#claiming victims are automates

[psychiatricmentalhealthfacility]

Claiming those without sufficient technological or life extension access are proven criminals or non-citizens or are artificial simulations resembling life that do not need technological access or to have data recorded in relation to them. Criminals claiming their victims are merely automated. Automatics. Automated.

[emitalderaanemissionscoruscant]

CLAIMING VICTIMS ARE AUTOMATES

[askshivanulegacy]

OP is very much barking up the wrong tree, clutching pearls at "how dare you call AI images not art!"

Well, AI images are NOT art. The person who inputs the prompt for them is very much a lazy button-pusher and NOT an artist. If the prompter is akin to anything in the art world, it would be an art commissioner, because that's exactly what they do. And yet, the AI tool is just a tool. There's no artist involved.

A "broke, disabled hobbyist" using the AI tool is still a lazy button-pusher no matter how you want to look at it. Doesn't matter how broke or disabled they are. None of that will magically transform them from a button-pusher to an artist via AI. None of that will make their AI output into real art. Full stop. You can't wishful think that reality away just because you want the title of "artist." Is that unfair? Well, do you think typing prompts into a machine actually qualifies you to be an artist? Ever? No. You will need to find some other method of creation that doesn't outsource the process to a machine, if you want to be called an artist. The quality of being "unfair" doesn't make reality change.

Does it matter to anyone at all if that "broke, disabled hobbyist" wants to generate pretty images for their home? NO. Nobody cares! It will impact no one. Personal use is fine.

But you can't turn around and sell those images. You can't turn around and suddenly market yourself as an artist. You can't go to corporations and demand to be paid as a button-pusher to sideline real artists who devote time, effort, and skill to create real work. You can't tell an artist that you didn't want to pay them so you used the AI to mimick their work and get your art for free.

I mean. You COULD but that would make you a selfish, entitled ass.

I've seen other comments on this post talk about "fair use" and "collages" and "data collection."

When you collect data from people to use for published purposes, those people have to give permission. No permission was given; AI is theft.

When you make a collage, you don't sell it. If you want to sell it, you must legally source and seek permission from all your sources for their original work to be used in your derivative thing and sold by you. AI is theft.

When you make fanart under fair use you are also legally not allowed to sell it! All the fanart and fanfiction operate in a very gray zone. Fanartists assume that they're chump change and no one will go after them, and that they provide free promotion. It's a fair assumption! Legally, the real creators are allowed to take issue with it, if they want.

AI is theft. At the very minimum, it is theft of the data, because there is no legal basis for these giant corporations to make use of personal art and writing for the purposes of training an AI which they turn around and profit from.

AI is theft, AI is NOT art, and those lazy-ass button-pushers are NOT artists.

Economic anxiety has a way of bringing out reactionary sentiment in anyone if they're not careful.

It is deeply, deeply frustrating to watch it play out in front of me in leftist spaces such that self-proclaimed leftists are using actual, literal fascist arguments about Real Art vs. Fake Art and Real Labor vs. Lazy Button-Pushing.

These things don't become any less bad when you SAY your enemy is "some rich techbro" while calling broke disabled hobbyists "evil soulless automatons".

The central logic doesn't become true when you SAY you're targeting an inhuman machine while you screech obscenities about a great replacement at its operator.

When you say one minute "there is no unskilled labor, only undervalued skills", it doesn't magically absolve you of saying "nooo, you were supposed to automate away the BAD and DEMEANING jobs with no financial safety net for the workers, not THIS one I consider RESPECTABLE" in the next breath; it only makes you a fucking hypocrite.

"Fair use for me but not for thee" is not a rational position to prevent plagiarism and forgery; it's just a means to codify an ingroup and an outgroup.

"Degenerate art" is always, ALWAYS reactionary and proto-fascist thing to believe in, even if you wrap it up in other fancy words because you know "degenerate" is a Bad Word. "There is Good Art that makes society better and Bad Art, if you can even CALL it Art at all, that will rot our brains and turn us all into mindless drones if it's allowed to survive" cannot be made into anything but a reactionary position! Period! End of!

"Lazy button-pushers" are EXACTLY what corporations want you to think ANY automation operator is, so they can take credit away from those employees and criminally underpay them. They said the same damned thing about digital artists back in the early days of Photoshop. They say the same thing about overworked VFX artists today. You are DIRECTLY helping them make it worse with this argument.

The same old fucking trick of making you uncertain of your financial future so you lash out at other victims of the system because you "can't take the risk" of coming together to fight the actual enemy? Is working a FUCKING treat on way too many people who pride themselves on Not Being Like That - and it's even worse because a lot of the time pointing this out will get nothing but denial because maintaining pride in a leftist, progressive, pro-labor, pro-human Identity is more important to way too many people than ACTUALLY identifying the root of reactionary sentiment and the strategies used to spread it.

It makes me genuinely feel like I've fallen into a Fox News convention, hearing all these blatantly reactionary arguments and actively self-defeating strategies to Protect Labor.

[light-the-spark-of-dawn]

Bruce Wayne being the owner of the Daily Planet is just about the only reason I can believe Clark Kent would still have a career as a news reporter. And to be clear, this isn't a joke about his salary (which would probably be decent anyway since he's a senior reporter), but rather a commentary on the compromised integrity of American journalism.

Consider the news surrounding the United Healthcare shooting. The murder of a healthcare company CEO was immediately met with universal public support for the killer. Pretty much everyone in America despises the predatory healthcare system so much that they celebrated Brian Thompson's getting gunned down in the streets of Manhattan as being well-deserved, in spite of major news media trying to paint the bastard as an innocent victim and family man

Literally, the best defense of Thompson's character that they could come up with was that he was a father, husband, and a successful CEO who expanded the company. None of the articles mention that he had been separated from his wife for years. They conveniently leave out that under his leadership, UHC was criticized by the American Hospital Association and used AI to automate claim denials, forcing thousands of people to go without medical care.

The dead are lionized all the time. But this was a man whose life's work was built off the suffering of others and had virtually no good deeds to speak of. And yet the narrative that news reporting is trying to push is that the public joy at his murder is "disturbing" and "ghoulish" and even "un-American" (genuinely the most tone-deaf take I've seen thus far).

And now that Luigi Mangione has been arrested as a suspect in the case, the news have shifted to dissecting his whole life and laying it bare for people to see. He's a well-read and intelligent guy who graduated from an Ivy League college. He's a 26 year old tech bro from a wealthy family and was the valedictorian of his private school. He wrote a review of the Unabomber's book and gave it 4 stars. He had a traumatic back surgery and afterward became depressed and withdrawn. He wrote a manifesto condemning corporate America. He played Among Us (the fact that a major news company published a whole ass article about this is both hilarious and depressing).

Whether Mangione was the killer or not, the media is airing out any and all details of his personal history. But most of the articles I've seen aren't trying to analyze what would have led to an otherwise normal guy to assassinate a healthcare CEO. Because it's obvious to anyone who knows anything about American healthcare. Instead it's all talk about how he was "yelling at the press" and not about what he was yelling ("This is completely unjust and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience").

90% of American media is owned by 6 conglomerates. It's in their best interest to diminish sympathy for someone like Mangione, who spoke out against the corporate robber barons. It's in their best interest to make people think he's a radical nutjob, a privileged college snob, a violent right-winger- anything that makes him less relatable to the people who are supporting him. And it's working.

Already we're seeing people across the political spectrum getting hung up on whether Mangione is a hero or not because his cousin is a Republican, his family was wealthy, he was college-educated, he's a cis straight white male, etc. It's worth noting that he hasn't even been extradited from Pennsylvania to New York yet, much less been put on trial or found guilty. And even if he was, his identity is not the point.

We must stop looking at the trees and take a step back to see that the entire forest was planted to prevent us from seeing the palace behind it.

[going-to-ikea-for-the-fries]

Bait and Switch. || Scammer!Reader x Victim!Ghost

Rating: M Words: 2.6K~ Pairing: scammer!Reader x victim(but not really)!Ghost CW: phone scams/conning (reader never actually cons him), financial issues?, threats (Simon threatens to find reader), degradation?. other tags: crack, OOC Simon., you/your pronouns (gn!reader but uses a female fake name), obviously fake names (pun/funny), lying, joking, the weirdest meet cute? a/n: this started out as a joke/crack and turned serious/dark at the end? idk how i did this.

Simon Riley would say that being legally dead is the best thing to have happened to him and that's because it allowed him to escape a bunch of responsibilities that regular men have to uphold.

He gets paid covertly, in full, and does not have to pay taxes on his income.

He rented a flat from a sweet ol' lady, who didn't run a background check or ask for a copy of his birth certificate (terrible choice on her part), and he pays her by dropping an envelope of cash in her mailbox on the 1st of every of the month.

He not only is old enough to drink but also sounds and looks old enough as well, which means he doesn't need I.D. to buy alcohol (not that any shops or bars really care enough to check).

He doesn't have a credit card. Or a debit card for that matter. Hell, he doesn't even have a bank account, so he doesn't have to pay maintenance fees.

He doesn't have a smartphone. And up until recently he only had a pager. In fact, the only reason he doesn't have a pager anymore is because it got shot in the crossfire during a mission... so Price forced him to get a jitterbug.

In short... Simon Riley can escape a lot of things (death, taxes, Philip Graves...). But telemarketers and phone scammers are not one of those things.

That's how, on a boring Wednesday afternoon, his new phone ends up ringing, like it had been doing multiple times a week for the last four weeks.

Telemarketers.

He never got telemarketers on his pager.

He hated telemarketers.

But that didn't mean he blocked them-

"What?" He answered as soon as he picked up the phone.

An automated voice came over the call, one of those typical Siri-esque robot voices, delivering a prepared speech: "Congratulations! You've won a free cruise to the Bahamas! To claim your prize, press 1."

Oh, now, this was different. He didn't need to hear more to know it was a scam call. But that didn't mean he was going to hang up.

So Simon pressed key 1, which caused a beep to sound over the call.

"Thank you!" The automated voice continued. "We are now connecting you to a live operator to claim your prize!"

Barely a millisecond went by before you took over the call. "Good afternoon, this is Stella Gormoni with Blissful Blessings Inc.! Who am I speaking with?"

As stereotypical as it is, Simon had expected a different voice on the other end of the line... maybe from a scammer in a foreign country who'd speak heavily-accented English...

But instead, he got a sweet and professional sounding person... It almost made him second-guess the scam that was being pulled on him.

His mind moved quick at coming up with a fake name. Not just a fake one, but a pun one too. "Wanh'a, first name Aiden." He replied, his gruff voice reverberating on the call.

"And how do you spell that?" You asked him politely, and, through your headset, he could hear your keyboard keys clacking in the background.

"That's A-I-D-E-N." He replied as he entered his kitchen, spelling his first, as if that was somehow what was causing you difficulty.

"Uh-huh!" You acknowledged in a peppy tone. "And... your surname?" You asked him.

