#so instead it just automatically churns out this to try and rationalize

[poisonouspastels]

hi guys here's my interpretation of Tessa as a drone hope you like it

[luminouspoes]

let my heart be your shelter

summary: poe seeks out the reader’s comfort during a thunderstorm

warnings: angst (with a happy ending), poe has a guilt complex the size of several parsecs, some self loathing (poe’s pov). no pronouns are used for the reader.

read on ao3

It’s too much.

Poe wakes up and his bedroom is entirely too small and too dark, and he can hear the echoes of bombers and X-Wings and transport ships turning to dust in between the cracks of lightning that slice through the Ajan Kloss’ night sky.

He’s barely aware of his own movements, his mind racing and churning as a sense of overwhelming emotion and a dash of panic clutches tightly in his chest, eyes burning as one thought runs over his head over and over again: my fault, all my fault.

Poe stumbles out of bed, almost tripping on the thin blanket. His bare feet shuffle across the cold floor, out of his quarters and into the hallway, the fear still suffocating him.

The Resistance was decimated because of him, there was more blood on his hands than he ever wanted, and he’d let down the one person who mattered the most to him, who guided him out of some of the darkest parts of his life, gave him the purpose he’d been seeking his whole life.

Leia forgave him, told him as many times as he needed to hear it. The Resistance backed him on Ryloth’s moon. But Poe can’t forgive himself, can’t stop hearing those screams, can’t stop -

He’s just a soldier, just a pilot, he’s nothing. He’s made so many mistakes and he doesn’t deserve the faith Leia has in him, doesn’t deserve the praise and kindness from everyone else, can’t they see?

He’s fading away; there’s no excitement in flight anymore. He’s shorter now, he knows, more easily frustrated. Terrified out of his mind that this is all for nothing, that they’re one bad day - one mistake, one more failure - away from being snuffed out for good.

Poe Dameron can barely recognize himself anymore. He wonders where the Resistance’s best pilot went, the one who could take everything in stride with a charming smile and a quick joke. Everything’s easy for Poe Dameron, right?

He can’t even pretend anymore. He’s so damn exhausted. 

His feet stop moving and he realizes he’s gone to your quarters automatically. There’s a hint of light piercing out from underneath, so before he can think better of it, Poe knocks on the door. He knows the code to your room - has it memorized better than his own - but he doesn’t just want to spring in on you unannounced.

The door slides open a second later, you on the other side. You’re in your night clothes, your holopad clutched under your arm and he figures he interrupted your nightly habit of reading before bed. He opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. Instead, he flinches when another roll of thunder cracks across the sky - another X-Wing down, another death on my hands - and you immediately reach for him, concern knitting your brow together.

He wants to tell you it’s alright, but he can’t find the words. You gently guide him inside the room, closing the door behind him and toss aside the holopad before you return to him. You hesitate, unsure if he’s okay with being touched right now. Poe manages a quick nod and you place your hand on his biceps.

“What is it tonight?” You ask quietly, eyes filled with so much gentleness that it nearly shatters him because he doesn’t deserve this kindness, don’t you understand that?

“Everything.” Poe wants to close his eyes because he’s so damn tired, but he’s afraid if he does he’ll just see more fire and more death. He’s not sure he can handle another memory.

“What can I do?” Your grip on him tightens, grows more firm as a rush of protectiveness surges through you, recognizing the look written on his face: the guilt, the regret. The way it’s been eating away at him, til the point that he’s barely the same man you met when you first joined the Resistance.

It kills you, seeing how this war has taken so much from him. Your chest aches at the thought of it, your eyes burning with unshed tears, and if you could you would tear down the First Order with your own two hands for taking this man who was once a brilliant, blazing sun and draining his light and fire.

But what was worse was having the knowledge that the haunted look in his eyes was from his own guilt, how he blamed himself for where the Resistance was now, no matter how many times everyone tried to assuage that guilt. The fear of letting Leia down again was a constant weight on his shoulders, and it was agonizing to know there was nothing you could do to prove to him that he was more than what he feared.

“I -” his voice cracks and you don’t even wait now, you pull him to you and he melts instantly, shoulders shaking as he buries his face into the crook of your neck. You feel the shoulder of your shirt grow wet as you rub soothing circles against his back, your own tears spilling down your cheeks because you hate this, because you can have his back when he’s out in the field but how can you save someone from inner turmoil and self-hatred?

How can you make someone realize they’re so loved when they don’t think they deserve it?

After a few beats, Poe’s shoulders still and you pull back slowly - so he knows you’re not going far and that if he needs to, he can stop you - to get a glimpse at him. His eyes red-rimmed, eyes dark without so much as a shine to them. You miss how easily he used to smile, how happy he used to be.

Maker, you’d do anything to see him that way again. You’d cross the whole galaxy, turn back time, fistfight Kylo Ren himself if needed, just to bring that smile back.

Poe breathes out your name, bringing you out of your reverie. He brushes his thumb across your cheekbone, swiping away your tears. “I’m sorry,” he whispers and something inside you snaps.

You wrap your fingers around his wrist, drawing it away from your face so that you can press a kiss to the center of his palm, “No.”

You close his fist, bring it up to your lips and press more kisses to his knuckles and say it again, more firmly: “No.”

When you finally meet his gaze again, his eyebrows are drawn up together, his lips parted somewhat. You step forward, cupping his face with your hands, and you press a kiss to his right cheek, then his left, and then it’s all bubbling up over the surface and you can’t stop raining kisses along every part of him you can reach: his brow, his eyelids, the corner of his mouth -

“You have nothing to apologize for,” you enunciate each word with another peppered kiss, drawing back when the only place left for you to kiss is his lips. “You are so good.” Your hands are trembling now, to the point that Poe reaches up with his own to take your wrists to steady them.

His mouth twitches as he inhales sharply, trying to gather the words. “I’m not, though. Everyone keeps saying that I am, but - we’re in this mess because of -”

“We’re in this mess because of the First Order,” your voice is sharper than you intend for it, but Poe barely reacts to it. “Not because of you. You made a mistake, you failed a couple of times, sure. But don’t you ever fucking lose sight of who put us here. You didn’t destroy our fleet, you didn’t destroy the Hosnian System, those -” your vision blurs, your voice cracks and there’s so much emotion roaring through your chest you’re surprised there’s even room for breath - “those beasts are to blame for all this, not you. Never you.”

Silence falls between you as your chest heaves. Thunder rumbles distantly, but it’s muffled in comparison to the way your heart drums out a tattoo against your ribcage as you realize neither of you have let go of the other yet.

“Why do you believe in me so much?” Poe asks.

“Because you’ve never given me a reason not to.”

