#prevent email attacks

[stjohnstarling]

I hate to go through this all over again. On July 23rd, Itch.io, one of the most popular platforms for hosting queer and adult independent media, went through a large-scale crackdown on adult content.

This was primarily aimed at games, but novels and comics were hit in the process. Most adult content has been de-listed from the site's search, and some creators were banned without warning. Any funds banned creators have not been paid are currently being withheld by Itch.io.

This crackdown was done, as it always is, because of payment processors like Mastercard and Visa threatening to pull their services.

The payment processors caved to an influence campaign by Australian extremist anti-pornography group Collective Shout, who have been inundating Visa and Mastercard with calls to force video game platforms to stop hosting adult content - which, of course, includes anything queer.

Collective Shout claim to have sent in 1000 emails to get this result, but there are a WAY more than a thousand of us. We need as many people as possible to make as much noise as we can!

Below the cut are numbers and scripts, all you need to do is follow the step by step guide.

Graphic, contact info, alt text, and script by voiddebris on Bluesky, also available collected in a handy document:

Paypal:

Phone (US): 1-888-221-1161

Phone (outside US): 1-402-935-2050

Hours: 6am - 6pm PT

Online (for non-users or logged out - UK bc US site ONLY allows logged in users)

Mastercard:

Phone (US): 1-800-627-8372

Phone (outside US): 1-636-722-7111

Online form

Visa:

Phone (US): 1-800-847-2911

Non-US numbers

Online form

Script:

Customer Complaint Dept, This message is to lodge an official complaint about the ongoing rampant restrictions your company has placed on legal sales made by legitimate businesses. These restrictions are not only counter to the concept of freedom of speech and expression, but they harm consumers, businesses, and they harm your company’s bottom line. The following actions are absolutely necessary to protect the freedoms of your client base and the sustainability of legitimate business practices: 1. Remove from your Terms of Service any mention barring the use of your service for sale and purchase of legal products. 2. Contact Steam (Valve), Itch.io, and any other company you have previously put pressure on to retract your content restrictions. Put in place protections to prevent such restrictions from being put in place in the future without ample warning and time to contest them. If these changes aren't made then I, along with many others will be forced to seek other options for processing payments. Sincerely, A Concerned Customer

***

OTHER THINGS YOU CAN DO

Sign this petition from the ACLU:

Americans - contact your representatives about payment processors acting as censors! You can find your reps’ contact information on 5calls.org.

Script, from here:

Hello Representative/Senator [LAST NAME], -or- Hello office of Representative/Senator [LAST NAME], My name is [YOUR FIRST NAME/SCREEN NAME] and I am one of your constituents. I am calling today to express my concerns with technological censorship. Legal and legitimate adult entertainment is being banned in this country. These bans are not by legislators, but by payment processors like Mastercard and Visa. Mastercard and Visa are improperly creating legislation online through their user and merchant policies. They are banning creator and user access to content that is legal and legitimate. They are inciting fear and panic to encourage censorship. Please take a stand against this impermissible censorship. This is a direct attack on an adult's right to legal content. No one but the legislative branch should be allowed to create legislation. Please support the Federal Trade Commission in their stand against technological censorship to protect the first amendment. Thank you for taking the time to listen today.

***

UPDATE: Apparently it is Stripe specifically putting the pressure on Itch.io:

“The open case we have with Stripe right now is probably most critical right now. They apparently are or will be making a determination on the eligibility of our entire platform soon. Do what you want with that information”

Contact info for Stripe can be found here and here:

(888) 963-8955 (San Francisco HQ)

Stripe: complaints@stripe.com

Stripe Complaint Submission Form

354 Oyster Point Boulevard, South San Francisco, California, 94080

Americans, I also encourage you to file a complains against these companies with the Better Business Bureau!

And here is a website to help Americans contact their representatives:

Australians can register a concern about Collective Shout's wrongful listing as a charity:

Collective shout's profile + ABN

Raise a concern with the ACNC

[expphot0]

How Disrespect in Business—Like Ignoring Emails and Turning Down Networking—Can Lead to Cyber Attacks

Let’s get something straight right now: your crappy communication habits aren’t just annoying—they’re dangerous. That ignored email chain? It might be the reason your company gets ransomwared next month. That networking event you blew off because you were “too busy”? Could’ve been where you learned about the security vulnerability currently festering in your system. Disrespect in business isn’t…

[filehulk]

What is WormGPT?

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are expected to transform the workplace by automating everyday tasks, increasing productivity for everyone. However, AI can also be misused for illegal activities, as highlighted by the new WormGPT system. What is WormGPT? WormGPT is a harmful AI tool designed for cybercriminal activities. It is based on the GPTJ language model, developed by OpenAI, and was…

[probablyasocialecologist]

Microsoft has quietly implemented a policy blocking employee emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “genocide” on its internal Exchange servers, according to No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestine Microsoft employees. The automated filter, which silently prevents such emails from reaching recipients was first detected on Wednesday—just after Microsoft’s Build developer conference faced repeated disruptions by the activist group. Microsoft has been rocked by internal dissent over its collaboration with the Israeli military and government amid the ongoing assault on Gaza. The company has faced disruptions to its events, including protests from employees over its provision of cloud services and other critical infrastructure used by the Israeli military. Now, the company appears to be tightening its grip on internal discourse. The terms “Israel” and “P4lestine” do not trigger a block, the group said. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[...]

Just days after the October 7, 2023 attack and the start of Israeli offensive in Gaza, Microsoft started pitching to the Israeli military, anticipating major military spending. Over the next few months, Israeli military became one of Microsoft’s top 500 global customers.

