-D-O does it. All those other companies did it. It's fine.

We've solved that problem. Or you could just use an Xbox controller. And there's a. amazing third party Xbox controllers coming out of China. It's on my desk. It's one button press. It turns on exactly. I have a fly diggy. A fly diggy. That's actually ransomware. You plug that in and it hydrides your system. That would not surprise me at all. Custom nickel. No, they're expensive, but they are very good controllers.

I buy that. But yeah, I don't know. That's the takeaway from me on this is. We look at the price of a steam machine. You look at it versus the PlayStation, which are getting price increases. Yeah. Apple has announced price increases on some of their hardware. Everybody's announcing these memory-related chip storage-related price increases. And there's a lot of Apple hardware in the ecosystem that would make amazing. Like, I can't see how an M5 Mac Mini.

is going to be worse hardware spec than the steam machine. Like it will be a better hardware spec, have faster memory bus speeds, have more access to GPU and V RAM and RAM, and it's cheaper. They just need to add something like the proton layer to make it so that I can just download Cyberpunk and install it and run it on my TV. Cyberpunk must be available natively on Mac by now, right? They've got to have. I feel like that's the new, like they have it running on fridges.

Like it's become the new, can it run, cyberpunk. You are correct. Cyberpunk 27 Ultimate is $83 Canadian on the Mac store right now. I had no idea. Well, there you go. You can do it. You can live that life. Yeah.

I played control on my Mac, like Remedies Control. Cool game. I played that on my Mac. It's only like 15 years old, but yeah. The sequels coming out pretty. soon that that'll be fun they were showing that off game i played it back when it released in 2012 or isn't that old i think so yeah wow okay anyway worth worth trying let me let me let me fact check myself here back check myself here oh 2019 never mind a little bit fresher medium somewhere in the middle

i'm a liar you're a liar scott yeah anyway that's i think the biggest thing i i touched on it briefly but We've talked about it numerous times, but Grant Deft Auto 6 as of date of recording June 25th has been released for pre-order. The bigger shock on this one is that the pricing is not as high as I think people thought it was going to be. I didn't see the pricing. What are they putting it at? Standard Edition 80 US, which is, I think, a little bit premium, but not like I think there

was a lot of people that were expecting this to be the first $100. $100 base game. game. The ultimate edition, I think, is $100, but that I think a lot of people were thinking that it was going to be in the 140-ish range. Yeah. It's funny. The entire games industry has been sort of orbiting around when this is going to happen in the sense that, like, do not release a game at the same time as this game is coming out. It is a bad idea. So it's looking like it's November. And then included in the announcement is that it is not going to include at least. launch the online component. Yeah, multiplayer. Yep.

Which for anyone who's unfamiliar has become one of the, it's, the long tale of Grand Theft Auto Five has been the online played. It is basically its own game, its own world at this point. And so the thing people are saying is like, oh God, there's two launches. Like we thought it was going to be, there's two launches. Oh God, oh God, there's two. And like we don't know when the second one is. So the tension has just been kind of kicked down the road.

It's like, if you were planning something, I don't know, a few months after it comes out, good luck like now we all have to just wait and see when the online component's going to come out because that'll that'll be its own fun uh gravitational orbit to try and escape i can't see them i can't see them like it comes out november 19th it's been declared it will be released pre-orders allow you so this is another funny thing pre-order only gets you the ability to download the game and get ready to play it as of november 12th so essentially you beat the server congestion of downloading the digital copy of the game. I see.

So you don't get any additional days for the pre-order. You just get to download it in advance. But I can't see them waiting beyond maybe the early January at the latest for the multiplayer. Like most people will get it on November 19th and complete the main story single player mode within a week, I would say. Like I think there's going to be a lot of people. people taking days off to play it. This game's been highly anticipated for, what,

a decade now? When did five come out? Yeah, if you don't, if there isn't a hacked episode in the week following the, I guess it would be December 1st, you'll know what happened. 13 years. Jesus.

September 17th, 20. Xbox 360? PlayStation 3, Xbox 360. September 17th, 2013. That is, crazy. They've been building this game since that game launched. That is insane. This is going to be a opus.

To anyone who is excited for us to stop talking about it. Yes. You and us both, you know? Like, it's going to be a good day. A few other things I think we should mention. Yeah. What else? We put up a new hackpodcast.com website.

Check it out. Jordan and I just got back. We were actually together. We were just in Banff, Alberta at the Banff World Media Festival, where a project we worked on was up for an award, but had a bunch of interesting conversations with film and TV studios. So hopefully we'll have some more chitter-chatter about that in the future. Maybe something happened in there.

What else do we got to update people on? Oh, man. I mean, like and subscribe. Smash that like button. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're being good at our jobs now. YouTube, yeah, like and subscribe. Like and the one person that hated that we mentioned Patreon and the merch store last time,

Can't help you, brother. Sorry. Can't help you, brother. Yeah, like and subscribe. Check out the new website. It's interesting. It's all built up. Definitely AI was facilitated the development of it.

Automates everything. You put a lot of love in that. Let's just be clear. You were 20 plus hours in on that. Oh, yeah. Let's not make this sound like a clawed one shot. You put the time in on that. Yeah, yeah.

It's got a bunch of custom plug-ins that do a bunch of stuff for us without us having to. Like when we post a new. YouTube video, it immediately comes up. When we post a new episode, it immediately gets pulled in, transcribed, all the rest of it. You did a nice job with it. Yeah, thanks. Thanks.

Thanks. The, yeah, check it out. Check out the thing. And then, yeah, another word is that big thanks to Nordlayer for a sponsorship of hack. Check them out at Nordlayer.com slash hacked podcast. We're happy to have Nordlayer on as the title sponsor. Makes things a little bit easier for us and provides us a bit more funding for

some of the things that we're doing over on the YouTube space and we're planning to do over there. Watch for the big face reveal as sooner than later you will see some of these live episodes, the new episodes coming live on YouTube as well. So you'll actually be able to see Jordan and I's faces. We're booking. You're going to get used to my bad webcam frame with the poorly blurred out background. But we're trying to book some interviews that might be worth popping into a studio or popping out to meet the person. getting more into that.

Yeah, just trying to mix it up. But again, thank you to Nordlare for their sponsorship of hack. Zombie top-level domains, SpaceX IPOs, steam machines. I think that's a wrap, my friend. Take care. Catch you in the next one. I started Or Not in 2013, and we make bike apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially non-tenth.

technical people were able to admin everything on the back end, front end, and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory, I think it would actually be the bicycle. It's the thing that you do the thing on. We run the business on Shopify. Start your free trial on Shopify. I'm Keanu and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business. But Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use.

It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial at Shopify.com. I'm Keanu and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business. But Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use.

It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial at Shopify.com.