"W-A-N-H-'-A." He continued spelling as he crossed the small kitchen, hearing your fingers tapping away at your keyboard in his ear.

For a moment, you didn't talk, as if stunned into silence. Had you just picked up on the fact he was trolling you by giving you a name that, phonetically, sounded like 'I Don't Wanna'? Probably. But you hadn't hung up yet.

"Well, congratulations, Mr. Wanh'a, you just won an all-inclusive, two-week long cruise to the Bahamas!" Your peppy tone made him bite his lip to contain a laugh. Well, at least you were dedicated in continuing the scam. "How are you feeling?"

"Very well, and yourself?" Simon asked casually as he leaned himself against the door of his refrigerator, leaning down to look inside and find a snack.

"I'm doing very well, thank you, sir." You replied in a cheerful tone. "So, let's process the information so we can get you your prize, shall we?" You announced in a polite tone.

"Go right on ahead, sweet'eart." He murmured as he grabbed a yogurt and closed the fridge with his hip, sitting at the table and peeling open the lid.

"Well, for us to start, I'm going to need your-"

"Actually, I have a question, before we start." Simon interrupted your speech, cutting off your silver-tongued lies.

You went silent for just a moment before you replied with a sweet little: "Of course, what can I help you with, Mr. Wanh'a?"

"I want to know how exactly I signed up to receive this prize." Simon replied before he placed a spoonful of yogurt in his mouth.

He was trying to accomplish two things by doing this: 1) throw you off your game and make you stammer and stutter, and 2) see how long it took for you to get annoyed, and hang up on him.

"Well, that's what I was going to explain, you see-" You replied, a smile behind your voice, but his trained ears could pick up the slight frustration. It made Simon smile.

"Oh, then, I'm sorry for interrupting you, sweet'art, please go ahead." He replied and gestured with his spoon, as if giving you the stage, unnecessarily so, because you were not there to watch it.

"As I was saying... You were entered automatically into the draw by buying a cereal box of any Kellog's cereal at Tesco. I'm sure you saw a 'Win a free cruise!' sticker on yours?" You asked in a professional and sickly-sweet tone.

He could see right through your scam, he had already done that. You name a famous brand, one people trust, to trick naive or impressionable ones into believing you...

Normal people would tell you they no longer have the cereal box, many of them naive enough to believe your scam despite the fact they hadn't even bought one of those boxes in the first place...

Next, you'd ask for the card used to make the purchase, and some people were dumb enough to read their number aloud to you...

Oh, how he hated scammers. Even more than telemarketers.

"I do remember seeing something like that..." He murmured, his voice deepening, before he popped another spoonful of yogurt past his lips, loudly smacking them right against the receiver of his jitterbug.

"Well, all I need is for you to get the box and read me the code that's imprinted on the inside of the flap!" You announced.

"Well, you see, I would, sweet'art... But my sight isn't so good anymore..." Simon replied. "I'm getting up there in age, you know?" He continued eating his yogurt.

"I understand, sir." You replied. "I'm sorry to hear that. One of my cousins also started losing his vision pretty early." You announced.

Huh.

There was no hint of forced sympathy in your voice.

No, you were being genuine. That was a real story of your life you were telling him...

But you had picked up on the fact he was trolling you, right? So why were you-

"Good thing though, about this system of ours, is that you can just confirm your credit card details so we can double check them and get you that prize!" You had, your tone right back to the scamming silver-tongue you had held until now.

Secretly, Simon had to admit that he admired your commitment to the bit. He couldn't help but smile a bit, amused.

"Oh, of course. Let me just set you down while I get my card." Simon replied and got up, finishing his yogurt and tossing out the plastic container, popping the spoon into the sink, and, after setting down his phone, he walked out of the room.

Simon glanced down at his wrist watch, noting the time on it, then, approached his bedroom door, grabbing his over-the-door pull-up bars, and began doing a quick set, leaving you to 'wait' for him in the kitchen.

After a few sets, he waltzed back into the kitchen and grabbed his phone again. "You still there, da'lin'?" He beckoned in a gruff tone.

You sighed, your politeness sounding slightly more forced. He had kept you waiting for over ten minutes after all. "Yes, sir, I am. Did you get your card, Mr. Wanh'a?"

"Oh, please, enough of this 'sir' thing, Mr. Wanh'a was my mother." He replied, then went silent for just a beat, almost like he could hear your frustration sizzling on he other end.

He was being more and more obvious with his trolling... And it pleased him immensely to imagine a parasite like you seething on the other end of the line, reaching your wits' end.

"You can just call me 'Ai', it's what my friends call me." Simon continued, a smirk forming on his lips. "And we're friends now, right? You're giving me a cruise and everythin'." He added, his tone just as charismatic and peppy as his had been.

"I guess we are!" You replied, returning the overly cheery tone. "So, 'Ai Wanh'a', then?" You asked, but he could hear the mix of frustration and amusement behind your voice.

"Yeah? What d'you want, babygirl?" Simon asked, unable to resist making a more impish remark. And, unfortunately, it had the desired result. It genuinely caused your brain to blue-screen for a moment.

Sure, you'd experienced plenty of people getting angry at you when you attempt to scam them, or even trolling you the same way this bloke was doing but...

It was definitely a first, to have someone flirt with you, even if it was still part of his trolling attempt.

"Your... credit card details?" You ended up adding, your voice still showing the surprise and light meekness that came from him catching you off-guard.

"Oh, of course. Are you ready? It's a very complex number." He replied.

"Ready when you are." You added as you steeled yourself for another smartass response or run around from him.

"Here it is: 1234-5678-9987-6543." He replied, reciting the numbers 1-9 in order and then backward. "And the three digits on the back are: 210."

Oh, he was so fucking annoying! He didn't get to troll you, even if it was pretty amusing of him to do so, then flirt with you, then go back to trolling.

"Sir, if you're not interested in the cruise, just say so. There's no need for this mockery." You replied, your tone serious and professional though you were definitely seething on the inside.

Simon could tell. And he reveled in it. "Oh, but I am interested!" He replied with a smirk behind his voice. "In fact, I want to know more. Will my cabin in the cruise have an ocean view?"

Simon heard you inhale aggressively on the other side of the line, steeling yourself not to hang up on him, or down right berating him on the phone. "Yes, Ai, of course!" He heard your fake cheeriness through your clenched teeth. "It'll be a luxury cabin, actually. Isn't that great?"

"No, it's not that great, actually. I get very seasick, you see?" Simon murmured. "Not to mention, ever since my pet goldfish died, I've just never been able to look at the ocean the same..." He added in a forced pitiful tone.

You went quiet again on the other side and Simon knew he had finally worn you out. He waited to hear the clicking sound of the call falling, but, instead, he just heard you let out a sigh.

"You're very frustrating." You murmured.

"Oh, my, is this how you speak to all your prize winners?" Simon gasped dramatically.

"Shut up... You didn't have to be a smartass, you know?!" You scolded him, as if you had any ground to stand on.

"No, I fear I did, sweet'art." Simon replied as he leaned casually against the kitchen counter. "You called me, interrupted my day, and wasted my time with a scam, of all things. I have every right to be a smartass and have some fun with it." He added, a smug tone obvious in the dulcets of his deep voice.

"Okay? You could've just hung up on me?" You were truly grasping at straws to justify your behaviour. It was comical.

Simon laughed dryly. "And waste an opportunity to annoy a parasitic leech like you?" He quipped.

That stunned you into silence for a moment and you couldn't help but pout a bit.

"Not to mention, what you're doing is illegal, you know that righ'? And I'm military, I could get you arrested for this." He added.

"For that, you'd need to know where I am." You retorted, maybe a bit bratilly. "Besides, I knew you were a soldier."

"And how did you know that?"

"You used the NATO phonetic alphabet while spelling 'your' name'." You replied directly. "Nobody spells 'Aiden' as 'Alpha-India-Delta-Echo-November'."

"So you knew I was military and you still went ahead with your little scam attempt? You're not that bright, are you?" He defied you, which earned him a scoff from your end.

"No, I already knew you were trolling me."

"Oh, so you just wanted to waste my time?"

"That's exactly it, Aiden."

"Sounds to me like you're just looking for trouble, da'lin'." He quipped, his voice having lowered to a gruffer tone.

Rolling your eyes, you scoffed. "Am not. I'm just enjoying myself. You're not the only one that can make jokes at people's expenses."

"No, you really are..." He tutted his tongue and shook his head. "Need I remind you you were trying to scam me, and other people?" He added in a tone that sent a shiver down your spine.

"I know what I was doing."

"Yeah? And are you proud of that? Proud of being a conniving little cunt who tries to take people's hard-earned money?" He taunted you.

You didn't reply. Of course you weren't proud. You still had a conscience! But you wouldn't tell him that. He wouldn't get the satisfaction of hearing you apologise.

"I see. You don't like what I'm saying, so you give me the silent treatment, is that it, sweet'art?" He teased. You could hear the smirk behind his words.

"I wonder if you'd still act like this if you had to face me and had to answer for yourself."

Closing your fists tight, you steel yourself again to gain some edge and reply to him. "I guess you're going to keep wondering then. Because it's not happening."

"You know, it's a shame your little computer spat out my phone number for you to call..." He trailed off.

"And why's that?"

"Because instead of anyone else, you got me... And that's just... really bad luck for you. Any other service member, you would've been fine..." He trailed off.

"What, are you some sort of General-Major-Chief thing, super high up the ladder?" You taunted.

Simon simply chuckled dryly on the other side of the line. "No. But I'm definitely the worst person you could've tried to play with."

"Oh, big scary man, what are you gonna do? Gonna come teach me a lesson?" You added, taunting him some more, clearly feeling comfortable behind your laptop, with your smartphone, sitting at home, comfortable and warm, with your pet at your feet. "Oh, I'm so scared!" You added, feigning fear in a dramatic tone.

"Is that a challenge I'm hearing, sweet'art? Inviting me to come pay you a visit?" Simon asked you, his brow cocking, despite the fact you couldn't see it.

You don't know what it was about the way he spoke. The way he said that. The way his voice sounded.

It sent a shiver down your spine, a cold sweat, like he was, for the first time, not joking around anymore.

"No...?" You murmured in reply, feeling your shoulders tensing in an unpleasant way.

"Yeah... That's an invite I'm hearing..." He disregarded what you said and chuckled. "Maybe I'll come pay you a visit then, hey? How does that sound, little leech?"

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Anne Applebaum :: @anneapplebaum

This was the moment that mattered. Trump's political movement relies on total impunity for liars, and mostly gets it. The lies bind them together, cement their feeling of power.

* * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 1, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 02, 2024

More than 45,000 U.S. dock workers went on strike today for the first time since 1977, nearly 50 years ago. The International Longshoremen's Association union, which represents 45,000 port workers, is negotiating with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike will shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping. Analysts from J.P. Morgan estimate that the strike could cost the U.S. economy about $5 billion a day. The strikers have said they will continue to unload military cargo.

