#legal hacking software

[olivergisttv]

Ethical Hacking Tools: What’s Legal and Free?

Curious about ethical hacking but worried you might trip over legal lines or blow your budget? You’re not alone. With cybersecurity threats rising every day, ethical hackers—also known as white-hat hackers—are becoming heroes in hoodies. But to do it right, you need the proper tools: ones that are legal, effective, and preferably free. Let’s dive into the best ethical hacking tools you can use…

[grouchythefish]

Was looking at dropout and was shocked the betrayal at house on the hill episode of parlor room only had 4 people in it and then I remembered that my primary experience with the game is from when me and my friends used to hack it in order to play it with WAY more people than you're supposed to when we played online during lockdown.

[pauljonessoftware]

11 Lessons I Didn’t Know I Was Signing Up for When I Built My First SaaS

When I set out to build my first SaaS product, I thought the hardest part would be writing clean code. I figured the technical decisions would carry the most weight — choose the right stack, organize the database, write good tests, ship features. I had no idea I was about to get a crash course in business, legal strategy, pricing, communication, and product thinking. Here are 11 lessons I…

[mckinlily]

Plot armor but it’s Bruce Wayne’s wealth.

Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.

He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.

Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.

But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.

Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.

Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.

So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?

Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.

Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.

Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.

Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.

Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.

Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.

But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?

Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.

Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.

So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.

Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.

At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.

The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.

Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.

All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.

Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.

But by GOD is he trying.

[lonk-water]

hell yeah i actually managed to rescue the 500gb microsd

[argumate]

The company now legally known as “THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD” was set up by a British software engineer, who says he did it purely because he thought it would be “a fun playful name” for his consulting business.

The original name of the company was ““><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD”. By beginning the name with a quotation mark and chevron, any site which failed to properly handle the HTML code would have mistakenly thought the company name was blank, and then loaded and executed a script from the site XSS Hunter, which helps developers find cross-site scripting errors.

[mariacallous]

If you want a job at McDonald’s today, there’s a good chance you'll have to talk to Olivia. Olivia is not, in fact, a human being, but instead an AI chatbot that screens applicants, asks for their contact information and résumé, directs them to a personality test, and occasionally makes them “go insane” by repeatedly misunderstanding their most basic questions.

Until last week, the platform that runs the Olivia chatbot, built by artificial intelligence software firm Paradox.ai, also suffered from absurdly basic security flaws. As a result, virtually any hacker could have accessed the records of every chat Olivia had ever had with McDonald's applicants—including all the personal information they shared in those conversations—with tricks as straightforward as guessing that an administrator account's username and password was “123456."

On Wednesday, security researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry revealed that they found simple methods to hack into the backend of the AI chatbot platform on McHire.com, McDonald's website that many of its franchisees use to handle job applications. Carroll and Curry, hackers with a long track record of independent security testing, discovered that simple web-based vulnerabilities—including guessing one laughably weak password—allowed them to access a Paradox.ai account and query the company's databases that held every McHire user's chats with Olivia. The data appears to include as many as 64 million records, including applicants' names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

Carroll says he only discovered that appalling lack of security around applicants' information because he was intrigued by McDonald's decision to subject potential new hires to an AI chatbot screener and personality test. “I just thought it was pretty uniquely dystopian compared to a normal hiring process, right? And that's what made me want to look into it more,” says Carroll. “So I started applying for a job, and then after 30 minutes, we had full access to virtually every application that's ever been made to McDonald's going back years.”

When WIRED reached out to McDonald’s and Paradox.ai for comment, a spokesperson for Paradox.ai shared a blog post the company planned to publish that confirmed Carroll and Curry’s findings. The company noted that only a fraction of the records Carroll and Curry accessed contained personal information, and said it had verified that the administrator account with the “123456” password that exposed the information “was not accessed by any third party” other than the researchers. The company also added that it’s instituting a bug bounty program to better catch security vulnerabilities in the future. “We do not take this matter lightly, even though it was resolved swiftly and effectively,” Paradox.ai’s chief legal officer, Stephanie King, told WIRED in an interview. “We own this.”

