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factual-fantasy · 2 months ago

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Salutations Factual! As is always the case, I was overjoyed to see your recent works- Wall-E is another childhood movie of mine, and as you always do, you perfectly translated them into your style! I was also delighted to see a small peak at some new original OCs in the new meme post! While I assume you don't have anything massive planned for them, I was wondering if you had any info regarding them you'd be willing to share? I'm always a big fan of bugs!

Alongside that, it's been fun seeing all this TF prime discussion the past few days. And as part of that, I also wished to bring out a few more points regarding the Vehicons. You made some good points in your last post- the difference between the Vehicons and the Starscream's clones despite their shared method of creation is indeed a bit confusing. However, a few obscure lore bits and a couple of statements from the show's producers help rectify some of the plot holes- and some of your ideas actually weren't too far off!

As far as we know, at some point during the war Megatron selected one or more disposable Soldiers to be "cloned" using a process presumably developed by Shockwave. Small copies of their sparks were created, and given life through energon after being implanted into protoform molds. The resulting clones were fully sentient, but like the predacons Shockwave later created, their sparks were synthetic, thus making them a step above true "drones" but not quite natural cybertronians, as their sparks did not come directly from the Well. As you put it, Shockwave did what he does best and "played God".

Notably, this practice of churning out Vehicon fodder during the wars long lifecycle became so routine, that, as confirmed by one of the producers, some protoforms were designed to resemble Vehicons before they even had a spark inserted- including the five protoforms which Starscream found, all of which had the Vehicons distinctive visor before being reformated into his clones...

However, like you hypothesized, similar to the clones from Star wars, it is suggested in the lore that over the years the cloned Vehicons declined in quality, like because, as the originals died or found their sparks exhausted, the Cons had to start making clones of clones, which over the centuries degraded the newer batches. This is also likely the reason that the modern Vehicons differ so vastly from Starscream's clones...notably, in the prequel games set on Cybertron, most of the Vehicons sound identical, and generally, they proved to be slightly bigger threats.

But by the time of Prime, the majority of them seem weaker and less intelligent- and some have started to manifest vastly different personalities and voices as the clones become less "perfect" with each generation. However- as many fans have pointed out- it seems there are a few OGs left. You'll remember these two guys from the first episode:

They, and a few rare other Vehicons, were evidently from the earlier batches- as despite being clones they fought on even terms with Bumblebee and Arcee for a good while, only retreating when Bulk showed up and saved themselves. (Where they went after that, is anyone's guess)

This also explains why Starscream's clones were so similar to him- they were a "first generation" of clones copied directly from his spark- to the point it even linked them together (which probably happened because he didn't know what he was doing) and this is also why, while the Autobots occasionally show sympathy to select Vehicons, generally except that they have to destroy them in combat- ultimately, their all just "clones", and despite being sentient, their sparks are synthetic, and thus not as valued as well-forged sparks. hence why they mow down Vehicons, but constantly hesitate to kill Starscream, Knockout, and other "pure" Cybertronians.

Oops. Somehow I ended up rambling even longer than last time- sorry! But those are the conclusions I was able to gather. Let me know your thoughts, and again, you're still totally free to go whatever direction you want in your AU! I can't wait to see it one day! I wish you have a good evening! (Or morning!)

(WALL-E post) (OCs post)

Thank you so much! :DD And I DO have a litttttle bit developed for those goobers :)

I thought that these bug critters could be a team of researchers/explorers or something. They go from planet to planet to study the life there and what not. The main character is the Bee gal. I was thinking she's the team scout and is interested in one of her coworkers.. but alas.. it must be kept secret because that is not allowed ☝

The Crane fly and Dragonfly are meant to be the scientists of the ship..? Not sure what their specific job title would actually be but they wear white lab coats. 👍Not much personality is built for the Dragonfly as I made him just for the meme. Thinking he might be a tone deaf/strictly logical character..? But the Crane fly is meant to be the classic kooky scientist character that everyone thinks is actually insane but he's somehow always right and always manages to fix things.

