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sebeth · 8 years ago

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Aliens Outbreak Part 1

Warning, Spoilers Ahead…

Outbreak by Mark Verheiden and Mark A. Nelson

For your information, per Wikipedia: “The first three stories formed a continuation of the two Alien films that had been released by the time they were published. However, 1992 saw the release of Alien 3, which contradicted the events of the comics by beginning with the deaths of Newt and Corporal Hicks. In order to keep the stories relevant and canonical to the Alien film series, Dark Horse changed the names of the characters for future printings of the stories. Newt became Billie while Hicks was now known as Wilks.”

A man in a lab coat interviews a woman on a gurney. He would like to know what happened last night. She explains that she and two friends decided to indulge in some old-fashioned camping. What’s camping without scary stories being told around a fire? Billie decides to tell the scariest story she knows: “There are these – things – that live in space. They live to feed – and to hate. They have acid for blood and skin as hard as hull steel. You don’t see them until they’re on top of you. And then all you see are the teeth, glittering like sparks as they snap – Maybe they’re from another world. Or maybe they just exist in the black hell of space, feeding on anything they find. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but those teeth, snapping shut on bone and brain, tearing, cutting, crushing – But it doesn’t end in death. They use what’s left for breeding, burrowing into the tissue, spreading like cancer, until the parasite is whole, until the hate can build again and again and –“

Billie is a very effective storyteller! I’m properly scared. It’s also a nice way to summarize the xenomorphs if you’ve never heard of them.

A xenomorph bursting out of Mag’s chest interrupts Billie’s tale of horror while Carly states that “I don’t feel…” Billie screams “Not again! Not again!”

Billie comments to the man: “I guess that’s when you found me in the hall, screaming.”

Did the camping story actually happen or was it a nightmare? It’s very descriptive for someone who hasn’t had first-hand experience with the xenomorphs.

Billie mentions that “Nothing can stop the dreams” as we flashback to Aliens 2. A squad of marines – Drake, Vasquez, Wilks, Jasper, Quinn – are in the base. Wilks is carrying a young blonde girl. Vasquez and Drake are found dead in the generator room. The rest of the marines – besides Wilks – are killed. Wilks finds the blonde girl cocooned to the wall. Wilks awakens from his nightmare. He is told to report to Colonel Stephens. Wilks’ cellmate warns that “He’s sick, man – You don’t know what he’s got inside him!” PTSD or ominous foreshadowing?

We discover that the inhabitants of future earth still don’t believe in taking care of the planet. Abandoned ships and space stations are left to fall and burn up in orbit. It worked great until “…one of the flamers crashed half-intact near a coffee plantation near the island of Hawaii. The radiation killed the indigenous population…” Oops?

The (space) Coast Guard send a probe into an abandoned ship. The probe broadcasts images of destruction. Highlights include a massacred body and the words “kill us all” written in blood on the walls. The officers write it off as a “murder – suicide” and blow the ship up. The officers feel their ship’s controls are sluggish and discover a full-grown xenomorph on the ship’s surface. The xenomorph makes quick work of the duo. Unfortunately for the xenomorph, the ship explodes.

The encounter with the xenomorph is the cause of Wilks’ recall from the military prison. It’s clear that “Outbreak” is retconning the ending of Aliens 2. Newt is Billie (now in an insane asylum) and Wilks ended up in a military prison. I wonder if we will find out what happened to Ripley and the android?

A preacher films a portion of his next broadcast: “The truth of my message will shine like a beacon. The others are pretenders – I preach the gospel of the true messiah!” The true messiah is a xenomorph. To quote the cameraman: “But if that thing’s god…gimme the old religion.”

How would you even recruit for this religion? Unless it’s used as a deterrent – be good or you’re banished to the land of the aliens! It’d make me behave!

Back to a sedated Billie. An irate Billie lashes out: “I didn’t ask to be born out there! Nobody warned me about the risks! You can’t get it out of me with drugs. I saw them tear my mother apart like a doll! And they’re still out there!”

Billie exemplifies the PTSD that an encounter with xenomorphs would result in. If you think about it – she saw the horrifying massacre of her entire colony plus no one knows the origin of the aliens. If you survive a shark attack – stay out of the ocean. But to survive a xenomorph attack? It could happen in any environment – there is no safe zone.