Dockworkers want a 77% increase in pay over six years and better benefits, while USMX has said it has offered to increase wages by nearly 50%, triple employer contributions to retirement plans, and improve health care options. In the Washington Post, economics columnist Heather Long pointed out that the big issue at stake is the automation that threatens union jobs.

Although the strike threatens to slow the economy depending on how long it lasts, President Joe Biden has refused requests to force the strikers back to work, reiterating his support for collective bargaining. He noted that ocean carriers have made record profits since the pandemic—sometimes in excess of 800% over prepandemic levels—and that executive compensation and shareholder profits have reflected those profits. “It’s only fair that workers, who put themselves at risk during the pandemic to keep ports open, see a meaningful increase in their wages as well,” Biden said in a statement.  

In the presidential contest, the Trump-Vance campaign is trying to preserve its false narrative. In Wisconsin today, Trump accused Vice President Harris of murder—although he appeared to get confused about the victim—and claimed that she has a phone app on which the heads of cartels can get information about where to drop undocumented immigrants. He also said that Kim Jong Un of North Korea is trying to kill him.

When asked if he should have been tougher on Iran after it launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured, Trump rejected the idea that soldiers with traumatic brain injuries were actually hurt. He said “they had a headache” and said he thought the attack “was a very nice thing because they didn’t want us to retaliate.”

Trump also backed out of a scheduled interview with 60 Minutes that correspondent Scott Pelley was slated to conduct on Thursday. 60 Minutes noted that for more than 50 years, the show has invited both campaigns to appear on the broadcast before the election and this year, both campaigns agreed to an interview. Trump’s spokesperson complained that 60 Minutes “insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.” Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in her interview as planned. 

The campaign’s resistance to independent fact checking of their false narrative came up in tonight’s vice presidential debate on CBS between Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s running mate, and Ohio senator J.D. Vance, running mate for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan moderated the debate.

Walz’s goal in the debate was to do no harm to Vice President Harris’s campaign, and he achieved that. Vance’s goal was harder: to give people a reason to vote for Donald Trump. It is doubtful he moved any needles there. 

The moments that did stand out in the debate put a spotlight on Vance’s tenuous relationship with the truth. When Vance lied again about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are in the United States legally, Brennan added: "Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status."

Vance responded: "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.”

There were two other big moments of the evening, both based in lies. First, Vance claimed that Trump, who tried repeatedly to repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, “saved” it. Then, Walz asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance refused to answer, saying he is “focused on the future,” and warned that “the threat of censorship” is the real problem in the U.S. 

Walz said: “That’s a damning non-answer.” 

Former chair of the Republican Party Michael Steele said after the debate: “I don't care where you are on policy…. If you cannot in 2024 answer that question, you are unfit for office.”

It was significant that Vance tried to avoid saying either that Trump won in 2020—a litmus test for MAGA Republicans—or that he lost, a reflection of reality. While this debate probably didn’t move a lot of voters for the 2024 election, what it did do was make Vance look like a far more viable candidate than his running mate. Waffling on the Big Lie seemed designed to preserve his candidacy for future elections.

It seems likely that the message behind Vance’s smooth performance wasn’t lost on Trump. As the debate was going on, Trump posted: “The GREAT Pete Rose just died. He was one of the most magnificent baseball players ever to play the game. He paid the price! Major League Baseball should have allowed him into the Hall of Fame many years ago. Do it now, before his funeral!” 

Former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Rose died yesterday at 83. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ncc-42069]

Got any online safety tips people don't know about or heavily underestimate?

A few basics before the biggie:

Continuing theme of scammers on the phone... think about this: the last time you've tried to call a company, they make it hard. They want you to go to their website, talk to their automated chat, do everything but talk to a person. They don't want to talk to you because they don't want to pay people to talk you. So when you call a number you found online - or is in an email or text message - and you immediately get a person? Red flag. It's cynical but it's true.

And these companies are never going to call you out of the blue. Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are not going to call you. If some one calls you claiming to be them, they're not.

And no legitimate company - absolutely none - will want you to pay them with gift cards. Never going to happen. If you hear the phrase "gift cards" mentioned, hang up immediately.

Now the big one... these scams have nothing to do with technology. The same techniques have been used to con people for literally centuries. And, it has nothing to do with being smart or clever.

The scammers are not outsmarting you. They're using social engineering on you to get you to react emotionally.

Social engineering is always based on one or more of these six principles:

Authority/Trust: We're conditioned to listen to authority figures, like law enforcement, senior management, etc. For example, if it appears that your boss is asking for your personal information for something, you will likely be more inclined to reveal it.

Intimidation: A bad actor will often use threats or subtle intimidation tactics to convince the victim to act accordingly. This can include intercepting communications, manipulating them, and threatening to release them to a boss or friend to promote distrust.

Scarcity:  The more demand there is for a product and the less supply there is, the more likely a person is to want it.

Urgency: Similar to scarcity, using the ploy that something is available for a “limited time only” is a form of time-based psychological manipulation that can convince an individual to act quickly or risk missing out.

Consensus: As a form of social proof, people are more likely to participate in something that they see other people doing as well.

Liking/Familiarity: It is human nature to be more persuaded to engage in or buy something from someone you like or respect. Attackers can capitalise on this, and social engineering schemes often seem to come from a source that is known or respected by the victim. They also will be very nice, complimentary, and personable.

(Adapted from: https://www.okta.com/sg/identity-101/social-engineering/)

They rarely use all six, but usually more than one are combined. For example, scarcity and urgency pair well, and authority often leads into intimidation. Consensus can also lead into scarcity or urgency - your friends are all doing it, don't miss out!

The whole point of social engineering is to get you emotional so you're not thinking clearly, and will react quickly to whatever they suggest.

The good news is, social engineering can be defeated.

Slow down.

Question it. Ask someone else about it.

And when in doubt, do nothing at all.

That last one is very hard to do, and scammers know it. They will keep talking, keep you moving, and not let you get a thought in. But it's the key.

------------

The thing is, this is not just good to know online - offline scammers use all these same tactics!

If you find this useful, please share it with others, especially older adults who are often the targets of these scams. (Although no one is immune!) I teach people about this as part of my work, but the information and awareness is so important, I'm happy to share anything I can and answer questions.

Thanks for the ask, anon!

[dailyanarchistposts]

A.2.5 Why are anarchists in favour of equality?

As mentioned in above, anarchists are dedicated to social equality because it is the only context in which individual liberty can flourish. However, there has been much nonsense written about “equality,” and much of what is commonly believed about it is very strange indeed. Before discussing what anarchist do mean by equality, we have to indicate what we do not mean by it.

Anarchists do not believe in “equality of endowment,” which is not only non-existent but would be very undesirable if it could be brought about. Everyone is unique. Biologically determined human differences not only exist but are “a cause for joy, not fear or regret.” Why? Because “life among clones would not be worth living, and a sane person will only rejoice that others have abilities that they do not share.” [Noam Chomsky, Marxism, Anarchism, and Alternative Futures, p. 782]

That some people seriously suggest that anarchists means by “equality” that everyone should be identical is a sad reflection on the state of present-day intellectual culture and the corruption of words — a corruption used to divert attention from an unjust and authoritarian system and side-track people into discussions of biology. “The uniqueness of the self in no way contradicts the principle of equality,” noted Erich Fromm, “The thesis that men are born equal implies that they all share the same fundamental human qualities, that they share the same basic fate of human beings, that they all have the same inalienable claim on freedom and happiness. It furthermore means that their relationship is one of solidarity, not one of domination-submission. What the concept of equality does not mean is that all men are alike.” [The Fear of Freedom, p. 228] Thus it would be fairer to say that anarchists seek equality because we recognise that everyone is different and, consequently, seek the full affirmation and development of that uniqueness.

Nor are anarchists in favour of so-called “equality of outcome.” We have no desire to live in a society were everyone gets the same goods, lives in the same kind of house, wears the same uniform, etc. Part of the reason for the anarchist revolt against capitalism and statism is that they standardise so much of life (see George Reitzer’s The McDonaldisation of Society on why capitalism is driven towards standardisation and conformity). In the words of Alexander Berkman:

“The spirit of authority, law, written and unwritten, tradition and custom force us into a common grove and make a man [or woman] a will-less automation without independence or individuality… All of us are its victims, and only the exceptionally strong succeed in breaking its chains, and that only partly.” [What is Anarchism?, p. 165]

Anarchists, therefore, have little to desire to make this “common grove” even deeper. Rather, we desire to destroy it and every social relationship and institution that creates it in the first place.

“Equality of outcome” can only be introduced and maintained by force, which would not be equality anyway, as some would have more power than others! “Equality of outcome” is particularly hated by anarchists, as we recognise that every individual has different needs, abilities, desires and interests. To make all consume the same would be tyranny. Obviously, if one person needs medical treatment and another does not, they do not receive an “equal” amount of medical care. The same is true of other human needs. As Alexander Berkman put it:

“equality does not mean an equal amount but equal opportunity… Do not make the mistake of identifying equality in liberty with the forced equality of the convict camp. True anarchist equality implies freedom, not quantity. It does not mean that every one must eat, drink, or wear the same things, do the same work, or live in the same manner. Far from it: the very reverse in fact.” “Individual needs and tastes differ, as appetites differ. It is equal opportunity to satisfy them that constitutes true equality. “Far from levelling, such equality opens the door for the greatest possible variety of activity and development. For human character is diverse … Free opportunity of expressing and acting out your individuality means development of natural dissimilarities and variations.” [Op. Cit., pp. 164–5]

For anarchists, the “concepts” of “equality” as “equality of outcome” or “equality of endowment” are meaningless. However, in a hierarchical society, “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome” are related. Under capitalism, for example, the opportunities each generation face are dependent on the outcomes of the previous ones. This means that under capitalism “equality of opportunity” without a rough “equality of outcome” (in the sense of income and resources) becomes meaningless, as there is no real equality of opportunity for the off-spring of a millionaire and that of a road sweeper. Those who argue for “equality of opportunity” while ignoring the barriers created by previous outcomes indicate that they do not know what they are talking about — opportunity in a hierarchical society depends not only on an open road but also upon an equal start. From this obvious fact springs the misconception that anarchists desire “equality of outcome” — but this applies to a hierarchical system, in a free society this would not the case (as we will see).

