#02/2008

[carbone14]

Réplique du planeur Airspeed AS. 51 Horsa – Mémorial Pegasus – Ranville – Calvados – Février 2008

Photograhe : Fodfish

[blinkandyoumissit]

Patrick Stump as Marty Dressler on Law & Order S18 E02 "Darkness" - supercut (air date: 02 JAN 2008)

[ video source ]

[1nkstainedsoul]

i find it cool yet so funny that a lot of my favorite shows come from a time where i was not born

like, yes it was a part of my childhood. yes, i feel like the outfits of the characters fit the time period. how do i know? streaming services and looking at my parents pictures from that time

[photoncatcher]

Grip

Nikon D50; 1/60; F/8; ISO 200; 100mm

18/02/2008

[kommabortsig]

Russian_sailor_cap.jpg

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the world's leading breach expert got phished

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

If you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, you're the sucker. Also, if you think you can't get phished, you're the sucker.

I've been successfully scammed six times in my life. Each time, the scam relied on the confluence of several factors that yielded a fleeting moment of vulnerability that some scammer was able to exploit by being in the right place at the right time. I had to be lucky always, they only had to be lucky once.

The first time I got scammed was in 2008, on my first trip to India. As I walked toward the Mumbai airport taxi queue at 2AM, I was approached by two uniformed airport security guards who told me that the taxi rank had been moved in the wake of a recent terrorist bombing in Islamabad, which had resulted in all the regional airports going on high alert. The bombing was real, the airport high alerts were real. The security guards – not real. They were scammers, working with a fake cab that charged me $200 for a $20 taxi ride.

I got scammed again this way in Shanghai, at the Pudong taxi-rank. I was with my wife, daughter and parents and we split into two cabs and the drivers colluded to turn off their meters and charge us extremely high cash fares, dropping us across the street from our hotel so we couldn't enlist the doorman to interpret. Again, it was very late at night, things were confusing, and we'd had to wait for more than an hour for the cab, so we were exhausted and sweaty and divided into two groups so we couldn't coordinate strategy.

Then there was the time I got successfully phished by a Twitter account takeover worm:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

That was also a miracle of timing – for the scammers. I got hit on a day when I was running late, when I'd just reinstalled my phone's OS and was being prompted for my passwords all over again, when I had just done a bunch of major publishing and was getting a lot of messages about my new articles. When a friend got infected by a worm that took over his account and messaged me, "Is this you?" with a link that took me to a webpage that asked me to log back into Twitter, I re-entered my password. If I'd been five minutes later in getting to that DM, I would have seen three more identical messages from other infected friends and twigged to the scam. But I just happened to look at my phone in the two-minute window when the scam wasn't self-evident, and I just happened to be distracted and flustered about running late, and I just happened to have had some life circumstances that made the generic phishing lure seem plausible.

In 2023, I got scammed by a fake restaurant. I was on the couch with a friend from out of town who'd come by to watch a movie. We were chatting and decided to order from our local Thai restaurant. The top result on Google was a paid ad (marked out with the word "ad" in 8-point, grey-on-white type) that had a plausible domain name, which led to a replica of my local place's menu, only with the prices set 15% higher. I didn't even notice – not until the restaurant called me to say that they'd had a flood of orders from these scammers, who charged their customers' credit cards 15% over the odds, then placed an order for delivery using their own credit card numbers. I ended up contesting the charge with Amex, getting the scammers' Wix and credit card accounts canceled, and shaming Google into blocking their ads:

https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/cory-doctorow-duped-by-fake-thai-restaurant-scam/

Then there's the guy who used leaked data from my credit union to impersonate their fraud department, calling me up and social-engineering me out of the last seven digits of my card number (not the last four, as is common – most banks use the same nine-digit prefix, so the final seven digits are all you need to derive the whole card number). The scammer called right after I used two dodgy ATMs in New Orleans, during my last hour in town when I was rushing around to get my most favorite sandwich in the world before leaving. It was the day that a Boeing 737 Max lost its door-plug so the airport was a zoo and we barely made the flight, so I lost the hour I'd planned to use to call the bank's fraud department back. Again: if, if, if. If he'd called an hour earlier – or later. If there hadn't been a giant aviation disaster. If I hadn't been traveling. The scammer had to get lucky once, I had to be lucky every time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

I got scammed again last Christmas week. I was in NYC with my wife and daughter and I'd gotten great tickets to see The Outsiders on Broadway. It was my kid's first musical and to her surprise, she loved it. In the cab back to the friend's place we were staying at, we talked about what other musicals she might want to see. She loves South Park, and I'd seen banners advertising The Book of Mormon (which was created by the same people) in LA. So I looked up "book of mormon tickets los angeles" on my phone in the cab and found the production's website and ordered the tickets, working quickly in the cab because it was one of those websites that has a countdown timer so you have to finish your transaction in five minutes.