In its own statement to WIRED, McDonald’s agreed that Paradox.ai was to blame. “We’re disappointed by this unacceptable vulnerability from a third-party provider, Paradox.ai. As soon as we learned of the issue, we mandated Paradox.ai to remediate the issue immediately, and it was resolved on the same day it was reported to us,” the statement reads. “We take our commitment to cyber security seriously and will continue to hold our third-party providers accountable to meeting our standards of data protection.”

Carroll says he became interested in the security of the McHire website after spotting a Reddit post complaining about McDonald's hiring chatbot wasting applicants' time with nonsense responses and misunderstandings. He and Curry started talking to the chatbot themselves, testing it for “prompt injection” vulnerabilities that can enable someone to hijack a large language model and bypass its safeguards by sending it certain commands. When they couldn't find any such flaws, they decided to see what would happen if they signed up as a McDonald's franchisee to get access to the backend of the site, but instead spotted a curious login link on McHire.com for staff at Paradox.ai, the company that built the site.

On a whim, Carroll says he tried two of the most common sets of login credentials: The username and password “admin," and then the username and password “123456.” The second of those two tries worked. “It's more common than you'd think,” Carroll says. There appeared to be no multifactor authentication for that Paradox.ai login page.

With those credentials, Carroll and Curry could see they now had administrator access to a test McDonald's “restaurant” on McHire, and they figured out all the employees listed there appeared to be Paradox.ai developers, seemingly based in Vietnam. They found a link within the platform to apparent test job postings for that nonexistent McDonald's location, clicked on one posting, applied to it, and could see their own application on the backend system they now had access to. (In its blog post, Paradox.ai notes that the test account had “not been logged into since 2019 and frankly, should have been decommissioned.”)

That's when Carroll and Curry discovered the second critical vulnerability in McHire: When they started messing with the applicant ID number for their application—a number somewhere above 64 million—they found that they could increment it down to a smaller number and see someone else's chat logs and contact information.

The two security researchers hesitated to access too many applicants' records for fear of privacy violations or hacking charges, but when they spot-checked a handful of the 64-million-plus IDs, all of them showed very real applicant information. (Paradox.ai says that the researchers accessed seven records in total, and five contained personal information of people who had interacted with the McHire site.) Carroll and Curry also shared with WIRED a small sample of the applicants' names, contact information, and the date of their applications. WIRED got in touch with two applicants via their exposed contact information, and they confirmed they had applied for jobs at McDonald's on the specified dates.

The personal information exposed by Paradox.ai's security lapses isn't the most sensitive, Carroll and Curry note. But the risk for the applicants, they argue, was heightened by the fact that the data is associated with the knowledge of their employment at McDonald's—or their intention to get a job there. “Had someone exploited this, the phishing risk would have actually been massive,” says Curry. “It's not just people's personally identifiable information and résumé. It's that information for people who are looking for a job at McDonald's, people who are eager and waiting for emails back.”

That means the data could have been used by fraudsters impersonating McDonald's recruiters and asking for financial information to set up a direct deposit, for instance. “If you wanted to do some sort of payroll scam, this is a good approach,” Curry says.

The exposure of applicants' attempts—and in some cases failures—to get what is often a minimum-wage job could also be a source of embarrassment, the two hackers point out. But Carroll notes that he would never suggest that anyone should be ashamed of working under the Golden Arches.

“I have nothing but respect for McDonald’s workers,” he says. “I go to McDonald's all the time.”

[zeravmeta]

completely totally unrelated to any sort of "nintendo news" you might have heard about now but here's two totally wacky zany random link to both the nintendo 3ds and wii u Legally Owned Hardware homebrew guide to which you can put some Funny Files into your Legally Owned Software which take all of about one hour for both to complete

and also a completely coincidental link to the 3ds qr codes reddit where you can Legally Distinctly Acquire not only multi platform games to play on your Legal 3DS but also ROM "modifications" to games that are entirely new and better gameplay experiences

[captain-acab]

Do you have a more up to date link for a hacked spotify for android? I found your post from 2022 but the link doesn't have a version that's up to date with the version of spotify I have.

Thanks 💚

Not exactly. I actually don't use the hacked Spotify app anymore. I prefer Spotube, a free open-source app that interfaces directly with the Spotify web API. It also let's you download songs and albums directly, which the hacked app didn't do!

Overall Spotube is more stable, trustworthy (because the code source is open and community-audited), and will never be at risk Spotify patching the hack or disabling your account for violating terms of service, because it uses 100% legal software.

(P.S. the first link leads to F-Droid, an alternative app store for free, community-driven, open-source apps. That's where you can also download NewPipe, my favorite ad-free youtube app.)

[queen-mabs-revenge]

Although the rate of Trump’s arrests and deportations quantitatively falls behind the ruthless efficiency of the Biden years, this administration’s audacity and chaotic extra-legal methods are honed to incite maximum fear, repression and a chilling of speech in immigrant communities, amongst labour organisers, and Palestine solidarity activists. That these groups are in the crosshairs isn’t a unique capricious expression of Trumpian malice, this is by systematic design. The ideological fear tactics engaged against these groups specifically make perfect sense when stripping back the propaganda to look at the circuitry powering the oppressive machine. As part of the Biden administration’s ‘virtual border wall’, towers along the Arizona/Mexico border were built and operated by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer (with a massive 2024 contract awarded to expand their operations over the next decade). Israeli phone hacking software company Cellebrite has continuously been awarded contracts by ICE since 2008. Vice President JD Vance’s financial backer Peter Theil’s mass surveillance company, Palantir, has supplied ‘new tools’ to the Israeli state from the start of the genocide, while leaked internal messages show the company’s role in physically locating people marked for ICE deportation . Google and Amazon’s cloud storage hosts military data for the Israeli state as well as data and AI systems for US Customs and Border Protection's ‘machine learning surveillance tools’. The same companies who have participated in and profited off of Israel’s AI and hyper-surveillance fuelled ‘mass assassination factory’ in its genocide in Gaza and terror campaigns in the West Bank have been some of the major players in the tech-washing of state violence against people who have migrated to the US. Trump’s overt embrace of the big tech broligarchy that undergirds both Israeli genocide and US ICE terror is only the latest of his administration doing what it does best: ripping the mask of decorum off US empire and parading out the grotesque reality of capitalist violence that’s been there all along.

[deadly-espresso]

(OC: Seiteki)

Why yes, I gave this image posterization and a bit of static on purpose.

Also I ended up drawing this image as an excuseto properly talk about this guy and the current version of him so far since he's gone through so many iterations over the years since I never really knew what to do with him... [click for rambling]

Seiteki is basically Espresso's all-but-legally-stated roommate. He ended up stuck with her after some wild internet shenanigans, and Seiteki just stuck around out of convenience because, while he is a paranoid and eccentric guy who goes off the rails sometimes, Espresso values him as a walking anti-virus software (evidentially, he's never forgotten his roots as a Porygon-Z)

Seiteki has a strong admiration for the 2000s, if his blatant "scene kid" haircut is of any indication.

Seiteki is a gamer and owns a lot of consoles from the 1990s up to the 2010s, including an N64, Sega Genesis, Dreamcast, Gamecube, Wii, DSi, 3DS, Playstations 1-4, Playstation Portable, Xbox (original, 360, and One), and Game Boy Advance. He is also somewhat infamous for his PC gaming escapades as well.

Espresso doesn't know much about where Seiteki came from. He is apparently from Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan (or Jubilife City, Sinnoh?). He's picked up plenty of tongues over the years, but mainly uses Japanese and English. His Japanese uses little hiragana and is thus mostly katakana and kanji-only, similar to how robots are commonly depicted in Japanese media.

Seiteki is agender, mainly using they/them or he/him pronouns. He is gynesexual (attracted to feminine qualities, regardless of gender) and has a romantic partner named Moloko. Besides that, Seiteki doesn't have a lot of actual friendships, with his only other friendship with a Pokémon being with a Rotom named Sprays.