The “xenomorph is the true messiah” broadcast plays during Billie’s freak out. Really? What idiot would allow that to be broadcast in a place full of individual suffering from emotional/psychological issues?

Wilks recaps his previous encounter with the xenomorphs to Colonel Stephens and Doctor Orona: “Other than myself, a civilian woman, and the young girl, no one from the mission survived”.

One side of Wilks’s face has is heavily scarred from the alien’s blood.

Doctor Orona reveals what happened to Wilks in the aftermath of the encounter with the aliens: “Once back on earth, you spent several months in quarantine waiting to be cleared into the general populace. There was considerable concern over the – infectious nature of the alien spore. According to hospital records, you didn’t have a single visitor during this entire period. When you were finally reinstated to active duty, there seems to have been problems in – readjusting – to military life. Former comrades, fearful you might somehow be ‘infectious’ from the alien blood, avoided contact. Your later record is painfully repetitive – drunk and disorderly, brawling, public intoxication. Really quite disappointing”.

Doctor Orona tells Wilks that “You seek redemption. I seek – specimens.”

The only proper response to that statement is “Good luck with that. I’m going back to my cell”. At least, that’s what I would have said.

Wilks visits Billie. He wants to see her before he leaves on his mission. Billie begs Wilks to take her with him. Life has to be horrible in the asylum if you feel that another encounter with xenomorphs is the better alternative.

Colonel Stephens and Doctor Onora are arguing over the selection of Wilks: “They think he’s the big, tough monster killer. Crew killer is more like it. It’s not like the rim mission was a success. Hell, the only survivors were a kid, a civilian woman, and Wilks. The kid’s a brain case and the woman – well, you know what became of her.” “Which means Wilks is the only experienced hand available.”

Colonel Stephens clashes with Wilks over weaponry. Wilks wants the most powerful weaponry available while Stephen maintains that they are “collecting specimens, not pieces.”

I’m hoping that Stephens and Onora die first – their stupidity deserves to be met with horrible, painful deaths.

Wilks smuggles Billie out of the asylum after learning that she’s scheduled for a lobotomy. He hides her aboard the ship.

The ship launches and we are officially on the space highway to hell!

#Aliens #Xenomorphs #Outbreak

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jennifersnyderca90 · 7 years ago

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A Sobering Look at Fake Online Reviews

In 2016, KrebsOnSecurity exposed a network of phony Web sites and fake online reviews that funneled those seeking help for drug and alcohol addiction toward rehab centers that were secretly affiliated with the Church of Scientology. Not long after the story ran, that network of bogus reviews disappeared from the Web. Over the past few months, however, the same prolific purveyor of these phantom sites and reviews appears to be back at it again, enlisting the help of Internet users and paying people $25-$35 for each fake listing.

Sometime in March 2018, ads began appearing on Craigslist promoting part-time “social media assistant” jobs, in which interested applicants are directed to sign up for positions at seorehabs[dot]com. This site promotes itself as “leaders in addiction recovery consulting,” explaining that assistants can earn a minimum of $25 just for creating individual Google for Business listings tied to a few dozen generic-sounding addiction recovery center names, such as “Integra Addiction Center,” and “First Exit Recovery.”

The listing on Craigslist.com advertising jobs for creating fake online businesses tied to addiction rehabilitation centers.

Applicants who sign up are given detailed instructions on how to step through Google’s anti-abuse process for creating listings, which include receiving a postcard via snail mail from Google that contains a PIN which needs to be entered at Google’s site before a listing can be created.

Assistants are cautioned not to create more than two listings per street address, but otherwise to use any U.S.-based street address and to leave blank the phone number and Web site for the new business listing.

A screen shot from Seorehabs’ instructions for those hired to create rehab center listings.

In my story Scientology Seeks Captive Converts Via Google Maps, Drug Rehab Centers, I showed how a labyrinthine network of fake online reviews that steered Internet searches toward rehab centers funded by Scientology adherents was set up by TopSeek Inc., which bills itself as a collection of “local marketing experts.” According to LinkedIn, TopSeek is owned by John Harvey, an individual (or alias) who lists his address variously as Sacramento, Calif. and Hawaii.

Although the current Web site registration records from registrar giant Godaddy obscure the information for the current owner of seorehabs[dot]com, a historic WHOIS search via Domaintools shows the site was also registered by John Harvey and TopSeek in 2015. Mr. Harvey did not respond to requests for comment. [Full disclosure: Domaintools previously was an advertiser on KrebsOnSecurity].

TopSeek’s Web site says it works with several clients, but most especially Narconon International — an organization that promotes the rather unorthodox theories of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard regarding substance abuse treatment and addiction.

As described in Narconon’s Wikipedia entry, Narconon facilities are known not only for attempting to win over new converts to Scientology, but also for treating all substance abuse addictions with a rather bizarre cocktail consisting mainly of vitamins and long hours in extremely hot saunas. Their Wiki entry documents multiple cases of accidental deaths at Narconon facilities, where some addicts reportedly died from overdoses of vitamins or neglect.

A LUCRATIVE RACKET

Bryan Seely, a security expert who has written extensively about the use of fake search listings to conduct online bait-and-switch scams, said the purpose of sites like those that Seorehabs pays people to create is to funnel calls to a handful of switchboards that then sell the leads to rehab centers that have agreed to pay for them. Many rehab facilities will pay hundreds of dollars for leads that may ultimately lead to a new patient. After all, Seely said, some facilities can then turn around and bill insurance providers for thousands of dollars per patient.

Perhaps best known for a stunt in which he used fake Google Maps listings to intercept calls destined for the FBI and U.S. Secret Service, Seely has learned a thing or two about this industry: Until 2011, he worked for an SEO firm that helped to develop and spread some of the same fake online reviews that he is now helping to clean up.

“Mr. Harvey and TopSeek are crowdsourcing the data input for these fake rehab centers,” Seely said. “The phone numbers all go to just a few dedicated call centers, and it’s not hard to see why. The money is good in this game. He sells a call for $50-$100 at a minimum, and the call center then tries to sell that lead to a treatment facility that has agreed to buy leads. Each lead can be worth $5,000 to $10,000 for a patient who has good health insurance and signs up.”

This graph illustrates what happens when someone calls one of these Seorehabs listings. Source: Bryan Seely.

Many of the listings created by Seorehab assistants are tied to fake Google Maps entries that include phony reviews for bogus treatment centers. In the event those listings get suspended by Google, Seorehab offers detailed instructions on how assistants can delete and re-submit listings.

Assistants also can earn extra money writing fake, glowing reviews of the treatment centers:

Below are some of the plainly bogus reviews and listings created in the last month that pimp the various treatment center names and Web sites provided by Seorehabs. It is not difficult to find dozens of other examples of people who claim to have been at multiple Seorehab-promoted centers scattered across the country. For example, “Gloria Gonzalez” supposedly has been treated at no fewer than seven Seorehab-marketed detox locations in five states, penning each review just in the last month:

A reviewer using the name “Tedi Spicer” also promoted at least seven separate rehab centers across the United States in the past month. Getting treated at so many far-flung facilities in just the few months that the domains for these supposed rehab centers have been online would be an impressive feat:

Bring up any of the Web sites for these supposed rehab listings and you’ll notice they all include the same boilerplate text and graphic design. Aside from combing listings created by the reviewers paid to promote the sites, we can find other Seorehab listings just by searching the Web for chunks of text on the sites. Doing so reveals a long list (this is likely far from comprehensive) of domain names registered in the past few months that were all created with hidden registration details and registered via Godaddy.

Seely said he spent a few hours this week calling dozens of phone numbers tied to these rehab centers promoted by TopSeek, and created a spreadsheet documenting his work and results here (Google Sheets).

Seely said while he would never advocate such activity, TopSeek’s fake listings could end up costing Mr. Harvey plenty of money if someone figured out a way to either mass-report the listings as fraudulent or automate calls to the handful of hotlines tied to the listings.

“It would kill his business until he changes all the phone numbers tied to these fake listings, but if he had to do that he’d have to pay people to rebuild all the directories that link to these sites,” he said.

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT FAKE ONLINE REVIEWS

Before doing business with a company you found online, don’t just pick the company that comes up at the top of search results on Google or any other search engine. Unfortunately, that generally guarantees little more than the company is good at marketing.

Take the time to research the companies you wish to hire before booking them for jobs or services — especially when it comes to big, expensive, and potentially risky services like drug rehab or moving companies. By the way, if you’re looking for a legitimate rehab facility, you could do worse than to start at rehabs.com, a legitimate rehab search engine.

It’s a good idea to get in the habit of verifying that the organization’s physical address, phone number and Web address shown in the search result match that of the landing page. If the phone numbers are different, use the contact number listed on the linked site.

Take the time to learn about the organization’s reputation online and in social media; if it has none (other than a Google Maps listing with all glowing, 5-star reviews), it’s probably fake. Search the Web for any public records tied to the business’ listed physical address, including articles of incorporation from the local secretary of state office online.

A search of the company’s domain name registration records can give you an idea of how long its Web site has been in business, as well as additional details about the the organization (although the ability to do this may soon be a thing of the past).

Seely said one surefire way to avoid these marketing shell games is to ask a simple question of the person who answers the phone in the online listing.

“Ask anyone on the phone what company they’re with,” Seely said. “Have them tell you, take their information and then call them back. If they aren’t forthcoming about who they are, they’re most likely a scam.”

In 2016, Seely published a book on Amazon about the thriving and insanely lucrative underground business of fake online reviews. He’s agreed to let KrebsOnSecurity republish the entire e-book, which is available for free at this link (PDF).

“This is literally the worst book ever written about Google Maps fraud,” Seely said. “It’s also the best. Is it still a niche if I’m the only one here? The more people who read it, the better.”

from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/a-sobering-look-at-fake-online-reviews/

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cassandrasroguelevels · 2 years ago

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The sheer volume of information available to people at an instant now is mind boggling, and I fully understand why kids think like this. I struggle to comprehend the number of hours you'd have to spend in a well stocked library to come up with even a quarter of a given wikipedia page right now.

To put the amount of information available now in context, let's go back to that Wikipedia example briefly. In text alone, Wikipedia is about 25GB.

So all 2000 bound books would fit on a flashdrive. A complete summary of human knowledge, in the palm of your hand.

Now, if you've ever filled a flashdrive to the brim, you know it doesn't get heavier, right? Except it does. That sort of data storage works by trapping electrons in clever ways, electrons have a small amount of mass, ergo it gets fractionally, nearly undetectably heavier. Scale this up to any size flashdrive, you'll never notice a difference.

But to store the entire internet?

The data alone would weigh around 50 grams. That's about what a strawberry weighs. That's just the electrons, that doesn't even account for the storage media or anything else.

Compare that to your flashdrive, which weighs practically nothing more when filled vs empty.

It's insane to imagine how much information we have now.

And it's hard, sometimes, to realize this wasn't always the case. We're so used to it now. I grew up in a world where computers were the norm, but I didn't really start using the internet for much until... Well honestly until after smart phones were commonplace.

Even I forget.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but learning new information has, for most of history, been insanely difficult compared to now. We're in a world where most people are educated, where we literally carry access to the sum total of human knowledge in our pockets. The calculator app on your phone alone has more functionality than the computers of the first craft to land on the moon.

Learn from the past. Use that access. Don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

But don't condemn large swaths of people of the past for not knowing better when they couldn't have had access to the same information you have now.

And remember.

One day, that will be you. And how could You know better, when the hypernet didn't give you access to the collective knowledge of all spacetime yet? How could you know that the text you deleted would have set someone on the path to cure cancer?

You couldn't.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like… oh… you cannot comprehend before the internet.

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like… actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.

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amberdscott2 · 7 years ago

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A Sobering Look at Fake Online Reviews

The listing on Craigslist.com advertising jobs for creating fake online businesses tied to addiction rehabilitation centers.

A screen shot from Seorehabs’ instructions for those hired to create rehab center listings.

A LUCRATIVE RACKET

This graph illustrates what happens when someone calls one of these Seorehabs listings. Source: Bryan Seely.

Assistants also can earn extra money writing fake, glowing reviews of the treatment centers:

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT FAKE ONLINE REVIEWS

Seely said one surefire way to avoid these marketing shell games is to ask a simple question of the person who answers the phone in the online listing.

from Amber Scott Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/a-sobering-look-at-fake-online-reviews/

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