Not much was developed for the moth because he was made just for the meme- but he's basically a Ratchet clone XD Grumpy old medic that is incredibly skilled in his craft and secretly cares very deeply for all of his crew. 🧡

The Orchid mantis is either going to be the lieutenant or Caption of the ship, I haven't decided yet <:/ Despite his no nonsense vibe he's actually rather chill and usually is doing something stupid with the rest of the crew.

The Rhino beetle is also rather chill. He's best friends with the Tarantula and they show affection by beating each other up and throwing each other off of cliffs 💞

Not sure what the Tarantulas job is, but he walks around with crazy canons/weapons. Maybe he's a guard of some kind..? Who knows- he has a gruff exterior but he's got a big heart in there somewhere. ☺️

Now all of that aside,, reading through all that text about the Vehicons has left me with some more opinions- 💀

The whole thing with Shockwave playing God, Its just. Ugh. It just should not work. I've already got so much beef with the predacons, but now adding the ability to create sparks is way too much.

Think about it. A spark is the heart and soul of a Cybertronian. Those two are one in the same. You could say Shockwave could make an artificial spark chamber, or a "heart" of sorts. But he should never be able to create the living "soul" part of the spark.

Also another plot hole in my mind is this quote- "But by the time of Prime, the majority of them seem weaker and less intelligent- and some have started to manifest vastly different personalities and voices as the clones become less "perfect" with each generation." This seems like the exact opposite of what should be happening as the clones degrade in quality.

How are the lower quality/less intelligent clones more capable of forming new feelings and opinions when compared to the previous generations? Their minds have degraded over time. As time goes on they should morph more and more into mindless servants who are unlikely to create any new feelings or thoughts of their own, then they are to consider their actions and think outside the box and most importantly feel and choose.

Its more likely that the very first generation of clones could form new feelings and choose things for themselves because the first generation is the closest copy of a living and feeling Cybertronian as you can make. As the generations go on they become less intelligent, lose their critical thinking skills and should be much less likely to think or feel anything they aren't meant to. If they even can-

The more I think about it, the more I want to make clones 100% not living creatures. They have no sparks and are basically just an AI drone meant to replicate the Cybertronian it was cloned from. Its "feelings" are not real feelings and they don't belong to the Vehicon. Its all just an AI copy of the real thing. I cant think of any way to make the artificial sparks make sense. 😔

With the spark extractor thing, maybe I can make it so its designed to rip out the spark chamber/heart, which carries the soul inside of it. If the chamber is removed from the body that is a lethal blow and the soul is extinguished/released. When the Vehicons had their "sparks" ripped out what it really did is just removed their artificial spark chamber which extinguished the artificial power source inside of it and damaged the chamber beyond repair. So Megatron couldn't just waltz down their and shove the chambers back in their chests.

Also speaking of Vehicons and clones- the predacons? I have the same problems with them as I do with the Vehicons but way worse. I will either completely restructure them from the ground up or remove them from my AU entirely 💀💀💀

#my response #transformers prime #tfp vehicons #my ocs #long post #I also think I could have a lot more interesting and spooky scenes with the Vehicons if they were 100% AI clones #And Shockwave being able to create a living soul is just not gonna work for me #what is he Primus now? 😭😭#if these new plot holes I discussed have patches don't be afraid to let me knowww 🙏🙏

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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Microsoft pinky swears that THIS TIME they’ll make security a priority

One June 20, I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. On June 21, I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On June 22, I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

As the old saying goes, "When someone tells you who they are and you get fooled again, shame on you." That goes double for Microsoft, especially when it comes to security promises.

Microsoft is, was, always has been, and always will be a rotten company. At every turn, throughout their history, they have learned the wrong lessons, over and over again.

That starts from the very earliest days, when the company was still called "Micro-Soft." Young Bill Gates was given a sweetheart deal to supply the operating system for IBM's PC, thanks to his mother's connection. The nepo-baby enlisted his pal, Paul Allen (whom he'd later rip off for billions) and together, they bought someone else's OS (and took credit for creating it – AKA, the "Musk gambit").

Microsoft then proceeded to make a fortune by monopolizing the OS market through illegal, collusive arrangements with the PC clone industry – an industry that only existed because they could source third-party PC ROMs from Phoenix:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-monopolization

Bill Gates didn't become one of the richest people on earth simply by emerging from a lucky orifice; he also owed his success to vigorous antitrust enforcement. The IBM PC was the company's first major initiative after it was targeted by the DOJ for a 12-year antitrust enforcement action. IBM tapped its vast monopoly profits to fight the DOJ, spending more on outside counsel to fight the DOJ antitrust division than the DOJ spent on all its antitrust lawyers, every year, for 12 years.

IBM's delaying tactic paid off. When Reagan took the White House, he let IBM off the hook. But the company was still seriously scarred by its ordeal, and when the PC project kicked off, the company kept the OS separate from the hardware (one of the DOJ's major issues with IBM's previous behavior was its vertical monopoly on hardware and software). IBM didn't hire Gates and Allen to provide it with DOS because it was incapable of writing a PC operating system: they did it to keep the DOJ from kicking down their door again.

The post-antitrust, gunshy IBM kept delivering dividends for Microsoft. When IBM turned a blind eye to the cloned PC-ROM and allowed companies like Compaq, Dell and Gateway to compete directly with Big Blue, this produced a whole cohort of customers for Microsoft – customers Microsoft could play off on each other, ensuring that every PC sold generated income for Microsoft, creating a wide moat around the OS business that kept other OS vendors out of the market. Why invest in making an OS when every hardware company already had an exclusive arrangement with Microsoft?

The IBM PC story teaches us two things: stronger antitrust enforcement spurs innovation and opens markets for scrappy startups to grow to big, important firms; as do weaker IP protections.

Microsoft learned the opposite: monopolies are wildly profitable; expansive IP protects monopolies; you can violate antitrust laws so long as you have enough monopoly profits rolling in to outspend the government until a Republican bootlicker takes the White House (Microsoft's antitrust ordeal ended after GW Bush stole the 2000 election and dropped the charges against them). Microsoft embodies the idea that you either die a rebel hero or live long enough to become the evil emperor you dethroned.

From the first, Microsoft has pursued three goals:

Get too big to fail;

Get too big to jail;

Get too big to care.

It has succeeded on all three counts. Much of Microsoft's enduring power comes from succeeded IBM as the company that mediocre IT managers can safely buy from without being blamed for the poor quality of Microsoft's products: "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" is 2024's answer to "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Microsoft's secret sauce is impunity. The PC companies that bundle Windows with their hardware are held blameless for the glaring defects in Windows. The IT managers who buy company-wide Windows licenses are likewise insulated from the rage of the workers who have to use Windows and other Microsoft products.

Microsoft doesn't have to care if you hate it because, for the most part, it's not selling to you. It's selling to a few decision-makers who can be wined and dined and flattered. And since we all have to use its products, developers have to target its platform if they want to sell us their software.

This rarified position has afforded Microsoft enormous freedom to roll out harebrained "features" that made things briefly attractive for some group of developers it was hoping to tempt into its sticky-trap. Remember when it put a Turing-complete scripting environment into Microsoft Office and unleashed a plague of macro viruses that wiped out years worth of work for entire businesses?

https://web.archive.org/web/20060325224147/http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/newsinfo/collateral.aspx?cid=33338

It wasn't just Office; Microsoft's operating systems have harbored festering swamps of godawful defects that were weaponized by trolls, script kiddies, and nation-states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue

Microsoft blamed everyone except themselves for these defects, claiming that their poor code quality was no worse than others, insisting that the bulging arsenal of Windows-specific malware was the result of being the juiciest target and thus the subject of the most malicious attention.

Even if you take them at their word here, that's still no excuse. Microsoft didn't slip and accidentally become an operating system monopolist. They relentlessly, deliberately, illegally pursued the goal of extinguishing every OS except their own. It's completely foreseeable that this dominance would make their products the subject of continuous attacks.

There's an implicit bargain that every monopolist makes: allow me to dominate my market and I will be a benevolent dictator who spends his windfall profits on maintaining product quality and security. Indeed, if we permit "wasteful competition" to erode the margins of operating system vendors, who will have a surplus sufficient to meet the security investment demands of the digital world?

But monopolists always violate this bargain. When faced with the decision to either invest in quality and security, or hand billions of dollars to their shareholders, they'll always take the latter. Why wouldn't they? Once they have a monopoly, they don't have to worry about losing customers to a competitor, so why invest in customer satisfaction? That's how Google can piss away $80b on a stock buyback and fire 12,000 technical employees at the same time as its flagship search product (with a 90% market-share) is turning into an unusable pile of shit:

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

Microsoft reneged on this bargain from day one, and they never stopped. When the company moved Office to the cloud, it added an "analytics" suite that lets bosses spy on and stack-rank their employees ("Sorry, fella, Office365 says you're the slowest typist in the company, so you're fired"). Microsoft will also sell you internal data on the Office365 usage of your industry competitors (they'll sell your data to your competitors, too, natch). But most of all, Microsoft harvest, analyzes and sells this data for its own purposes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

Leave aside how creepy, gross and exploitative this is – it's also incredibly reckless. Microsoft is creating a two-way conduit into the majority of the world's businesses that insider threats, security services and hackers can exploit to spy on and wreck Microsoft's customers' business. You don't get more "too big to care" than this.

Or at least, not until now. Microsoft recently announced a product called "Recall" that would record every keystroke, click and screen element, nominally in the name of helping you figure out what you've done and either do it again, or go back and fix it. The problem here is that anyone who gains access to your system – your boss, a spy, a cop, a Microsoft insider, a stalker, an abusive partner or a hacker – now has access to everything, on a platter. Naturally, this system – which Microsoft billed as ultra-secure – was wildly insecure and after a series of blockbuster exploits, the company was forced to hit pause on the rollout:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/microsoft-delays-data-scraping-recall-feature-again-commits-to-public-beta-test/

For years, Microsoft waged a war on the single most important security practice in software development: transparency. This is the company that branded the GPL Free Software license a "virus" and called open source "a cancer." The company argued that allowing public scrutiny of code would be a disaster because bad guys would spot and weaponize defects.

This is "security through obscurity" and it's an idea that was discredited nearly 500 years ago with the advent of the scientific method. The crux of that method: we are so good at bullshiting ourselves into thinking that our experiment was successful that the only way to make sure we know anything is to tell our enemies what we think we've proved so they can try to tear us down.

Or, as Bruce Schneier puts it: "Anyone can design a security system that you yourself can't think of a way of breaking. That doesn't mean it works, it just means that it works against people stupider than you."

And yet, Microsoft – whose made more widely and consequentially exploited software than anyone else in the history of the human race – claimed that free and open code was insecure, and spent millions on deceptive PR campaigns intended to discredit the scientific method in favor of a kind of software alchemy, in which every coder toils in secret, assuring themselves that drinking mercury is the secret to eternal life.

Access to source code isn't sufficient to make software secure – nothing about access to code guarantees that anyone will review that code and repair its defects. Indeed, there've been some high profile examples of "supply chain attacks" in the free/open source software world:

https://www.securityweek.com/supply-chain-attack-major-linux-distributions-impacted-by-xz-utils-backdoor/

But there's no good argument that this code would have been more secure if it had been harder for the good guys to spot its bugs. When it comes to secure code, transparency is an essential, but it's not a sufficency.

The architects of that campaign are genuinely awful people, and yet they're revered as heroes by Microsoft's current leadership. There's Steve "Linux Is Cancer" Ballmer, star of Propublica's IRS Files, where he is shown to be the king of "tax loss harvesting":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

And also the most prominent example of the disgusting tax cheats practiced by rich sports-team owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

Microsoft may give lip service to open source these days (mostly through buying, stripmining and enclosing Github) but Ballmer's legacy lives on within the company, through its wildly illegal tax-evasion tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/13/pour-encoragez-les-autres/#micros-tilde-one

But Ballmer is an angel compared to his boss, Bill Gates, last seen some paragraphs above, stealing the credit for MS DOS from Tim Paterson and billions of dollars from his co-founder Paul Allen. Gates is an odious creep who made billions through corrupt tech industry practices, then used them to wield influence over the world's politics and policy. The Gates Foundation (and Gates personally) invented vaccine apartheid, helped kill access to AIDS vaccines in Sub-Saharan Africa, then repeated the trick to keep covid vaccines out of reach of the Global South:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

The Gates Foundation wants us to think of it as malaria-fighting heroes, but they're also the leaders of the war against public education, and have been key to the replacement of public schools with charter schools, where the poorest kids in America serve as experimental subjects for the failed pet theories of billionaire dilettantes:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/millionaire-driven-education-reform-has-failed-heres-what-works

(On a personal level, Gates is also a serial sexual abuser who harassed multiple subordinates into having sexual affairs with him:)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/technology/microsoft-sexual-harassment-policy-review.html

The management culture of Microsoft started rotten and never improved. It's a company with corruption and monopoly in its blood, a firm that would always rather build market power to insulate itself from the consequences of making defective products than actually make good products. This is true of every division, from cloud computing:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/28/other-peoples-computers/#clouded-over

To gaming:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/27/convicted-monopolist/#microsquish

No one should ever trust Microsoft to do anything that benefits anyone except Microsoft. One of the low points in the otherwise wonderful surge of tech worker labor organizing was when the Communications Workers of America endorsed Microsoft's acquisition of Activision because Microsoft promised not to union-bust Activision employees. They lied:

https://80.lv/articles/qa-workers-contracted-by-microsoft-say-they-were-fired-for-trying-to-unionize/

Repeatedly:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/activision-fired-staff-using-strong-language-about-remote-work-policy-union-2023-03-01/

Why wouldn't they lie? They've never faced any consequences for lying in the past. Remember: the secret to Microsoft's billions is impunity.

Which brings me to Solarwinds. Solarwinds is an enterprise management tool that allows IT managers to see, patch and control the computers they oversee. Foreign spies hacked Solarwinds and accessed a variety of US federal agencies, including National Nuclear Security Administration (who oversee nuclear weapons stockpiles), the NIH, and the Treasury Department.

When the Solarwinds story broke, Microsoft strenuously denied that the Solarwinds hack relied on exploiting defects in Microsoft software. They said this to everyone: the press, the Pentagon, and Congress.

This was a lie. As Renee Dudley and Doris Burke reported for Propublica, the Solarwinds attack relied on defects in the SAML authentication system that Microsoft's own senior security staff had identified and repeatedly warned management about. Microsoft's leadership ignored these warnings, buried the research, prohibited anyone from warning Microsoft customers, and sidelined Andrew Harris, the researcher who discovered the defect:

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-golden-saml-data-breach-russian-hackers

The single most consequential cyberattack on the US government was only possible because Microsoft decided not to fix a profound and dangerous bug in its code, and declined to warn anyone who relied on this defective software.

Yesterday, Microsoft president Brad Smith testified about this to Congress, and promised that the company would henceforth prioritize security over gimmicks like AI:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/microsoft-in-damage-control-mode-says-it-will-prioritize-security-over-ai/

Despite all the reasons to mistrust this promise, the company is hoping Congress will believe it. More importantly, it's hoping that the Pentagon will believe it, because the Pentagon is about to award billions in free no-bid military contract profits to Microsoft:

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/17/pentagon-weighs-microsoft-licensing-upgrades

You know what? I bet they'll sell this lie. It won't be the first time they've convinced Serious People in charge of billions of dollars and/or lives to ignore that all-important maxim, "When someone tells you who they are and you get fooled again, shame on you."

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/2024/06/14/patch-tuesday/#fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again

#pluralistic #microsoft #infosec #visual basic #ai #corruption #too big to care #patch tuesday #solar winds #monopolists bargain #eternal blue #transparency #open source #floss #oss #apts

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