commmentator

Definitely agree. A frank postmortem would be a good thing to see.

You'll note that Proton's PR only mentions the second date - " last one on Sep 6 with a 48-hour deadline."

Proton doesn't mention that the first email from Phrack which Proton ignored was weeks prior to that, which is what led to the second email in the first place.

You'll also note that Proton doesn't mention that their Abuse Team refused to re-anable the account after the article author did the appeals process, as per Phrack's timeline at the top of their article.

you're accessing content paid for by adverts, but you aren't contributing to that payment.

If the content is paid for by adverts, then of course I am not contributing to that payment. Because I am not an advertising company, so by your own logic I didn't pay for the content. What's the problem?

Why do I earn money if not to buy things?

To create a safety net for yourself (and perhaps your family)? So that if you were to incur unexpected catastrophic expenses, or lose your job, you would still be able to sustain yourself?

it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.

To see the absurdity of this position just replace "view ads" with the following:

I would stop content creators from breaking into my home and taking money from my wallet in the middle of the night, but I don't because it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.

It is not the responsibility of consumer to accept harmful practices because they're the only practices in broad use.

even if its pretty clear at this point some of his scores are dodgy.

"dodgy"? Quite the understatement there. This man has made fraudulent claims, has held fraudulent records and, most importantly, has sued people who told the truth.

Defending this person by downplaying their scores as "dodgy" is ludicrous.