Equality, in anarchist theory, does not mean denying individual diversity or uniqueness. As Bakunin observes:

“once equality has triumphed and is well established, will various individuals’ abilities and their levels of energy cease to differ? Some will exist, perhaps not so many as now, but certainly some will always exist. It is proverbial that the same tree never bears two identical leaves, and this will probably be always be true. And it is even more truer with regard to human beings, who are much more complex than leaves. But this diversity is hardly an evil. On the contrary… it is a resource of the human race. Thanks to this diversity, humanity is a collective whole in which the one individual complements all the others and needs them. As a result, this infinite diversity of human individuals is the fundamental cause and the very basis of their solidarity. It is all-powerful argument for equality.” [“All-Round Education”, The Basic Bakunin, pp. 117–8]

Equality for anarchists means social equality, or, to use Murray Bookchin’s term, the “equality of unequals” (some like Malatesta used the term “equality of conditions” to express the same idea). By this he means that an anarchist society recognises the differences in ability and need of individuals but does not allow these differences to be turned into power. Individual differences, in other words, “would be of no consequence, because inequality in fact is lost in the collectivity when it cannot cling to some legal fiction or institution.” [Michael Bakunin, God and the State, p. 53]

If hierarchical social relationships, and the forces that create them, are abolished in favour of ones that encourage participation and are based on the principle of “one person, one vote” then natural differences would not be able to be turned into hierarchical power. For example, without capitalist property rights there would not be means by which a minority could monopolise the means of life (machinery and land) and enrich themselves by the work of others via the wages system and usury (profits, rent and interest). Similarly, if workers manage their own work, there is no class of capitalists to grow rich off their labour. Thus Proudhon:

“Now, what can be the origin of this inequality? “As we see it, … that origin is the realisation within society of this triple abstraction: capital, labour and talent. “It is because society has divided itself into three categories of citizen corresponding to the three terms of the formula… that caste distinctions have always been arrived at, and one half of the human race enslaved to the other… socialism thus consists of reducing the aristocratic formula of capital-labour-talent into the simpler formula of labour!… in order to make every citizen simultaneously, equally and to the same extent capitalist, labourer and expert or artist.” [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, pp. 57–8]

Like all anarchists, Proudhon saw this integration of functions as the key to equality and freedom and proposed self-management as the means to achieve it. Thus self-management is the key to social equality. Social equality in the workplace, for example, means that everyone has an equal say in the policy decisions on how the workplace develops and changes. Anarchists are strong believers in the maxim “that which touches all, is decided by all.”

This does not mean, of course, that expertise will be ignored or that everyone will decide everything. As far as expertise goes, different people have different interests, talents, and abilities, so obviously they will want to study different things and do different kinds of work. It is also obvious that when people are ill they consult a doctor — an expert — who manages his or her own work rather than being directed by a committee. We are sorry to have to bring these points up, but once the topics of social equality and workers’ self-management come up, some people start to talk nonsense. It is common sense that a hospital managed in a socially equal way will not involve non-medical staff voting on how doctors should perform an operation!

In fact, social equality and individual liberty are inseparable. Without the collective self-management of decisions that affect a group (equality) to complement the individual self-management of decisions that affect the individual (liberty), a free society is impossible. For without both, some will have power over others, making decisions for them (i.e. governing them), and thus some will be more free than others. Which implies, just to state the obvious, anarchists seek equality in all aspects of life, not just in terms of wealth. Anarchists “demand for every person not just his [or her] entire measure of the wealth of society but also his [or her] portion of social power.” [Malatesta and Hamon, No Gods, No Masters, vol. 2, p. 20] Thus self-management is needed to ensure both liberty and equality.

Social equality is required for individuals to both govern and express themselves, for the self-management it implies means “people working in face-to-face relations with their fellows in order to bring the uniqueness of their own perspective to the business of solving common problems and achieving common goals.” [George Benello, From the Ground Up, p. 160] Thus equality allows the expression of individuality and so is a necessary base for individual liberty.

Section F.3 (“Why do ‘anarcho’-capitalists place little or no value on equality?”) discusses anarchist ideas on equality further. Noam Chomsky’s essay “Equality” (contained in The Chomsky Reader) is a good summary of libertarian ideas on the subject.

[figpuddingprincess]

Blog Post #2

What are some of the potential ways in which cyberfeminism seeks to subvert existing power structures rooted in white supremacy, heteronormativity, and masculinity?

Cyberfeminism has been instrumental in deconstructing power structures through the increased emphasis on race, culture, and gender in an unprecedented way on the Internet and more largely, in digital culture. Some of these mechanisms include human/machine “cyborgs, identity tourism, and disembodiment.” “Cyborgs” refer to those who are essentially part human and part machine, with a potentiality to uplift women, predominantly within underprivileged communities and countries. Identity tourism, a concept explored by Lisa Nakamura, refers to a practice of people “trying on” identities that belong to marginalized groups. Lastly, disembodiment is a concept where humans can essentially disconnect their physical bodies from their online selves/personas through various online communities. 

2. What are some potential drawbacks of cyberfeminism, or rather the ways in which it has previously manifested online?

While some may argue that cyberfeminist movements are inherently subversive, many communities still center white, cis voices and values. An example of this phenomenon can be seen through “pro-ana” communities, which claim to reframe eating disorders and anorexia as a community of women uplifting and encouraging one another through various mechanisms in a way that is ostensibly nonjudgmental. The demographic of users on these websites are predominantly young, white, cisgender girls who uplift those who are also young, white, cisgender girls who align with the image of what they aspire to be. Additionally, this movement is not rooted in disembodiment, as they movement itself centers around the corporeality as it manifests in the physical world. 

3. How has surveillance and automation disproportionately and negatively affected marginalized communities?

Surveillance has disproportionately targeted marginalized and underprivileged communities. In Eubanks’ article “Automating Inequality,” the author illustrates how low-income communities are subject to disproportionately high measures of data collection in all aspects of life, including when attempting to obtain benefits made available to the public. Additionally, underprivileged communities are subject to higher levels of policing, both in the real world and digitally, justified because of ostensibly higher rates of crime. Critically, the higher rates of crime can be attributed to a fundamental lack of resources that low-income communities are deprived of, unlike their affluent white counterparts. In the article, the author shares an anecdote about a Black man who was a victim of a violent atrocity (being jumped by four men, resulting in a broken jaw, eye sockets, and cheek bones) who was subsequently informed that his pain-abating prescription had been cancelled and that he no longer had healthcare upon arriving at the pharmacy. Although the event was characterized as a mere technological glitch, it revealed a much more insidious phenomenon about the ways in which underserved communities are targeted in all aspects of life, even through technology and digital culture. 

4. How do facial recognition systems, AI, and automation shape our access to a broader scope of life chances?

In the article “Automating Inequality,” Eubanks delves into the limitations of facial recognition systems, AI, and automation and how marginalized groups specifically pay the price for those technological shortcomings. Facial recognition systems have historically failed those with darker skin tones because they often fail to accurately recognize certain individuals, therefore resulting in glitches in the system that hold the potential to ruin lives. For example, misidentifying a Black man and falsely accusing him of a crime he did not commit; higher rates of data collection amongst low-income communities that their affluent, white counterparts are not subject to; AI producing deep fakes of individuals that have been used to falsely incriminate others and identity theft. Due to surveillance and technological shortcomings, marginalized communities constantly have to navigate the world with a target on their backs and the threat of false accusations, data collection, and welfare fraud looming over them.

5. As a society, how can we practice cautious optimism when looking towards the future of technology?

By using a critical lens when engaging with the world, both physically and digitally, one can understand that technology and digital culture are manifestations of our physical reality. Automated inequality exists because structures of power still run rampant throughout our actual world and often shape our chances and the scope of our choices. Until we eradicate all hierarchies of power, on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic status, we can not expect that our digital world will reflect those values similarly. As technology is created by humans, it reflects te deeply ingrained prejudices and hatreds that those in power, with money, hold, which as always, target marginalized communities.

Eubanks, V. Automating Inequality - Introduction. 

Daniels, J. 2009. Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment.

[beardedmrbean]

Oh hey, sorry this is my issues with a lot of black characters

Also the tweet their quoting

https://x.com/thestrxggler/status/1768348156922859892?s=46

Soo

Hillbillies

Trailer trash

Most white people in the Appalachian Mountains?

The Irish

The Jews?

The Italians and Germans in the USA during the world wars?

Actually I learn a lot of families stop teaching their kids their heritage languages in fear they would be put into internment camps during ww2….which explains why we’re monolingual af

I watched a video from count dankula where he covered the mess Tonya Harding did in ice skating? Now he primarily focus on the victim, but mention that it’s very likely that the judges had a classist bias towards Tonya which lead her to do the hit.

I was thinking about making a book called “The American Aristocrat”

Now this sound weird, but I found another tweet I link later. But my book would be about how the upper middle class presume that most black Americans are disfranchises due to slavery and Jim Crow, that played a role….but also the sex revolution, the shipping of factories to China and Mexico etc.

And you wondering why black Americans love the feds. Okay I’m going to be 24 next Thursday, but I think older blacks who lived through the 80’s-00’s confirm it better

Welfare, yeah welfare checks

Actually I been opposed to the Universal Basic Income thing because well….my community been a LOVELY experiment to show what happens if we push more Americans socialism

Black Panther tried to show the difference between African American and Africans…but the director and main writer is from Oakland so he still don’t comprehend the issues Africans have with us.

Next anon, but I thought about maybe seeing American through an African immigrant lens. Yes it been tackled before and most Africans just see black Americans as Americans but I think a make complex stories showing how black Americans and Africans are worlds shows a significant issues they have when Hollywood use them

Another anon, but African creators and writers online maybe realize something that hell I felt when going to the Americas in the ac games after traveling across Europe in the previous ones

Oh hey, sorry this is my issues with a lot of black characters Also the tweet their quoting

This is the kind of people that will claim the oppression Olympics doesn't exist, right before or after saying this.

If I take a blank sheet of paper and put a dot on it with a sharpie it's no longer a blank sheet of paper, if I scribble on it with a sharpie it's also no longer a blank sheet of paper.

Just because they're different degrees of drawing doesn't change the fact that they're both no longer blank paper, just because your experiences are worse it doesn't mean other people aren't also experiencing something.

Actually I learn a lot of families stop teaching their kids their heritage languages in fear they would be put into internment camps during ww2….which explains why we’re monolingual af

Some did some didn't there was a push to assimilate made by lots of migrants in the late 19th early 20th century, especially the ones that came in through places like Ellis Island.

Unlike the nazi here in the US Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz would be told his name is George Brown when all that was going on, anglicized names were the order of the day.

Now this sound weird, but I found another tweet I link later. But my book would be about how the upper middle class presume that most black Americans are disfranchises due to slavery and Jim Crow, that played a role….but also the sex revolution, the shipping of factories to China and Mexico etc.

Ya, blue collar work that you could earn enough to raise a family on went to China and Mexico, that and it also got automated.

And you wondering why black Americans love the feds. Okay I’m going to be 24 next Thursday, but I think older blacks who lived through the 80’s-00’s confirm it better Welfare, yeah welfare checks Actually I been opposed to the Universal Basic Income thing because well….my community been a LOVELY experiment to show what happens if we push more Americans socialism

UBI thing, Finland was the first to run a test program on that 5 years back or so, biggest takeaway they announced at first then never spoke of again was that it increased the trust in the govt, none of the actual goals were achieved, not to any great measure at least.

I am in favor of things like SNAP and such, but UBI I'm wary of to say the least.

Black Panther tried to show the difference between African American and Africans…but the director and main writer is from Oakland so he still don’t comprehend the issues Africans have with us.

Could have solved that problem by talking to a few of them, but in my experience black Africans just see black Americans as Americans, you get the same shit tossed at white folks in the US too.

Long ass rant from someone in Ireland about St Paddy's day all the things we do wrong here, had someone flip out on me screaming I'm not Irish after I'd answered an ask about family heritage.

I said yes I know that's why I called myself an American mutt after leading off with Irish, German, Scotch, and soda.

The French actually do the whole thing right, you're not a Nigerian Frenchman, you're just a Frenchman, French citizens are just French.

Next anon, but I thought about maybe seeing American through an African immigrant lens. Yes it been tackled before and most Africans just see black Americans as Americans but I think a make complex stories showing how black Americans and Africans are worlds shows a significant issues they have when Hollywood use them Another anon, but African creators and writers online maybe realize something that hell I felt when going to the Americas in the ac games after traveling across Europe in the previous ones

Looking forward to it

[mariacallous]

Just after 9 pm on an August night in 2020, Kimberly Thompson and Brian James pulled the car into a driveway in Akron, Ohio, and stepped out into a barrage of gunfire. They were shot in the legs, rushed to a hospital, and survived. But Thompson’s 20-month-old grandson, Tyree Halsell, who was still sitting in the car, was shot in the head and mortally wounded.

In the aftermath, Akron police collected video footage from the neighborhood and asked for the public’s help with identifying two men who’d been seen approaching the victims, firing, then fleeing in a truck. Within months, detectives narrowed in on a suspect, Phillip Mendoza, and obtained a search warrant for his cell phone location data from Sprint, according to court records. They also served a geofence warrant on Google, seeking information on devices whose GPS, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth records placed them near the scene of the shooting. Neither warrant turned up any evidence locating Mendoza or his devices on the 1200 block of Fifth Avenue, where the shooting occurred, that night.

The investigation stalled until August 2022, when Akron police received a three-page report containing the evidence they’d been seeking. It came from a little-known Canadian company called Global Intelligence, which for the past several years has been selling an extraordinary service to police departments across the United States.

Global Intelligence claims that, using only open source data—public information that doesn’t require a warrant—and a suite of more than 700 algorithms, its Cybercheck system allegedly can geolocate an individual in real time or at a specific time in the past by detecting the wireless networks and access points the person’s “cyber profile” has interacted with. The company’s founder, Adam Mosher, has testified under oath that the process is entirely automated, requiring no human intervention from the time an investigator enters basic details about a case into the Cybercheck portal until the time the system produces a report identifying a suspect and their location.

If the technology works as advertised, then Global Intelligence is selling police departments previously unknown surveillance capabilities for as little as $309 a case that rival the open source tools used by national spy agencies. But a WIRED review of investigations involving Cybercheck from California to New York, based on hundreds of pages of court filings, testimony, interviews, and police records, suggests Cybercheck is a much less effective tool—one that has provided evidence in high-profile cases that was either demonstrably incorrect or couldn’t be verified by any other means.

Open source intelligence experts allege to WIRED that much of the information Cybercheck provides in its reports to law enforcement would be impossible to obtain using only open source data. Indeed, over the past several months, Global Intelligence’s work in Ohio has faded away, with prosecutors ultimately deciding not to use Cybercheck reports as evidence in several murder cases, including Mendoza’s.

“Either they’re somehow doing the Minority Report now, or somehow it’s just BS,” says Stephen Coulthart, director of the Open Source Intelligence Laboratory at the State University of New York at Albany, who reviewed Cybercheck reports and transcripts of Mosher’s testimony at WIRED’s request.

Cases Pending

During a November 2022 trial, Mosher testified that 345 different law enforcement agencies had used Cybercheck to conduct approximately 24,000 searches since 2017. WIRED identified more than a dozen cases involving Cybercheck, including 13 in which prosecutors intended to use Cybercheck reports as evidence at trial. Two of the cases in which courts allowed Cybercheck reports to be admitted as trial evidence resulted in murder convictions.

The agencies we found using Cybercheck ranged from small suburban police departments to county sheriffs and state police. The alleged crimes ranged from those related to child sexual abuse material to drive-by shootings, as well as cold cases that have haunted communities for decades. Last year, for example, the New York State Police arrested a man for murder after receiving evidence from Cybercheck that allegedly placed his cell phone at key locations on the night of the homicide, roughly 20 years ago, according to the indictment. The case is scheduled to go to trial in 2025.

While Mosher has testified on numerous occasions about Cybercheck, his explanations of what data sources the algorithms draw on and how they reach their conclusions do not fully explain Cybercheck’s ability to produce its reports. Global Intelligence did not answer WIRED’s questions about who designed Cybercheck’s algorithms or what data the company used to train them. When asked how the tool could determine that a person’s cyber profile had pinged a particular wireless network—oftentimes years after the incident occurred—an unnamed Global Intelligence employee wrote in an email: “There is no specific single source of information with regard to wireless network interactions.”

Accuracy Ratings

In 2022, more than two years after Halsell was shot and killed in Akron, Cybercheck produced a report for police that claimed Mendoza’s cyber profile had pinged two wireless internet devices located near 1228 Fifth Avenue after 9 pm. A cyber profile, from what Mosher has testified, is the amalgamation of names, aliases, emails, phone numbers, IP addresses, Google IDs, and other online identifiers that combine to create a person’s unique digital fingerprint.

Summit County prosecutors charged Mendoza with murder. But when Mendoza’s defense attorney, Donald Malarcik, dug into the Cybercheck report, he found a problem. The police department employee who entered the information into Cybercheck’s system had allegedly made a mistake: They had asked the system whether it could locate Mendoza at the scene on August 20, 2020. The shooting occurred on August 2. Cybercheck had nonetheless claimed to locate Mendoza at 1228 Fifth Avenue with 93.13 percent accuracy, even though it was on the wrong day. Stranger still to Malarcik, at some point after delivering the first report, Cybercheck produced another report. It was identical in all respects to the first report—from the MAC addresses, which are unique IDs assigned to networked devices, to the time of day when Mendoza’s cyber profile allegedly pinged them, and the accuracy rating—except it had the correct date of the shooting.

The warrants served to Sprint and Google hadn’t produced any evidence that Mendoza’s devices or accounts were at the scene. But according to Cybercheck's entirely automated algorithms, Mendoza’s cyber profile had not only been at 1228 Fifth Avenue at the time of the shooting, it had also been at the exact same location, at the exact same time of day, for the same amount of time, pinging the same wireless networks, 18 days later.

The unnamed Cybercheck employee who responded to WIRED’s questions says the company stands by the accuracy of both reports in the Mendoza case. “It is not uncommon to have the same cyber profile with the same device at a location on a different date,” they wrote.

Malarcik filed a motion where he asked the prosecutor to provide Cybercheck’s software in another case for which a report had been generated. He also subpoenaed Mosher, and hired a digital forensics expert in an attempt to review the code and the two Cybercheck reports about Mendoza. He tells WIRED that all that experts in a separate case allegedly saw were a couple hundred lines of code that created a program for searching public websites for information about a subject—nothing like the 1 million lines of code and more than 700 algorithms Mosher has testified about in pre-trial hearings.

“It was the equivalent of what you would do on a Google search,” Malarcik alleges. “What we didn’t see is the secret sauce, which [Mosher] claims is the machine learning that takes these data points and turns it into intelligence that takes a cyber profile and says it was at this location. That’s what he’s never disclosed to us.”

Mosher and Global Intelligence did not respond to WIRED’s questions about Malarcik’s claims.

Malarcik requested the court hold what is known as a Daubert hearing to determine whether Mosher’s testimony about Cybercheck’s findings was credible enough to be admitted as evidence in Mendoza’s trial. Two days before the hearing date, Summit County prosecutors decided to not use Cybercheck as evidence. Since then, the prosecutor’s office has withdrawn Cybercheck reports in three other cases, involving four men accused of murder, in which they potentially could have been presented as evidence, according to Malarcik and court records. In early August, Mendoza pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve at least 15 years of a 15-to-20.5-year sentence.

“In the cases we had with Cybercheck that went to trial, there were those aspects that Cybercheck found that the boots-on-the-ground detectives also found,” Brad Gessner, the Summit County prosecutor’s chief counsel, tells WIRED. “Those things matched.”

In total, the office has used, or intended to use, Cybercheck reports in 10 cases brought to them by the Akron Police Department, Gessner said. The Akron Beacon Journal and NBC News were the first to report about the county’s use of the tool.

The Summit County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to the Akron Beacon Journal this month that it is investigating whether Mosher lied under oath but provided no other details.

In other cases—murder trials for Salah Mahdi and Adarus Black—defense attorneys didn’t challenge the use of Cybercheck and the trials resulted in convictions. Both convictions were upheld by an appeals court.

Since then, judges overseeing the murder trials of Javion Rankin, Deair Wray, Demonte Carr, and Demetrius Carr have ruled that Cybercheck cannot be admitted as evidence unless Global Intelligence grants the defendants access to its source code. However, the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office appealed several of those rulings, and in September an Ohio appeals court ruled that the trial court erred in excluding the Cybercheck reports as evidence for reasons unrelated to the technology’s effectiveness.

In other jurisdictions, WIRED found, prosecutors have also decided not to use Cybercheck reports, or have dropped charges against defendants after defense attorneys scrutinized the findings and Mosher’s testimony.

In 2021, Midland County, Texas sheriff’s deputies were investigating the murder of a woman whose burned body had been found in a roadside field. Deputies had arrested the woman’s ex-boyfriend, Sergio Cerna, on unrelated charges. When they searched his phone, according to an affidavit, they found text messages in which he threatened the victim, including texts that read, “Your car is going to be burned down then you will be next.” But they couldn’t find evidence that placed Cerna near the scene of the crime.

The sheriff’s office asked Cybercheck for help and received a report claiming that the algorithms had determined, with 97.25 percent accuracy, that Cerna’s cyber profile had pinged a wireless LaserJet printer near the crime scene the day the victim’s body was found. Prosecutors wanted to use the report as evidence at Cerna’s trial, but his defense requested a Daubert hearing. Halfway through the hearing and before the defense could cross-examine Mosher, assistant district attorney Lisa Borden decided not to use Mosher’s testimony or the Cybercheck report at trial.

“We would have needed to be able to authenticate that data,” she tells WIRED, but by the time of the Daubert hearing, the printer that Cybercheck had identified in its report couldn’t be located. That was the first, and only, Daubert hearing that Cybercheck has been subjected to in the country, according to court records and Global Intelligence.

A Midland County jury convicted Cerna in March and sentenced him to life in prison. Cerna’s attorney said he would appeal the conviction.

In Colorado, questions about Mosher and Cybercheck preceded prosecutors’ dropping the charges and sealing the file against a defendant in what law enforcement said was a child sexual abuse material (CSAM) case. After learning that the local district attorney’s office planned to enter Cybercheck evidence at trial and call Mosher as an expert witness, defense attorney Eric Zale hired private investigators to look into Mosher’s background.