Something shifts in his expression now and he takes a quiet step forward, closing the rest of the gap between you. “I can think of plenty of reasons you could hold against me.”

You shake your head just slightly, a quick dismissal. “You’re more than what you believe you are, Poe Dameron.”

His dark eyes search your face for a second and just as you start to question whether or not there’s a spark building in them again, he presses his lips to yours, one hand moving up to cup your cheek, his calloused fingertips feather-light against your skin.

You freeze against his touch and before you can properly register what’s happening, he’s pulled away with a panicked expression. He opens his mouth, presumably to give another apology, but you cut him off by grabbing him by the shirt and dragging him down to capture his lips with your own for a second time.

He wraps his arms around your torso, pulling you close to his chest, as you memorize the feel of his mouth against yours, his stubble brushing against your skin, and then as you slide your hands up into his hair, what it’s like to card your fingers in his curls.

You’re determined to show him what he can’t believe, so when you pull away for breath, you immediately press quick kisses to the corner of his mouth, his jawline, his neck, then back up to press another kiss to his lips, gentler this time.

You take a step forward and guide him backwards to the mattress, not breaking the kiss until he almost trips on a blanket and you snatch your hands out to steady him before he can fall on his ass. “You okay?” You ask and you can’t quite recognize your own voice.

His cheeks are darker than usual when he replies, “Yeah. No. I don’t know -” he shakes his head, sits down on the mattress. You hang where you’re at for a second, standing over him a couple inches away, rocking back and forth on your heels.

The kiss wasn’t too much of a surprise — there was always something undefinable between the two of you, there was no right term for the bond you shared, just...that it was a bond, constantly shifting, full of devotion and loyalty and fierce protectiveness for the other — but you can’t help but feel self-conscious about what just transpired, even though rationally, you know that’s not as important as the reason he came here in the first place.

Poe looks up at you and, as if he read your mind, whispers, “Not about that. That was…” his lips quirk upward slightly, not quite a full smile — not that broad grin you fell in love with — but it’s more than you’ve seen from him in such a long time that you feel like you just watched a sunrise for the first time in months. “That was great.”

You smile and cross the room to him, sinking down next to him. “So what is it?”

Poe closes his eyes and exhales slowly, when he opens them, you can see the fear in them. “Do you really believe I’m a good man?”

You open your mouth to reply of course, but you hesitate. It’s not that you don’t believe he’s a good man, you know that in your bones, but the trouble is that he doesn’t. You can tell him as many times as you want that you believe he’s a good man, you can kiss him until the sun comes up to show him how much he’s loved, but -

But he’s drowning in the fear that he isn’t, and sometimes when you’re that far beneath the surface, it takes more than just someone telling you they believe in you to make a difference, as horrible and terrifying as that is.

So, instead, you reach forward and push back a strand of curls from his forehead, linger slightly where you remember finding a bruise blooming after he returned from being held aboard the Finalizer. You meet his eyes, see the trepidation in them, and you make sure your voice is firm and certain but gentle when you answer him, “I think that you try to be, and I think that’s probably the point. Everything you’ve done, you’ve done because you thought it was the right, just thing, because you thought it could save people.”

“I got people hurt because of that.” Poe whispers. “I got people killed because I had to play hero.”

“Yes you did.” If he won’t mince his words, neither will you. “You were a stubborn ass who refused to listen to orders and your luck ran out. But how many people have you saved, Poe? What about on the Raddus? Who was giving us hope when we had none? That was you.” 

“My plan failed and I almost got Finn and Rose killed for it. The First Order found out because of our transport ships because I sent them into the heart of the beast -” you cut him off by pressing your palm to his lips. He raises one eyebrow in surprise.

“Our luck ran out. People got killed, yeah. Nothing’s going to change that, we can’t take it back, but you weren’t the one who shot them out of the sky, were you?” You hang your head, hand dropping from his mouth, heart seizing - wondering if he’d ever believe you.

To your surprise, Poe whispers, “I guess not.”

You snap your head back up. He doesn’t look entirely convinced by your argument, but he seems to be considering it. He looks up at you, another smile tugging on his lips. This one’s even weaker than before, but it’s a start.

The thunder has died away completely, leaving only the soft patter of the rain.

Feeling embolden, you twist and curve into him, pressing your foreheads together. He shifts to meet you, wrapping one arm around you, his hand splaying across the small of your back as you crash your lips to his again. He gently falls backwards, using his elbow to cushion the fall so it’s not terribly awkward, and your legs twist together.

You stay that way for minutes or maybe hours, parting now and then for air and a shared chuckle before melting against each other again. Eventually, you slip off of him and into the space beside him, his arm underneath you as he rolls with you to capture your lips again, this time in a quick peck. 

He looks more content now anyway, eyebrows soft as he lays on your pillow beside you. You turned off the lamp a few minutes ago after you caught him yawning for a second time, and now you were both lying underneath the same blanket, still holding onto each other - but it’s different from when you’d fallen backwards onto the mattress, then you’d clutched at each other like lifelines, now it was just adjusting to this new familiarity.

You’re curled up against his side with one hand over his heart, fingers lightly twisting around the fabric of his nightshirt as he leans down to press a kiss to the crown of your head. “Thank you,” he whispers against your hair.

“For what?”

He hesitates, like he’s not sure how to phrase what he’s thinking. Finally he lands on, “For not giving up on me, for trusting me - even when I don’t think I deserve it. Especially when I think I don’t deserve it.”

“Always, flyboy.” The nickname falls from your lips with as much affection as it did the first time you used it on him, but Poe doesn’t respond. You huff out a laugh, realizing he’s fallen asleep. You shake your head and snuggle up closer to him. Just before you close your eyes, you whisper the truth you know he doesn’t believe, “You’re the hero.”

Because heroes aren’t just daring and reckless with no sense of self-preservation: they inspire people to be heroes in their name. They find hope in the impossible and offer it to the people who’ve had everything taken away. They listen to the people most would be eager to dismiss, they’re encouraging to those around them. They fight against injustice, stand up for their beliefs, even at great personal cost.

These are all traits Poe Dameron has in spades.

So yes, you muse to yourself just before sleep claims you, he is a good man.

He always was one and he always would be one. You just hope that one day soon, he’ll come to believe it himself.

[rosarenn]

All things are ephemeral

I've been thinking a lot about the illusion of certainty and the way it holds us back from achieving great things.

There's this idea that if something is temporary, transient, that it isn't worth putting any effort into. That something is only worth your time if it endures, if it's permanent. That the investment must be followed by a payoff or why bother.

I am very much talking out of my own experience here, as a white settler/colonizer raised in a more or less middle class family. I know my experience is not universal, and I am still going to talk about "we" and "us" because I want to include myself in this group, and I'm noticing a pattern that I want to talk about. If you have never experienced certainty, or are in a stable position for the first time in your life, this is probably not about you, for example. Take what you need and compost the rest.

I'm reading Nine-Tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States by Hannah Dobbz, which discusses squatting in the US. One of the themes that comes up over an over again is the idea that because a squat is temporary, because the police could kick you out at any moment, because you don't have ownership or equity or any kind of title on your side and you could lose everything in a moment's notice, that it doesn't make any sense to improve the home you're living in. That the work would be wasted, and who wants to work their ass off and not reap the benefits? Why would you bother?

And this, to me, is so incredibly short-sighted, and represents an internalization of the logic of capitalism. Why would you bother? Because you are fucking living there. You're living there, you're passing your limited time on this planet in this space, and why would you live in a dump if you don't have to, if you don't like living in a dump, if you would feel better, be happier, enjoy your time there just a little bit more than if you didn't clean it up. It's the same reason I've painted countless rental apartments - even though I don't know how long I'll be there, while I'm there I eventually get sick at looking at plain white walls. It's why I'm planning to paint a mural in my rental apartment - it will bring me daily joy for as long as I am here. It's why I decorated my office when I still had an office. Because if this is where I am passing my time, I want it to be a little more pleasant.

We've so internalized the logic of the state and the market that we have this illusion that home-owning provides certainty, that it makes sense to invest in a home you own because it can't be taken away at a moment's notice. But it's a lie. The bank could repossess your home. The sewer could back up. A flood or a wildfire could make your home vanish in a moment. With climate change these events are only going to increase in frequency, as will the unrest and failed states and all the other forms of violent dispossession that that entails. The entire stock market could blow itself to pieces tomorrow, the currency we've all agreed to use could become worthless pieces of paper, anything can happen. I could die tomorrow. I could die today. There is no certainty, any where, ever. Anything I work for could be for nothing - nothing except for what I make of it here and now. I want to live before I die.

I think about the way I've been indoctrinated to delay gratification to the extreme. That's what the promise of capitalism to the middle class is, after all. Work tirelessly for all of your productive years, save your coins prudently, invest them in the stock market for the future and never take out your principle because compound interest is magic and you'd be a fool to forego that sweet, sweet "free" interest income. And then, and only then, you can retire for a few years and live a tiny sliver of your life free from the constant grind of daily waged labour. If someone is not able to make ends meet, I was taught, it's because they are too loose with their spending, they aren't able to delay gratification long enough for the real payout, the poor dears. Scrupulously saving, denying ourselves the momentary joys of right now in order to chase a possible future prosperity, is positioned as a moral good.

Of course this is a lie, and a terrible way to live (even as it is incredibly privileged). I lived this way for years and I'm only now beginning to come to terms with it. There's so much grief there. How much did I miss out on? Think of all the joy, vitality, and the things that make life worth living that I denied myself - and for what? To chase certainty in the future, because I couldn't accept the ephemerality of today.

There's a delicate balance needed here, of course. There's an argument to be made that what we need is more delayed gratification, not less. The constant churning consumption, the endless extraction from the earth and our bodies, putting today's profits ahead of tomorrow's, or even above the survival of our own children - these are features of capitalism and they are destroying us.

But they need to sell us this lie, that if we work hard today we can be happy tomorrow, to keep us working. Because if we truly looked at horrors of this reality, if we truly knew in our bones that everything we have today could be gone tomorrow, that everything in life is fleeting - would you still go to work, day after day after day? I know I sure wouldn't. Even though I don't know what I would do to survive instead. Even though stepping into that unknown is terrifying. Even though I have no answers, I would have to take that leap.

I think, too, about the way I sometimes see people talk about revolution - and I include myself in this group. That until we are ready to make a global revolution, until we are all but guaranteed success, until the moment we reach critical mass, all we can do is wait. Maybe we agitate, maybe we form unions and organizations and try to spread the word, but until success is certain we can't act, not truly. I see this more in communist circles than in anarchist ones, and it was especially present in the critiques of the temporary autonomous zones that popped up in the midst of last summer's uprisings - they would never succeed, they would be quickly dismantled, and thus were doomed to failure and shouldn't even be attempted. As if there was no value in the experiences, however fleeting. As if the way we live our lives is irrelevant. As if a thing bringing you joy is not enough justification in itself.

Even though I skew more towards anarchism, I can still feel this attitude infecting my own thinking. I don't want to try to unionize my workplace because it will fail and I'll get fired and it won't matter, really, anyways. I don't want to talk openly about my politics when I know people don't agree with me, because what's the point when I already know I can't change their minds. What's the point of guerrilla gardening when the city can just come by with a weed whacker and destroy our labour. So on and so on ad nauseum, every endeavour doomed to be temporary and thus, automatically, a failure.

I think of my friend who spent the past two summers building up an incredible garden, who now has to move, suddenly, before the end of the growing season. My first reaction was that it was such a waste, that she had put in so much effort and time and money and now wouldn't even be there to collect the final harvest, that it would be better if she hadn't done the planting, somehow. As if she hasn't taken immense pleasure and pride in her garden for the past two years. As if she hasn't harvested throughout the whole summer. As if the harvest she planted suddenly winks out of existence if the benefits go to someone other than her. As if this somehow invalidates everything that came before. But this line of thinking is horseshit. Someone will still eat those vegetables. If nothing else, the birds and the beasties will love eating what she has grown. She learned so much and will be able to carry that knowledge forward with her. On and on, there was great value in this venture even if she will not be there to reap every last piece of the harvest. And if it wasn't a sudden move, it could have been a drought, or a violent storm, or an infestation, or theft. Or or or. The possibilities are endless, results are never guaranteed, and if we are only working to achieve an ends, we might need to take a good long look at what we're up to.

I wonder if the roots of this ideology stretch all the way back to the agricultural revolution. Ephemerality would have been the day to day lived experience of hunter-gatherers. Here today, gone tomorrow, pick the berries now, while they're ripe and before the birds get them. But agriculture? Prepare the field, plant the seeds, water, tend, wait. wait. wait. then finally harvest. Finally finally your labour has paid off and you can eat. Careful though because there won't be another harvest until next year, so be careful, ration, wait. Would you plant the field if you didn't know if you'd be around to harvest it? That's a tough sell, for sure.

I think of flatwormposting, on instagram, who announced suddenly that they would delete their account today. That they felt like they had accomplished what they wanted to accomplish, that they were complete, and ready to move on. The immediate response, of course, was no, don't go, or if you must go, please don't delete the account. Leave it up, to sit in perpetuity, an archive of your work and legacy. Please, you did good work, please let us keep it. As if deleting their account deletes their work. As if they won't carry it forward with them. As if people who interacted with the account while it was up weren't changed in some small way. As if a thing that is temporary - which is all things - is somehow less important than a permanent thing.

And their response was simply, all things are ephemeral. All things are ephemeral, everything could be gone tomorrow. If they didn't delete this account, instagram could. A hacker could take it. Nothing is certain, everything is a constant renegotiation. Given that, what now?

What now? How do we want to live before we die? What choices might we make if nothing was certain? What risks would we take? How would we live our lives if we knew, deeply, truly, in an embodied way, that another world is possible, as the Nap Bishop constantly reminds us? That the continuation of this one as it is, that the status quo is not and has never been certain? That each day we wake up we make this world again, and we could simply chose to make it differently, to paraphrase David Graeber. If we no longer privileged that which is over that which could be. If we no longer held onto the illusion of certainty and control and permanence.

All things are ephemeral. What now?

[ash-overthinking]

Where You’ve Been (13RW, Zach&Alex missing scene)

Fandom:

13 Reasons Why (TV show)

Characters/Pairing:

Zach Dempsey & Alex Standall (canon compliant/pre-slash)

Summary:

-"I wanna talk to Alex. Okay, look, I brought him something." -"What? 'Oh happy birthday Alex, here's a photo book of you in a coma'?" -"He told you about that?"

Sometime in the days before Alex's birthday party, Zach finds him struggling, a little book of graphic pictures in his lap.

Tags of Consequence: 

Missing scene; angst; references to canon suicide attempt and implied canon suicidality and depression; canon disabled character; pre-slash/gen.

Word Count:

2008

Read it on AO3

  Alex wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been thinking asking for the pictures. Maybe it was about trying to fill in the gaps, to see matter within the spaces of blurring and blankness. There was something about knowing his body had been put through so much shit, tests and operations and stitches and more than he could even begin to keep in his head, and totally without him, that left horror like a rock growing into his stomach and ribs. So, he wanted to know. Alex kept thinking if he learned enough, maybe he could recover the map to how his pieces were meant to fit. Maybe he could feel like he belonged here, in this body and mind and life.

  He hadn’t quite been glad Tyler took the pictures, really he didn’t care one way or the other, but- maybe he was kind of grateful?

  At least the other boy didn’t try to argue with Alex about seeing them, about what he was and wasn’t ready for. He didn’t even question or dispute when Alex asked if he could get them printed, taking Alex’s fumbled preface about screen-time and migraines at face value. Alex really fucking liked that about Tyler.

  Still. It probably wasn’t the healthiest choice?

  The pictures were in a little book now, one of those old-school photo albums with fake leather and vinyl, unlabeled and with a dozen empty pages. Alex could fill the latter of his own accord if he wanted to see his progress like Tyler had suggested, to watch the ghastly scars fade and disappear under his hair. Like a baby book, he could note the stupid little milestones he’d had to reach all over- waking up like being reborn; his first word post-coma; lifting his fucking head; taking a goddamn step. There were probably pictures of it all, but Alex would sooner burn or bury them than arrange them in some pseudo triumphant order.  

  The graphic journey back to his body imbued Alex with more heartbreak and revulsion than the pictures of him in the coma ever did. Memories he had but didn’t necessarily want, all an ode to his greatest failing.

  Most of the time he could try not to think about it. The moments of quiet devastation didn’t need talked about and there were even days he could appreciate things like second chances. If nothing else, he could distract himself with ways to be useful or at least become it. He gave himself wholly to that cause. If he was going to be here than he would damn well find a way to make the burden of his existence worth its while to all the people around him. Maybe eventually he could even believe himself that he was worth it.

  So, sure, ignorance was the opposite of bliss; but maybe there was a difference between abstract knowing and staring his own near-death in its face.

  All Alex knew was that the pictures drew him in, and in and in until he was locked inside a silence he couldn’t really breathe through, with all his senses disappearing.

  How could he do this to himself? Why couldn’t he have done it right?

  Hate surged like it always did, for this stupid fucking world with its stupid fucking people and its stupid fucking injustice and fucking him, Alex Standall, fuckup extraudinaire, at the boiling center. There were angry tears on his face and his bad hand curled around the photo album and his good hand in his hair, nails in his scalp just above the scar.

  He heard the creak of the door too late.

  “Hey- woah. Alex, what’s going on? What’s-” and Zach had cut himself off with a noise like nothing Alex had ever heard from him before as Alex’s stupid, broken grip tried to move to close the book and instead only managed to knock it from his lap so it landed, still open, inches from Zach’s feet.

  Frustration and humiliation reared, and Alex didn’t mean to yell; but he did anyway, curses exploding from that ugly place inside his chest.

  Zach didn’t respond, and the vitriol died about as quickly as it had come, even if the tears did not, still randomly tracking down his cheeks while he fought to focus on his friend. There would be time to dwell on all the ways he had ruined all the best things in his life later. For now, there was Zach.

  How one guy could look both so steady and so shaken, Alex would never know.

  “Alex, where the hell did you get this?” Zach asked finally.

  The quiet anger in his voice promptly put Alex right back on the defensive.

  “That’s not any any of your fucking business,” he heard himself snarl, the high pitch of a whine right beneath the words. Pathetic.

  Alex thought, barely there, that lately he made Hannah sound downright chill and self assured, and the inherent snipe at his once best friend brought him right back to earth, his stomach cramping and churning.

  How was it that someone like him had beaten the odds to live so many times in the last five months while someone like Hannah-

  No. He couldn’t keep going there.

  “Where the hell did you get these?” Zach asked roughly.

  Alex sighed and adjusted himself to sit back against his pillows, looking at his friend directly.

  “Can we not do this right now dude?”

  “Uh, no. We can’t… not do this right now. Dude.”

  Alex stared at him for a beat before succumbing to a tired snort of laughter. Zach huffed a little, the hint of a smile at the corner of one lip, but then it all faded away again. He bent to pick up the book with Alex watching carefully, his heart in his throat.

  Zach leafed through a few pages, then closed it with a sharp exhale. Alex thought he saw a shiver go through his friend and dropped his eyes to his sweatpants, guilt ebbing back to him, the rush of cold into his veins like saline through an IV.

  Zach paced for a minute then dropped restlessly onto the edge of Alex’s bed.

  “Who the fuck-,” he paused, took a breath, started again. “How did you get these?”

  “...I can’t tell you.”

  Zach turned to face him and Alex met his eyes. He could feel his hand tremor on his leg, all his muscles reacting to the continued distress. His body was always betraying him.

  “You really fucking can. Is this related to that target bullshit?”

  “No,” Alex reassured him, calming a little more with the opportunity to tell a helpful truth. “I swear.”

  “Yeah? How can you do that if you can’t tell me?”

  Alex groaned and sagged back against his bed but kept his eyes sideways on Zach.

  “If I do, you’ve got to be chill about it.”

  “Nah. Can’t promise that,” Zach retorted.

  Alex glared and Zach looked right back, determined, unaffected.

  “Okay, well, you have to promise you won’t go after the person.”

  Zach opened his mouth, very clearly to object, so Alex continued right along.

  “Seriously. I’m a big boy, Dempsey. I asked for the pictures. It’s my own fault.”

  Zach’s face twisted and smoothed back.

  “It was fucking Tyler, right?”

  Alex knew Zach well enough by now, if only just, to recognize the curl of his lip and tightening of his jaw. The darkness of his eyes. There was disgust, anger, frustration- and fear.

  The last softened Alex’s resolve.

  “He didn’t mean anything by it. I asked to see after he told me about taking them, man. I asked to see them, and I asked him to print them.”

  Zach nodded, but he was clearly unmoved.

  “I knew that creep was coming to the hospital so often for a reason. He’s not even your friend, Alex.”

  “He kind of is.”

  Zach snorted derisively and stood again, this time just standing over Alex in a way that made Alex want to roll his eyes, and also just stare up at him for awhile because holy shit, who gave him the right to look that much like a fucking tree?  

  “Alex, that creep is not your friend. A friend doesn’t take pictures of you when you’re inches from death. Especially without permission. And then, he just shows you? Gives you an album of prints?”

  “I asked to see them,” Alex protested again, his voice starting to crack. “I asked for the prints.”

  “And he gave them to you, man,” Zach said loudly. “The fact that he fucking took them in the first place…”

  “Photography is just what Tyler does,” Alex rationalized back to him, but it sounded dumb and half-hearted now.

  Zach stared at him, like he could hear in the words how Alex’s energy had fallen away, like he could see the whole heap of self-flagellation and emptiness Alex kept shoving back and throwing a blanket over as if to hide and disguise its shape. Alex wondered dimly how he could in turn almost see these things register with Zach, cut into him, and then disappear behind the wall he kept in his own mind.

  “Man, screw that. It’s fucked up. These first ones, Alex? They’re from just a few days after. You were still bleeding. We still had no idea if you were going to die. You had machines helping you breathe. Even if you didn’t fucking die, the doctors kept saying that you might never wake up.”

  “I know,” Alex told him lowly, eyes burning.

  Zach shot him a wounded look then shook his head and turned away.

  “And you’re still doing this to yourself? Alex, who does this help?”

  “I don’t know, me?” tossed out. Nothing words. Empty sarcasm.

  Zach’s scoff was like a weight on his chest. Alex wanted to scream, but he was so fucking drained already.

  “Nobody wants to talk really. And nobody wants to tell me things. It’s like I’m still barely a person to everyone.”

  Zach looked back at him, long and hard, and Alex’s good shoulder pulled up automatically, as though the defensive half-shrug could temper his words.

  “Alex…” Zach blew out a hard breath. “You’re a person, okay?”

  “I know.”

  “Did looking at the pictures help?”

  “I don't know,” Alex muttered. “Maybe.”

  “It didn’t look like it,” Zach countered, his voice more gentle now.

  “Yeah, well. That’s my own shit.”

  “Right,” Zach said, “Sure.” But when Alex looked at him, his jaw was tight and working. “Maybe you want to keep your distance from him, though?”

  Alex sighed.

  “I’m not ditching Tyler, Zach. He was there for me a lot, too. Anyways, it’s not like we see each other that much. He’s busy a lot with that guy, Cyrus or whatever. And between school and PT and Jess and you and my five thousand other appointments…”

  Zach smiled.

  “We do keep you pretty busy. Speaking of which, I’m totally in for your birthday party.”

  “Oh yeah? Those fuckheads you hang around are cool with that?”

  Zach ignored the jibe and laid down flat on his back across Alex’s bed, the weight of his head on Alex’s fucked up knee heavy and warm and welcome.

  “Don’t keep looking for things that will hurt you, okay?”

  “I’m not,” Alex tried to say, but he wasn’t sure either of them could believe it.

  “I mean it. You’re doing really great. You don’t want to screw over your progress for this shit that’s happening. Even if you think you do, the rest of us don’t, man. Just… take care of yourself.”

  “I would if I could. Broken dick, remember?”

   Zach laughed loudly.

  “Fuck you, Standall. You know what I meant.”

  “You know, that’s a good point,” Alex told him. “If I’m the one getting fucked, that’s actually still pretty doable.”

  Zach shook his head, but he was grinning.

  “You know, they said personality changes were to be expected after, but listen to you now. Same old Alex. Almost, anyway.”

  “I guess,” Alex agreed, the cold in his chest again. “Almost.”

[theitalianscribe]

Not In the Write Mindframe

Lenore was tired of a life of writing essays. She was also tired in general. So she decided to get some homework help she had heard a demon used to do. It was past 3, she was not capable of being rational at this point.

It had been during one of Alcor's "bad periods." Reports of entire cults, even those who sacrificed animals instead of people, disappearing in a flicker and of a form that appeared as a consuming void of madness to those who survived. But those were stories and Lenor wasn't in her right mind at the moment. She was barely in her writing mind. See, she had three essays to write in the one week and none of their deadlines had popped up until the day they were due. And the website she was supposed to upload those to were an absolute bitch for procrastinators who worked to the second. She hated that the due date was to the second. Essays should be due at midnight, not at 11:59, or due by 11:58 one second before 11:59 and at the time stated at the due date, everything looked like it would work but that submit button was nothing but a cruel decoration.

No, she wasn't in the right mind or the write mind. Essays were her kryptonite and when her lips met the demon's design on her Twin Soul coffee mug, she decided that she had nothing to lose if her grades were already doomed to be below a c.

She had heard stories of Alcor being a homework helper. All he supposedly asked for was ice cream. Lenor had not heard of anyone summoning him on a bad period and that was totally absurd to her. Surely someone would have done what she was about to do. But her google searches had come useless and she didn't care to go further than that. Alcor, for all his power, was harmless to kids like her.

So she printed out the circle, chanted the latin in her sleepy white girl voice, and waited for a response.

There was no fanfare, there was no void. There was just a tall figure that looked like it was trying to assume a human like form but couldn't settle on one. Its height stretched and shrunk. It oozed wings, then those fell into a puddle of inky void. Eventually it coalesced into a cartoony one-eyed star.

"I haven't seen this circle in a while."

"Yeah. Guess you haven't had any tutoring requests for a while, then?"

"Nope." The negative response came gurgled out. Lenor wondered if he was trying to scare her off. She was too tired to ponder that for long.

"So here's the thing. Can I just vent to you for a while before we get to this? I'll take your silence as a yes."

She sat down at her seat.

The void shape mirrored her movement and even took on an outline of her form. But with no other features colored in except for glowing gold eyes. It looked like someone had made a figuring of her but forgot to paint it and splashed on whatever color to make the eyes stand out.

"I'm an english major, right? But I hate writing essays. I want to write my own stuff, not write about what other people write. Sometimes I don't even have time to read this stuff. I just churn out words in the hopes that they fill out the requests, but I don't let myself stop until they are perfect. I don't have a shitty passable mode. So I am like a homework machine that grinds gears to get out paper for words that matter for maybe all of five minutes at most. And I'm sick of it. Just, let me put out essays fast so I can move on. I have this and I honestly feel like school is trying to make me into a robot that can't function without output from others. Isn't that amazing?

"I guess I wish I could just either be that robot or not have to bother with it at all. Is there an option for something like that?"

"Are you asking me?" The void asked.

"I guess. Can't make any decisions without someone else's input, remember?"

"So you want to be like a computer that makes essays quickly?"

"In a sense." She didn't clarify. She wasn't even thinking of deals. She was just venting about school and lost herself.

"I can make that happen."

"Yeah?"

"My power is limitless. Especially without those self-imposed limits I sometimes have. Your pain will be short lived."

"I am so down for that!" Lenor cheered.

She turned to her fridge and pulled out some tubs of ice cream, a box of ice cream sandwiches, and some gold bars that her dad wouldn't miss if she could buy new ones before he checked the freezer. "So I have a few options for you. Take whatever you want?"

"Are you sure about that."

"Yeah. You know what I mean and I've used up my ability to use my words properly. Go ahead with the deal making."

"Don't mind if I do."

True to his word, it was fast and painless.

The remaining years of her life were delectable. The memory chip dropped to the floor where the girl once stood. She basically wanted a transformation, but she didn't say what to do with it when it was done. Well, she did say to take whatever he wanted. Surely there was a use for it.

--

"You know what's great about homeschooling, aside from the part where your home literally is your school that teaches through simulating events and taking you on field trips?" McRosa flopped on her bed. Two tiny avatars were on her phone screen. One was listening half-heartedly while messing around with some app that dealt with sand. The other was messing with her brightness settings on the screen while also browsing through the internet for fan fiction to take down through her desktop.

"What?" The female avatar asked.

"I don't have to write essays." McRosa pumped her fists up and let them fall. The rapid change in view had Vira yell in protest and kick at her sand creation while Alvie set her brightness to full for several flashes in retribution. "Ow!"

"Hold your phone still."

"Yeah, some of us aren't everywhere and can actually feel your phone move. More or less."

"Anyway, I could actually help you with essays if you ever needed that." Alvie said as he reset the sand app. He knew Vira had yet to save it, but she underestimated how discombobulating it was to hear their voices from two places and to have several cameras showing him completely different viewpoints all the time.

"Wait, really?"

"Yep. Of course, I wouldn't do it for free."

"I honestly would be mad if you did. The pain of essays shouldn't be avoided and free rides would be a gypp to people who actually worked on them.” After a pause, she asked, “How would it work?”

“I take several different sources, mainly your notes, wikipedia articles, and whatever else depending on the subject, and generate paragraphs. You can tweak things here and there and tell me the point you want to make and I automatically adjust things to make it. The whole thing takes like ten minutes depending on the length. Oh, and the quality depends on the payment. Better the payment, higher the grade.”

“Sounds pretty…” McRosa searched her mental reservoir of outdated words, “nifty. Where did you get it?”

The digital demon paused. “I...actually don’t know.”

“Do you have like a file with the source?”

“Wait. I think it was some...chip. I have a copy of the folder here.”

On McRosa’s desktop screen, a locked Alvie file opened up. The other contents of the file and his code were either blurred or in a language that looked like a bunch of characters of different languages jumbled up. The file she could see claimed that it was originally created over a century ago. The name of the source looked like it might be some knock off lenovo or something. Nothing else explained it, except maybe the user being a poetry fan,

The name said, “Lenore.”

[itbeatsbookmarks]

(Via: TechCrunch)

Bots are ruining the internet.

When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train tickets and odds from betting sites to get the best data. Or, they’re just trying to knock a website offline for hours at a time. There’s an entire underground economy where bots are the primary tools used in automating fraudulent purchases, scraping content and launching cyberattacks. Bots are costing legitimate businesses money by stealing data, but also hogging system resources and costly bandwidth.

Clearly, the existing approach of playing bot Whac-A-Mole isn’t working.

“Until now you just had to suck it up as a cost of doing business,” said Johnny Xmas, director of field engineering at Kasada, an anti-bot startup that strikes at the heart of the bot economy itself by frustrating bots with complex tasks.

Their system is simple enough. Bots, said Xmas, are the “white noise” of the internet. Once a bot is started, they keep going until they’re told to stop or their job is done. Kasada tricks bots into thinking that their job is never done. By serving up a small but difficult math puzzle before the site even loads, it tricks the bot into spending its time solving the puzzle and not scraping the site as it thinks it’s doing.

Weeks earlier, Xmas tweeted a photo of Kasada’s proprietary platform Polyform. A single bot made close to four million requests to a website in a single day. Instead of loading the target website, Kasada pushed its randomly generated JavaScript code that loads silently in the browser to the bot instead. For more than 24 hours, the bot was sinking all of the cloud processing resources into trying to solve an impossible math challenge.

“This guy’s [cloud] bill is going to be nuts,” he tweeted.

We troll bots for a living. This one made 3.7M unsuccessful HTTP requests in 24 hrs, and we responded to each with a js cryptographic challenge, which effectively tarpits the bot by sucking up CPU resources. Expensive, Lambda CPU resources. This guy's AWS bill is going to be nuts pic.twitter.com/erfuvvQmru

— Johnny Xmas @Kasada_io (@J0hnnyXm4s) January 4, 2019

The company’s aim isn’t to defeat the bot, but the reason for starting it in the first place, said Sam Crowther, Kasada’s co-founder, in a call with TechCrunch. “We cost them money, making their projects not fiscally viable,” he said.

Here’s how it works. Each time someone — or something — visits a website, Kasada accurately fingerprints the requester, using several methods to determine if it’s a bot or not. If not, the site loads as if nothing happened, taking only a few milliseconds off the load time. If it’s a bot, Kasada throws the bot the puzzle, keeping it busy. The bot thinks the website has loaded and doesn’t trigger any warnings on the back-end, all while busily plunging its resources into trying to understand and solve the math problem. “You don’t want to alert the person behind the bot, or they’ll just keep trying,” said Crowther. That’s when the bot starts churning more and more of its resources, and eventually topping out. “The human launches the bot and walks away,” he said. “Often the account maxes out and runs out of money long before the human comes back.” Even if the bot is automatically adding more resources, it won’t ever solve the puzzle. All while the processor usage is spiking, the bots don’t have the resources to target other sites — whether it’s a paying customer or not, said Crowther.

“We’re cleaning up the internet,” said Xmas. “We want to disenfranchise bots from operating to begin.”

False positives are rare — just 0.07 percent of all requests are mistakenly flagged. The team often found that more often than not it’s an old, legacy browser that’s mistakenly flagged its fingerprinting, or that the browser is exhibiting bot-like behaviors through a malicious Chrome extension, for example. Xmas said the service sends a CAPTCHA puzzle to solve in case, allowing the human through.

Bot authors take weeks or even months to develop code that will target specific kinds of sites hoping for a big eventual payoff, Crowther explained. Retail outlets, hotels, major financial institutions and realty listings — all revenue-making customers in the company’s portfolio — are at risk of bots that, if successful, could reap a huge reward.

“One bot targeted a betting company we protected, grabbing odds so that the most cost-effective bets are being placed at the micro-level — like stock trading,” said Xmas. “They’ll put months into a bot that’ll defeat every bot detection system.”

But already the team is finding some bot owners meeting their match.

In one case, Crowther and Xmas — both based in the company’s Chicago office — said they had one company, which they declined to name, was the target of account fraud and scraping. The company came in and stopped the automated logins and scraping of identity documents — preventing a wider attack hitting some 30,000 consumers from identity theft.

“One case we had a betting site where 95 percent of the traffic were bots,” said Xmas. “Think of that. You’re paying for tons of servers, tons of bandwidth because you think you’re doing a ton of business — and you’re making a lot of money so it seems rational,” he said. “Then you find out that 95 percent of that was trash.”

“At first we thought, ‘oh shit, what did we break?’,” he said. “It turns out we broke an insane botnet.”

The two recalled how one suspected bot operator was so frustrated by the company’s anti-bot countermeasures, he sent an abusive note to the company.

“The guy who was running some bots figured out it was us who was stopping them,” said Xmas. “And he went to our website, hit the contact us button, and wrote a very angry letter.” Crowther said that the company caught the bot controller’s IP address because he submitted the “not very nice email” through its contact form. “We found out that he was located in Sydney,” where one of the company’s offices is located. Xmas joked that he told Crowther, knowing who the bot operator was, to “send him a t-shirt.”

Or, better yet, Xmas said, “take that angry email, blow it up, and make it the wallpaper in our Sydney office.”

New malware pulls its instructions from code hidden in memes posted to Twitter

[toomanysinks]

Bots are cheap and effective. One startup trolls them into going away

Bots are ruining the internet.

When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train tickets and odds from betting sites to get the best data. Or, they’re just trying to knock a website offline for hours at a time. There’s an entire underground economy where bots are the primary tools used in automating fraudulent purchases, scraping content and launching cyberattacks. Bots are costing legitimate businesses money by stealing data, but also hogging system resources and costly bandwidth.

Clearly, the existing approach of playing bot Whac-A-Mole isn’t working.

“Until now you just had to suck it up as a cost of doing business,” said Johnny Xmas, director of field engineering at Kasada, an anti-bot startup that strikes at the heart of the bot economy itself by frustrating bots with complex tasks.

Their system is simple enough. Bots, said Xmas, are the “white noise” of the internet. Once a bot is started, they keep going until they’re told to stop or their job is done. Kasada tricks bots into thinking that their job is never done. By serving up a small but difficult math puzzle before the site even loads, it tricks the bot into spending its time solving the puzzle and not scraping the site as it thinks it’s doing.

Weeks earlier, Xmas tweeted a photo of Kasada’s proprietary platform Polyform. A single bot made close to four million requests to a website in a single day. Instead of loading the target website, Kasada pushed its randomly generated JavaScript code that loads silently in the browser to the bot instead. For more than 24 hours, the bot was sinking all of the cloud processing resources into trying to solve an impossible math challenge.

“This guy’s [cloud] bill is going to be nuts,” he tweeted.

We troll bots for a living. This one made 3.7M unsuccessful HTTP requests in 24 hrs, and we responded to each with a js cryptographic challenge, which effectively tarpits the bot by sucking up CPU resources. Expensive, Lambda CPU resources. This guy's AWS bill is going to be nuts pic.twitter.com/erfuvvQmru

— Johnny Xmas @Kasada_io (@J0hnnyXm4s) January 4, 2019

The company’s aim isn’t to defeat the bot, but the reason for starting it in the first place, said Sam Crowther, Kasada’s co-founder, in a call with TechCrunch. “We cost them money, making their projects not fiscally viable,” he said.

Here’s how it works. Each time someone — or something — visits a website, Kasada accurately fingerprints the requester, using several methods to determine if it’s a bot or not. If not, the site loads as if nothing happened, taking only a few milliseconds off the load time. If it’s a bot, Kasada throws the bot the puzzle, keeping it busy. The bot thinks the website has loaded and doesn’t trigger any warnings on the back-end, all while busy plunging its resources into trying to understand and solve the math problem. “You don’t want to alert the person behind the bot, or they’ll just keep trying,” said Crowther. That’s when the bot starts churning more and more of its resources, and eventually topping out. “The human launches the bot and walks away,” he said. “Often the account maxes out and runs out of money long before the human comes back.” Even if the bot is automatically adding more resources, it won’t ever solve the puzzle. All while the processor usage is spiking, the bots don’t have the resources to target other sites — whether it’s a paying customer or not, said Crowther.

“We’re cleaning up the internet,” said Xmas. “We want to disenfranchise bots from operating to begin.”

False positives are rare — just 0.07 percent of all requests are mistakenly flagged. The team often found that more often than not it’s an old, legacy browser that’s mistakenly flagged its fingerprinting, or that the browser is exhibiting bot-like behaviors through a malicious Chrome extension, for example. Xmas said the service sends a CAPTCHA puzzle to solve in case, allowing the human through.

Bot authors take weeks or even months to develop code that will target specific kinds of sites hoping for a big eventual payoff, Crowther explained. Retail outlets, hotels, major financial institutions, and realty listings — all revenue-making customers in the company’s portfolio — are at risk of bots that, if successful, could reap a huge reward.

“One bot targeted a betting company we protected, grabbing odds so that the most cost-effective bets are being placed at the micro-level — like stock trading,” said Xmas. “They’ll put months into a bot that’ll defeat every bot detection system.”

But already the team is finding some bot owners meeting their match.

In one case, Crowther and Xmas — both based in the company’s Chicago office — said they had one company, which they declined to name, was the target of account fraud and scraping. The company came in and stopped the automated logins and scraping of identity documents — preventing a wider attack hitting some 30,000 consumers from identity theft.

“One case we had a betting site where 95 percent of the traffic was bots,” said Xmas. “Think of that. You’re paying for tons of servers, tons of bandwidth because you think you’re doing a ton of business — and you’re making a lot of money so it seems rational,” he said. “Then you find out that 95 percent of that was trash.”

“At first we thought, ‘oh shit, what did we break?’,” he said. “It turns out we broke an insane botnet.”

The two recalled how one suspected bot operator was so frustrated by the company’s anti-bot countermeasures, he sent an abusive note to the company.

“The guy who was running some bots figured out it was us who was stopping them,” said Xmas. “And he went to our website, hit the contact us button, and wrote a very angry letter.” Crowther said that the company caught the bot controller’s IP address because he submitted the “not very nice email” through its contact form. “We found one that he was located that was in Sydney,” where one of the company’s offices is located. Xmas joked that he told Crowther, knowing who the bot operator was, to “send him a t-shirt.”

Or, better yet, Xmas said, “take that angry email, blow it up, and make it the wallpaper in our Sydney office.”

New malware pulls its instructions from code hidden in memes posted to Twitter

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/05/kasada-bots/

[fmservers]

Bots are cheap and effective. One startup trolls them into going away

Bots are ruining the internet.

When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train tickets and odds from betting sites to get the best data. Or, they’re just trying to knock a website offline for hours at a time. There’s an entire underground economy where bots are the primary tools used in automating fraudulent purchases, scraping content and launching cyberattacks. Bots are costing legitimate businesses money by stealing data, but also hogging system resources and costly bandwidth.

Clearly, the existing approach of playing bot Whac-A-Mole isn’t working.

“Until now you just had to suck it up as a cost of doing business,” said Johnny Xmas, director of field engineering at Kasada, an anti-bot startup that strikes at the heart of the bot economy itself by frustrating bots with complex tasks.

Their system is simple enough. Bots, said Xmas, are the “white noise” of the internet. Once a bot is started, they keep going until they’re told to stop or their job is done. Kasada tricks bots into thinking that their job is never done. By serving up a small but difficult math puzzle before the site even loads, it tricks the bot into spending its time solving the puzzle and not scraping the site as it thinks it’s doing.

Weeks earlier, Xmas tweeted a photo of Kasada’s proprietary platform Polyform. A single bot made close to four million requests to a website in a single day. Instead of loading the target website, Kasada pushed its randomly generated JavaScript code that loads silently in the browser to the bot instead. For more than 24 hours, the bot was sinking all of the cloud processing resources into trying to solve an impossible math challenge.

“This guy’s [cloud] bill is going to be nuts,” he tweeted.

We troll bots for a living. This one made 3.7M unsuccessful HTTP requests in 24 hrs, and we responded to each with a js cryptographic challenge, which effectively tarpits the bot by sucking up CPU resources. Expensive, Lambda CPU resources. This guy's AWS bill is going to be nuts pic.twitter.com/erfuvvQmru

— Johnny Xmas @Kasada_io (@J0hnnyXm4s) January 4, 2019

The company’s aim isn’t to defeat the bot, but the reason for starting it in the first place, said Sam Crowther, Kasada’s co-founder, in a call with TechCrunch. “We cost them money, making their projects not fiscally viable,” he said.

Here’s how it works. Each time someone — or something — visits a website, Kasada accurately fingerprints the requester, using several methods to determine if it’s a bot or not. If not, the site loads as if nothing happened, taking only a few milliseconds off the load time. If it’s a bot, Kasada throws the bot the puzzle, keeping it busy. The bot thinks the website has loaded and doesn’t trigger any warnings on the back-end, all while busy plunging its resources into trying to understand and solve the math problem. “You don’t want to alert the person behind the bot, or they’ll just keep trying,” said Crowther. That’s when the bot starts churning more and more of its resources, and eventually topping out. “The human launches the bot and walks away,” he said. “Often the account maxes out and runs out of money long before the human comes back.” Even if the bot is automatically adding more resources, it won’t ever solve the puzzle. All while the processor usage is spiking, the bots don’t have the resources to target other sites — whether it’s a paying customer or not, said Crowther.

“We’re cleaning up the internet,” said Xmas. “We want to disenfranchise bots from operating to begin.”

Bot authors take weeks or even months to develop code that will target specific kinds of sites hoping for a big eventual payoff, Crowther explained. Retail outlets, hotels, major financial institutions, and realty listings — all revenue-making customers in the company’s portfolio — are at risk of bots that, if successful, could reap a huge reward.

“One bot targeted a betting company we protected, grabbing odds so that the most cost-effective bets are being placed at the micro-level — like stock trading,” said Xmas. “They’ll put months into a bot that’ll defeat every bot detection system.”

But already the team is finding some bot owners meeting their match.

In one case, Crowther and Xmas — both based in the company’s Chicago office — said they had one company, which they declined to name, was the target of account fraud and scraping. The company came in and stopped the automated logins and scraping of identity documents — preventing a wider attack hitting some 30,000 consumers from identity theft.

“One case we had a betting site where 95 percent of the traffic was bots,” said Xmas. “Think of that. You’re paying for tons of servers, tons of bandwidth because you think you’re doing a ton of business — and you’re making a lot of money so it seems rational,” he said. “Then you find out that 95 percent of that was trash.”

“At first we thought, ‘oh shit, what did we break?’,” he said. “It turns out we broke an insane botnet.”

The two recalled how one suspected bot operator was so frustrated by the company’s anti-bot countermeasures, he sent an abusive note to the company.

“The guy who was running some bots figured out it was us who was stopping them,” said Xmas. “And he went to our website, hit the contact us button, and wrote a very angry letter.” Crowther said that the company caught the bot controller’s IP address because he submitted the “not very nice email” through its contact form. “We found one that he was located that was in Sydney,” where one of the company’s offices is located. Xmas joked that he told Crowther, knowing who the bot operator was, to “send him a t-shirt.”

Or, better yet, Xmas said, “take that angry email, blow it up, and make it the wallpaper in our Sydney office.”

New malware pulls its instructions from code hidden in memes posted to Twitter

Via Zack Whittaker https://techcrunch.com