#data spoofing

[jbfly46]

The FBI, CBP, and other agencies can track your location using WiFi and GPS data, but they rarely know how to do all of this and piece together enough of your location data to get a conviction without a confession. Most of this data is actually useless without other evidence or a confession, not to mention the easy method of making all of your digital behavior random and unpredictable to where their machines can’t make predictions on you, and any agents get a headache trying to understand what you’re doing. You can also have multiple phones logged into the same account running in different locations, faraday bags, and custom encrypted operating systems.

[bevcrushes]

Trek Office: "Space Nookie"

I had to do a *script writing exercise,* so I was like "what if I wrote a Star Trek TNG scene in the style of The Office/Parks and Rec" and it's BAD please help lol it's a lot of fuckery so I put it under the cut...and of course, it's nsfw because the plot is basically:

[unfried-mouth-wheat]

Excuse me while I SOB

[robpegoraro]

Weekly output: Uber in Paris, Mint Mobile in Canada, Waymo in L.A., fallout of AT&T data breach

The last time I saw headlines fill with news of somebody trying to kill a current, former or would-be president was 1981. I would have liked to see that streak continue instead of ending Saturday with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania and the murder of attendee Corey Comperatore. The U.S. has all sorts of problems–some the fault of Trump and his ilk–but…

[noob2networking]

Firewall Friday: Network Security - Protecting Your Network from Threats

Welcome to Firewall Friday, where we dive into the exciting world of network security with a touch of humor and relatable analogies. In this edition, we’ll explore the importance of network security and how firewalls act as the guardians of your network, protecting it from potential threats. Get ready to embark on a hilarious and informative journey as we use common analogies, playful emojis, and…

[jinjeriffic]

DCxDP Prophecy Universe Part 7

Part 6

It took Damian the rest of the afternoon to prepare for his trip to Amity Park. Jon helpfully agreed to cover for him, on the promise of a copy of the upcoming Cheese Viking 2 and getting filled in on all the hot Bat gossip afterwards. Wasn’t friendship grand?

Pennyworth thankfully agreed that ‘bonding time’ between the Super Sons was a good use of fall break and even took the time to ‘Prepare some healthy snacks for the young Masters, lest you eat junk food the whole week’. The task also handily distracted the butler while Damian packed the Batwing with all the necessary surveillance equipment he would need and set up the program to spoof his flight data. Damian had no doubt that Father wouldn’t be fooled for long, but with the Bat it was always better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

The flight to Illinois was mercifully uneventful. Damian rappelled off in the middle of the eponymous city Park, then instructed the autopilot to take the plane to a wooded area outside city limits and park there in camouflage mode. Once he was sure his arrival had gone undetected, he changed into civvies and with his backpack full of gear set off in the direction of Fenton Works on foot. In jeans, sneakers, a dark hoodie and a baseball cap he looked like any other kid his age, even if he was out after curfew. Damian made sure to stick to the shadows and ducked behind cover whenever a car passed him.

All in all it took him until the early morning hours to arrive at the correct address. Intellectually, he had known the Fentons operated their workshop out of the family home, but he was in no way prepared for the monstrosity of a building that greeted him. Damian couldn’t help but stop and stare in disbelief.

What had once started out as an ordinary brownstone building had a glaring neon sign out front, proudly proclaiming the company name. Perched precariously on the roof was a gigantic metal structure that looked like a cross between a cartoon UFO and an observatory. There was no way this was legal or sane. If something like this had popped up in Gotham it would have been flagged as a Rogue hideout and bugged to hell and back. Hell, Damian was half tempted to break in immediately to start planting cameras but was held back by the likely presence of a custom security system. Mad scientists were rude like that and Damian didn’t want to tip his hand too early. He would have to at least wait until he was sure the Fentons weren’t at home.

Damian tucked his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and strolled past the building at a fake casual pace. The windows were dark and the building was silent, except for the faint hum of the neon sign. This early on a Saturday morning, the residents were likely fast asleep. He spotted an electric scooter chained up next to the stairs leading up to the entrance and made the deduction that it likely belonged to Daniel. Under the guise of retying his shoelaces, he dropped to one knee and surreptitiously attached a bug to the vehicle. Ideally he would get the opportunity to bug Daniel himself, but for now this would have to do. Hoping that no one had noticed him, Damian continued down the street.

He had researched the area ahead of time and had found an apartment a few buildings down and across the street that was advertised as available for rent and was unoccupied. Breaking in and disabling the home alarm was child’s play, and after making sure he was alone in the apartment, Damian settled in to begin his surveillance.

He pulled the handheld radiation detector out of his backpack and after making sure it was operational he slipped it into his pocket. With no way to boost its range he would have to get pretty close to Daniel with no major obstructions in the way in order to verify if he had been in contact with the marked bills he had slipped Phantom. But Damian was confident in his ability to stay undetected. After all, Daniel had no reason to suspect he was being stalked by a curious Bat.

Damian kept himself occupied by listening to the local radio broadcast over his comm. The hosts sounded like chipper twenty-somethings, excitedly shilling for various local events happening over fall break, in-between shilling for local businesses. Why anyone would want to eat at an establishment called the Nasty Burger was beyond Damian. Whenever they stopped nattering to play actual music it was a blessing even if the appeal of the songs was entirely lost on the young vigilante. Finally, at 8am they had an actual news segment. Most of it was covering major US and global events, nothing Damian hadn’t already heard. Elections, natural disasters, rising tensions in Bialya…

“...and in local news, the City Library has announced that clean-up after last week’s ghost attack is finished, and they will be open at their normal hours on Monday!” the female host said cheerily, as if she was talking about the weather. “As usual, we would like to remind our listeners to keep their third eyes peeled for any ghost sightings! In case of a ghost attack, follow standard protocol and head to your nearest ghost shelter. Thank you! And here’s Mark with sports!”

Damian was flabbergasted. Ghost attack? This city experienced supernatural incursions and treated it like it was a normal occurrence? He’d read that the Fentons were ghost hunters, but he hadn’t thought anyone was taking them seriously! If Amity Park was under attack on a regular basis, how come the Justice League didn’t have a file on the city? Surely the news should have leaked to the outside world by now!

It was rare that Damian was caught so utterly wrong footed. His cursory research into Amity Park had turned up nothing like this! He was itching to get back to the Batcomputer to do a deep dive on the city and its history. Unfortunately, all he had on him was his phone which was ill suited for serious data compilation. At best he could scour local news sites and social media for any hint as to what was going on.

After half an hour of fruitless searching, he gave up in disgust. There was no mention of ghosts anywhere, save for the Fentons’ own website. Yet the news report had been almost blasé about the subject! Something was rotten in the State of Illinois.

All he could do for now was stare out the window at the Fenton’s front porch and hope his quarry made an appearance soon.

At 9.13 AM there was finally movement at the Fenton house. A dark-haired teenager in jeans, a light T-shirt, a backpack and a bicycle helmet bounded down the front steps and unlocked the electric scooter. It was unmistakably Daniel.

Damian hurriedly packed away his things, grabbed his backpack and left the apartment. He made sure to rearm the security system and lock the door, leaving no trace of ever having been there. Of course Damian wasn’t about to pursue his target across the rooftops of an unknown city in broad daylight. He would just have to wait for Daniel to arrive at his destination and follow him there. He retrieved his phone and pulled up the tracking data. It looked like the teen was headed towards the city center.

Damian tuned his comm to the listening device he had planted and set off towards downtown Amity at a light jog. For a while, all he heard was background noise. After about ten minutes, Daniel came to a stop.

“Hey Tucker, ready to go?” That had to be Daniel.

“Hey Danny!” a second male voice answered, “I was just waiting for you. Sam says she’ll meet us at the main entrance of the mall.”

“Sweet. Hopefully we can grab something cool from Game’O’Rama if we beat the rush.”

“You said it, my dude. Come on!”

The tracker resumed its movement. Now that he had a destination, Damian used his phone to call a cab. There couldn’t be that many malls in a city this size.

Daniel and his friend ‘Tucker’ kept up a steady stream of idle chatter on their journey. Damian learned more than he ever wanted to know about the attractive qualities of the female students at their high school, the tediousness of the homework assignments they had received for the week and the reviews of recent horror movie releases. Inconsequential chit chat as far as Damian was concerned. Once the pair arrived at their destination they parked their scooters and were soon out of range of the listening device. Damian cut the transmission and spent the rest of the short cab ride trying to find information on Daniel’s companion. Since they were apparently classmates and he had a first name to go on, it didn’t take long to narrow it down to Tucker Foley. Damian made a mental note to investigate him in depth later.

The mall was moderately busy when he arrived but nowhere near as bad as Gotham. Luckily there was a floorplan displayed at the entrance and it didn’t take Damian long to find the Game’O’Rama store. Predictably, it was dedicated to video games, gaming accessories and memorabilia. A sign in the window announced a major weekend sale, likely what had drawn Daniel and his companions. Damian slipped on a pair of mirrored sunglasses to conceal his eyes and meandered into the store. Wandering between the aisles, pretending to examine the games on offer, it didn’t take him long to find his quarry and Damian got his first good look at the trio.

Daniel was almost a head taller than Damian, slightly paler and with his dark hair mussed up from the scooter ride earlier. His clothes were slightly threadbare, and not the kind that was intentional. His white T-shirt bore a faded NASA logo and his jeans were frayed at the cuffs. He had dark circles under his eyes, though not nearly as bad as Drake got when he was on a case. Nonetheless, for the moment he seemed cheerful and at ease. He was examining the back of a disk case.

“I don’t know Tuck, I’m not much for medieval fantasy,” he said amusedly, “and a lot of these monsters look like ghosts we’ve seen. I get enough of them on a day to day basis, I don’t need them in my video games too.”

Again, this talk of ghosts.

The African American male next to Daniel had to be Tucker Foley. He was just a few inches shorter than Daniel, with his hair in shoulder length dreadlocks partially covered by a red beret. A matching red T-shirt with white Atari logo and baggy camo pants screamed nerd even before you got close enough to notice the black rimmed glasses and the clunky looking device he was tapping away on. Where did he get it from, the middle-ages?

“Look, the reviews are pretty great, and if we avoid everything ghost related what’s even left?” the boy argued, “You can’t let ghosts ruin your fun, man.”

“Tucker’s right, Danny.” the third member of their group chimed in. She was dressed head to toe in black, with a sheer, lacy top, a knee-length skirt, fishnet gloves and stockings and a pair of combat boots. With the thick soles giving her added height, she was almost as tall as Daniel. She wore eerily pale foundation making her dark purple lipstick and eyeshadow pop out even more. She had a small nose stud with a matching purple stone. Her earrings were shaped like spiders dangling from a web and she wore a pentagram necklace. Damian knew some of his schoolmates belonged to the goth subculture, but Gotham Academy’s dress code heavily limited such self-expression on campus. He guessed this girl was either really dedicated to the style or really dedicated to pissing off her parents. Maybe both.This had to be ‘Sam’.

“Besides, if Technus couldn’t ruin gaming for us no one else should either!” she continued.

“Fiiiiine,” Daniel sighed, clearly playing up his reluctance. “but if Amity gets attacked by an army of goblins next I reserve the right to say ‘I told you so’!” He double checked the price tag. “Splitsies?”