Mosher told the Boulder County court that he’d previously testified as an expert witness in two CSAM cases in Canada, according to Zale and an appeal brief filed by Malarcik for another client in which a Cybercheck report had been shared in discovery. But after being contacted by Zale’s investigator, the Canadian prosecutors in one of those cases contacted the prosecutor in Boulder County to say that Mosher had never been called to testify in any capacity. The defendant, who was related to Mosher, had pleaded guilty on the first day of the trial. A prosecutor familiar with the other Canadian case wrote to the court that no charges had ever been brought against the person whose trial Mosher had told a judge he testified at.

Zale alleges Mosher is “preying on this kind of holy grail of technology to sucker local law enforcement and judges and prosecutors, and frankly some defense counsel” into relying on Cybercheck’s technology.

Mosher did not respond to WIRED’s request to comment on Zale’s claims. Global Intelligence did not dispute that Mosher claimed to have testified as an expert in the two Canadian cases.

“Mr. Mosher felt at the time that he needed to relay all court participation activities including provision of statements regarding an investigation,” the unnamed Global Intelligence employee wrote. “Other prosecutors have reviewed this matter during other trial proceedings, finding this incident was more of a lost-in-translation issue as opposed to some sort of impropriety.”

WIRED requested the names of those prosecutors but did not receive a response.

No Receipts

The challenges in Ohio and Texas have hinged on an unusual aspect of Cybercheck that differentiates it from other digital forensics tools: The automated system doesn’t retain supporting evidence for its findings. As Mosher has testified under oath in multiple jurisdictions, Cybercheck doesn’t record where it sources its data, how it draws connections between various data points, or how it specifically calculates its accuracy rates.

In Mendoza’s case, for example, no one knows exactly how Cybercheck determined that the email address “ladypimpjuice625@aol.com” belonged to Mendoza. Nor did Global Intelligence explain exactly how the system determined that Mendoza’s cyber profile had pinged the wireless devices near 1228 Fifth Avenue.

Mosher has testified that the only information Cybercheck retains during its search process is the data it deems relevant to the investigation, all of which is included in the reports it automatically generates for investigators. Anything else, including potentially contradictory information about who owns a particular email address or online alias, is supposedly processed by the algorithms and used to calculate the accuracy scores that Cybercheck includes in its reports but isn’t archived.

“When you're asking, you know, do we preserve all the artifacts and all the data that we crawl—we couldn't realistically do that because it's zettabytes of data,” Mosher testified in the Texas Daubert hearing on January 19, 2024. A zettabyte is equivalent to more than 1 trillion gigabytes.

Mosher has testified that Cybercheck doesn’t need to show its work because its conclusions are derived from open source data that anyone with the proper open source intelligence (OSINT) training can find on the web.

“If you give that [Cybercheck] report to a skilled investigator that knows cyberspace and machine learning, they're going to come up with the exact same results,” Mosher testified during the murder trial of Adarus Black, in Summit County.

Rob Lee is an OSINT expert and chief of research and faculty lead at the SANS Institute, a leading provider of cybersecurity and infosec training. According to Mosher’s résumé and court testimony, Mosher took more than a dozen SANS Institute training courses prior to founding Global Intelligence.

At WIRED’s request, Lee and a team of researchers at the SANS Institute reviewed Cybercheck reports and the descriptions of the system that Mosher has given under oath. They say it’s highly unlikely that some of the information in the reports can be gathered from publicly available sources.

Specifically, to determine when a particular device has pinged a wireless network, an analyst would need to either physically intercept the signal or have access to the device or the network’s logs, neither of which are open source, Lee says. That kind of access requires a search warrant.

“There is a lack of peer review and transparency in [Cybercheck’s] algorithmic processes, which makes me question the legitimacy, sufficiency, and legality of the datasets used for accurate profiling and geolocation,” Lee tells WIRED. “The claim of achieving this level of accuracy using only open source data without further validation and transparency in the tool's methods and data sources is highly suspicious and questionable.”

A Global Intelligence employee tells WIRED that law enforcement works with “industry analysts and experts in the open source intelligence space who are manually replicating and backstopping intelligence data from our reports.” They add that “investigations and prosecutions only move ahead on the strength of the evidence gathered by agencies and verified after backstopping Cybercheck intelligence.” The company’s response did not address claims that certain data, such as whether a device connected to a specific Wi-Fi network, are typically not accessible via open source methods.

“Completely False”

During the Black murder trial in November 2022, Mosher testified that, since January 2021, Cybercheck had run approximately 1,900 searches for suspects’ historical locations and another 1,000 searches for their real-time locations. Out of those 2,900 searches, Mosher testified, there was only one search in which the individual didn’t turn out to be in the location Cybercheck listed for their cyber profile.

But in interviews with WIRED and in emails obtained by WIRED through public records requests, more than one of Cybercheck’s law enforcement clients allege the company’s technology provided information that investigators were unable to substantiate or that contradicted reliable sources.

In January, Mark Kollar, an assistant superintendent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI), wrote an email to Cybercheck about a search warrant his agency had served to an email provider seeking information about an account that Cybercheck linked to a suspect. “The email provider is saying that the email listed in the Cybercheck report doesn’t exist and has never existed,” Kollar wrote.

The Ohio BCI, which is a division of the state attorney general’s office, entered into a $30,000 trial contract with Cybercheck in August 2023 and submitted more than a dozen cases to the company, Steve Irwin, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, tells WIRED. “BCI has not received results on many of the cases and some of the leads produced haven’t panned out,” he says. “Due to the lack of investigative leads that have been produced, BCI has no intentions of entering into another contract with the company.”

The Yakima County Sheriff’s Office, in Washington, signed an $11,000 contract in 2022 allowing them to submit 20 cases to Cybercheck. “I think we still have access to Cybercheck, but we don’t use it,” Casey Schilperoort, the sheriff’s public information officer, wrote in an email. “I heard that we don’t receive much or accurate information.”

In an unofficial email chain in which investigators from different agencies shared their experiences with the technology, which WIRED obtained through a public record request, Aurora, Colorado detective Nicholas Lesnansky wrote that Cybercheck had identified someone as a suspect in one of his department’s homicide cases because the person’s cyber profile pinged a router located at an address of interest. “Detectives went and spoke to the resident at that home who has lived there for 20+ years and never had a router by that name so we can’t corroborate their information,” Lesnansky wrote. Neither Mosher nor Global Intelligence responded to WIRED’s inquiry about Lesnansky’s claims.

In a second Aurora case involving the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old, Global Intelligence staff were “adamant” that Cybercheck had identified the killer, but Lesnansky’s investigation was pointing toward an individual he considered a more likely suspect. “They then came up with a scenario where it was a gang initiation thing where the person they had identified was driving the person I think is more likely around,” Lesnansky wrote. “I doubt the suspect Cybercheck identified and the other person I find more likely are driving around together as one has had his house shot up by the other several times.”

On the same email chain, Heather Collins, a special victims unit intelligence analyst with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, wrote that she used Cybercheck on a missing juvenile case. “They gave us information on possible ‘suspects’ and it wound up being completely false. We located the missing juvenile using other methods. They wasted our time.”

Mosher did not respond to WIRED’s questions about Collins’ allegation that the information Global Intelligence provided was false.

In other cases, Cybercheck appears to have produced accurate information, although investigators weren’t always able to act on it.

Joe Moylan, the public information officer for the Aurora Police Department, says that his agency has requested information from Cybercheck on five cases, and that in two of those cases the technology was “beneficial to the investigations,” although no arrests have been made as a result.

In 2017, then 9-year-old Kayla Unbehaun was abducted. For years, the South Elgin, Illinois police department searched for Unbehaun and her noncustodial mother, Heather Unbehaun, who was accused of the abduction, following her trail to Georgia, where they hit a dead end. During that time, the department signed a contract with Global Intelligence, and sergeant Dan Eichholz received a Cybercheck report that placed Unbehaun and her mother in Oregon, he tells WIRED. It was a new lead, but because Cybercheck didn’t provide any evidence to support its findings, Eichholz couldn’t use the report to obtain a search warrant.

Unbehaun was finally reunited with her father in 2023, after an employee at a consignment shop in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized her mother from a picture shown on the Netflix show Unsolved Mysteries. After Unbehaun was located, Eichholz learned during the follow-up investigation that, until several months earlier, the pair had indeed been living in Oregon.

“I don’t want to say it wasn’t actionable, but I couldn’t just take their information and go with it,” Eichholz says. “That was always the hang-up for us. ‘OK, you got me this information, but I still have to check and verify and do my thing with search warrants.’” The child abduction case against Heather Unbehaun is ongoing.

Any Help They Can Get

Cybercheck has spread to law enforcement agencies across the country thanks to generous marketing offers and word-of-mouth recommendations. But in interviews with WIRED and the email exchanges we examined, there was little evidence that law enforcement agencies sought or received evidence to support Global Intelligence’s claims about what its technology could do.

Prosecutors who spoke to WIRED, such as Borden from Midland County, say they learned about Cybercheck because law enforcement in their jurisdiction had been using it. And when it came up in a case, they let the adversarial court system decide whether or not it was legitimate.

“It was new technology and I was curious, so I was like, ‘Let’s give it a try and see how far we can get,’” Borden says. “I’m thankful that it didn’t come into evidence in my case, that I didn’t need it to get my conviction.”

Emails show Global Intelligence sales representatives regularly offered to run police departments’ cases through Cybercheck for free in order to demonstrate the technology. They also referenced cases that Global Intelligence characterized as high profile and that Cybercheck supposedly helped solve, without naming the cases outright or providing evidence that Cybercheck had made any difference in the investigations.

Emails obtained by WIRED from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation show that investigators were initially excited to see what information Cybercheck could provide about their cold cases. They even introduced Global Intelligence sales representatives to other law enforcement agencies in Ohio. That enthusiasm seems to have helped convince other agencies to trust the company.

Gessner, from the Summit County Prosecutor’s office, says that when his agency was deciding whether to use Cybercheck evidence, it asked the Ohio BCI’s cybercrimes unit for an opinion. “They said, yes, it makes sense … we don't have the technology to do this, but we'd love to have it.” County prosecutors also reached out to the SANS Institute, he says, and were told the institute didn’t “do this type of stuff.”

But even as it has withdrawn evidence that Cybercheck provided, Gessner says the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office is asking other companies whether they can do the same kind of open source locating that Global Intelligence marketed.

“We don’t want to shut doors that can help point to the truth in our cases,” he says.

[consequencesofargentdawn]

With all due respect, and regardless of 'warning' (about what btw?) we just have no choice but to reply to what is, at best case, a major misunderstanding and ignorance of situation. You choose whether to publish it or not, but we must explain things and make our position clear.  "multiple independent reports" - how do you know it's not same person spamming accounts and fakes? Just takes a hour to make maybe 50 or 100 of them. If it's 3 people doing this - multiply by 3. How do you know it's not PCU drones that were ordered to suddenly start doing this at same time? Some of them may have old tumblr pages which look legit or active WoW accounts, after all, PCU drone is a WoW player too.

"You also insulted one of our editors, claiming they were "PCU scum" for putting your main invitation "bot" or however you use to automate your invitations on ignore." - none of our officers are aware of any situation like. While we indeed to send automated guild invites, that's just to speed up finding people we need (and we indeed find those who thank us for invite, such as victims of PCU or friends of somebody who PCU bullied out of WoW), however we always respect people's right to refuse, and it would make zero sense for any purpose to get toxic and try to offend them. Don't you think (can you?)? Also - Izanaxis is a horde character, while the guild is alliance. It is cross-faction, yes, however FastGuildInvite addon does not work if you run it on character of opposite faction. You could have checked it easily, big fail. Unless you think Izanaxis would just run to random people and spam /ginvite ? Cool, but even then - if somebody refuses - what is the point of getting toxic about it? The fake evidence you are spammed with tries to portray as like some crazy fanatics, when in fact we are reasonable people (in light of recent events I would say more reasonable than you).

"CoAD is not your personal army, nor are we your hammer to swing at others" - it is not, where did we say it is? "Anyone claiming to be CoAD in game is not CoAD" - none of us (of officers) ever claimed of being CoAD, where did you pull that from? All we did was trying to advertise your website in good faith, because we wanted more of actual WoW players know of it existence and even use it as their daily news source. We included it in guild info labeled as 'General news site', similar in some TRPs. Sometimes when people asked what is PCU we directed them to your site to read. That's it, we never claimed to be part of it, being editor of it or working together with it. But don't worry about that, after you backstabbed us like a rat for no reason (still not sure if on purpose or played by PCU like stupid kid) and then proceeded to, basically, harass and slander us with more lies, we won't mention you anywhere ever again. I should also mention that we actively sent you valuable evidence between 2019 and 2022, in good faith (not from this account, also I won't tell which evidence exactly but it did a big impact on the outcome of PCU situation). Of course proving anything like that would be too hard, but from now on expect interesting evidence avoiding you and being brought up by somebody else, somewhere else.

It's also very funny how you marked Hand of Conquest as 'inactive', while them having events with 15-20 online nearly every evening, most are also fully honor geared (which proves they play game actively on their HoC characters). Do your editors even play the game, or just read some guild statistics from outdated third-party site? At this point you are outright lying to your readers. Makes the whole list not trustworthy enough to even bother checking others. The whole 'PCU is dead' mantra is a big and very suspicious lie.

To sum up.

After careful consideration our council came to conclusion that COAD changed into something that can't be trusted anymore, became careless or, possibly, got corrupted by PCU (there could be agreement like 'as long as Perroy is out of WoW we will keep informing people that PCU is dead to keep situation calm'? who knows, after all you think of yourselves as those sneaky benevolent puppeteers who can decide what is better for realm and enforce it with lies if it achieves the goal). Therefore we part ways for now.

The only potential way to make it work is if you thoroughly examine each of your editors, especially new ones, investigate the whole situation with 'PCU dead' narrative, maybe start playing actual game? or at least make some bot that monitors in-game activity of guilds (via Who). Then make necessary adjustments and reach out to us. Haha, just kidding, of course you'll do nothing of that. Therefore it will be our last post, feel free to smear us with more lies if you want, those who are smart will see through them and also what kind of blog COAD has became. Have fun fading into obscurity in your little 'PCU is dead' bubble.

[ellie-belle014]

A Study of Holmes Heart By Dr John H Watson:

This is something I wrote for an assignment for my Creative Writing Masters that actually triggered this whole determination in me to continue developing this short story into a whole series.

In all my years recording the adventures of my dear friend Sherlock Holmes, I have very rarely diverted my attention from his intellect to his heart. For most people Holmes is a machine, an automation. I believed that the moment I met him all those years ago. However, contrary to popular belief, the more recent events of my life with my dearest friend have proven otherwise.

It is upon one of these events that I reflect today. I once claimed, in my record of The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, that the moment I was wounded was the first time I realised that Holmes’ heart was as big as his intellect. This was, for all intent and purposes, a simple embellishment of the truth. In fact, I had realised it much earlier, when Holmes directed his affection and concern to another, in a moment of weakness - and strength.

It was in late February of 1900, when our story begins. The spring weather was far from making its yearly appearance, and there was a certain chill in the air, but the warmth of the covers in my bedroom at 211B Baker Street were enough to keep any man from awakening in the ungodly hours of the morning. Yet a simple noise awakened me from what should have been a peaceful slumber: a gagging and coughing from the bathroom upstairs that forced me to spring from my bed to see what the matter was.

I ripped open my bedroom door and crossed the cold but comfortable sitting room. My feet pattered on the hard wooden floor, and it was not long before I noticed the putrid stench that filled the air which led me to the infrequent puddles of vomit spread across the floor. These continued out of the door and up the steep staircase rug, filling me with dread. I realised that Holmes’ bedroom door had been shut tight, meaning there was only one more logical victim of the misfortune laid upon the house that morning.

Now, it is here I must admit there is a further truth I have neglected to tell the world. The inevitable fortune that has arisen from writing these accounts, came at the cost of my anonymity. My own person became vastly recognised in the streets of London. So, once I had taken to myself a wife in Mary, beyond that one tale of our first meeting, I made sure to keep her inclusion to a minimum with only a passing mention. So, when our son arrived, and upon Mary’s passing soon after, I resorted to drastic measures, neglecting any mention of him and his residence at 221B all together in these tales, out of the pure desire of giving him a normal childhood.

Or as normal as I could, living with the world’s greatest detective.

As I reached the top of the stairs, I laid my eyes on the small frame of the young boy, a few days shy of six years old, retching over the toilet bowl. I could feel my expression soften with sympathy.

‘Oh Georgie’

‘It hurts!’

He wailed as he turned to face me, barely looking up from where he had been leaned over. My heart leapt in concern as I looked upon his appearance. The sweat beading from his skin, soaking his blue red and white striped two piece pyjamas and sticking his sandy coloured hair to his forehead. I crouched down to tend to the boy and was shocked to find how warm his skin felt beneath his clothing, like a piece of coal from a recently put out fire, hot to the touch. He had complained of a headache at dinner the previous evening, a fact that raised alarm in my mind.

Ensuring that the stream of sick had stopped coming, and George was alright to be moved, I scooped the boy gently into my arms, his own arms wrapping tightly around my neck. I carried him back down the staircase and back to the sitting room, yelling for our landlady as I did so.

Holmes was already awake by the time I had reached the bottom of the stairs, and Mrs Hudson was not far behind, appearing at the top of the seventeen stairs leading to the sitting room almost instantaneously.

Placing my son on the soft silk settee situated below the V.R outlined from the bullet holes my fellow lodger had shot into the red patterned wall years earlier, I turned towards my friends.

‘It seems George has become unwell; I am going to fetch my equipment. Mrs Hudson will you please telephone Dr Verner and inform him I will be needing assistance immediately.’

I looked to the landlady first, her expression one of distinct gentleness towards the boy on the settee, before I looked to address Holmes,

‘Holmes, if you would not mind watching George for a few moments.

Holmes nodded and I retreated into my room to retrieve my black leather doctor’s bag and the China bowl on the nightstand in case George began to sicken once more.

When I returned to the living room, I found Holmes crouched in front of the poor child, gently trying to figure out what was afflicting him. his hand gently resting on George’s in an attempt at comfort and asking questions to him diligently. However, despite my initial shock at Holmes gentleness, I immediately set to work, taking George’s temperature and heart-rate, even managing to get a sample of his blood for testing. I had been worried upon recalling George’s complaint of a headache and a sore throat earlier, and now being sick and having a fever... the symptoms were pointing to something I was dreading. I hoped it was not what I believed it to be and hoped another set of eyes would offer different diagnosis.

But a short while later, still in the early morning, Dr Verner, the Doctor who had bought my medical practice some years ago arrived and as we glanced down Holmes’ microscope at the blood sample, he confirmed my worst fears.

George had contracted Poliomyelitis.

The following weeks progressed in a blurry haze. With the lack of cases, and the diversion of my own attention, I was certain Holmes could have been driven to a frenzied, excitable boredom. But if he ever indulged in his seven percent solution, one of his usual remedies for the dullness, I had failed to notice.

It is to my shame that I will admit I had neglected to pay much attention to anything beyond the state of my son in those few days, the world had become a hollow, echoing chasm, with my son’s life trapped in a limbo of pain and suffering, causing him to become increasingly evanescent in the grand scheme of my life. I had resorted to trying everything possible to cure him, from the traditional medicines, like massaging the joints and a cooling cloth on the forehead, to more updated suggested cures such as applications of poultices of Roman chamomile, slippery elm, arnica, mustard, cantharis, amygdalae dulcis oil, spikenard oil and Xanthoxolinum.

But alas, nothing appeared to be working and I was fearful of the results of my effort and failure.

It was on one awful night a few weeks after George’s diagnosis when I first suspected the heart of Holmes was as great as his mind. I am not an uncourageous man; I hope that my service in Afghanistan should attest to that. But as I watched my son sleep in his small bed in our shared room, my medical equipment by his bedside, a cold cloth on his head, I could not overcome the pusillanimity that had taken hold of me.

I had blocked out all sense of time, the clock on the dresser was ticking loudly, but I did not hear it. the melody from Holmes’ violin, the clattering of beakers and the fiery noise of a Bunsen burner, were non-existent to me as I focused on my son’s wellbeing, whilst the worry clouded my every waking moment. It was only when my friend called for me that my attention was broken from wallowing in my misery.

‘Watson!’ he called ‘Watson!’

I glanced at George, watching as his chest rose and fell, a little too quickly for my liking. But I took a small comfort was that he wasn’t crying in his sleep from the pain and fever anymore.

‘Watson!’

I decided that perhaps I could see what Holmes wanted, albeit for a little while, George would hopefully sleep soundly for a while. I stood from my seat stiffly, and I entered the sitting room to find Holmes sitting at the dining table with a spread of meats, cheeses, and bread across the table.

‘Ah Watson, my good fellow,’ Holmes smiled, ‘Mrs Hudson has put together quite the spread. When was the last time you ate?’

I was taken aback. Was Holmes really asking about my health? That seemed quite impossible, perhaps I was delusional from misery? Either way, I reasoned I hadn’t eaten in a while. With Martha, George’s nursemaid, visiting family and with my concerns, I hadn’t eaten in days. And so I hesitantly obeyed my friend’s request, despite not feeling very hungry myself.

Holmes did not eat. He sat at the table watching, craning his long neck across the table with interest as I slowly ate, his grey eyes on me like a hawk, clearly ensuring I had my fair amount of sustenance.

‘I was wondering if a distraction from being unwell might benefit George, a walk in Kensington Park? Or perhaps St James’?’

‘Holmes, he is too weak’.

‘When he is well enough. I read it might do him some good’.

‘Read?’

‘Of course, what else do you think I have been doing without a case at my fingertips?’

He indicated to the large number of medical books borrowed from St Barts which I had failed to notice on the floor, and I pieced the information together. I was rather taken aback by this revelation. Holmes had not been undertaking any of his usual coping mechanisms with boredom, instead he had been attempting to find a way to save my son.

‘He may not get well enough, Holmes, you are aware of that.’ I spoke, aware of the possibility that my words would make my own fear apparent to my friend.

‘You must not entertain that notion Watson; you are doing your job as a Doctor and a father. He will be well because this place wouldn’t be the same without him. I doubt any of us could bare it’. As Holmes spoke, his expression flickered instantly between enthusiasm, fascination and concern. ‘So if we can help it, George will not fall victim to his illness, I assure you.’

Sherlock Holmes, the detective with the world’s greatest intellect, had spent the last five years in adoration of George. Clearly he was worried for the young boy, and yet still trying to reassure myself and perhaps himself.

We sat in comfortable silence for some time, for I had to absorb the simple revelation that was beginning to unravel itself in front of me: The great detective had a heart.

Holmes’ words had come as a great reassurance to me. He was not a machine, and I suddenly realised with clarity that I was not alone in this endeavour. I could breathe, think, and hope that George would be well, with my friend’s unusual support.

As I have previously mentioned - in another story - all my years of humble, but single-minded service had led to this very moment, the first glimmer of Holmes’ great heart. Whilst I am sure that it was only words to Holmes, to me, and by extension to George, Holmes had answered the call once more of someone in need of assistance. He was assisting in the best way he could in a situation I had never dreamed I’d find myself in as a parent and or as a doctor.

The conclusion to this story is abrupt, as I’m afraid Holmes is needing my assistance in Scotland. However, I am pleased to report to you all that George did recover, although not without some lingering effects, which I may need to elaborate further in future tales with his expressed permission.

But I will leave you all with the knowledge I acquired that night.

That Sherlock Holmes is capable of love.

[zerosecurity]

LockBit Ransomware Gang Claims Responsibility for Wichita, KS Cyberattack

The notorious LockBit ransomware gang has claimed responsibility for a devastating cyberattack on the City of Wichita, Kansas, the largest city in the state with a population of nearly 400,000. This ransomware attack has forced the City's authorities to shut down crucial IT systems used for online bill payment, including court fines, water bills, and public transportation. Wichita, a major cultural, economic, and transportation hub in the region, and home to several aircraft factories, announced the disruptive ransomware attack last Sunday, May 5, 2024. In response, the City's IT specialists promptly shut down computers used in online services to contain the damage and stop the spread of the attack, as stated in their announcement: "This decision was not made lightly but was necessary to ensure that systems are securely vetted before returning to service." LockBit Ransomware Gang Threatens Data Leak Earlier today, the LockBit ransomware group added Wichita to its extortion portal, threatening to publish all stolen files on the site by May 15, 2024, unless the City pays the ransom. This unusually quick listing of a ransomware victim, merely three days after the attack, is believed to be in retaliation for the recent international law enforcement operation that named and sanctioned the leader of the LockBit ransomware operation, a 31-year-old Russian national named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, who uses the online alias "LockBitSupp."

Lockbit Lists the City of Wichita as one of its victims.

Widespread Service Disruptions in Wichita

Meanwhile, Wichita continues to face significant disruptions, with the latest status update indicating that the following services remain unavailable: - Auto payments for water bills are suspended. - Public Wi-Fi at certain locations (Airport terminal, Advanced Learning Library, Evergreen, and Walters branches of the Library). - The online catalog, databases, and some digital services of the Library. - Email communications through the city network for Library staff. - Self-service print release stations and self-check stations at the Library. - Automated materials handler at the Advanced Learning Library. - Most incoming phone call capability for the Library. - Wi-Fi and phone services at neighborhood resource centers. - Public services, including golf courses, parks, courts, and the water district, require residents to pay in cash or by check while online payment platforms are shut down. Additionally, any Request for Bid, Proposal, or Qualifications with a due date of May 10, 2024, has been deferred until May 17, 2024, and the 'Bid Opening' scheduled for Friday, May 10, 2024, has been canceled. Public safety services like the Wichita Fire Department (WFD) and Wichita Police Department (WPD) have resorted to using "pen and paper" reports, and the Wichita Transit buses and landfill services can only accept cash payments. Data Theft and Potential Leak While the City is still investigating whether data was stolen in the attack, the LockBit ransomware gang is known for stealing data before deploying their encryptors. Therefore, if a ransom is not paid, data will likely be leaked in the future on the ransomware gang's data leak site, exacerbating the already severe impact of this cyberattack on the City of Wichita. Read the full article

[caffeineandsociety]

The past few days on tumblr have been a fascinating albeit EXTREMELY frustrating case study in how bigotry spreads among people who think they're resistant to it.

Mattie-boy, shortly before....all of this, went on a whole screed about how he doesn't SEE race and he's so similar to MLK and anyway labels like race and gender and sexuality are just so divisive and uwu can't we all just be friends? He is not actively hateful on a group level, we will not see him go on a rampage about how trans women are ruining his precious website because by all evidence that's not what he CONSCIOUSLY believes, that's not what he BELIEVES he believes; he's just a giant egomaniac who thinks he has nothing left to learn about the world and the people in it.

But three things are very obviously true about him:

He experiences a lot of subconscious bias,

He doesn't care to take the time to learn basic sensitivity (again, he thinks he's already got that down), and

He is blissfully unaware that overmonitoring one group while letting others slide for the same infractions - if not making false accusations outright and letting the authorities come up with a post-hoc justification to explain why someone freaked out (because it WOULDN'T be for NO reason, right?) - is a form of both top-down and grassroots bigotry VERY popular on the internet, despite us telling him multiple fucking times over the course of 5 years.

I'm sure that Matt believes he would act the same way toward ANYONE who bruised his ego so severely. I'm sure he's wrong about that; I'm sure the intensity might be similar but the specifics would be very different given the number of blatantly transphobic and specifically transmisogynistic tropes he's invoked-

But more importantly, we're overlooking a core part of the problem that is much bigger than Matt and his ego: not many groups would ever get the CHANCE to bruise his ego so severely.

He prides himself on being a good and fair and just person who believes in equality...in the most center-right liberal chickenshit way. The exploitability of his moderation system - the automated nature of a good chunk of it, and the way the human staff is so overworked that they make constant obvious mistakes and often act as barely more than an extension of the machine, such that anyone with an axe to grind and a willingness to mass-report (you know, usually racists and terfs...who are largely the same people) effectively becomes a member of the FUNCTIONAL community standards team - shows in no uncertain terms that he is failing to live up to that ideal.

And he can't fucking STAND having that called out. He HAS to prove its not true...by constantly changing his justification for banning a trans woman who made too much of a stink about it, justifying taking down her SFW photos with claims that she totally DID post explicit ones elsewhere, then abandoning that justification to say she threatened him, then abandoning that justification to say she HARASSED him (AND, as an afterthought, other users), and THEN stalking her to another fucking website to double down on the already disproven explicit content allegation.

Again. This is a center-right milquetoast liberal loser. This is someone who believes that he treats everyone equally and doesn't see labels. Not only is this obviously not true, he is ignoring the role of systems of abuse in determining who pops up on his radar as a threat to that spun glass ego of his. Absolutely none of this would have happened had he been willing to take criticism and make even the SLIGHTEST effort with the SLIGHTEST bit of transparency to make the moderation system less exploitable, but because he hasn't - and, as he just admitted, hadn't even considered it until now - it was near inevitable that the person who would end up bringing it to his attention so loudly as to wound his ego this severely would be a victim of the system; i.e., probably a trans and/or Black woman - and sure enough, as it ended up, it was a trans woman...surprising absolutely no one but Matt himself.

And, frankly, we are doing a disservice by ignoring that aspect as well, especially since now there's yet another bullshit pedo callout circulating about yet another trans woman and the overlap between people who have been calling this bullshit for what it is and people who have been reblogging that callout uncritically is...significant.

The problem, in this case, is that entirely too many people here have not unlearned the stranger danger mindset. Of course, we believe, trans women are not especially likely to be 🚨 SEXUAL PREDATORS 🚨...but as a community we still do believe in the idea that the INTERNET as a whole has a massive problem with unchecked 🚨 SEXUAL PREDATORS 🚨 and callouts of them work. We talk about how the stereotype of trans women as predators is a problem - but every single time a callout comes along, as a community, we often think it's one individual exception; most trans women aren't child molesters...but THIS ONE totally is!

In reality, let's look at where CSA is common: in the nuclear family, and under other systems of authority that are held up as beyond questioning. The most likely child abusers are older immediate family members, religious authorities, cops, teachers, sports coaches, doctors and nurses - people who, for one reason or another, have power over the victim that manifests as a sense of ownership, be it permanent or temporary. Randomly acting opportunists are rare.

Many of us know this, some of us don't, but even among the people who do know, we also know that "rare" doesn't mean "nonexistent"...

So as a community, every time someone swears they've found that rare exception, people believe it. The fact that it's a trans woman about 80% of the time, another trans person about 19% of the time, a POC a good chunk of the time including most of the 1% of the time it's a cis person - as a community we don't even tend to consciously notice, because every time is yet another "rare isolated incident".

There's too much acceptance of the premise that the internet is just FULL of PEDOPHILES like all the stranger danger PSAs of the 2000s claimed, and too much trust that no one in THIS community would make such a callout in bad faith, or at least that a bad faith one would contain NO evidence but "dude trust me", so even the flimsiest "evidence" is accepted without question - and that's not even getting into how the kink community and the queer community intertwine, and yet a kink more taboo than light bondage is often seen EVEN among younger queer people as proof of predatory tendencies.

You see what happens? Even if you have fully managed to reject the idea, on a personal level, that trans women (or other trans people, or POC, or mentally ill people, or whatever other group painted with this brush, for that matter) are disproportionately likely to be A Predator, if you uncritically believe whatever callout crosses your dash, you will still disproportionately hurt marginalized people, because most if not all of them are going to be bullshit and you're not going to be given nearly as many targets who are NOT part of those groups - just like how Matt may indeed have had this nuclear meltdown on anyone who bruised his ego this badly, but the odds of him being pushed to that breaking point by anyone BUT a trans woman, or a member of at least one of a handful of other marginalized groups, were extremely slim.

And thus, bigotry finds a way to perpetuate itself even in communities and individuals who staunchly believe themselves to have rejected it.

[the-hacker-news]

The Interdependence between Automated Threat Intelligence Collection and Humans

The Hacker News : The volume of cybersecurity vulnerabilities is rising, with close to 30% more vulnerabilities found in 2022 vs. 2018. Costs are also rising, with a data breach in 2023 costing $4.45M on average vs. $3.62M in 2017. In Q2 2023, a total of 1386 victims were claimed by ransomware attacks compared with just 831 in Q1 2023. The MOVEit attack has claimed over 600 victims so far and that number is still http://dlvr.it/Sw7ymt Posted by : Mohit Kumar ( Hacker )