22 May 2025

[joetastic2739]

Someone accessed my Gmail 2 days ago, compromising my linked accounts like Twitter and YouTube. Here's how it happened, why I fell for it, and what you can learn to avoid making the same mistake:

The scam I fell victim to was a cookie hijack. The hacker used malicious software to steal my browser cookies (stuff like autofill, auto sign in, etc), allowing them to sign in to my Gmail and other accounts, completely bypassing my 2FA and other security protocols.

A few days ago, I received a DM from @Rachael_Borrows, who claimed to be a manager at @Duolingo. The account seemed legitimate. It was verified, created in 2019, and had over 1k followers, consistent with other managers I’d seen at the time n I even did a Google search of this person and didnt find anything suspicious.

She claimed that @Duolingo wanted me to create a promo video, which got me excited and managed to get my guard down. After discussing I was asked to sign a contract and at app(.)fastsigndocu(.)com. If you see this link, ITS A SCAM! Do NOT download ANY files from this site.

Unfortunately, I downloaded a file from the website, and it downloaded without triggering any firewall or antivirus warnings. Thinking it was just a PDF, I opened it. The moment I did, my console and Google Chrome flashed. That’s when I knew I was in trouble. I immediately did an antivirus scan and these were some of the programs it found that were added to my PC without me knowing:

The thing about cookie hijacking is that it completely bypasses 2FA which should have been my strongest line of defense. I was immediately signed out of all my accounts and within a minute, they changed everything: passwords, 2FA, phone, recovery emails, backup codes, etc.

I tried all methods but hit dead ends trying to recover them. Thankfully, my Discord wasn’t connected, so I alerted everyone I knew there. I also had an alternate account, @JLCmapping, managed by a friend, which I used to immediately inform @/TeamYouTube about the situation

Meanwhile, the hackers turned my YouTube channel into a crypto channel and used my Twitter account to spam hundreds of messages, trying to use my image and reputation to scam more victims

Thankfully, YouTube responded quickly and terminated the channel. Within 48 hours, they locked the hacker out of my Gmail and restored my access. They also helped me recover my channel, which has been renamed to JoetasticOfficial since Joetastic_ was no longer available.

Since then, I’ve taken several steps to secure my accounts and prevent this from happening again. This has been a wake-up call to me, and now I am more cautious around people online. I hope sharing it helps others avoid falling victim to similar attacks. (End)

(side note) Around this time, people also started to impersonate me on TikTok and YouTube. With my accounts terminated, anyone searching for "Joetastic" would only find the imposter's profiles. I’m unsure whether they are connected or if it’s just an unfortunate coincidence, but it made the situation even more stressful.

[artfight]

Important Announcement

A now-patched breach of security has occurred on Art Fight. To learn about this issue in full detail, please read the following newspost:

Below is a FAQ regarding the exploit. We highly recommend that you reset your password and enable 2FA if you have interacted with the site recently. If you need any assistance, please send a support email to the following address: support@artfight.zendesk.com

The inbox will be opened shortly to respond to user questions and concerns. Anonymous will be turned off for the time being, please let us know if you prefer that your ask is answered privately.

How did this happen?

Our BBCode system had a vulnerability flaw in it that was temporarily exploited to attempt to gain user credentials, but it has since been patched.

What do we do?

If you believe you may have been affected, please change your password to something unique and secure. We also recommend keeping an eye out on your other accounts, and to change the passwords on them if they shared any credentials as your Art Fight account (so same email or same password).

How do we know if you were affected by this exploit?

If you accessed the comments of the most recent news post (Terms of Service Updates), there is a chance your browser was exposed to the XSS script, and we recommend resetting your password ASAP to be safe.

What are you doing to prevent this from happening again?

Our hard-working dev team has already patched this exploit, as well as added additional security measures to help prevent this from happening again in the future. We will also be proactively doing a security review to help locate any other security concerns. Two Factor Authentication (2FA) has been established as a feature on the site that can be found in your settings.

I'm nervous about going onto the site at all now! What if my account gets hacked/stolen/etc?

Art Fight's dev team has patched the vulnerability that this incident has revealed, and has added additional security to catch/stop malicious scripts before they can affect the userbase. All instances of the previous malicious script have been removed from the website, meaning that it is once again safe to view the last news post! We are working hard to continue to keep users safe, so you don't need to worry about accessing anything on the site. If you come across anything potentially concerning, please don't hesitate to forward it to a moderator - we're happy to look into it!

What information might've been taken from me?

The XSS attack attempted to collect autofilled Art Fight log in information--emails and passwords--from users. No other information (like birthdays) should have been collected through this script. If you use the same email/password combo, or same password anywhere else, we recommend changing to ensure your accounts stay secure.

[randomperson54321]

i’ve got some tough news: This morning, Senators Blackburn and Blumenthal reintroduced the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).1

After successfully killing this pro-censorship and surveillance bill last session, it’s back, and we’re jumping into action to stop it again.

Can you rush an urgent donation to Fight for the Future today to jump start our stop KOSA fight?

DONATE TO STOP KOSA

It is honestly unfathomable that in the current political climate lawmakers are putting forward legislation that would give the Trump administration more tools to silence perspectives they don’t like. Over the past five months they have disappeared, deported, and defunded people and organizations who have exercised their first amendment rights.2,3,4

The fact that lawmakers are watching all this happen, and are still willing to support KOSA, is unconscionable.