The girl scoffed and plucked the case from his hand. “I’ll take this one, you can pay for lunch later. Why don’t you two go ahead to Pineapple Republic for those jeans you wanted? I’ll catch up to you.”

“If you’re sure. Thanks Sam!” Daniel leaned over and gave her a peck on the cheek. “I guess we’ll see you there.”

“Yeah, thanks Sam.”

“Go on, shoo!” she laughed and headed over to the cash register as the boys left the store. Making a split second decision, Damian grabbed a random game from the shelf and got in line behind Sam. He leaned slightly towards her, pretending to examine the figurines behind the counter and stealthily stuck a bug to her skirt. Now he could listen in on their conversation without having to risk being noticed.

After paying for his purchase he wandered off in the direction the other teens had taken. He would just have to leave the game somewhere ‘accidentally’ at the earliest opportunity. Pretending to check his phone he tuned his comm to the frequency of the new bug. 

“...I think those are still a little short on you.” Sam said amusedly.

“Man, I’m glad I finally got my growth spurt, but having to replace most of my wardrobe is gonna be a pain in the ass!” Daniel complained.

“Look at it this way Danny, this could be your chance to branch out. A whole new style, a whole new you!” Sam countered enthusiastically.

Damian walked towards the source of the signal. He didn’t follow the trio directly into Pineapple Republic, instead heading into the shoe store across from the clothing store. Browsing there would let him keep an eye on the entrance.

“Let me guess, would this style include black, black and more black?” came Foley’s snarky voice.

“Black is timeless, I’ll have you know,” Sam sniffed in mock offense, “and Danny does look good in it. Just try it?”

“I don’t know Sam, I don’t wanna blow my allowance on clothes that don’t feel like me.”

“Oh! We could always try the thrift store, they have plenty of cool stuff! And upcycling is great for the environment.”

“Uh, hard pass,” came the flat reply, “I would like to survive the year with some of my dignity intact, please.”

“Yeah dude, if Dash and his cronies caught wind of Danny going to Goodwill or something they’d never let him live it down.”

“There is nothing wrong with buying second-hand!”

“Says the girl in $500 guaranteed cruelty free designer boots.” Foley shot back.

“That’s different!” Sam sputtered, “And besides, I don’t see why you still chase the approval of those jerks.”

“Easy guys, settle down,” Daniel said placatingly, “Sam, you know it’s different for us. You might be able to brush off Paulina’s snarky comments, but I can’t just brush off Dash trying to rearrange my face. I’d rather not paint an even bigger target on my back.”

Sam gave a loud sigh. “Ugh, stupid high school politics. I can’t wait to graduate.”

“I dunno, if things go according to plan you’ll have to deal with real politics, Ms Future Administrator of the EPA Manson.” Daniel teased.

“You mean Senator Manson.” Foley chimed in.

“Madam President Manson!”

“Stop it guys!” the girl laughed, “I’ll leave the political ass kissing to someone else. I just want to save the planet! But I gotta get my doctorate first.”

“Well if you do end up having to take over the country to do it, there’s one thing to keep in mind,” Foley said sagely, “You can’t be much worse than President Luthor.”

The two replied with fake gagging noises while Foley just snickered.

“But seriously, since you brought up mixing up my style… I was thinking of getting my ears pierced.” Daniel said hesitantly.

“Really? Ooh, do you want studs? Danglers? An industrial?” Sam gushed excitedly.

“Well… aw nuts.” Daniel’s voice was suddenly tense.

“You know what?” Sam rushed out, equally tense, “I think you should go and try these pants on. In the changing room. Right now.”

Damian frowned. What the hell had happened? He glanced out the shop window but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Suddenly, he heard distant screams and the sound of glass breaking. It’s almost like being back in Gotham.

Part 8

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

If you're running a business, you can either invest at being good at your business, or good at Google SEO. Choose the former and your customers will love you – but they won't be able to find you, thanks to the people who choose the latter. And if you're going to invest in top-notch SEO, why bother investing in quality at all?

For more than a decade, Google has promised that it would do something about "lead gens" – services that spoof Google into thinking that they are local businesses, pushing down legit firms on both regular search and Google Maps (these downranked businesses invested in quality, not SEO, remember). Search for a roofer, a plumber, an electrician, or a locksmith (especially a locksmith), and most or all of the results will be lead-gens. They'll take your call, pretend to be a local business, and then call up some half-qualified bozo to come out and charge you four times the going rate for substandard work:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html

Some of them just take your money and they "go back to the shop for a tool" and never return:

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/news/when-a-fake-business-used-a-real-st-louis-address-things-got-weird-32087998

Google has been promising to fix this since the late aughts, and to be fair, it's a little better. There was once a time when a map of Manhattan showed more locksmiths than taxis:

https://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/02/18/google-maps-proves-more-locksmiths-in-nyc-than-cabs/

But GMaps is trapped in the enshittification squeeze. On the one hand, the company wants to provide a good and reliable map. On the other hand, the company makes money selling "ads" that are actually payola, where a business can pay to get to the top of the listings or get displayed on the map itself. Zoom out of Google's map of central London and the highlighted landmarks are a hilarious mix of "organic" and paid listings: the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, the Barbican, the London Eye…and a random oral and maxillofacial clinic in the financial district:

https://twitter.com/dylanbeattie/status/1764711667663831455

Hell of a job "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful," Big G. Doubtless the average Londoner finds the presence of this clinic super helpful in orienting themselves relative to the map on their phone screens, and it's a real service to tourists hoping to hit all the major landmarks.