It wasn't the real Book of Mormon website. It was a scam website, reselling Book of Mormon tickets at a 200%+ markup. That fact was noted in infinitesimal writing on the main screen, which I missed in the crowded taxi backseat while I raced the countdown timer. I figured it out about 20 seconds after the transaction cleared, and immediately emailed the vendor to cancel it. All I got was a series of smug "all transactions final" emails from outsource customer service reps (in the end, I was able to get my credit card issuer to reverse the transaction, but it took months). But yeah, I got scammed by a sleazy company called "Bigstub." Fuck those guys.

Every time I got scammed, the con that got me was nearly identical to a con that I'd avoided on numerous occasions. The fact that I'm actually pretty good at spotting this kind of hustle, 99.9% of the time, didn't mean I was immune it it. It just meant that I was vulnerable under very special circumstances, and those very special circumstances do crop up from time to time.

This is the most important lesson of scams: that no matter how well-attuned you are to cons, you can still be conned. The belief that you are immune to a con actually makes you a mark. It's for that reason that I recount the tales of how I got scammed – to help other people understand that being sophisticated, alert and even paranoid is no guarantee that you will be safe.

I'm not the only person for whom a detailed knowledge of scams created immunity from being scammed. Troy Hunt is the proprietor of HaveIBeenPwned.com, the internet's most comprehensive and reliable breach notification site. Hunt pretty much invented the practice of tracking breaches, and he is steeped – saturated – in up-to-the-minute, nitty-gritty details of how internet scams work.

Guess who got phished?

https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mailchimp-mailing-list/

Hunt had just gotten off a long-haul flight. He was jetlagged. He got a well-constructed, plausible counterfeit email from Mailchimp telling him that his mailing-list – which he absolutely relies upon – had been frozen after a spam complaint, and advising him to click on a link to contest the suspension. He was taken to a fake login screen that his password manager didn't autopopulate, so he manually pasted the password in (Mailchimp doesn't have 2FA). It was only when the login session hung that he realized he'd been scammed – and by then, it was too late. Within minutes, his mailing list had been exported by the scammers.

In his postmortem of the scam, Hunt identifies the overlapping factors that made him vulnerable. He was jetlagged. The mailing list was important. Bogus spam complaints are common. Big corporate sites like Mailchimp often redirect their logins through different domains, which causes password manager autofill to fail. Hunt had experienced near-identical phishing attempts before and spotted them, but this one just happened to land at the very moment that he was vulnerable. Plus – as with my credit union scam – it seems likely that Mailchimp itself had been breached (or has an insider threat), which allowed the scammers to pad out the scam with plausible details that made it seem legit.

Hunt's forensics on the scam are very interesting. Of especial note is the fact that Mailchimp had retained the email addresses of thousands of former subscribers who had already unsubscribed, meaning that their data was exposed as well. It's not clear why Mailchimp would do this, but I will note that the company is extraordinarily spammer-friendly and goes to great lengths to make it easy for spammers to add you to their lists, and impossible to get off of all those lists;

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

Getting scammed doesn't mean you were stupid, or careless. Frequently, it just means you were distracted, upset, or distraught. We're living through a moment of total, all-consuming chaos, and the scammers are sharpening their blades – not least because the people running the show are unabashed grifters who openly boast that when they get one over on you, "that makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Buyer beware – it's ugly out there, and it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.

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/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecomms.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[oneterabyteofkilobyteage]

original url http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/6622/ last modified 2008-12-30 11:02:58

[cru3wrld]

more insta bios!

🏹🌹💌🍓

intj 3w4 :; 15 ₊˚⊹

- 11:11 | 2008

🪩 · pisces, infp

i don't care.

02:18 !! ♡

@weareone.exo

your name " 🩰

it's my personal diary

˚₊‧꒰ა ☆ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

(taylor's version)

we'll be fine line..