If KOSA passes, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be able to say that any topic they want to stop people from talking about causes “harm” to kids, and force platforms to censor it. And we don’t have to guess what they would target, since FTC Chair Andrew Fergusson said if confirmed he’d fight the “trans agenda.”5

It’s unfortunately not surprising that Senator Blumenthal, the Democratic sponsor of the bill, doesn’t seem to care about the harm his bill would cause. Sen. Blumenthal has consistently ignored the hundreds of organizations that have raised concerns about how KOSA would impact the LGBTQ+ community, access to information on reproductive rights, and everyone's free expression online.

But we do think there is a good opportunity to strip other lawmakers’ support for KOSA in the face of Trump’s attack on human rights. We have a plan to continue working with our anti-censorship coalition, the hundreds of thousands of parents, young people, and activists who have already helped stop KOSA, and to kill this dangerous bill again.

Your support made all this organizing possible over the last few years, and it’s what will keep fueling this fight now. Please make a gift today to fight against KOSA and to support real solutions that will help keep everyone safe online.

Lawmakers are trying to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a dangerous bill that would give the government unprecedented control over the internet and force platforms to spy on youth.

90+ rights groups agree KOSA won’t make kids more safe. Instead, it’ll put youth in danger by subjecting them to surveillance and preventing them from accessing resources they need.

Believe in a free and open internet? Join me and take action: https://stopkosa.com/?source=email&

Together, we can stop KOSA again,

Caitlin and the team at Fight for the Future

P.S. If you’ve been with us for a bit, you know this is a long-term fight. Yes, we need to stop KOSA today, but there will be more bad bills. And we know we need to keep building an organized movement against censorship and surveillance. So if you can, consider starting a monthly donation today. This will help us know we can keep fighting, month-after-month, no matter what.

Footnotes:

1. Blumenthal Press Release: https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal-blackburn-thune-and-schumer-introduce-the-kids-online-safety-act

2. The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/28/trump-immigration-people-detained-deported-cases

3. New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-university-college.html

4. CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/08/politics/universities-medical-research-funding-frozen-trump-diversity-purge

5. The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/10/24318388/trump-ftc-chair-pick-andrew-ferguson-censorship-tech-companies

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Every complex ecosystem has parasites

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

It's a very well-argued piece, and here's the nut of it:

The marginal return of permitting fraud against you is plausibly greater than zero, and therefore, you should welcome greater than zero fraud.

In other words, if you allow some fraud, you will also allow through a lot of non-fraudulent business that would otherwise trip your fraud meter. Or, put it another way, the only way to prevent all fraud is to chase away a large proportion of your customers, whose transactions are in some way abnormal or unexpected.

Another great explainer is Bruce Schneier, the security expert. In the wake of 9/11, lots of pundits (and senior government officials) ran around saying, "No price is too high to prevent another terrorist attack on our aviation system." Schneier had a foolproof way of shutting these fools up: "Fine, just ground all civilian aircraft, forever." Turns out, there is a price that's too high to pay for preventing air-terrorism.

Latent in these two statements is the idea that the most secure systems are simple, and while simplicity is a fine goal to strive for, we should always keep in mind the maxim attributed to Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." That is to say, some things are just complicated.

20 years ago, my friend Kathryn Myronuk and I were talking about the spam wars, which were raging at the time. The spam wars were caused by the complexity of email: as a protocol (rather than a product), email is heterogenuous. There are lots of different kinds of email servers and clients, and many different ways of creating and rendering an email. All this flexibility makes email really popular, and it also means that users have a wide variety of use-cases for it. As a result, identifying spam is really hard. There's no reliable automated way of telling whether an email is spam or not – you can't just block a given server, or anyone using a kind of server software, or email client. You can't choose words or phrases to block and only block spam.

Many solutions were proposed to this at the height of the spam wars, and they all sucked, because they all assumed that the way the proposer used email was somehow typical, thus we could safely build a system to block things that were very different from this "typical" use and not catch too many dolphins in our tuna nets:

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

So Kathryn and I were talking about this, and she said, "Yeah, all complex ecosystems have parasites." I was thunderstruck. The phrase entered my head and never left. I even gave a major speech with that title later that year, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:

https://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt

Truly, a certain degree of undesirable activity is the inevitable price you pay once you make something general purpose, generative, and open. Open systems – like the web, or email – succeed because they are so adaptable, which means that all kinds of different people with different needs find ways to make use of them. The undesirable activity in open systems is, well, undesirable, and it's valid and useful to try to minimize it. But minimization isn't the same as elimination. "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero," because "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Complexity is generative, but "all complex ecosystems have parasites."

America is a complex system. It has, for example, a Social Security apparatus that has to serve more than 65 million people. By definition, a cohort of 65 million people will experience 65 one-in-a-million outliers every day. Social Security has to accommodate 65 million variations on the (surprisingly complicated) concept of a "street address":

https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298bbf0886

It will have to cope with 65 million variations on the absolutely, maddeningly complicated idea of a "name":

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

In cybernetics, we say that a means of regulating a system must be capable of representing as many states as the system itself – that is, if you're building a control box for a thing with five functions, the box needs at least five different settings:

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html

So when we're talking about managing something as complicated as Social Security, we need to build a Social Security Administration that is just as complicated. Anything that complicated is gonna have parasites – once you make something capable of managing the glorious higgeldy piggeldy that is the human experience of names, dates of birth, and addresses, you will necessarily create exploitable failure modes that bad actors can use to steal Social Security. You can build good fraud detection systems (as the SSA has), and you can investigate fraud (as the SSA does), and you can keep this to a manageable number – in the case of the SSA, that number is well below one percent:

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12948/IF12948.2.pdf

But if you want to reduce Social Security fraud from "a fraction of one percent" to "zero percent," you can either expend a gigantic amount of money (far more than you're losing to fraud) to get a little closer to zero – or you can make Social Security far simpler. For example, you could simply declare that anyone whose life and work history can't fit in a simple database schema is not eligible for Social Security, kick tens of millions of people off the SSI rolls, and cause them to lose their homes and starve on the streets. This isn't merely cruel, it's also very, very expensive, since homelessness costs the system far more than Social Security. The optimum amount of fraud is non-zero.

Conservatives hate complexity. That's why the Trump administration banned all research grants for proposals that contained the word "systemic" (as a person with so-far-local cancer, I sure worry about what happens when and if my lymphoma become systemic). I once described the conservative yearning for "simpler times," as a desire to be a child again. After all, the thing that made your childhood "simpler" wasn't that the world was less complicated – it's that your parents managed that complexity and shielded you from it. There's always been partner abuse, divorce, gender minorities, mental illness, disability, racial discrimination, geopolitical crises, refugees, and class struggle. The only people who don't have to deal with this stuff are (lucky) children.

Complexity is an unavoidable attribute of all complicated processes. Evolution is complicated, so it produces complexity. It's convenient to think about a simplified model of genes in which individual genes produce specific traits, but it turns out genes all influence each other, are influenced in turn by epigenetics, and that developmental factors play a critical role in our outcomes. From eye-color to gender, evolution produces spectra, not binaries. It's ineluctably (and rather gloriously) complicated.

The conservative project to insist that things can be neatly categorized – animal or plant, man or woman, planet or comet – tries to take graceful bimodal curves and simplify them into a few simple straight lines – one or zero (except even the values of the miniature transistors on your computer's many chips are never at "one" or "zero" – they're "one-ish" and "mostly zero").

Like Social Security, fraud in the immigration system is a negligible rounding error. The US immigration system is a baroque, ramified, many-tendriled thing (I have the receipts from the immigration lawyers who helped me get a US visa, a green card, and citizenship to prove it). It is already so overweighted with pitfalls and traps for the unwary that a good immigration lawyer might send you to apply for a visa with 600 pages of documentation (the most I ever presented) just to make sure that every possible requirement is met:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/in/photolist-zp6PxJ-4q9Aqs-2nVHTZK-2pFKHyf

After my decades of experience with the US immigration system, I am prepared to say that the system is now at a stage where it is experiencing sharply diminishing returns from its anti-fraud systems. The cost of administering all this complexity is high, and the marginal amount of fraud caught by any new hoop the system gins up for migrants to jump through will round to zero.

Which poses a problem for Trump and trumpists: having whipped up a national panic about out of control immigration and open borders, the only way to make the system better at catching the infinitesimal amount of fraud it currently endures is to make the rules simpler, through the blunt-force tactic of simply excluding people who should be allowed in the country. For example, you could ban college kids planning to spend the summer in the US on the grounds that they didn't book all their hotels in advance, because they're planning to go from city to city and wing it:

https://www.newsweek.com/germany-tourists-deported-hotel-maria-lepere-charlotte-pohl-hawaii-2062046

Or you could ban the only research scientist in the world who knows how to interpret the results of the most promising new cancer imaging technology because a border guard was confused about the frog embryos she was transporting (she's been locked up for two months now):

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/horrified-harvard-scientists-ice-arrest-leaves-cancer-researchers-scrambling/ar-AA1DlUt8

Of course, the US has long operated a policy of "anything that confuses a border guard is grounds for being refused entry" but the Trump administration has turned the odd, rare outrage into business-as-usual.

But they can lock up or turn away as many people as they want, and they still won't get the amount of fraud to zero. The US is a complicated place. People have complicated reasons for entering the USA – work, family reunion, leisure, research, study, and more. The only immigration system that doesn't leak a little at the seams is an immigration system that is so simple that it has no seams – a toy immigration system for a trivial country in which so little is going on that everything is going on.

The only garden without weeds is a monoculture under a dome. The only email system without spam is a closed system managed by one company that only allows a carefully vetted cluster of subscribers to communicate with one another. The only species with just two genders is one wherein members who fit somewhere else on the spectrum are banished or killed, a charnel process that never ends because there are always newborns that are outside of the first sigma of the two peaks in the bimodal distribution.

A living system – a real country – is complicated. It's a system, where people do things you'll never understand for perfectly good reasons (and vice versa). To accommodate all that complexity, we need complex systems, and all complex ecosystems have parasites. Yes, you can burn the rainforest to the ground and planting monocrops in straight rows, but then what you have is a farm, not a forest, vulnerable to pests and plagues and fire and flood. Complex systems have parasites, sure, but complex systems are resilient. The optimal level of fraud is never zero, because a system that has been simplified to the point where no fraud can take place within it is a system that is so trivial and brittle as to be useless.

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/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times

[faerie-hideaway]

🚨Reblog for Awareness!

Hello everyone,

Recently RFK Jr has publicly said that he wants to collect medical data from private insurances (and other agencies and sources) in order to enter the data into a database to track people with Autism. He also mentioned they are creating an Autism Registry where people with Autism's data will be tracked and linked back to the patient they are studying.

With that, this is a HIPPA violation, among other things. I implore you to please reach out to your representatives regarding this. This is a slippery slope. RFK Jr is aiming to find a cure to Autism and identify toxins that cause Autism. In case you didn't already know, Autism is a neurotype and not a disease. It cannot be cured. Many have pointed out that because Autism tends to be genetic that this could turn into a Eugenics problem, as the government is trying to prevent Autistic people from being encouraged to reproduce, and stop Autism altogether. As a result of that, normal people are calling for sterilization of Autistic people, and being fed misinformation regarding Autism and vaccines. RFK Jr is refusing to listen to Autism organizations and advocates, but you can speak up!

Please follow the link below to this Google doc that has email templates to send to your representatives. With your help, we can end this targeted attack on those with Autism and this will ultimately protect your medical data rights and honestly probably avoid things like what happened in the Holocaust as well.

[softtdaisy]

to be held / Aaron Hotchner

summary. you have an anxiety attack and all you need is the arms of your bodyguard

words count. 2 590 

what to expect. mention of anxiety, reader has an anxiety attack and these two are stupid in love

a/n. is this becoming my favorite series? maybe but i'm so obsessed i want to write more of these two so please if you have any idea you can request it 🤍

bodyguard masterlist | criminal minds masterlist | F1 masterlist | general masterlist | request

Time: 1:23 am.

Number of rolling over in the bed: around 30.

It was one of those nights. One where your anxiety was getting the upper hand on your sanity. 

The last couple of days haven’t been the easiest either. Maybe this explained why your heart kept beating faster and your breath kept getting stuck in your throat. 

Your stalker has sent you new pictures. At first, you didn’t even pay attention to them. You received them through a new email address. Since neither Hotch nor his team saw the threat, you didn’t open the message immediately, letting it sleep in your mailbox the whole day.

You had dinner with Hotch that evening. It didn’t happen as much as you wished; that man had a lot of work and often ate in his room, on his computer. Sometimes you would call a friend to give you company, sometimes you would write or compose a song, and some nights you would just stay by yourself, enjoying the silence.

But that night, Hotch stayed with you. You told him some memories from your last tour, and he listened. This was a consistent pattern of communication. You talked, and he listened. You offered to invite him to your next concert. And you ignored the heartache you got when he answered, “Sure, I’ll come.”

Having no idea when you would be able to go on tour again.

Knowing that the day you could, Hotch wouldn’t be by your side anymore.

Scared that when he would leave this place, he would leave your life too.

And so after dinner, he was smoking on your balcony, checking on his phone. You remembered laughing at your dirty thought that you wished he could use his experienced finger on you instead of his cigarette. The last moment of peace you got before finally reading your mail.

“Hope you bought the red one, love,” it said. Linked with pictures of you trying on dresses earlier that week for an event. Most of the pictures were blurry, but there were some distinctive elements. Like your naked shoulder. Or Hotch’s presence in the corner. That was the scariest part for you. Even your bodyguard couldn’t have prevented it.

The rest of the night was just…blurry. You screamed and didn’t see Hotch run back inside. Suddenly you felt his arm around you, holding you against his chest, while his other arm straightened, with his gun in front of him. Even when he realized there was no threat inside and took your phone from your hand, he didn’t let you go.

“I’m here,” he repeated multiple times in your ear. You remember, he whispered. Because his voice never sounded so soft, even with a directive tone. With your eyes closed, you could picture his voice. Imagining a whole painting from it.

It helped you fall asleep that night while he spent the next hours working on your case with his team.

It helped you fall asleep the following nights when you could still see the pictures clearly in your head anytime you closed your eyes.

But tonight, it didn’t help you.

And maybe it was because you knew Hotch wasn’t there.

It didn’t happen much, less than once a week. But some days, he would leave and not come back until hours later or the following day.

“I know you’re going to your other wife,” you told him one day in a very dramatic tone. You always made fun of him for leaving early in the morning, almost like a cheater who was indeed trying to escape discreetly. 

“What can I say?” he replied, with a shrug. “The kids are waiting for me.” He couldn’t contain his smile when you looked at him with big eyes and your mouth open, too surprised Aaron Hotchner had joked with you.

Oh, how you would do everything to hear him laugh right now.

You didn’t realize how bad your anxiety was—or actually you knew but tried to pretend it wasn’t that bad—until you went to grab your phone and noticed your hand shaking. You quickly lit up the room, hoping it would help. But it got worse when it felt like the whole room was moving and your vision was getting blurry.

And the only thought in your mind was that you needed Hotch right now.

You didn’t know how you managed to, but you got up and walked to your living room. Your legs felt so weak that you kept a hand on the wall like it could save you from falling. You weren’t convinced about the efficacy of this, but it worked. 

“Sorry?” you said in a low voice. So low that you barely heard yourself. But Alvez, the agent there for the night, did. You could see the confusion in his eyes and the worry when he saw your condition. You lost all the color in your face and looked like you were close to breaking down. You were. “Do you know when Aaron is coming back?”

“Hotch isn’t supposed to come until the morning. Why?”

A heartache. A big one. Almost like a knife hammered right in your heart. 

“Nothing. I… I just needed… You know what? Never mind.”

Suddenly going back to your bed felt impossible. You opened the door to your room again but glided against the wall until you sat on the floor. Soon, the tears were running down your face, and your sobbings seemed so loud you didn’t hear the agent behind the door calling Hotch.

“I don’t know, she's asking for you. She doesn’t look great. No, she went back to her room.”

The ride was thirty minutes. Hotch did it in twenty.

Usually, coming back to your place was light. Not that he could forget about the case and why he was there in the first place. And if he was asked, he would deny it. But it almost felt like coming home.

But tonight, all Hotch could feel was the heaviness of the situation. Alvez was quick to tell him you hadn’t moved from your room, and he respected the instruction that nobody should enter your bedroom without your permission. You deserved intimacy, and only an emergency allowed them to open your door. 

This one was a particular situation. Hotch was the only one who could feel the emergency of the situation. 

After he put his hand on your door handle, it took him a second to open it. Your case wasn’t scaring him, even if that bastard was driving him insane. But the idea of you breaking down was awful to him. He took a big breath before finally stepping into the so-dark room. 

Hotch didn’t see you at first. You were nowhere to be seen. Not on your bed, where he expected you to be at 2 am. Not by the window, where you loved to stand when your thoughts were getting too loud.

“Hello, beautiful.”

He looked down and saw you, still standing on the floor, your back against the wall. Hotch was soon on his knees in front of you, a hand on your knee and the other on your face. He moved it slowly, looking for any sign of…well, whatever could tell him what happened while he wasn’t there. And he found it, somehow, with the stains of your tears on your cheeks. 

You followed as his eyes were scanning every millimeter of your face. You almost found it funny how you flirted with him non-stop since he started working for you, but it took an anxiety attack to get him to look at you like that.

After a moment, Hotch’s eyes landed on yours. “Do you want to tell me what happened?” he asked in a deep but calm voice. That man was bossy. You heard him giving orders to members of his team like it was the most natural thing to do. Making you wonder if he was talking like that to everybody. Everybody but you.

The sudden realization that he wasn’t asking to know; he was asking if you wanted to share it with him made you sob again. You made that man drive around the city in the middle of the night because you were anxious about his absence, and still, he wasn’t waiting for an explanation if you weren’t ready to give him one.

You needed Hotch to be safe.

But you needed Aaron to feel safe. 

The words left your mouth before you got the time to think about them. “I needed you,” you whispered in another cry.

You could have easily missed the subtle way his head moved because of your blurry vision. You could have missed the brief smile on his lips—you needed him. But you couldn’t have missed the way his arms moved slowly. Not to hold you, no. To carry you. One arm under your knee, the other on your back. “And I’m here,” he replied, still looking at you right in the eyes. Making sure his words made their way to your brain. To your heart. 

It wasn’t until he lifted you up and you could cuddle your face in the crook of his neck that you noticed his look: his messy hair, the dark circles under his glossy and tired eyes, and the little salt-and-pepper beard that he didn’t shave this morning. It was past 2 am, and he hadn't slept since last night. If you asked him, he would say it was his job, and he had no complaints to make about that. 

You still felt guilty.

“I’m sorry.”

You thought Aaron didn’t hear you. Or he pretended not to; you weren’t so sure. The darkness in the room hid the tense in his jaw when he actually heard you. 

He kept walking, from the wall to your bed, without saying a single word. He still hadn’t said anything when he laid you on the bed in the softest way. And still nothing when he sat next to you and brought his fingers to your forehead to put away the wet hair stuck on your skin.

“I don’t ever want you to be sorry for needing me.” It was almost mesmerizing how he could easily look you in the eyes all the time. “Is it clear?” That was Aaron Hotchner in all his splendor, commanding in all situations.

You simply nodded at first. Too stunned to reply anything at that man clearly asking you to need him whenever you felt like it. Too stunned by the beauty of this same man simply illuminated by the reflection of the moon afar. Too stunned by the feeling of his finger still on your face, tracing an invisible line from your forehead to your jaw. 

The last one was a necessity for Hotch. To see that his absence didn’t break you.

“I know this isn’t procedure, but…” You closed your eyes, almost ashamed of your proposition. The truth was, you thought about it a lot. The whole time alone in bed, remembering that Hotch wasn’t in the room next to yours. You told yourself that if he was there, you would have reached for him. But now that he was right next to you, his elbow next to your chest, so close you could feel the heat of his body on yours, it was harder. Harder to ask. Harder to assume. “Do you think you could stay with me? Tonight?”

Hotch stayed silent again. You could have meant so many things.

Staying around, at your apartment, and not leaving again. Even though it would have been unlikely for him to leave again after coming back.

Staying in your room, simply around to make sure you would sleep well and nothing would happen to you. 

But he knew. From the insecurity in your voice when you asked him that. You were never insecure, certainly not with him. But this time it was a question of flirting or playing around with a desire you both had for each other. 

It was about feeling safe in someone else's arms. Something you couldn’t experience anymore.

You felt his hand on your face again, and his thumb brushing your temple softly. “One minute,” he whispered. You didn’t open your eyes but felt his body leaving your bed. Making it lighter, sure, but emptier, mostly. You heard the door closing and nothing else.

You didn’t hear Hotch talk to the other agent. “Go home, I’ll stay here.” 

The benefit of being the boss was that he had no explanation to give. Not that Hotch would have been ashamed to say he would be staying in your room—something you asked for. His job was to take care of you and do what you needed to be in security.

Was it all professional, though?

When he came back to your room, you were still lying with your eyes closed. He leaned against the door, his arms crossed against his chest. That had been a hell of a night, working on a case he hated and then getting the phone call that you needed him. He imagined so many terrible scenarios. So awful that seeing you peacefully lying on your bed healed something in him he didn’t even know was bruised.

“I can feel you, Aaron Hotchner.” 

A laugh escaped his lips. “You need to sleep now,” he said, walking back to your bed. He sat against the headboard, his legs resting above your quilt. Instinctively, you turned around, your head resting against his thigh.

This was the closest you’ve ever been to Aaron, except for the moment when he put his arm around you to protect you or when you held his arm at some event. This was something different. This was intimate.

“I’m scared.” You mumbled, your voice muffled against his jeans’ material. 

Hotch brought his hand to your back, making his fingers travel all over it slowly and softly, giving you goosebumps. “Of what?” 

“Everything.” You moved your head a little, just enough so you could open your eyes and look at him. You weren’t surprised that his look was already on your face. “Of my stalker, sure. I feel like this isn’t going to end, and it’s driving me insane.”

You were met by silence. Because he knew there was more than this. 

“And at the same time, I’m scared of the day you’ll leave me.” 

Hotch’s hand stopped moving; it was fully open against your back. You didn’t know if he was the one who pushed you softly or if you moved closer to him by yourself, but soon you were cuddling harder against your bodyguard. So close you heard the breath he let go at the thought of leaving you. 

You imagined many different answers from him when the thought first came to you. That this was his job—classic. That it was meant to happen—logical. That it would mean you were safe again—reassuring. 

But he said something else. 

“We shouldn’t think about it right now.” When his hand moved again to the top of your back, his fingers slipped under your collar to caress your neck.

Not just you. We. 

The idea of losing you was something that was haunting Hotch too. 

It didn’t take you long to fall asleep with him by your side. While he stayed awake watching you and wondering

How was he going to go on with his life the day this case would be over and he would have to say goodbye to the woman that woke up feelings he had shut down years ago?

Tag List: @kiwriteswords@monzabee@raysmayhem-72 (if you want to be in it, ask me and I’ll be happy to add you x)

[zentarablog]

10 Common Cyber Threats and How to Avoid Them

In our increasingly connected world, cybersecurity is no longer just a concern for large corporations; it’s a fundamental aspect of daily life for individuals, families, and small businesses alike. The convenience of online banking, shopping, and social networking comes with the inherent risk of cyber threats, which are constantly evolving in sophistication and frequency. Cybercriminals are…

[mariacallous]

If the policies of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. aren’t reversed, “a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases.”

Unfortunately, that quote is not attributable to Chicken Little. Instead, it’s the opinion of Dr. Fiona Havers, formerly a top scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who resigned from the agency Monday.

In her first interview after leaving, Havers told the New York Times that Kennedy’s attacks on science and how science is conducted will have dire consequences.

“It’s a very transparent, rigorous process, and they have just taken a sledgehammer to it in the last several weeks,” she said. “CDC processes are being corrupted in a way that I haven’t seen before.”

At the CDC, Havers oversaw the team that collects data on COVID-19 and RSV hospitalizations and helped craft national vaccine policy.

In a goodbye email to her colleagues that was seen by Reuters, Havers said she no longer had confidence that her team’s output would “be used objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions.”

Kennedy’s attacks on vaccination, coupled with the shocking firing of all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices earlier this month, helped persuade her to go.

The health secretary has since named eight replacements to the influential panel. Among them are a scientist who criticized COVID-19 vaccines, a critic of pandemic-era lockdowns and another person the Associated Press described as “widely considered to be a leading source of vaccine misinformation.”

“I could not be party to legitimizing this new committee,” Havers told the Times.

“I have utmost respect for my colleagues at CDC who stay and continue to try and limit the damage from the inside,” she added. “What happened last week was the last straw for me.”

[taikeero-lecoredier]

Chat Control to return on the agenda this month

Tweet link For those unaware, Chat Control is a European proposal that aim to prevent people from sending videos,pictures or links through private messages and emails unless they agree to be scanned by artificial intelligence to "fight against csem". While the intention seems good this would open a door to mass surveillance and vulnerabilities that hackers can easily exploit,and given all the recent cyber attacks through the world, they dont need to have their job become even easier. Without even talking about the false positives this would trigger. There are better ways to keep children safe online. Chat Control is not it. Even messages from minors wont be exempt from being scanned. TAKE ACTION HERE !

JOIN OUR DISCORD SERVER ! American followers, please reblog this,because this goes in the same hand as KOSA does, and its very likely Europe will be geo blocked from messaging services if it passes, cutting off communication with your European friends. (and the possibility that the US govt will use Chat Control as "inspiration" if it passes) See more of my posts on chat control

[probablyasocialecologist]

The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

[...]

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death — likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years. The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

24 September 2024

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice:

Though it’s largely already been forgotten, 2024 was not a completely peaceful election. Anonymous terrorists, probably working for Russia, sent bomb threats to numerous majority Black and Native American polling places in battleground states in an effort to disrupt voting and aid the Trump campaign.

The threats were widely reported on Election Day itself. However, in the aftermath of Trump’s narrow but definitive win, there has been little discussion of these egregious, deliberate attacks on democracy in general, and on the voting rights of Black and Native American people in particular. Analysts have instead focused on whether the Democrats and Kamala Harris should have run further to the left or further to the right or further in some other direction. The bomb threats did not change the election outcome, so it’s perhaps understandable that they have not been a focus of the collective, apparently endless post-election autopsy. But the lack of interest in an egregious assault on American democracy is a mistake. The attacks demonstrate how fragile our democracy is. And they provide a blueprint for the MAGA regime to tamper in elections in the future. The fact that incoming president Donald Trump can and probably would try to block investigations into Russia’s involvement — and into the Trump campaign’s potential involvement as well — is chilling. If we want to prevent attacks like this in the future, it’s important not to instantly memory hole the attack that just happened.

A coordinated attack on democracy, and on Democrats

The hoax bomb threats on Election Day were sent to polling locations in the swing states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona. The FBI said that many of the threats “appear[ed] to originate from Russian email domains.”

None of the threats were credible, and no bombs were found. However, the threats did cause disruptions in Georgia, where five polling places were evacuated. Hours were extended at those locations to ensure all voters could cast their ballots. Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State best known for refusing to aid Trump in his coup attempt in 2020, argued that Russia was attempting to undermine faith in the US system of government. The Russians are “up to mischief it seems,” he said. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair and accurate election.” This is probably true, as far as it goes. But it seems important to note that the bomb threats weren’t just randomly distributed attempts to undermine the electoral process. Like threats of violence in the 2020 election, they were intended specifically to target and discourage Democratic voters in key swing states.

Polls heading into November 5 indicated the election would be extremely close, so whoever was behind the threats had good reason to believe that even minor disruptions in Democratic leaning areas could tip the balance and hand Trump a win in a tight race. In the event, Trump’s win was large enough, and the disruptions small enough, that they didn’t change the outcome. But the pattern of interference nonetheless makes it clear which side was being targeted. Fulton County, Georgia, a Democratic stronghold with a 43.7 percent plurality of Black voters, received 32 bomb threats by email and phone. Neighboring DeKalb county (53.7 percent Black) was also targeted for threats. Police had to sweep six polling locations. Similarly, bomb threats in Pennsylvania were directed at polling locations in Democratic majority city Philadelphia. In Wisconsin, Madison was targeted; in Michigan, Detroit. In Arizona, polling locations on the lands of the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe were both threatened. Native voters tend to favor Democrats (as they did this year, despite some misleading early exit polls).

Russia helps Trump because Trump helps Russia

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Putin would attempt to help Trump. Russian election interference globally has been designed to advance the far right and boost candidates friendly to Russia’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin. Putin has been doling out money to boost and buy the allegiance of far right candidates across Europe, focusing especially on getting Europe to abandon Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2022. His interference in Romania’s recent election on behalf of far right candidate Călin Georgescu was so egregious that the Romanian Constitutional Court invalidated the election results.

And of course Putin interfered in the 2016 presidential election, waging a sweeping electoral interference campaign. Russian intelligence hacked the Democratic National Committee network, stealing and releasing private emails, which drove news cycles throughout the campaign and boosted Trump, who won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. (Trump continues to deny there was any election interference, because of course he does.) According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which was launched after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey amid a probe of his campaign’s connections with the Kremlin, Russia attempted to hack the DNC shortly after Trump publicly urged Putin to expose and disseminate Hillary Clinton’s emails. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” Trump said, live on television. A Senate investigation found numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016. And Putin tried again to help Trump (unsuccessfully) in 2020. In return, Trump has consistently and successfully undermined support for Ukraine within the GOP while legitimizing Putin as a global player.

Trump’s link to Russia were not fully investigated or prosecuted after 2016 because Trump, with the power of the presidency behind him, did everything he could to delegitimize and block the investigation in ways that may well have constituted obstruction of justice. He was aided in that by a Republican Party dead set against any suggestion that the 2016 election victory that allowed them to stack the Supreme Court and cut taxes for billionaires was in any way compromised. Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general (who has subsequently become a Trump critic), downplayed and mischaracterized Mueller’s report about Russian interference, creating a narrative that helped the right to dismiss the findings. Supposedly moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins refused to even consider impeachment on the basis of Trump’s links to Russia. This is, to put it mildly, an ominous precedent for investigation of, and accountability for, Russian bomb threats during 2024. Raffensperger (again, a Trump critic) wouldn’t even acknowledge that the threats were intended to help Trump.

[...] Putin, Trump, and Republicans have learned that potentially violent election interference targeting Democratic voters is fine as long as you win. If they aren’t made to pay some sort of price, why wouldn’t they do it again?

Bomb threats at swing state polling places on Election Day were a Russian campaign to intimidate potential Kamala Harris supporters.

[under-your-floorboards]

THIS IS A PSA:

I want to see more of Will expanding their reaches of medical practice at Camp Half Blood.

Not only are they understaffed, but the equipment is probably outdated, and their textbooks needed to be updated badly.

Will Solace talking to Chiron about starting a required medical training course 101 for non Apollo kids; quests without healers, random monster attacks, any kind of injury where a healer cannot get to them so they can know what to do themselves and self sustain until they fix it or help arrives.

Will Solace starting a network with pharmaceutical suppliers under the guise of being an on campus clinic for a private school. (Which it basically is) getting access to equipment, birth control, proper prescriptions for disorders and health problems that can’t be helped on Nectar alone, other kinds of over the counter medication, pain relievers and sedatives, gender affirming care, etc.

Will Solace emailing Pre-Med professors of esteemed institutions to get their input on practice regulations and follow up’s on articles he read, getting insight on the proper literature to look for to add to the infirmary shelves.

Will Solace working with the Demeter cabin to grow medicinal herbs because he doesn’t totally disregard the power of Ancient Greek physicians work (the bruise salves work really well)

Will Solace speaking with the nymphs and Coach or Grover about how to better help in case of any emergencies (we don’t want a repeat of Eurydice) cause other species require different healing methods.

Will Solace building the Infirmary from the ground up to actually be a productive system that helps demigods on their way in life, not just preventing their life from ending because he’s awesome like that and he sees the flaws in their current situation and strives to fix them.