Seiteki frequently gets involved with Espresso's dimensional travel shenanigans, whether he wants to or not.

Seiteki knows plenty about hacking, but he's more interested in using game modifications for benign purposes such as game emulation or online play. In practice, he's what most would call a "white hat hacker" at best or a "grey hat hacker" at worst. He would NOT get along well with black hat hackers or "crackers" such as Troy Andrews.

Seiteki is rather infamous for having acquired plenty of prosthetics, such as prosthetic hair, ears, and legs. Speaking in human languages also comes naturally to him.

Due to an incident that happened after Seiteki became Espresso's roommate, Seiteki is able to assume human form (originally this version of him was going to be non-canon, but eventually I just went "yeah I'll keep it"). He initially didn't like it, but it later grew on him. That said, his human form isn't perfect, as he has black, scalding-hot "blood", a trait also seen in his natural form.

Seiteki is sometimes nicknamed by Espresso as "Eki" or "Suteki".

Seiteki's internet username would probably be "suteki_dennousenshi" or "SDS" for short.

An amusingly high amount of people on the in-universe internet are aware that Seiteki is a Porygon-Z, despite his strange behavior.

Seiteki's favorite food is lemons (skin and all), and he likes bright colors.

Seiteki's favorite "song" is the GBA crash sound. He apparently thinks it sounds like his kind's native tongue.

Seiteki's parents are unknown (whether he even HAD any is unknown). All that's really known that he has a younger sibling named Mono.

Seiteki tends to be fairly self-reliant, seeing no need for an owner or trainer. Though, the reason why is that he apparently grew up in a situation where he had no choice but to grow up fast and be self-reliant in order to survive.

The exact timbre of Seiteki's voice varies wildly. Sometimes it sounds like a young man, other times it sounds more adult (but still high-pitched), and other times it barely even sounds human (especially when he's bugging out).

Seiteki knows how to tweak.

[aratedfreyjablog]

Corner Talk about in Regards to PB's Announcement in Sharing Paid Contents

So, at this point everyone has read the recent announcement PrettyBusy has posted in regards to sharing ANY paid content. For the full announcement you can access it here but for those that just wants a sweet, small summary, it's essentially them taking legal action on anyone who:

Share any DATAMINE of PAID characters

Share any of the PAID characters FULL story, chats, etc.

So, they still allow players to share parts/bits and pieces of the paid content, just not all of it.

Though it seems like everyone can understand the whole business side of things, there's still confusion on the datamine aspect as in how is datamining is illegal, why is there legal action taken against datamining, etc.

First, I feel like people need to understand that datamining, itself, it NOT illegal. The problem is sharing datamines publicly on any social media. The reasons are for the following

Intellectual Property Rights: when companies release games, all of their contents are protected by trademarks, copyrights, and intellectual property laws. When posting content that company didn't share themselves on their own social media page or to EVERYONE (both F2P and P2W), it's infringing copyright laws since the one sharing it wasn't the one to have produced/created the work or data (think of it reposting artists work without their permission but you're sharing a work that was put in by artists and game creators of the company without their permission).

Terms of Service Violation: Many software applications, websites, and digital platforms impose terms of service (ToS) that users must agree to before using their services. These ToS often prohibit activities like reverse engineering, data scraping, or extracting data in a manner that circumvents the intended use of the service. By datamining and posting content obtained in violation of these terms, you are breaching a contractual agreement between yourself and the platform, which can lead to legal consequences.

Security: there are certain codes and firewalls set up that many (if not ALL) game companies put in as a means to detect if there is any malicious activity happening within the system that could potential harm the players (e.g., hacking and extracting players' personal information). When datamining, most people aren't aware in what form these protective barriers are set-up, so when extracting contents from the game, rather than being seen as simply getting contents for one's amusement, it can be detected as a threat by the security system.

What I wrote are only snippets of the few reasons as to the legal concerns in sharing datamine contents. And despite for other fandoms, it's not as prevalent, game companies are starting to take up action in regards to datamining, some being obvious about it while others are being discreet.

However, if we were talking about solely on the announcement, it's understandable why it would bother players, especially F2P. For other games (not saying ALL or MOST), they do eventually make the paid content accessible at some point for F2P without having to make them wait for so long. However, PB isn't taking much initiative with that, where now they're adding characters from the Solomon Seals after 3 MONTHS while, for now, not letting F2P have ANY ACCESS to limited characters from Nightmare Pass. To top that off, previously PB had promised re-runs of events, which would've allowed newer F2P to have a chance to play the event and obtain resources/characters from it. But now they have their previous events accessible behind paywall, decreasing the likelihood for event re-runs to happen. As for P2W, players are literally paying to get the character and related contents related to said character so there shouldn't be much restrictions in sharing their paid content on public platforms in the first place (this is not to say they should disrespect PB and share everything though). This is without mentioning some of the promises that have already broken based on the announcement earlier this year and last month (?) (Main story drop every 2 months, Friendship System, Comics related to Cards being posted on their Social Media, etc.).

Hopefully PB will reconsider and address some of these issues with the upcoming event for Bethel and Belphegor dropping on 6/26.

[theaceofspaades]

Orwell Franchise

Star Ranking: ★★★★⯪

Tags (on Steam): Indie, Simulation, Political, Dystopian, Story Rich, Choices Matter, Political, Adventure, Singleplayer, Detective, Interactive Fiction, Mystery, Hacking, Visual Novel, Puzzle, Atmospheric, Great Soundtrack, Point & Click, Multiple Endings, Investigation 

Steam Reviews: Mostly Positive (as of 3/9/25)

Reviews: 1,278 (as of 3/9/25)

Developer: Osmotic Studios

Publisher: Fellow Traveller

Orwell: Keeping An Eye on You and Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength might be two of the most relevant games in this day and age. In an era of digital surveillance, we find ourselves extremely used to being watched, observed, or monitored. We are all, on some level, aware of the fact that nothing we say online is private. Yet many people don’t take this fact seriously. To me, the Orwell games felt like a call to action on that front. 

Though fictional, the Orwell franchise served as a reminder to me that we do not know everything that goes on within the government and that we can never be sure about what we read. Everyone has a bias, some are positive and some are negative, but even things marketed as “bias-free” are never truly free from the little demon we all carry known as bias. This is what makes the world interesting, and by extension, what makes people formulate ideas. Even if something is still grounded in fact, it does serve to further an agenda or idea. 

Although these games show an anti-government bias as villainous and a pro-government bias as heroic, many of the messages portrayed in these games (rather laid out plainly or in subtext) are very against government surveillance and full-scale government control. I look at the Orwell games as a warning for what may be to come in this digital world we inhabit. 

In the Orwell games, you work for the government of an area known as “The Nation,” specifically a specialized division known as “The Office.” In both Orwell games, you are an investigator. Not just any investigator, though, you’re part of the team responsible for using a software called Orwell. What is Orwell?

Orwell is a digital surveillance software used by The Nation’s government. As an investigator, you are responsible for utilizing this top-secret software to gather information on possible suspects of crimes. While most of these crimes are heinous and large-scale, most of them build off of smaller, less severe crimes. In the case of Orwell: Keeping An Eye on You, your main suspect (Cassandra Watergate), was involved in a protest against The Nation’s government that turned violent quickly. Cassandra was responsible for injuring a police officer in an area known as “Freedom Plaza.” The Orwell software allows you to go through her internet posts, her criminal record, et cetera. All while dealing with the ethical and moral dilemma that comes with the fact that you are essentially stalking her. 

While this is legal under something called the “Safety Bill,” it still raises a few questions. Are you doing the right thing? Do you trust the information you see from her social posts or do you trust her friends? When faced with conflicting evidence, you’re required to make a choice: Which do you think best fits the situation? 

You’re given the option to arrest Cassandra Watergate based on information you submit to Orwell, but some of the information may not be necessarily true. Was Cassandra at the wrong place at the wrong time or was she associated with the violent acts of terrorism you’re tasked to solve? That all depends on the information you submit and what you find. You dig through news articles from The Nation’s main news source: The National Beholder, while also looking at conflicting blog posts from Cassandra and her friends that may lead you to question the integrity of The National Beholder and The Nation altogether. 

You choose what you want to submit and what you wish to believe, but the game may never confirm or deny if the data chunks you submit to Orwell were correct or not. When a data chunk has no conflict, it’s assumed that is the correct information. However, data chunks tend to conflict with each other. Do you trust the medical reports of a patient or do you trust their story? The choice is yours. 

In the second installment of the Orwell franchise, Orwell: Ignorance is Strength, the game is shorter but the message is much deeper and darker. While the information you receive in the first Orwell game doesn’t necessarily tie into the main part of the second game, certain characters (Such as the previous game’s Adviser/Interpreter, a man with the codename of Symes) do make smaller cameos and may be referenced. You don’t necessarily have to play the first Orwell game to play the second one, but it does provide some interesting background. 

While the main conflicting character, Raban Vhart, is a new character with no real connection to the previous game, he does show the same ideologies as some of the previous conflicting characters. Characters from the original game like Abraham Goldfels and Nina Maternova mix in the form of Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength’s main antagonist. 

Much like the previous game’s antagonist, Vhart is in opposition to the Government and The Nation as a whole and he is a notorious blogger with a large following. Similar to the original game’s Thought group, Vhart runs an internet blog called The People’s Voice. While I won’t cover everything related to The People’s Voice here, much like Thought in the original game, they’re an outspoken activist group that is rooted in anti-National beliefs*, while Vhart is portrayed as an antagonist, most of his beliefs are very reasonable.

Similar to Thought in the original Orwell, The People’s Voice is heavily biased and has been put under investigation because one or more of their members have been linked directly back to a violent crime. As the game progresses, you follow Rhaban Vhart and various other members of The People’s Voice as they try to navigate their complicated personal lives, all while being somewhat unaware of the fact that they’re being watched.

Unlike in the original Orwell game, Vhart is much more experienced at dodging or evading Government interference than the members of Thought were. While the concept of “Orwell” or a government surveillance device was met with skepticism and disdain, when Vhart is presented with the idea of a Government agency watching him or his site, he is already well aware of the possibility and he weaponizes it against the members of the Nation’s government, including the player character. 

Throughout Orwell: Ignorance is Strength, unlike in Orwell: Keeping An Eye on You, you find yourself actively fighting the media. As the game progresses, it grants you the ability to manipulate the media and requires you to turn those affiliated with The People’s Voice against Rhaban Vhart. It’s an interesting addition to the Orwell storyline that adds another level of depth to the game and its story.

The main problem I have with Orwell is how short the games are. Specifically in the second Orwell installment. While Orwell: Keeping An Eye on You had a relatively average playtime (4-5 hours) just to complete the base game, and approximately 2 extra hours of playtime if you decided to go and progress through the side-quests and additional objectives. While this isn’t a major gripe, Orwell: Ignorance Is Strength was noticeably shorter. Despite this fact, the story was still satisfactory and had an interesting conclusion. 

All in all, I would heavily recommend these games for a variety of reasons. Still, the main reason I had to play them personally is the fact that they are highly relevant to the current and possible future of the world we live in, especially with the rise of ethical surveillance and spyware. The Orwell franchise reminds us that everything we post, in or out of context, is permanent and can be used against us. 

[vague-humanoid]

Anas Altikriti was in London, and busy, on the day in July 2020 when his phone was hacked. He frequently works as a hostage negotiator and, at the time, he was negotiating a deal to free a hostage being held on the Libya–Chad border. Altikriti also had a meeting with former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. But his schedule did not include having his phone infiltrated by Pegasus, the phone hacking software made by Israel’s NSO Group. 

Four years later, Altikriti, an Iraqi-born British citizen and vocal critic of the United Arab Emirates, is filing a report to the Metropolitan Police in London accusing the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group of complicity in the targeted hacking of his phone. On Wednesday, he filed the complaint about NSO and its associates alongside three fellow U.K.-based human rights defenders whose phones were also hacked.

“This case has some real legs,” said Leanna Burnard, a lawyer at the nonprofit Global Legal Action Network, who prepared the complaint. “The U.K. shouldn’t stand for the hacking of human rights defenders on its own soil.”

Assembled with the help of advocates from GLAN on behalf of the victims, the extensively footnoted filing sent to the Metropolitan Police, which was obtained by The Intercept, puts the ball in the police’s court. The police now have discretion over whether to open an investigation and subsequently bring charges.

[mk-writes-stuff]

Character Intro: Cassie

Tumblr ate this post last time I tried to do it, so let’s try it again! Character intro 2 for my darling girl Cassie

Cassie is a clone of the Head of Sixth Station, Cassiopeia, so she wasn’t born in the traditional sense - she was decanted. Chronologically, she’s been decanted for about a year and a half when the story starts, but she was the physical and mental equivalent of twenty-four when she was decanted, so she’s about twenty-five now.

Cassie’s experience on Sixth Station was unpleasant, to say the least. Clones are not legally considered people anywhere on the seven stations, but Sixth Station takes that to an extreme. Cassiopeia is constantly farming clones for slave labour and, eventually, to expose to the magical radiation surrounding the stations in hopes that they’ll develop magical powers. The life of a clone is short and brutal, full of exhausting labour, strict and cruel punishments, and the knowledge of an inevitable, brutal death.

Cassie had enough. After about six months of this, she escaped and stowed away on a cargo ship bound for Seventh Station. She got out undetected, but the cargo bay was poorly insulated from the radiation surrounding them and her right arm received bad radiation exposure, forcing her to hack into a sliding door and sever it to prevent the spread of dangerous radiation-induced illness. The radiation did also give her a magical affinity for and understanding of machines, however, which she uses to her advantage.

She spent about a year on the lower half of Seventh Station, making friends, dating women, and working as hired muscle. She spent her spare time constructing a mechanical arm to replace the one she’d had severed.

Unfortunately, it all came to an end when she was sent by her supervisor to visit the upper half of Seventh Station. She was detected by radiation detectors as having magical abilities and was whisked away to become the bodyguard of the heir of Seventh Station, Belladonna - with the understanding that this was all in name and Belladonna would soon kill her to steal her magical powers.

But, for reasons unbeknownst to Cassie, Belladonna hasn’t killed her. And also, she’s really unfairly hot.

That’s Cassie for you. She likes women and punching things, in no particular order. Despite the “dumb muscle” impression she gives off with her jacked appearance and lack of decorum, there’s a lot more going on in her head than meets the eye. Cassie is an angry, passionate woman driven by a deep-seated fear of her own past and identity and a longing to make sure no one else ever has to go through what she went through. She’d do anything to help others escape their torment, but can’t bring herself to confront what happened to her - when push comes to shove, she doesn’t know what to do with her problems, other than punch them or run. She’s kind, fiercely independent, and deeply loyal to those she loves, but she struggles to address the parts of her she’s escaped.

Appearance-wise, Cassie is a tall, muscular woman with a mechanical metal arm that starts just below her shoulder for a right arm. She has a variety of hand attachments, but usually prefers a simple clamp. She has pale skin with a few scars, long blonde hair that’s constantly out of control, and mismatched eyes - one blue, one purple, although she hides the latter under an eye patch. For most of the story, she wears white armour and black clothes underneath as her guard uniform, but she’s in sweatpants the minute she’s off-duty.

Here’s a picrew of her:

Fun facts about Cassie:

She’s completely illiterate and relies on text-to-speech and dictation software for her work

She doesn’t know what a hairbrush is

Her name is Cassie because the first time she was asked for her name, she almost said “Cassiopeia” on instinct but stopped herself halfway through

Unbeknownst to her, she’s a misprint clone (meaning the brain conditioning that was given to her while she was being grown failed in some aspect). Her misprint was on the personality imprint meant to make her docile and subservient

In very early development of the story, her name was Cass

I hope you like Cassie - she’s very fun to write. As always, questions and comments are welcome!