˚｡ 🦢🩰🪞₊˚♡

october | istj - diary of an angelic soul

꒰📿🕯️💌📖🗝️꒱ ｡ﾟ

♡♱ sweetest girl in town ｡ﾟ ୨୧⠀

🩰 infp; thirteen. 333 ༄‧₊

｡ﾟﾟ･｡･ﾟﾟ｡

ﾟ。 your kisses are my medicine 🫶💋

3teen | infp 💌

[melonramune]

2008-02-21

[stylestarkey]

TWO DOORS DOWN │ 02

𐙚 a rafe cameron social media au

pairings — famous!rafe X pogue!femaleOC (f.c christina nadin)

summary — IN WHICH the cameron siblings turn to social media in a desperate attempt to track their childhood neighbour, who also turns out to be a huge fan of sarah.

warnings — swearing!

navigation — masterlist 01 02 03

liked by cleoanderson, kiecarrera and 105 others

elynajavier i searched every corner of my house to find this photo … this you? @/rafecameron

view all comments

cleoanderson rafe does not look happy ↳ kiecarrera i mean ... she did bite him constantly ↳ elynajavier guys i was 4

popeheyward  poor boy actually looks miserable and it’s all your fault ↳  elynajavier you guys are seriously gonna make me feel bad 4ever

jjmaybank  can you find my mom too  ↳  elynajavier  … ↳  kiecarrera  … ↳  cleoanderson  … ↳  popeheyward  …

user1  holy shit THATS RAFE

user2  SOMEONE SEND THIS TO CAMERONUPDATES RIGHT NOW

liked by justkelce, rafecameron and 26,140 others

cameronupdates UNSEEN PHOTO OF RAFE FROM 2008!

photo credits: @/elynajavier

view all comments

user1  i did not even exist in 2008

user2  so this is the girl?

user3  i want to squish rafe 

user4  i can’t believe we found the girl they were looking for!

user5  RAFE LIKED OMGJDNBDJNGFX

note 𐙚 — i honestly didn't think you guys would read this at all so thank you thank you x3904905!! 😭 part 3 is also finished, i just need to edit a few things but thank you again for the support <3 - H <3

[photoncatcher]

Bank

Nikon D50; 1/640; F/8; ISO 200; 55mm

15/02/2008

[kommabortsig]

Водопади1.jpg

Водопади2.jpg

[thepunkpanther]

THE HUNGER GAMES APPRECIATION WEEK day 02: favourite quotes/lyrics

THE HUNGER GAMES (2012) dir Gary Ross THE HUNGER GAMES (2008) written by Suzanne Collins Lawrence (pg. 297) THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) dir. Francis CATCHING FIRE (2009) written by Suzanne Collins (pg. 352)

[sweeetestcurse]

Ron Perlman as Hellboy in Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) 02/??

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. After that, it's LONDON (Jul 1) and MANCHESTER (Jul 2).

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives," about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:

https://locusmag.com/2025/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-strange-bedfellows-and-long-knives/

Stories about major change usually focus on a group, but groups rarely achieve big, ambitious goals. Think about all the goal-oriented groups in your orbit, with missions like alleviating hunger, or beautifying your neighborhood, or changing the health-care system. They've been at it for decades, and while many groups do excellent work at the margins, blocking regressions and making modest advancements (or the occasional breakthrough), they're playing a game of inches.

But sometimes – the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the Reagan revolution, Trump II – we get a wholesale, foundational, societal change. Very rarely, that's because an existing group conceived of a devastating new tactic (think of Obama's online campaigning in 2008), but that's the exception. Almost always, the major upheavals in our society aren't caused by the same people trying a different tactic – they're the result of a coalition that forms around a shared set of goals.

Reagan rode to power thanks to the support of different groups, many of whom had cordially loathed one another for decades. Most notably, Reagan brokered a deal with evangelicals – whose movement was already organized around strict obedience to charismatic cult leaders – to end their decades long boycott of politics and show up at the polls for him:

https://www.salon.com/2014/02/22/reagans_christian_revolt_how_conservatives_hijacked_american_religion/

Evangelicals hated politicians (whom they viewed as obsessed with "worldly" matters to the exclusion of the spiritual) and they really hated the finance sector (whom they damned as both amoral sons of Mammon, and also, quietly, Jewish). Right wing politicians and the financiers they relied on viewed evangelicals as stupid, superstitious, and ungovernable. But by promising to deliver culture-war stuff (racism, restrictions on abortion, homophobia) to evangelicals, and tax-cuts and deregulation to the rich, Reagan fused two groups that had been largely stalled in achieving their goals for decades, and, with the backing of that coalition, rewrote the American consensus to give each of them some of what their wanted.