It's not just Maps users who'd noticed the rampant enshittification. Even the original design team is so horrified they're moved to speak out about the moral injury they experience seeing the product they worked so hard on turned into a giant pile of shit:

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

Now, when it comes to locksmiths, I'm lucky. My neighborhood in Burbank includes the wonderful Golden State Lock and Safe, which has been in business since 1942:

https://www.goldenstatelock.com/

But you wouldn't know it from searching GMaps for a locksmith near me. That search turns up a long list of scams:

https://www.google.com/maps/search/locksmith/@34.1750451,-118.369948,14z/data=!3m1!4b1?entry=ttu

It also turns up plenty of Keyme machines – these are private-equity backed, self-serve key-cutting machines placed in grocery stores. Despite Keyme calling itself a "locksmith," it's just a badly secured, overcaptilized, enshittification-bound system for collecting and retaining shapefiles for the keys to millions of homes, cross-referenced with billing information that will make it easy for the eventual hackers to mass-produce keys for all those poor suckers' houses.

(Hilariously, Keyme claims to be an "AI" company):

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200114005194/en/KeyMe-Raises-35-Million-to-Further-Its-Mission-of-Building-the-Premier-Locksmith-Services-Company-in-the-Nation

But despite the fact that you can literally see the Golden State storefront from Google Streetview, Google Maps claims to have no knowledge of it. Instead, Streetview labels Golden State "Keyme" – and displays a preview showing a locksmith using a tool to break into a jeep (I'd dearly love to know how the gadget next to the Slurpee machine at the 7-Eleven will drive itself to your jeep and unlock the door for you when you lose your keys):

https://www.google.com/maps/place/KeyMe+Locksmiths/@34.1752624,-118.3487531,3a,75y,350.19h,90.21t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssHrtqjqvgFir3NBauMy13Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x80c2959cd65dbb1b:0x4b3744cf87492a71!2sBurbank+Blvd+%26+N+Hollywood+Way,+Burbank,+CA+91505!3b1!8m2!3d34.1750025!4d-118.3493484!16s%2Fg%2F11f37_3lq8!3m5!1s0x80c2951cedbf4d39:0xe8ff9fd5872e66e9!8m2!3d34.1755176!4d-118.349!16s%2Fg%2F11mw7nr4fx?entry=ttu

It's pretty clear to me what's going on here. Keyme has hired some SEO creeps and/or paid off Google, flooding the zone with listings for its machines. Meanwhile, Golden State, being merely good at locksmithing, has lost the SEO wars. Perhaps Golden State could shift some of its emphasis from being good at locksmithing in order to get better at SEO, but this is a race that will always be won by the firm that puts the most into SEO, which will always be the firm that puts the least into quality.

Whenever I write about this stuff, people inevitably ask me which search engine they should use, if not Google?

And there's the rub.

Google used predatory pricing and anticompetitive mergers to acquire a 90% search market-share. The company spends more than $26b/year buying default position in every place where you might possibly encounter a new search engine. This created the "kill zone" – the VC's term of art for businesses that no one will invest in, because Google makes sure that no one will ever find out it exists:

https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva-android

That's why the only serious competitor to Google is Bing, another Big Tech company (Bing is also the primary source of results on Duckduckgo, which is why DDG sometimes makes exceptions for Microsoft's privacy-invading tracking):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Controversies

Google tells us that the quid-pro-quo of search monopolization is search excellence. The hundreds of billions it makes every year through monopoly control gives it the resources it needs to fight spammers and maintain search result quality. Anyone who's paid attention recently knows that this is bullshit: Google search quality is in free-fall, across all its products:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

But Google doesn't seem to think it has a problem. Rather than devoting all its available resources to fighting botshit, spam and scams, the company set $80 billion dollars alight last year with a stock buyback that was swiftly followed with 12,000 layoffs, followed by multiple subsequent rounds of layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

The scams that slip through Google's cracks are sometimes nefarious, but just as often they're decidedly amateurish, the kind of thing that Google could fix by throwing money at the problem, say, to validate that new ads for confirmed Google merchants come from the merchant's registered email addresses and go to the merchant's registered website:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Search is a capital intensive business, and there are real returns to scale, as the UK Competition and Market Authority's excellent 2020 study describes:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fe4957c8fa8f56aeff87c12/Appendix_I_-_search_quality_v.3_WEB_.pdf

But Google doesn't seem to think that its search needs that $80 billion to fight the spamwars. That's the thing about monopolists, they get complacent. As Lily Tomlin's "Ernestine the AT&T operator" used to say, "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company."

That's why I'm so excited about the DOJ Antitrust Division monopolization case against Google. Trusting one company to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," was a failure:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies

I understand why people want to know which search engine they should use instead of Google, and I get why, "There aren't any good search engines" is such an unsatisfactory answer. I understand why each fresh round of printer-company fuckery prompts people to ask "which printer should I get?" and I understand why "There are only six major printer companies and they're all suffering from end-stage enshittification" isn't what anyone wants to hear.

We want to be able to vote with our wallets, because it's so much faster and more convenient than voting with our ballots. But the vote-with-your-wallet election is rigged for the people with the thickest wallets. Try as hard as you'd like, you just can't shop your way out of a monopoly – that's like trying to recycle your way out of the climate emergency. Systemic problems need systemic solutions – not individual ones.

That's why the new antitrust matters so much. The answer to monopolies is to break up companies, block and unwind mergers, ban deceptive and unfair conduct. "Caveat emptor" is the scammer's motto. You shouldn't have to be an expert on lead gen scams to hire a locksmith without getting ripped off.

There are good products and services out there. Earlier this year, we decided to install a (non-networked) programmable pushbutton lock. I asked Deviant Ollam – whom I know from Defcon's Lockpicking Village – for a recommendation and he suggested the Schlage FE595:

https://www.schlage.com/en/home/products/FE595PLYFFFFLA.html

I liked it so much I bought another one for my office door. Eric from Golden State Lock and Safe installed it while I wrote this blog-post. It's great. I recommend both of 'em – 10/10, would do business again.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#vapor-locksmith

Image: alicia rae (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kehole_Red.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

--

Budhiargomiko (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wasteland.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[notafragilething]

Late Night Buck & Tommy Rambles: Vertigo Week

Happy Sunday evening. I'm on the cusp of an insanely busy week but I wanted to spend my last calm evening sharing some of my thoughts on Buck and Tommy with all of you. So let's get into the highlights of the weekend.

Let's start with the hospital kiss Instagram reels data. Right now the video is at 921k and 83k in likes. It did get passed by the Happy Birthday Gavin post but who can blame that. But strangely enough, it still holds the 9th overall place because the video of Oliver making a basket on set of episode 4 is now gone. I'm really not sure what happened to that one. With that said, there is now only a 26k difference between it and video 8 and I do think at some point in the coming weeks it will pass that. I'm probably not going to be checking this everyday anymore since the views has slowed so much (which is to be expected). I'll probably check in once a week until it hits a million or until another Tevan reel is posted.

The Vertigo Poster nonsense that happened late last night and early this morning. I already made a post talking about this here so please go check that out if you want to know my thoughts on it. But to quickly summarize: it was made by a friend and posted on Tim's private Facebook. I'm not personally going to be putting much thought into it or using it for any theories because I don't think there is anything more to it then being a fun spoof poster made by a friend.

After seeing the second round of interviews with Ryan coming out on Friday I am now fully confident that marketing is doing a hard-kill on pushing Buddie. I was predicting this in my last ramble but now I'm fairly confident I was right. Ryan repeatedly hit the same key points in multiple interviews by explicitly saying that Eddie is straight. At this point, that seems to be intentional and seemed to be a talking point that marketing wanted out there. There also seemed to be far less buddie questions so I'm fairly sure they're not approving or limiting how many interviewers can ask.

Next weeks episode prediction: We will not be seeing Tommy...and possibly not Eddie or Buck. The summary only focuses on Bobby's storyline and the preview only showed him (and Athena). This might be an episode where the rest of the cast isn't there and is solely focused on what is happening with Bobby and Athena. If it does include the rest of the cast, it looks like there only going to appear in very short segments and are definitely not the focus. Which does mean the Eddie storyline is either on pause for next week or marketing is really, really killing anything involving Buck or Eddie.

Final thoughts: I don't predict anymore interviews with Oliver or Lou until the finale. Probably not anymore for Ryan either that haven't already been done. Marketing in general seems to have massively pulled back after the mess with the bachelor party. I think we won't get anything about this week until Thursday (just like last week).

[vashtijoy]

the list of incidents in the background

This is the list of incidents that appears in the background on TV, in the 10/4 cinematic with Sae, the SIU Director, and Akechi. Let's take a look at them, one by one, to see (some of?) what's been going on.

バス暴走死傷事故 basu bousou shishou jiko reckless bus driving accident that caused injuries and deaths

This is explicitly described as a bousou—the word meaning "runaway" or "rampage" that the original name for "psychotic breakdown" uses, and the original name for Call of Chaos uses. In this context, it means reckless driving. Also shishou is "deaths and injuries"—this is explicitly a fatal accident. The game wants us to know that, even if nobody died in that subway crash, people have died in these mysterious incidents.

コンビニ爆発物事件 konbini bakuhatsumono jiken convenience store bombing incident

What? Did someone bomb a convenience store? Well, maybe not. If you're following the news, the recent incident where someone threw a smoke bomb at PM Kishida Fumio is being described as a bakuhatsumono jiken. So this could be relatively tame.

Or it might not be. The Manchester Arena bombing, where people leaving an Ariana Grande concert were blown up and many died, is also a bakuhatsumono jiken. It could go either way.

トンネル内放火事件 tonneru nai houka jiken arson inside a tunnel incident

Short and sweet. Could be another subway incident, but since it's not explicitly mentioned as being one, it's more likely a road tunnel or something? Fires in tunnels can be devastating, of course.

ヨットハーバー燃料漏出 yotto haabaa nenryou roushutsu marina fuel leak

This sounds like another one that could have been quite dramatic. Marinas tend to be places where rich and powerful people hang out, so this is likely to do with someone being explicitly targetted?

翼田リムジンバス突入事故 yokuta (?) rimushinbasu totsunyuu jiko Yokuta (?) Airport shuttle bus crash accident

Hahaha, this one is fun. First, a "limousine bus" is an airport bus—the ones that run you out to the plane. The airport is a spoof of Haneda Airport. 羽田 "Haneda", to Yokuta (?)'s 翼田—they've changed the first kanji for another one that means "wing".

A totsunyuu jiko is a car crash, but seems to be specifically a crash where the vehicle crashes into a fixed obstacle? So some poor driver smashed their shuttle bus into a wall.

新都市交通あねはづる事故 shin toshi koutsuu anehazuru jiko Anehazuru Monorail case

This one is a P3 reference. shin toshi koutsuu—"New Urban Transport", a term for a "people mover" or monorail. The Shin Toshi Koutsuu Anehazuru is the monorail in P3.

We don't know what happened there, but this may be the only indication that anything happens outside Tokyo in P5 (besides Shido getting his drama on with Joker).

An anehazuru, BTW, is a type of bird, the demoiselle crane.

内閣部サイバー攻撃事件 naikakufu saibaa kougeki jiken Cabinet Office cyberattack incident

This one is interesting because it's so unlike the rest—though there are a lot of data leaks during the Medjed arc, which suggests the conspiracy is somehow taking the opportunity to carry them out. Cyberattacks certainly don't seem in Akechi's line (though he might be responsible for locating worthwhile targets?), so this might just have been swept in with the accidents and "incidents".

An attack on the Cabinet Office, of course, makes it a political attack, and exceptionally likely to be Shido-motivated somehow.

毒薬混入事件 dokuyaku kon'nyuu jiken poison adulteration incident; poisoning incident.

The last on the list: someone, or several someones, were poisoned.

so what do we know

While only one of these, the top one, is explicitly described as fatal, it doesn't take much of a stretch to see that many of them could have been fatal—and the fact that they aren't all called "fatal accident" doesn't make them necessarily not fatal.

Plus, the list fills the screen. These are unlikely to be all the cases; they're the most recent ones, or the ones the studio thought most worthy of note.

[katsukikitten]

Hacker Denki's fav way to get into any system is usually by social engineering and phishing. He has SOOOO much fun making fake emails or pretending to be someone else in order to get some information. He has a silver tongue you know, can sweet talk anyone into anything over the phone. Once he got the entire server key code and serial model thanks to a helpful security guard who thought Denki was head of IT. It made his life real easy.

He has at least four burner phones on him at a time and is constantly looking at his boss's long list of potential targets. Sometimes it can take a few months before someone takes the bait and other times it's his first phone call and he can sit in the system for months. Collect data as if it were gold and store it all on one of his many neatly labeled external hard drives. Although his system is meant to be understood by his brain only to ensure his safety, not that his new boss, you, would ever do anything to harm him.

After scrolling socials or gleaming information from open windows, or an initial phishing to get in, he can study the institutions processes and systems. What they use and how it looks, snag a couple screen shots that he can eventually manipulate into a very neat page that looks like a carbon copy. He can get an IT person's name and spoof their email to send out the "update" or if he was lucky he can send the update directly to his target who will easily log in and give Denki his user and password, not to mention how he authenticates, which will be easy once he knows what app they use and of course he has their cell phone number by now.

All while he has Sims running in the background on one of his many laptops.

[dumbass-robot-with-a-giant-gun]

It's silence that really gets to you.

Many people think that we might be punished with electric shocks collars, or waterboarding, or emotional degradation, or ever something as simple as a pay cut. We were, at one point, put through all of those. But we were also trained to be resilient against each one of those things in case our enemies used it against us.

Then someone in R&D realized how to really hurt us, the one thing that gets beneath our skin after all these years, the one action that makes us truly feel fear: Silence. No "poorly done", no failed report, no handler screaming in our ears, no sentence of extra weeks of training.

Silence.

Nothing.

Emptiness.

It's the same silent treatment you'd use on a puppy, just sitting and watching while we go insane, trying to kill others, trying to ask why, trying to prove your abilities beyond a doubt, trying to kill ourselves, breaking everything, do anything that might finally provoke a reaction. Until finally, when you're on the floor screaming in silence, she'll calm explain what your next objective is.

It makes you panic, the split second after killing your target, waiting to hear something, anything, waiting for the slightest bit of acknowledgment. The wave of relief when you feel your radio come to life with voice. The flood of knowledge that you're on the right track. That they still care about you. That they still want you. That they know you're still loyal. That you've still done a good job.

There are times where they break protocol. A Macau casino job, there were 5 managers that I suspected might be the target; when I was met only with a florescent hum and an office of blood I expanded that to 21 accountants; when I heard nothing but my dry tears and dying gurgles, that became 30 janitors; I had taken a fire-axe and left 97 randomly-chosen civilians dead in my path and had climbed over the 52nd floor railing when she finally spoke to me again, the whole mission was a bust, the result of false reports and spoofed data by opponent spies. I was recalled and put on mandatory therapy leave. She gave me an apology and gave me another job.

When I came back they didn't give me any more sil- ok no. They apologized to me, do you understand that? They fucking apologized. This company does not do apologies, 'sorry' is not a word we are recognized to understand.

Ok, I'm sorry, I'll stay on focus. When I came back they didn't give me any more silence, in fact I midway through my mission I even had a 5 second conversation with her. A real-life conversation. They did all the usual reprogramming, but I still feel that fear when it gets quiet. I still feel that urge to break down when she doesn't acknowledge my action.

I can still hear her silence.

[yayroos]

the thing google wants you to forget in this ad blocker war is that what happens on your hardware is entirely under your control, if you know how to make it happen. you have absolute and complete control over what software runs, what that software calls itself, what network requests it makes, and what those requests say.

you don't even need to know how to do this stuff yourself because there are whole communities of free and open source software makers building stuff to help you control your hardware. from a pi-hole to a user agent spoofing firefox extension to a vpn to wireshark to userscript to just opening the console and running some shit. you are in control the second the data hits your hardware. google would like you to forget this, and give in and surrender to whatever their next horrible plan is for making the internet worse, but you don't have to play their game.

use firefox

block ads

make the internet work for you

[astercontrol]

One of the exercises my pattern recognition loves, for some reason, is to take widely accepted ideas in fandom, things that are basically considered obvious from canon, and figure out ways that the truth could actually be something else.

This is an obnoxious thing to do, sometimes.

I get annoyed at my pattern recognition routines for this.

Especially when I don't even have any particular reason to want the new interpretation.

And especially when (like a lot of my sudden weird inspirations) it happens in the middle of the night.

----

But it is difficult to fight against.

Because whenever there is "proof" that something isn't true in canon, a creative enough mind will find ways around it.

If the proof is "no character ever mentioned that, and they would have mentioned it if it were true"…. all it takes is a plausible reason for someone to keep something secret, or even just not to bring it up in a particular context.

If the proof is "a character literally SAID that was not true"… likewise, all it takes is a plausible reason for someone to lie.

If the proof is "it involves a character who is dead in canon," we just need a reason why the character is believed to be dead but is actually not. (This is especially feasible in canons where there is a potential in-universe mechanism for someone to be copied, resurrected, etc.)

If the proof is "we saw something happen onscreen that is extremely incompatible with the new interpretation," then there's always the possibility of that onscreen event being some type of illusion (especially in canons with magic or technology that make that very feasible).

And I am especially irritated with my Recognizer… (I think that's what I'm going to call it from now on-- Recognizer, an annoying little Pattern Recognizer that buzzes around my head like a tireless insect, looking for puzzles to solve that absolutely nobody needs solved)…

…for becoming fixated, lately, on the question:

What is it, exactly, that makes TRON 2.0 incompatible with Legacy?

(Thank goodness the Recognizer isn't trying to take the comics into account… yet, at least. If I had to watch it try to reconcile Betrayal and Ghost in the Machine with the other canon and with each other, I'd probably eat my computer.)

Anyway. So far I've got:

The structure of ENCOM. I need to look more closely through all those emails from 2.0… they show the power balance of the company changing in ways that seem to diverge from what we see at the beginning of Legacy. (At least Flynn seems to have disappeared in both? Though the times may not line up.)

However, I imagine a lot could change at ENCOM between 2003 and 2010. And we have to remember that not everything said in every email has to be true. Some might even be spoofed emails, sent by FCon for whatever deceptive reasons they might have. We can theoretically disregard any 2.0 canon that comes from the contents of an email, if we can explain it on those grounds.

Alan's family. In 2.0, Lora is apparently dead from a digitization accident, and she and Alan have a son. Neither of these were mentioned in Legacy (although lack of mention isn't proof in itself). Also I believe Lora appears, alive, in some of the supplemental Legacy material.

Going from what I saw of the game's plot, we could imagine that Lora was somehow recovered, later on, from the data that became Ma3a. (If I recall correctly she was eaten by a Seeker? But that doesn't necessarily mean destroyed?) Anyway, if enough of her ended up being recoverable, she could theoretically have been found and rerezzed back into the User world, sometime between then and the events of Legacy.

And, of course, possibly the biggest obstacle: In 2.0, Alan is aware of the world inside the computer.

He got digitized in there as part of FCon's sabotage attempt. It appears (though it doesn't seem absolutely certain?) that this was the first time he'd been digitized into the computer, or even knew it was possible. But after the events of 2.0 he definitely knows about it.

If Alan knew this could happen, it would be… challenging, at the least, to explain a lot of how he acted in Legacy.

---

(And this line of speculation, I think, is really what my Recognizer is focusing on.

See, I don't think it even cares all that much about reconciling 2.0 into the canon. I think it mainly just wants to believe there were some early days when Flynn and Alan and Lora and Roy had fun together exploring the world inside Encom and meeting their programs.

If it were a rational being, it would just make up an AU for this.

But it is not a rational being. It's a deranged pattern recognition subroutine, and its entire obnoxious goal in life is to find or force connections between things, until it can figure out a way everything makes SENSE together.

Sometimes the most nonsensical thing you can possibly do is try to make everything make sense, Recognizer.)

---

First issue: If he knew that people could be digitized into computers, why did Alan not find out what had happened to Flynn?

Well… maybe he did know. Or had good reason to suspect. After all, someone's been paying the electric bill at that arcade to keep the computer running all these years.

If so, though-- why had Alan not tried to get Flynn out of there?

Maybe Flynn had specifically requested for him not to, not unless he paged asking for help.

Or: maybe Alan had tried. Maybe he'd even gone in! Maybe he barely made it back out with his life, without even being able to confirm Flynn was in there somewhere. Maybe he looked through the code trying to fix things from the outside, but realized there was no totally safe way to extract Flynn at this point or even identify him for sure.

Or: Maybe he did extract Flynn from there, time after time. Maybe Flynn kept going back in, and getting his stupid ass in trouble again and again. And the more it conflicted with his job, and the more stress it put on Alan… the more Alan decided, I am too damn old for this, this is a job for someone young and crazy and reckless like Sam, but even Sam is gonna have to wait until Flynn actually admits he needs help and actually pages me asking for it, the stubborn idiot.

In any of these scenarios, though, there's the further question: why did Alan not tell Sam more about what he was getting into?

And there, again, we can only speculate:

Maybe Alan reasoned that Sam has had many years to file away his dad's old stories firmly under the heading of "made-up tall tales," and if he told Sam the whole truth, Sam would refuse to believe it and just be angry.

This may or may not be actually true about Sam… but if Alan thought it, he may have refrained from telling him to increase the chance Sam would actually take on the task.

In any case, Alan sending Sam in there is… an ethically questionable decision at best.

Hell, even if Alan didn't know about the world inside the computer, sending Sam in was a questionable decision. He didn't know what would be waiting there at the arcade for whoever answered the page, and for all he knew it could be something dangerous. For all he knew, whoever answered the page could be walking into some hostage situation, with the mafia holding Flynn captive and demanding company secrets or something.

But… I can see his reasoning, even if I side-eye its ethics a bit.

Whatever he knows or doesn't know about the computer system, Alan knows he's not cut out to handle danger nearly as well as Sam is.

And he knows Sam, of all people, would want the closure of doing this, finding out Dad's secrets on his own.

And, if Alan knew something about those secrets already-- that even explains why he kept this solely between himself and Sam, instead of involving anyone else who might be better equipped than either of them to handle ordinary, real-world dangers.

But… all this notwithstanding, there are probably still some hangups for my Recognizer to deal with.

The one it's gotten stuck on now-- perhaps even stuck enough to let me go back to sleep-- is in the Next Day short.

Specifically, the very end, when Alan and Roy are alone together.

Everything up to that, the Recognizer can disregard any statements it doesn't like, because they could have been lies or omissions for the benefit of the public.

But assuming Roy and Alan both have been inside the computer-- as the Recognizer stubbornly wants to believe-- they don't have any reason to lie about it to each other.

So Roy's very last line-- "Why do you think Flynn gave you the cool nickname?" makes no sense, if they've both met their programs and know they were named after them.

But honestly�� nothing about that last line makes sense, in any interpretation.

Namely:

Even if they hadn't ever met their programs as living personifications, they know they wrote their programs... and presumably Roy's program was also named Ram outside the system.

Alan (from the earlier interviews in the short) clearly knows he was nicknamed after the program he wrote, so I can't see why Roy wouldn't already know the same.

Ram is an obviously cooler nickname than Tron.

So…. shut up, Recognizer.

Stay stuck.

For now, at least.

[reachartwork]

Hardening Your Electronics Against Technopathic Threats

Introduction

Welcome to the not-so-gentle art of hardening your hardware against technopaths. Now, before you panic about some rogue superhuman frying your precious rig from the inside out, let's get a few things straight. This isn't about turning your PC into a tank, but about being smart. Think of it as cyber hygiene for the age of brainy hackers who skipped the keyboard and went straight to mind control.

So: Here's how we prevent these new-age hacker freaks from getting more intimate with your home network than you'd ever been with your girlfriend.

First things first: the "Principle of Least Resistance" in dynology. Sounds fancy, but it's simple. About 80% of superpowers that do shit do so in predictable ways. They're like that one annoying friend who only knows one joke. Once you've heard it a hundred times, it's easy to see coming and dodge. The good news is, this predictability is your armor. Sure, every technopath is unique, like a snowflake, but most of them melt the same way under heat.

So, what does this mean for hardening your electronics? It means don't freak out thinking you need to prepare for a million different powers. Most technopathic threats follow certain patterns, and if you can guard against those, you've covered your bases against the majority. Think of this guide as your cheat sheet to keeping your tech safe without breaking the bank or your brain. Let's dive in and show those brainy hackers that we're not just sitting ducks in this digital pond, and I'll teach you how to make your hardware tougher than a two dollar steak, well-done.

Common Technopathic Abilities: The Usual Suspects

Alright, let's talk about what these technopathic troublemakers can actually do. Most of them fall under a few basic categories, so don't worry, you won't need a PhD in Superhuman Studies to get this.

Direct Electronic Manipulation: These guys can chat with your electronics without saying a word. They might turn your devices on and off, mess with your settings, or even fry your circuits. It's like having a ghost in the machine, but less spooky and more annoying.

Data Messing: Think of these technopaths as the ultimate data thieves. They can read, rewrite, or delete your data. If you thought regular hackers were bad, these folks can do it without even touching a keyboard.

Signal Highjacking: Wireless signals? More like open invitations for these types. They can intercept, disrupt, or spoof wireless communications. Think of it as someone eavesdropping on your Wi-Fi conversation, but with the power to shout louder than you.

Power Surge Creators: Ever had your lights flicker during a storm? These technopaths can do that to your devices on purpose. They generate power surges to short-circuit your electronics. It's like giving your tech an unwanted electric shock therapy.

How These Abilities Wreck Your Hardware

These abilities aren't just cool party tricks; they can turn your beloved gadgets into expensive paperweights. Direct manipulation can damage your hardware's physical components, data interference can compromise your privacy and security, signal highjacking can cut you off from the digital world, and power surges... well, they're just bad news all around.

In the next sections, we'll cover how to turn your devices from sitting ducks into digital fortresses.

[random2908]

My old study partner from college landed a job in data science a few days ago. (Data science is the current trendy thing for people with math/science degrees to turn to if they want to leave academia and don't have other prospects in their field, or want to leave their field. Supposedly there are enough well-paying jobs for everyone who wants to try it.)

Today he found out it was a scam! Someone had spoofed the company (a real company that really hires data scientists) and strung him along. Luckily at some point in the process, either he saw something suspicious or just wanted more info, and he reached out to the company that had "hired" him independently. They told him that they got this a lot, there was known to be a hiring scam out there that was spoofing them.

I haven't talked to him about what happened, but I assume what happened was that, since he was actively job searching, he reached out to a bunch of headhunters, so when a fake headhunter contacted him he thought it was one of the ones he'd reached out to. That's what these scams are going for--they spam a bunch of people, and hope that a few people are in just the right situation to be expecting a message like that from someone legit.

[ahedderick]

New scam!

At least, new to me. My daughter was seriously ill earlier in the week (doing much better, now). She had to pick up medicine from a CVS local to her college in Pennsylvania.

This morning I got a call, and the caller id said "CVS pharmacy." While there is certainly no reason for them to call me - an insurance issue? Maybe? - I picked it up. The person on the other end told me, in a heavy Indian* accent, he was calling from CVS (no name, though). He asked for my daughter by her full name. I told him that she was not available, but that I was her mother. He then asked me for her date of birth. "Uh-unh," I told him, "YOU called ME." He spluttered momentarily, and I hung up.

My husband, who is both more patient with phone menus and substantially more confrontational than I, called the CVS. They confirmed that their store had not tried to contact us, and he told them (quite nicely) that they had some kind of data breach, and their patients' names and home phone numbers were compromised. He ended up getting transferred up to their corporate office, to an office relating to that sort of thing. It took him quite a while, but he did manage to get across to them that someone had hacked them in some way and was also able to spoof caller id to pretend more successfully to BE them.

They seemed to be genuinely glad to be notified, and sincere in promising to try to track the issue down.

But. Shit. All these years, one of the only helpful things has been that the caller id of the scammers never matches who they claim to be when you pick up. If they can access pharmacy data, even just names and phone numbers, (which is BAD ENOUGH) and then call right after you've had a visit, how many people ARE going to get fooled by that?

'* I'm aware that 'Indian' is not a language - but I do not know how to distinguish Hindu/Tamil/Urdu/etc accents for ESL speakers.