But here's the thing about coalitions: while they share some goals, they don't share all their goals. Two groups that have identical goals aren't actually two groups – that's just one group with two chapters. Moreover, the divergence in coalition members' goals are often – nearly always – in conflict. Which is to say, they want some of the same things, but there are always group members who want different, mutually exclusive, opposing things.

When coalitions are forming and campaigning, they tend to focus on their shared goals. But once they take power, it's their differences that matter.

Think of Tolkien: the Fellowship of the Ring forms by pulling together disparate factions to join in a shared quest that culminates in a massive battle in which (spoilers) they are victorious. But in the immediate aftermath of that victory, even before the wounded and the fallen have been recovered from the battlefield, we (spoilers) witness another fight, this one between the allies, over what the post-victory order will be. This is pretty much also what happened after WWII, when (spoilers) the USSR and the USA switched from being allies to being rivals even before anyone could (spoilers) clean Hitler's brains off the walls of his bunker.

Leftists get a front-row seat for the coalitional moves of the right, but we tend to miss the internecine struggle to claim the prize after their victories. One exception to this is Rick Perlstein, a leftist historian whose books Nixonland and Reaganland are definitive histories of the internal machinations that powered the right wing revolution. For years, Perlstein has been carefully reading the massive anthologies that the Heritage Foundation publishes in the runup to each election, in which various members of the right coalition spell out their post-victory goals. These were pretty obscure until last year, when we all became aware of the latest volume in the series, Project 2025:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Perlstein read Project 2025 – all of it, not just the individual chapters that were the most lurid and apocalyptic right-wing fantasies. Because Perlstein read all 900 pages, he was able to identify something that nearly everyone else missed, that Project 2025 is full of contradictory plans that are in direct opposition to one another:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

Project 2025 is usually credited to the Heritage Foundation, but it's more accurate to say that Heritage was the anthologist of the plan, not its author. They selected and assembled chapters written by various members of the Trump coalition. Now, as anthologist, it was Heritage's job to make as coherent a job of this as possible, but, as it turns out "as possible" wasn't very possible.

Project 2025 contains multiple, contradictory, mutually opposed prescriptions for monetary policy, taxation, foreign policy, domestic security, government reform, taxation, and more. Normally, an anthologist editing a volume like this would serve as a kind of referee, choosing winners from among these opposing sides. That surely happens all the time in Trumpland – doubtless there are crank eugenicists, Proud Boys, and Q-addled hallucinators who have cherished goals that would never make it into Project 2025.

But the fact that Heritage couldn't tell one (or two, or three) sides in these debates to go pound sand and elevate a single policy to canon tells us that there are opposing forces in the Trump coalition who are each so powerful that neither of them can overpower the others. These are the fracture lines in the Trump coalition, the places we should apply ourselves to if we want to neutralize the movement, shatter it back into a mob of warring factions.

As Naomi Klein says, this is something Steve Bannon has been doing to the left for years:

One of the things I’ve learned from studying Steve Bannon is he takes the task of peeling away parts of the Democrats’ coalition very seriously, and he’s done it very successfully again and again. So why wouldn’t we try to do it back to him?

https://prospect.org/culture/2025-05-13-moment-of-unparalleled-peril-interview-naomi-klein/

The Trump coalition's fracture lines are already showing, for example, in healthcare:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/20/clinical-trial-by-ordeal/#spoiled-his-brand-new-rattle

And tariffs:

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-peter-navarro/

And Elon Musk:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/elon-musk-peter-navarro-comments-tariffs

Trump held his coalition together during the war, but history tells us that now, after the victory, is the moment when Trump's coalition is most vulnerable, as members of that coalition realize that they won't get the things they were promised in exchange for the blood and treasure they expended to get Trump into office.

I've been a Locus columnist for two decades now. It remains the journal of record for the science fiction and fantasy field, a vital source of information and community. Locus is structured as a charitable nonprofit (I'm a donor) and it depends on support from readers like you to keep going. They're currently hosting their annual fundraiser, with many, many, many cool rewards, from signed books to the right to name a character in an upcoming novel, and beyond:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/locus-mag-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-2025#/

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/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales