#so like what does a guy who will (allegedly) give up anyone and anything domestic to gain/retain status do against a guy who otherwise

[frodo-of-the-nine-fingers]

i think the actual disconnect between nie mingjue and jin guangyao is that nie mingjue is dying and knows he's dying and has to stick so so so closely to his morals and virtues or else it'll have been for nothing and then he'll have to come to terms with the fact that maybe he didn't actually have to die after all vs jin guangyao who wants to live, he wants to live and be safe and have all the things he was told he could never have-was told he was never good enough to have-and will do almost anything to make it so. and these are two like irreconcilable point of views right (and both Correct and Wrong at the same time) and so they can't understand each other because they aren't even having the same argument and neither of them can see that

[firebirdsdaughter]

Okay…

@briansastro10​

… I think we have a bit of a language barrier here, or something, and I’m afraid I don’t quite follow. If you don’t mind bearing w/ me, I get confused easily, but I do have things I want to say:

1) Horobi had no choice but to follow the Ark. He was hacked, aka mind controlled and brainwashed. He wasn’t ‘choosing’ to do any of that stuff, he was merely being used as a tool.

2) I don’t recall Horobi ever finding out Aruto was even at Daybreak, let alone lost family in it.

3) The thing I was criticising was the show’s decision to include a flashback of Soreo’s death in that sequence, bc it implies that the show and therefore the audience consider/should consider Horobi responsible for Soreo’s death, when not too long ago, they had Aruto shouting at Gai that he was the true cause of the Ark, and, again, the above brainwashing. Horobi was literally not in control of his own actions anymore than a MaGear at that point, it’s not right to let Jin, Naki, and even Raiden off the hook for the stuff they did under the Ark/Gai’s command and then blame Horobi for what he did. Jin was distributing ZetsumeRisers, Raiden was a spy, and Naki was manipulating everything and giving out RaidRisers, all by an external command, bc of manipulation (in the case of Jin and Naki) or hacking (in Raiden’s case). It’s really not right to recognise Yua’s, a full matured human adult who exhibited reasoning and at least reasonable emotional control and knowledge of morality, situation, to excuse her as having been manipulated and mistreated into doing the things she did, whilst blaming Horobi. Including Soreo’s death in that flashback implies that it should be considered equitable w/ Izu’s death, which it was not. Horobi did not kill Soreo, or even cause his death. For one thing, the explosion was caused by people trying to kill the Ark (another Soreo?) and, again, Horobi was brainwashed and not in control of his actions.

4) I will also repeat this as many times as necessary: Horobi was conditioned and used by the Ark. Again, to bring up Yua; she very nearly killed Izu in cold blood on Gai’s orders while Izu was panicked and confused and trying to run away. The only reason that did not happen was that Gai said the wrong thing and Fuwa snapped out of it in time. Here, Izu was completely calm, had plenty of time to dodge, clearly saw the threat, and did nothing. I bring this up bc both Horobi and Yua were in abusive, manipulative situations where they were controlled by someone else—the difference being, Yua was, again, a fully fledged human adult w/ a developed sense of right and wrong, enough that she knew what she was doing was wrong, but her situation had convinced her she had no choice. She was unwell and not in a good place. But she knew. Horobi literally couldn’t. On top of that, he was exposed solely to the Ark’s selective data (courtesy, Amatsu Gai), for years. Like he said in the AIMS basement, his understanding was that the Ark would always rise as long as human malice existed—and he didn’t turn on the Ark bc he suddenly realised humans were ‘good,’ but bc the Ark turned on HumaGear (and tried to make him kill Jin), and he realised what he wanted was peace and safety for HumaGear. But even after breaking free of the Ark, the conditioning and that belief still lasts. To him, seeking human destruction was merely the logical conclusion in order to ensure the safety of HumaGear. Humans teach HumaGear evil and give rise to the Ark, which is a danger to HumaGear, and caused him to do things that hurt HumaGear, the way his mind has been conditioned to work, the logical conclusion is to cut the knot and remove the ‘source,’ humans. It’s not a personal grudge, it’s being logical. That’s his thought process—and, honestly, he’s got a point, the Ark was created by humans, and they’ve never owned up to it, the guy responsible is walking around free, and a number of HumaGear died and suffered for it. It’s unclear when exactly the emotions start catching up to him—he was def managing to hold on to the logic, I like to think by focusing on the fact that he thought this would be best for Jin (he knew Jin was important to him, even if he didn’t know why, and he took the time to take care of him before going out). He’s very calm when talking to Izu and shows no aggression toward her, it’s not until Fuwa and Yua show up guns drawn that he reacts violently—bc he perceives a threat, sees their aggression, which counteracts Izu’s claims about the goodness of humans. All he sees is humans looking to destroy. But despite that, he still goes and asks Fuwa about proving the Ark will not rise again, and that’s another important thing; Horobi is looking for an absolute. He is looking for an absolute assurance that the Ark will not come back, that human cruelty will never be a danger again, and that’s not possible. Fuwa’s response, although it can be translated as a believable blunder on Fuwa’s part, does nothing but make the situation worse, bc he violently rejects Horobi’s question and says he’s there to destroy him and then prepares to shoot him. To Horobi, who got tortured the last time he asked a question, that’s enough. And right on the heels of that, Izu comes in and starts pressuring him about emotions. He’s stated to have been literally terrified of these sensations taking over him, and the Ark trained him react to that kind of thing w/ violence—bc he can’t attack the feelings inside himself, he system concludes Izu must be the source and fires on her… Only that doesn’t work, the sensations actually get worse. His increasing aggressiveness in insisting he doesn’t have a heart after that is basically a little kid getting more and more insistent that they didn’t steal a cookie when they did. He was conditioned to think removing Izu would remove the feelings, but instead that made it worse, harder to control, that frightens him even more, bc he doesn’t know what’s happening, he doesn’t know what those feelings are. He falls back on old answers to Jin’s questions bc he doesn’t know the answer (but we can’t let the son know that, father’s always have to have an answer). Meanwhile, he doesn’t understand why Aruto’s the Ark. Like, he def expected humans to resist, why wouldn’t they, I don’t think he’d’ve been surprised by Aruto being mad, Aruto’s been mad at him before for people he knew less. I think it was Aruto going as far as using the Ark’s power (also, I think the Ark still terrified him) that threw him for a loop and pissed him off (something he might’ve understood? But it had def never controlled him like that before). Additionally, I don’t think he could have conceived to seek revenge on his own—when Jin died, he was clearly overwhelmed and very dazed. It took Azu showing up and telling him how he felt for him to react. A friend put it really well, so I’ll paraphrase: Azu’s role for Aruto was ‘you are absolutely right to want revenge on Horobi!’ while her role for Horobi was ‘hey, hey, you want revenge on Aruto, right?’ Aruto jumped at the chance while Horobi didn’t know what to do, and ended up following the first lead he had—which was literally how the Ark kept him so easy to manipulate. I still don’t see the Aruto side of it (well… it’s complicated), but if you go back and look, I think you can def see how the Ark was conditioning Horobi as a patsy for this from the start.

4) Bc I refuse to ever let this go unsaid when discussing it, Horobi was not the only person responsible for the Izu situation. If I were to list the people I hold responsible, in order, it’d be: Amatsu, for creating the Ark in the first place. The Ark/Azu, clearly the AI w/ the most know-how, who very deliberately manipulated the whole situation, was well aware of what Horobi’s mental state would be like, and manipulated both Jin and Izu into being stupid. Fuwa and Yua for escalating things, esp bc Fuwa’s character development was allegedly about learning not to rush in swinging and literally the next episode Yua is giving a speech to Williamson about how they shouldn’t respond to the HumaGear’s ‘new hearts’ w/ aggression, like she didn’t do that exact thing, like, yesterday, wtf. Aruto, for hanging around outside instead of doing what one might expect from someone who wanted to resolve stuff peacefully and going to the root of the situation, and for not keeping an eye on Izu (I have other opinions about his behaviour there, but those are for another time), and for apparently not even bothering to try and give Izu a backup. And, finally, Horobi and Izu. Yes, I hold Horobi the least ‘responsible’ and I hold Izu responsible. Bc, and I do not mean this as an insult to any of the characters, it’s like taking a dog that was abused and used in dog fights and leaving it alone w/ a domesticated dog it doesn’t know. More than likely, if the domesticated dog starts trying to play like it’s used to playing the abused dog is going to react aggressively, possibly even bite. Neither Horobi nor Izu had the emotional maturity to handle that situation. He had been conditioned to fear and reject emotion, had been kept away from it, and therefore had no control over it, nor knew what it was—to him, it felt like some unidentifiable ‘sensation’ wrenching control away from him, clouding his mind; additionally, he’d just had his one attempt to reach out and understand violently shut down, and he’d been conditioned for years to respond to uncertainty and confusion by destroying the source—when Izu was prodding at him about feelings and ‘hearts,’ she pushed his already fragile state into full panic that he lacked the emotional maturity to handle, and he reacted the only way he knew how. W/ Izu, if she had just told Aruto, or anyone, anything about where she was going, tried to coordinate rather than just running off like that, if she hadn’t rushed him and repeatedly pressured and prodded him, if she had dodged, then things would have gone differently—but, ultimately, her data was just as biased as Horobi was, and she had absolutely no way to understand or work through what was going on for him. Horobi didn’t seek out Izu and kill her in cold blood, she approached him, and made a conscious choice not to dodge. If we want to get really deep, I also blame Korenosuke bc Izu not having a backup is stupid, it protected literally nothing, if they had actually tried to back her up and there was a reason why they couldn’t, I’d be less judgemental, but wtf the Zero-One equipment got hijacked up the wazoo and it’s very uncomfortable that Izu was just cool w/ that bc it ‘benefited humans’ and it made Aruto look kinda hypocritical… But that’s more the writers. But, to try and sum this up… I do give Horobi some responsibility, bc he yeah, he did pull the trigger, but the fact was, he didn’t understand what he was doing (also likely didn’t know Izu had no backup, it probably never occurred to him humans would do that), or why. Essentially, he was still being used as a weapon by the Ark, who manipulated the whole thing bu showing Izu that vision, making her rush in and not tell anyone, then the humans abandon their reasoning for an day and go in all aggressive, Horobi sees this as a threat, but even then still tries to reach out only to get shot down (literally), and then Izu comes in and stresses him out further and he cracks. And she chooses to stand there and take the hit. Gai knowingly shutdown multitudes of HumaGear w/ the intention of them never coming back online, Yua nearly killed Izu before, actively hunting her down, Fuwa, I love him dearly, but Fuwa was down to smash every single robot he saw no matter what they said. These were human adults w/ knowledge of morality and emotional maturity and control (okay, Fuwa’s a little debatable…). All of them, esp Gai, are walking around just fine. Like. Gai. Gai. Aruto goes Ark on Horobi for this but is letting Gai walk???? I don’t even like Aruto, and that’s ooc! But to try and sum up my sum up: Horobi was the gun Azu shot Izu w/. It was a gambit. She deliberately manipulated them all into a situation where this would happen. Yes, Horobi pulled the trigger, but if this were court, a plea of insanity could be made/he’d be being sent to a psychiatric ward rather than regular prison.

5) Horobi blaming himself is one thing. It was very clearly depicted before that he had no sense of free will for himself, he only knew the Ark’s will. It is absolutely natural that after being so deep under the Ark’s control for so long, he’d have immense trouble differentiating between his own, new will, and the Ark’s. He might not be able to tell what he wanted or what the Ark wanted. He genuinely does not know how to make that distinction. He also has literally only just kind of gotten a grasp on consequences and cause and effect. I’d love to think he’ll be allowed to figure out he was manipulated by the Ark and that things like that weren’t things he wanted to do, but I dunno if the show will give me that. What I’m criticising is the apparent intent of saying that the audience should blame him for those things. What I want is confirmation that Aruto knows that the situation was manipulated, that Horobi wasn’t ‘in control’ when that happened. I wanted Aruto to respond to Horobi blaming himself for Izu and Jin’s deaths w/ ‘it’s more complicated than that.’ Horobi blaming himself is understandable, bc he’s barely figured out cause and effect, regret, anger, that shooting things is not an appropriate way to handle a situation. He’s only just gotten a few emotions. Nuance is going to be lost on him for a bit. He’s been trapped seeing only in black and white for so long, he’s going to need help seeing grey. Horobi blaming himself makes sense. I’m just criticising that the humans, who should know that it wasn’t as simple as that, didn’t let him know tha t he didn’t need to shoulder all the blame. Bc he was just a single part of a whole chain of events, not the sole cause. And I’m criticising that the show seemed to be implying that he also had a responsibility for Soreo’s death, which was a completely different situation that he def was not responsible for.

This is likely way more than you were expecting, and I do talk a lot, I know. I just wanted to try and establish my reasoning here. I hope I wasn’t too incomprehensible, I have trouble articulating my thoughts outside of fictional writing. I think I’ve just been keeping a lot of this in.

I should say that if you are bothered by my stance on this, I would recommend blocking me or my Zero-One tags, bc I am stubborn as all hell and will not budge, and will occasionally be very vocal. Horobi is very important to me, and I have no sympathy for victim blaming, esp not when it involves literal perpetrators getting away scot free (*cough cough* Amatsu Gai *cough cough*).

[ghostyprince]

prompt thing: 7. routine kisses (bc cuTE af)

this definitely got a bit longer than i thought it would be, but yeah. i hope you’ll like it!! thanks for the prompt request 💖

(ao3 link)

Ryan thought it would be more difficult, getting used to the fact that he’s dating Shane now. Sure, everything felt new and even a bit weird at the beginning, but it was still Shane. The guy he could talk about popcorn for an hour straight, who gets fake-pissy at Ryan for stealing food off his plate and who wouldn’t recognize any real proof of ghosts if it’d hit him right in his big ol’ head.

From then on, it was easy to fell into a routine and treat their relationship as an extension of what they already had. Because it was simply that. They never stopped being best friends, or the ghoulboys. They just got a new neat little label like boyfriends or partners. But it all meant the same thing in the end. What they already had, with benefits like slumping against Shane whenever Ryan pleases, so Shane can wrap one of his unreasonably long arms around him and they fit perfectly together. Or Ryan grabbing onto Shane’s hand when he gets startled, even if he’s embarrassed about it later. What’s a little embarrassment for the comfort of Shane’s too big for their own good hand in his.

The movie nights they had become date nights, the previously established space disappeared between them as they ended up tangled together on Shane’s big, soft couch, or Ryan’s bed every single time. Kissing Shane whenever he damn wants to is just a big perk, not to mention the sex. Ryan honestly can’t decide which one is his favorite.

He never thought much about the other little pleasant things that made their relationship amazing until now, staring at the sea of unedited footage, unable to concentrate without Shane’s presence next to him. It’s becoming a problem, honestly. Well, maybe Ryan just misses him more than usual, barely being able to spend time outside of work with Shane lately, Unsolved completely taking over his days. He loves doing it more than anything, but man, he’s been stressed in the past week.

Ryan misses the sleepovers, curling up next to him after Shane fucks him into the mattress, or rides him, or just laying around arguing over a ghost hunting show, or watching some dumb reality TV together. And Ryan misses their trips to Disneyland, or anywhere they wound up sometimes, really. That’s what Ryan loved about them most, how well they work, it’s like they’re always on an adventure together. Even after several months of dating, they never fail to surprise the other.

Altogether, Ryan was just feeling way too sappy, wanting nothing more than to kiss his boyfriend’s stupid face but Shane was fucking late. He looked at his reflection in the darkened screen in front of him, chin propped up in his hand.

He’s having more and more bad hair days lately, schedule too cramped to go and get a haircut even. His hand twitches towards his hat, but then he lets it fall back on the table, remembering that Shane still hadn’t arrived yet and Ryan didn’t get his mandatory forehead kiss in the morning, which would be made difficult with the hat.

It sort of hits him like a ton of bricks, because it wasn’t a conscious thought, coming deep from his brain after getting used to the gentle press of Shane’s lips near his hairline almost every day for seven months now.

Ryan did gape at him like a fish the first time Shane did it, about a week and a half into their very much new but pretty fucking exciting relationship, right after they stopped hiding it so it was for everyone to see. They were never big on PDA, that was one of the many things they both agreed on when putting down the ground rules. Of course, there were some touches here and there, Ryan stroking a hand down Shane’s arm just because, or Shane putting a hand on Ryan’s thigh under the table in the Ghoul HQ, curious to see how much he can distract him while they’re recording.

There were quick kisses, only sometimes though, because in the first few weeks of their relationship most people in the office started cooing around them every single time, almost in perfect unison. Ryan thought it was at least a bit fucking creepy. They weren’t safe at locations either, TJ and Devon doing the same, mostly to drive them up the wall, Ryan saw right through them.

Before he could marvel more at the rest of their domestic little habits he sees Shane walking towards him. He has the softest little smile on his face, complete with the lovely crinkle of the corners of his eyes Ryan loves so much and wow, does he look at Ryan every time like this?

It’s a heady thought, not helped by the fact that his entire being fills with warmth as his boyfriend gets closer. He lights up like a fucking Christmas tree and he doesn’t even care that Shane knows, that everyone knows who takes one look at his big toothy smile. Let them know, Ryan thinks, it’s usually written all over his face anyway.

“What is it? Do I have something on my face?” Shane asks, smugly as he finally stops next to Ryan. He’s standing right next to his chair, so Ryan has to crane his neck more than usual if he wants to look at him properly.

Before Ryan could even think of an answer Shane is leaning in, planting a just as gentle kiss on his forehead as Ryan expected and he basks in the feeling of it against his skin, almost melts, as the weak weak man he is.

And then Shane is pulling away like that kiss did not just shut down Ryan’s entire operating system. He doesn’t get far though, hands cupping his cheeks to pull him back into a sweet kiss. Ryan feels the soft hum against his lips and relishes in Shane’s stubble brushing against his chin. He dares to drag his tongue along Shane’s, workplace rules be damned, feeling Shane lean more of his weight on the arms of his chair as he breathes a quiet moan into Ryan’s mouth.

“Wow, will I get such a greeting every day if I bring you coffee?” Shane says after they separated, both of them struggling a bit to catch their breaths. Ryan thinks he’s fucking beautiful like this, flushed, eyes shining, he even loves the stupid Cheshire grin on his kiss bitten lips.

“I didn’t even know you brought me coffee,” Ryan admits, mirroring Shane’s grin. “but don’t get used to it, this was a special occasion.”

“Too late, baby. Already got used to it.” Shane answers with a wink, moving away to sit in his chair and push a still steaming coffee cup in front of Ryan. Well, that explains why he was late.

Ryan thinks it’s pretty wild, how after even months and months of being basically attached by the hip (even more so now that they started dating) Ryan could still get excited over just spotting Shane’s stupidly tall form in a crowd. Or about him getting Ryan his favorite coffee, or lunch. Because it says ‘I know you’ve been stressed lately and I care about you’ and nothing warms Ryan’s stupid heart more, so soft for this idiot next to him.

Ryan doesn’t say anything besides a “thanks, big guy” however, as he puts his hat on.

He doesn’t need to, that kiss said a lot already. Besides, Shane knows how fucking gone Ryan is over him and he never fails to take advantage of that, the little shit he is.

Even now, it’s shown in the content happy expression he wears as he sips his coffee, or how he gives Shane’s arm an affectionate squeeze as he can finally focus on working properly and in comfortable silence, chairs pushed up close together, just how they like it.

Shane loves everything about their relationship, the Good Luck kiss they share (as Shane lovingly named it) before they enter any location for Unsolved has to be one of his favorites, however. As the name suggests, it’s to give them good luck. To catch something on camera (“all of the good luck kisses on the world wouldn’t be enough, Ryan”) to not die because Shane provoked some demon, or that the episode will do well, it’s a little bit of all of those, and most importantly, an excuse.

Just like how it started, when Shane couldn’t control himself on the porch of some allegedly haunted home. They were fairly newly dating, it’s been only a couple of weeks since they got their shit together and finally impulse made out in the library as soon as they were left alone after the shooting of a Post Mortem.

Later they made a deal that they’d keep things professional at work, especially because no one knew about them yet. And Shane agreed, but there was only one, tiny problem. Ryan looked gorgeous. Like all the damn time. Even in the shitty light of the porch, and with a BuzzFeed beanie stuck over his messy hair and eyes tired from all the traveling they did. He was fucking stunning and kissable and Shane couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that he’s allowed to kiss him, anytime.

No more pining, no more wondering what it’s like, how he tastes if Ryan would look at him with a soft, lovestruck expression afterward every time, because Ryan is his boyfriend, and Shane would never admit it to anyone how it made his heart flutter still.

He was allowed to, so he did. Brain turned off, cupping Ryan’s cheek in one hand to press a soft kiss to his lips, while Ryan was talking none the less. Right in front of the whole crew. When Ryan (and everyone else, honestly) stared at him bewildered, Shane just grinned and shrugged.

“It’s a good luck kiss,” He said, before casually stepping into the house, heart racing, most definitely not from the thought of what kind of ghosts and demons are waiting for them inside.

That’s how Shane single-handedly outed them. Ryan being pissy about it later was all for show though, it’s not like they were hiding their relationship too well anyway. They just didn’t exactly know how to go about it, and it made things a lot easier later in the end.

Shane did it again, next shoot, and on every single one ever since, until it became tradition. To the point that Ryan would just tilt his head up for a kiss, in a middle of a sentence even, if that’s when they arrived at whatever ghoul infested location they were visiting and Shane adored him for it, happy to comply and peck him on the lips every single time.

[secretshinigami]

Masterlist of B’s Bitchin Prompts

A compiled list of everyone’s prompts from this round of our exchange – thank you for letting us post them, and we hope you guys enjoy them! If you use a prompt, please let us know and we’ll reblog your piece!

Prompts are organized by their submitter, so feel free to ctrl+f to find character-specific prompts.

fandom-fae

Misa surrounded by lots of flowers, with Rem floating in the background.

Light, happy, wearing goth/emo clothes & he’s holding an apple.

Female!L and female!Light  on a date in an ice café

Misa  in pastel goth fashion, reading a book.

Shien from Light Up The New World meeting Mello (from his time at the mafia) and Misa (from before L died)

Near and Misa eating ice cream together

Misa painting Mello’s nails

Linda painting Misa

Mello in pastel clothes, being in a café with Misa

Beyond crying with A’s dead body in the background

Misa standing on the edge of the building she jusmped off, viewed through the shinigami eyes.

Light waking up in his teenage bedroom after he died, as a seventeen-year-old a day before he would’ve found the death note, and what he’d do

Mello finds the death note instead of Light, and if he’d tell Matt about it

Beyond and Misa spending a day together (going shopping, playing pranks on ppl, committing murder, a date, etc. it’s your choice!)

(pre-canon) Misa going on vacation with her family to Winchester, and befriending the Wammy’s kids, Maki and her father are also there

(pre-canon) Mello adopting a stray cat and naming her L, he absolutely adores her. one day she dies, how he would react

Naomi meets L, she thinks he’s Beyond Birthday. how does he convince her otherwise?

Light being suicidal, and either Misa or L stop him from killing himself, and the conversation that ensues

 Linda lives in LA, and gets contacted by Near, years after the Kira case

Misa performing a ritual to talk to ghosts after Light died. She actually manages to contact a ghost, L’s ghost

Beyond contacting Misa because someone told him she had a god of death at her command, and he wants to bring someone back (A, or L, your decision), Rem (compassionately) explaining that it doesn’t work that way, and Misa comforting Beyond (it’s optional whether or not they end up friends)

gevnni

Light and Mikami having a lightsaber fight

Rester is Takada's bodyguard

Gevanni putting together a ship in a bottle

the FBI asks B for help in a case + Naomi and Raye look on slightly horrified at his antics

Rester is Takada's bodyguard

Gevanni putting together a ship in a bottle while on a case

nocturneproductions

Fem!Light

MatsuLight kissing

Beyond birthday being creepy

Mob!au, ideally focused on Light

Light and Matsuda on a first date

Ryuk stays with Light during the Yotsuba arc

hazblogs

A in a crop top with the queer flag(s) of your choice

Mello and sun imagery

Pokémon (Go or not) AU with the Wammy gang (including possible OCs of yours)

band AU with Light, Misa, Ryuk and L

Light with Hanahaki disease (you can pick the ship you want, make it AU or not)

Naomi and BB interacting (during the LABB case or in an AU)

L/Light being soulmates (canon or AU)

how Matt started smoking (I am comfortable with heavy drug themes)

ikathemadhatter

Light and L as goth idols

Naomi & B as Pokemon trainers

L taking care of a cat

Lucifer!Light

Light, L and Misa dressed up for Halloween

LawLight Little Mermaid AU where Light is a mermaid

LawLight Mad Max AU

What chain of events brought Wammy to adopt L?

During Yotsuba Arc, Misa forces Light on a night date at the karaoke and L has to follow them because he and Light are still chained together. What happens after few drinks and some songs?

jam-knife

Naomi and B rocking some tuxedos!

Mello and Matt just laying around at Wammy's. Just a nice art is more than enough, but if you feel like making it into a funny one-panel comic then that would be awesome :D

Misa and B (and any other character you feel like including) killing it at Met Gala -literally or figuratively or both is up to you xD

An LxLight slowburn with Yotsuba!Light obsessing over whether he is in fact Kira or not.

The Tales of That One Time Mello Allegedly Beat Matt's Ass at Mario Kart.

A first-person narration of Misa after finding out Light died, and how she planned her suicide (but if it's a triggering subject for you I totally get it! No probs at all)

misas-biggest-fan

misa at one of her concerts! super hardcore and goth and metal

 Light and L being soft and loving to each other!!

misa and beyond but LIFE SWAP AU where b is the tormented rockstar second kira and misa is the bitter, murderous wammy's kid!

beyond meets naomi before starting his LABB plan and his love for her convinces him not to go through w it <3333 you can make it romantic if you want by im more a platonic ship sort of dude!

kira!L goes up against detective!Light

light being tailed by L’s ghost

niatsuki

Near and Light kissing

Mikami and Light in the rain sharing an umbrella

Mello travelling

Domestic Mikalight

Matsuda confronting Near on the theory he brings up at the end of the manga

Nate and Light having an obtuse argument, but with romantic undertones

ichigosouma

L wearing Gucci

Watari on his day off

Anyone as a pokemon trainer

Misa and Beyond going shopping

Mikami and Kiyomi hanging out on their day off

Ryuk and Rem playing the wii together

translightyagami

L in a sweater that says "My Gender is Shut the Fuck Up"

Light with a bloody nose and starry eyes

L with his hair in a loose ponytail, reading a Nancy Drew book

The books L read as a child, bonus points if you do Nancy Drew and not Sherlock

3 drinks Light has had with men he's in love with (your choice on who the men are)

L putting Light into a coat and leaving an object in his pocket that Light finds later, with Light speculating what the object means.

izaori

Backup in a magical girl outfit (whether it's from akazukin chacha or somewhere else, it doesn't matter)

Mello playing a sport like soccer or baseball, in a cool sports uniform perhaps

Sayu and Light studying together!!

Backup back in his Wammy days before doing the LABB, interacting with other students or working on case files

Light and Yuri's date at the amusement park since she still wanted to go so badly after the bus-jacking incident.

 L and Rem have a chat shortly before L's death, by themselves. L likely knows he'll be dying soon, and Rem has the same feeling.

pensulliwen

Misa making Valentine’s Day chocolate, perhaps while daydreaming about a fantastically unlikely result of giving them to Light.

Meme redraws featuring Misa, Light, and L. Just go crazy. Any ridiculous meme image, shove these dorks in there instead.

A family portrait of Misa when she was younger, imagining her parents and sister or with their faces obscured.

Misa and Mogi on a shopping “date” in which the unlikely pair manage to work together surprisingly well. 

Light considers eliminating Misa from the equation many times, but there’s always something that stops him. Explore how he views her and the dissonance between how he views her versus how he views himself, as well as the reasoning for keeping her around longer than intended. 

An older Sayu reflecting on how her relationship with her brother has changed, and maybe trying to rekindle the closeness she felt when they were younger. 

stanmisa

Misa in fashionable clothes or Misa in Scene/emo fashion

L x Light hate-relationship

Misa, Light, and L (and any other characters you prefer) as fantasy classes/races, like d&d

L/Light hate pining/complicated emotions between these emotionally stunted men

Misa getting together with Rem instead of Light

Sayu and Misa being friends

yagami-raito-kun

Light and Near interacting in any form

College professor AU (any characters)

Art inspired by any of my fics or drabbles is always welcome!

Light in prison always gets a hell yeah

Light and Sayu at the beach being siblings and having fun

Canon divergence: Mello kidnaps Light instead of Sayu

sculs-cf-scnder 

 Misa Amane giving Beyond Birthday a very Misa makeover

Demegawa at a spa, getting pampered after a hard day at work 

Team Kira (Mikami, Light, Misa, Takada, Higuchi is optional) as a visual kei band.

Death Note is actually a TV drama; Misa and Light are actors and Misa is starting to think that Light hates her just like his character even though they are dating

An insight on the aftermath of Aizawa quitting, how did his family react, doubts about his marriage and his future

Sachiko and Sayu take the day off to have a girls' night.

eyeshiny

Beyond chilling with some tigers in the jungle (if you enjoy drawing animals)

70s fashion Mello+Matt (romantic or no)

stone faced 1920s family-style portrait of L + the Wammy boys (A+B included or removed, however youd like)

Beyond and A start a ghosthunting business, B is essentially a fake psychic but A can actually see ghosts

Pre-orphanage backstory for any of the Wammy boys (not necessarily tragic! think series of unfortunate events moreso than a true crime documentary)

What if death note was written like a seinfeld episode?

Anonymous

Sidoh drinking hot chocolate & being happy

B in a bathrobe with a strawberry pattern

Naomi and Halle on a date

Awkward post-Kira case dinner at Gevanni's house that includes all four living members of the SPK

Mello interviews B, but B mostly just trolls him and doesn't give clear answers to anything he asks

L uses astrology to try and prove that Light is Kira

Your interpretation of A with B sharing a nice moment at Wammy’s house 

A few characters of your choice aged-up (what do you think they’d have looked like in the show if they had grown older?)

Matt and Mello (either at wammy’s house or after— doesn’t have to be super shippy if you don’t want)

Near with a big fluffy dog— maybe a therapy/comfort dog

Either L or Naomi visiting Beyond in prison

Gevanni, Rester, or other SPK members reflecting on Near. Maybe including an attempt at trying and failing to treat him like a child

A and Beyond are alive for the Kira case au

Past light meeting future light

90s fashion Beyond

Creepy contortionist L

the Death Note cast recreating a famous painting1. Mello and Beyond bonding (but not as a ship)

Light in any of the circles of Hell

the main Death Note cast set in a 'Lord of the Flies' situation

Naomi, B and L shenanigans

Halle, Wedy and Naomi as Charlie's angels1. Naomi visiting B in jail

Raye meeting B

D&D AU

Misa and Rem painting each other's nails black.

Matt and Mello cuddling and watching the rain.

L dressed as Sherlock Holmes.

oleswap AU between L and Light.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde AU with Light as Jekyll (Kira being his hidden personality aka Hyde) and L as Gabriel Utterson.

A story of how Ryuuk summarizes his adventure with the human world in a poem, really dark poem, which he later declaims to the Shinigami King and the unnamed Shinigami.

[yourownpetard]

Slate brings a strong contender for Worst Article of 2017 thus far.

Based on an un-attributed and unverified report in Rolling Stone, Pence referred to his wife as “Mother” at a dinner party. We start, already baffled as to why this is something anyone is reporting on. It gets worse from there.

Knowing what we do about how much respect Mike Pence has for women’s rights, treating your wife like a subhuman, sexless domestic servant [by calling her “Mother”] sounds about right.

I had no idea Mother was such a horrible slur.

Recently, Pence tweeted about picking up ice cream for his wife. In the tweets, he called her Mrs. Pence. An improvement over mother, but still the kind of thing a pod person doing a bad job pretending to be a human might say.

Or maybe it’s a term of respectful address used in a public communication.

Ice cream is exactly like birth control in this instance.

I didn’t include the context for this sentence because there isn’t any.

Another interesting fact to know about the Pences is that before Mike proposed to Karen, she started carrying around a gold cross with the word yes on it. Oh, mother. Not to be outcreeped, Mike brought along two loaves of bread when the two were duck-hunting one day. He hollowed each of them out to conceal a bottle of champagne and a ring box. Was it white bread, to symbolize their heritage?

That’s a really nice engagement story. What is wrong with you?

(Full article after the cut, in case this utter madness gets retracted, or you just don’t want to give Slate clicks.)

Rolling Stone published a long piece about Vice President Mike Pence’s record in Indiana on Monday. As disturbing as the facts you likely already knew about Pence are—his anti-LGBTQ history, his opposition to reproductive rights, his fealty to his religion over the Constitution—they turn out to be merely the tip of an appalling iceberg: He also did little to stop an HIV outbreak in his state and refused to visit a community affected by a serious lead poisoning crisis while he was governor. That was after he paid his mortgage and bought groceries with congressional campaign funds and declared global warming a myth. But somehow, those might not be the worst revelations in this article. Because it also reveals that Pence calls his wife, Karen, mother:

While Mike Pence was governor, his relationship with the Democratic minority in the legislature was crap. Someone on his staff suggested having the Democratic leaders over to the governor's mansion for dinner. The table was set for 20, but there were only around seven in attendance. One unlucky legislator stuck next to Pence tried to make conversation, but found even at dinner she couldn't shift Pence off his talking points. Gov. Pence shouted to his wife, Karen, his closest adviser, at the other end of the table.

"Mother, Mother, who prepared our meal this evening?"

The legislators looked at one another, speaking with their eyes: He just called his wife "Mother."

Maybe it was a joke, the legislator reasoned. But a few minutes later, Pence shouted again.

"Mother, Mother, whose china are we eating on?"

Mother Pence went on a long discourse about where the china was from. A little later, the legislators stumbled out, wondering what was weirder: Pence's inability to make conversation, or calling his wife "Mother" in the second decade of the 21stcentury.

The mother story is carefully unsourced in the Rolling Stone piece, so unless anyone has caught Pence calling his wife mother on tape (if you do, email us attips@slate.com), we’ll have to take it with a grain of salt. Perhaps he meant something else? Maybe the legislators misheard him and he was saying muva, which is model and entertainer Amber Rose’s fun catchphrase for empowered women like herself. Though Pence's politics more closely align with Kanye’s, if anything. Honestly, does mother sound like the kind of creepy thing “a silver-haired man resembling the guy on top of a wedding cake,” as the Rolling Stonearticle describes him, would say? It sure does.

Many mothers and fathers refer to each other as mom and dad around their kids, but usually they have enough self-awareness to adapt to different audiences. Even if it’s a regional thing or an old-fashioned thing, it was weird enough to freak out, allegedly, the Indiana legislators who witnessed it that night. Part of why it’s strange is that it sounds incestuous: Is his wife also his mother? Or does he think the world revolves around him and we’re all his children? And Pence doesn’t just call his wife mother—he calls her mother, mother, while demanding answers about food and china. Knowing what we do about how much respect Mike Pence has for women’s rights, treating your wife like a subhuman, sexless domestic servant sounds about right.

I can confirm that when Mrs. Pence asks me to pick up ice cream, I pick up ice cream. 😉 https://t.co/GaQDqvIFZz

Recently, Pence tweeted about picking up ice cream for his wife. In the tweets, he called her Mrs. Pence. An improvement over mother, but still the kind of thing a pod person doing a bad job pretending to be a human might say. Isn’t that just like a typical man, also, to pretend it was the wife who requested the ice cream? Like you won’t be partaking from that carton either, big boy. Ice cream is exactly like birth control in this instance.

Another interesting fact to know about the Pences is that before Mike proposed to Karen, she started carrying around a gold cross with the word yes on it. Oh, mother. Not to be outcreeped, Mike brought along two loaves of bread when the two were duck-hunting one day. He hollowed each of them out to conceal a bottle of champagne and a ring box. Was it white bread, to symbolize their heritage? The New York Times leaves this detail out. Some would find this romantic; others would be reminded of the time they needed to buy Tupperware because mice were getting into their bread. And more questions arise—did Mike scoop out the bread and throw it out, the way he threw out $80 million in federal pre-K funding in Indiana, or did he binge like a friendly bear in a children’s book? Picture it, a mid-’80s Pence, hair not yet gray, furiously scarfing down Wonder Bread while he fantasizes about proposing to the woman he will one day call mother. That man is our vice-president.

[celticnoise]

Every article written about Brendan Rodgers time at Celtic will include a run-down of the honours he’s won and the superb accomplishments whilst he was here.

That’s why I’m not going to write that stuff.

You can read it all elsewhere, everywhere in fact, if you’re looking for that.

I refuse to write that article; his conduct today doesn’t deserve it.

Nobody is going to say he is not an excellent manager or that his record here in domestic football is anything other than exceptional.

But all of it is tainted. The copybook is blackened by an act of betrayal of the club, of the players, of the board and most importantly of the fans. Nothing will make it right. No mealy mouthed platitude will erase what he has done, which is to abandon the ship mid-campaign, as if everything he said to us over the last two and a half years was a lie.

He knows where this leaves us. He knows the damage it could have done.

He’s put himself front and centre, he’s put himself first and that’s alright, as long as everyone is being honest and everyone knows where they stand. He can spare us the fake piety and expressions of affection and love; you do not do this to something you love.

I can pinpoint for you the exact date on which I knew Brendan Rodgers would not be at Celtic next season.

I can time it to near enough the exact minute on that date and I can tell you where I was and who I was with at the time. Secrecy is no longer necessary, and it will no longer avail us.

It was at 10:30 am on 9 August, the day after we drew 1-1 with AEK Athens.

I vowed not to tell this story whilst the manager was at Celtic; you are entitled to be pissed about that, but in my defence we were in a bad spot at the time and my writing this would have done no good. As the season became a slog it was evident that no benefit could have come from writing it whilst games still had to be played. I considered doing it during the January window when the manager made his comments about Shved, but parked it.

Was I right to do so? You can be the judge.

The moment is as fresh in my mind as if it was yesterday.

I realised he would be gone at the end of the season if not sooner sitting in an office at Celtic Park with some of the Resolution 12 team.

Sitting across from us was an irate, frustrated, Peter Lawwell, who I knew had either spoken to Chris McLaughlin of the BBC the night before, in a scathing attack on the manager, or who had willed that act and given someone else authorisation to do so.

Before the meeting even started that morning, I knew we were in a bad spot.

I knew there were major issues at Celtic Park because in quick succession the manager had slagged the board and the board had fired back, and the fact that we were in the midst of a Champions League qualifying campaign didn’t seem of particular concern to any of those allegedly “running things.” This was next-level frightening.

But it was Lawwell’s demeanour on that day which truly left its mark on me. For openers, he was absolutely unapologetic for the shot across Brendan’s bow. The words that came out of his mouth were almost identical to what McLaughlin had said the night before, and so that confirmed the story I’d posted on that subject shortly before the game kicked off.

“What changed?” Lawwell asked us. “Nothing on our side,” he said with a mixture of deep frustration, under which I could see was a real anger. “We’ve done things no differently this summer than last summer, so what’s changed?”

You could be ungenerous and say that was exactly the problem, but beneath my own anger – much of it directed at Lawwell himself – I understood what he was saying.

He was saying that Brendan knew the score. He knew the club couldn’t chase mega-deals and had signed up on that basis. And whilst mistakes had been made and deals not closed, the club felt it had done its best on all counts.

So what was the public strop all about? An attempt to force the boards hand, or something else? Either way, it was about as unprofessional an act as I’d ever seen. As much as I blamed Lawwell, in no small measure, for Brendan’s apparent frustration, the manner and timing of his comments had been absolutely appalling. It was clear the club felt the same.

But Lawwell wasn’t quite finished. “You guys know me,” he said, “Have I ever been unambitious? Do you think I would let us fall behind?”

And again, you could be ungenerous and give a negative answer, but I know that deep down Lawwell does believe he has Celtic’s best interests at heart. It was the second time I’d met him in such a setting, and having heard some of his private views on certain issues within the game I can assure you he feels the way we do about almost all of them.

I wanted to warn him of the likely reaction of the fans, myself included, if it all broke down; “Look on the bright side,” I said. “If this goes bad you’ll never hear the name Steven Fletcher again.” I wanted to remind him that his own legacy was irrevocably tied to the fate of the manager.

He saw the funny side, although he knew I wasn’t joking.

We all pressed him to say more than morning, and he was initially reluctant to go further; we were there on other business and you could tell it was the last thing he wanted to talk about, but he did say one other thing that rung alarm bells. “You don’t know half of what’s been going on,” he said. “And believe me, you don’t want to know.”

And at that moment, I knew it was over.

I knew that whatever was going on behind the scenes was about more than transfer budgets and it had created a schism that probably couldn’t be healed. I know Lawwell is blessed with a very high opinion of himself, and anyone who knows the smallest thing about Brendan Rodgers can’t be unaware that he is similarly inclined. I knew that a monstrous clash of egos had happened, and that it would be a minor miracle if it was fixed.

I’ve gone through spells since then of wanting to believe it could be sorted out, and when Desmond called them both to London to get them back on the same page I hoped it had been fixed. One thing about that period stands out; an account of that meeting which had Desmond reminding Rodgers that he was the highest paid boss in the club’s history and that he should start acting like it.

Whatever was going on, Dermot Desmond was well aware of it all.

I knew January would tell the tale, and the team’s indifferent start to the campaign suggested that all wasn’t exactly well behind the scenes.

Any hope I genuinely had that the manager would stay was shot the day Brendan chose to criticise the club’s spending £2 million on Maryan Shved. There was something almost confected about those comments; his claim we didn’t need another winger was not only shocking but manifestly at odds with the fact we’d spent much of the summer trying to sign one.

To cap it all off, Maryan Shved is a very, very good footballer; he returned to first team action at the weekend and scored a hat-trick. He’ll do a very fine job in the Hoops next season.

All the way through this campaign, at the back of my mind, always, was Lawwell that day and an anger he felt keenly and which he felt he was fully justified in.

Misgivings about the manager have haunted me all the way through the season so far, and every now and again I could feel them seeping out in the words on the page. I’ve fought the urge as best I could, but a steady drip-drip-drip of stories in the background un-nerved me on a regular basis. They were easy to dismiss as long as the manager was still in the job … but I always knew that a reckoning might come, depending on how he finally departed.

I genuinely thought – as all of us did – that we’d get through the season, and I was content with that until the current campaign was over. Had he left us with another treble it’s doubtful that this article would ever even have been written. Loyalty rewarded with the same. All the unanswered questions could have waited, and in the spell following the next appointment doubts might have been parked and the whole caravan might have moved on.

Do I believe he was backed by the board?

Of course I don’t, not to the extent he was entitled to expect and certainly not to the extent we were entitled to as fans … but that was never the full story. I’ll cover the board in another article; we’re in the midst of a busy few days here, so that ball is still rolling.

Believe me, I am not going to sugar coat what I think of them.

But today belongs to Rodgers and in a manner none of us expected.

For openers, what do we really know about Dembele’s departure? He hinted at Rodgers not being committed, which gave him his own excuse to seek a move. Rumours persist that Kieran Tierney would have left for Everton in the summer; a sign, perhaps, that he too wasn’t convinced that the Brendan Rodgers show had long left to run. The manager himself was the one who broke the story about China, and he didn’t have to do that, as it only created greater uncertainty.

Brown negotiated his decision to stay with Lawwell, with Rodgers not even in the room. How many times this season did the manager make it clear that entire areas of the club were not his concern? A sign that he wasn’t fully engaged, or that the club itself didn’t care to share long term plans with someone with no long term commitment?

And for two transfer windows, his private frustrations were given public voice in a way that wasn’t good to hear and which not only undermined potential signings but upset us at crucial moments in the most un-necessary fashion. It was almost unbelievable that he chose to make his discontent public during the summer on the eve of such a mammoth game, and Celtic’s response through the BBC was a public rebuke to a guy they thought had crossed a very big line.

Some of what has gone on behind the scenes has been equally troubling. One of his earliest acts was to cut down our head of scouting, the guy who found Ki, Wanyama, Forster, Van Dijk and others. His replacement, Lee Congerton, has been a disastrous failure by every measurable standard, a fiasco which is surely now almost at an end. It’ll be expensive, I’m sure, but we’re sitting on a £6 million fee for the manager, and we can easily afford to dispatch him.

Which brings me to Europe, and an article I wrote with some regret after the Valencia match at home, which said that I’d resigned myself to us never moving forward at that level whilst he was boss. I saw signs of great promise in the away leg, but even that infuriates me now, that he only changed tac right at the end when he already had half a foot out the door.

Our European record under him was awful, if we’re being honest. I was willing to excuse the away game poundings at the hands of Barcelona and PSG, but our home form used to be the envy of the isles and he leaves it shredded, and our club a pale shadow in that arena. The one thing, above all, that I knew I would welcome on the day he departed was an end to those kind of drubbings and, at last, a management team that could construct a defence.

I don’t know what really went on here, but all through this campaign there have been endless whispers and because most of us believed Rodgers when he said he was happy and settled and in his dream job there was a lot of suspension of critical thinking, and I’m as guilty of it as anyone.

And for that, you do have my apologies.

The idea that he would leave for Leicester seemed, frankly, absurd. When the press wrote that he was evens to take the job I wrote a piece saying that it was a ridiculous bet and that I’d want better odds and even then I wouldn’t have touched it. And then last night, his odds moved to 1/10 and I knew the worst was true.

I don’t care about feeling like an idiot; part of this job is having the courage to speak your mind every day and knowing that at least some of the time you are going to come off looking like a clown. I do care that he’s made the whole club feel that way, that he’s flat-footed everyone, including the squad, with this dire, unconscionable decision.

He leaves us two and a half years into a five-year deal, and I have every bit as much angry contempt for that disloyalty as I did when Dembele exited stage left on the final day of the window in the summer. In hindsight I suspect he saw the writing on the wall.

Certainly, it is no longer possible to merely dismiss his comments as he headed for the exit door as the sentiments of someone playing mind games. It’s a situation – one of many – that requires some re-evaluation in light of current events.

Rodgers has left us in a hell of a mess, but if he thinks that running out on us is something he can do without consequence he is dead wrong.

Those at Leicester who are applauding this today should know that this ends in one of two ways, and neither to their benefit. Theirs is a club afflicted by a curious condition but not an uncommon one; a single unexpected league triumph has convinced them that they only need to appoint the right man and the glory days will follow all over again.

But there are no miracles to be had here; they used theirs up and it’ll be a generation before they get a second shot at it. This ends in Rodgers being dispatched as Ranieri and others have been or with him scuttling for the exit as he has done today. If he can demonstrate this level of disloyalty where we’re concerned there’s no relying on him to show it anywhere else.

No club can trust him after this, no board which hires him again will believe they can do so without risk. The chairmen of the bigger clubs, many of whom think Lawwell is an outstanding administrator unfairly maligned, are also entitled to wonder if Rodgers isn’t running out under pressure and “facing a challenge for the first time.”

I’ve already heard that view expressed; it will be heard more loudly in days to come. Is it a daft idea? Of course it is, but there are some who will believe it and he’s left himself wide open to the charge, to the idea that he’s wilted under pressure, that he’s cut and run.

I have zero sympathy for him in that regard.

In his time at this club he has been The Unconquerable, the Invincible, the Double Treble winner, the man on the brink of stamping his name on every page of our modern history as the boss who delivered our second nine in a row and then took that step further and brought home the ten. His name was being mentioned with those of Stein, McNeil, Johnstone, Larsson, Auld and the rest … not simply Celtic figures, but Celtic icons.

Tonight it’s all in ashes. He leaves us angry and bewildered, a selfish man putting vain ego and ambition above all else.

It was Malcolm in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when speaking of the Thane of Cawdor, who died a traitor but repented at his execution and went to the next world with dignity, who said; “Nothing in his life became him like his leaving it.”

Brendan Rodgers isn’t going to the afterlife, only to Leicester. It doesn’t matter to me what dignity he claims for himself at the press conference. Because this is his exit, this is the manner of it, and this is what he’ll be remembered for.

There will be other managers, there will be other trebles.

Perhaps Neil Lennon himself will secure the third of them, and write his own final act.

But on the day, sometime in the year after next, when our future manager holds aloft the trophy for the ten in a row title, today will be a memory and nothing else will matter.

Where Rodgers will be then, I cannot know and do not care.

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[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/silly-stupid-suspicious-statement-season/

Silly-Stupid-Suspicious Statement Season

Sorry if this article offends some people, but… tough! You say it, suggest it, speak it in any way, and you own it, with all its attendant ignominy!

Perhaps the first salvo of this fusillade of folly came from the former U.S. ambassador to Armenia, Richard Mills. In his farewell interview, he made a number of observations. Some were quite reasonable, yet others, such as his reference to ceding land for peace in Artsakh and attributing the oligarchic-monopolistic economic system that came into existence in Armenia to the Turco-Azeri blockade were off-the-charts ridiculous.

But there were others, too. Some were overt, such as his endorsement of the Amulsar gold mine developed by Lydian International. He blithely ignored the projection that its toxic wastes will leach through the ground and end up in Lake Sevan in about a century, poisoning the most important body of water in the country.

Others were more subtle; silly-stupid-suspicious statements. Mills said that “the U.S. government sees Armenia as a friend in the region,” with a “strong relationship” and understands the “special relationship” with Russia, but also stating that the U.S. is “not expecting or pressing that Armenia veer away from” that relationship. Hmmm, sounds like a “the lady doth protest too much, methinks” kind of statement. Mills also credited civil society in the Republic of Armenia for successfully carrying out the uprising of last Spring, yet he also observes that assistance by the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. government, the EU and all of Armenia’s friends “who helped support and nurture civil society over the last 20 years did lay the groundwork and create the dialogue and discussion that ultimately led to the events of April-May.” Sound like he’s taking credit for the movement.

“Ultimately, what we want for Armenia is that it follow its own foreign policy” based on its being “a sovereign nation” and adding, “We just want to make sure that Armenia remains a sovereign country, free to make its own decisions.” All of this makes it sounds like he’s making these points to cover up that the reality is quite the opposite.

But Mills may have known what was coming and was trying to soften the blow of U.S. national security adviser John Bolton’s presumptuous, intrusive, and disruptive comments. In an interview with Radio Liberty, Bolton offered to sell U.S. arms to Armenia, intimated that Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act (which has largely prevented U.S. arms sales to Azerbaijan) might be dumped, all in the name of “preventing” regional instability through over-reliance on one major power (i.e. Russia). Plus, he was very strongly urged a quick resolution to the Artsakh issue and said he told Pashinyan that “the Trump administration will enforce U.S. sanctions against Tehran “very vigorously” and that that the Armenian-Iranian border is “going to be a significant issue.” The thread tying all this together is Bolton’s decades-long desire to start a war with Iran, or at least cause another “regime change” there. He figures if the Republic of Armenia’s reliance on the lifeline provided by its border with Iran is reduced/minimized, then Washington can squeeze Yerevan to go along with whatever is being cooked up against Iran. It’s also worth observing that a few days after Bolton’s arms sales offer, Sweden offered to sell 10 fighter jets to the RoA. Coincidence or coordination?

Bolton is a howling warmonger, and something of an embarrassment to the U.S., both now and during his service in the second Bush administration. His comments, proposals, and (not-so-subtle) suggestions in and to Yerevan fit his confrontational, brusque, and arrogant style. He must think Pashinyan mad if he believes the acting Prime Minister would take steps that would antagonize Russia.

Before moving to the U.S. for silly-stupid-suspicious statements (other than the obvious Trump ones which appear almost daily), there’s one more matter that is stirring things up in Yerevan, leading to much foolishness. There’s some kind of international LGBTQ conference planned for November, with rumors going around that it’s funded by Elton John as payback for his allegedly being disrespected during his visit to Yerevan last year. This has some people in a tizzy and calling for actions to counter such “anti-Armenian-national-values” and “anti-family-values” activities.

Spare me. What part of hating LGBTQ folks is a “national,” specifically Armenian, value? What kind of family values include domestic violence against wives and children? When will people learn that it’s no one else’s business what anyone does with their private parts. The only time these types of issues do, and rightly should, spill into the public realm is when the state intrudes into this otherwise private realm, requiring political action to remedy such intrusions. Stop this divisive and human and civil rights violating foolishness, Armenians and our homeland don’t need it. Just live and let live, enshrined in law.

It seems the RoA’s Culture Ministry has invited everyone to participate in a public discussion of the idea to rename Zvartnotz Airport after Charles Aznavour. Stop! The guy just died. Let his legacy be digested and then let’s start naming things in his honor. Separately, it seems tacky to me that in a country as small as Armenia, where pretty much everyone entering goes through the airport, should have its point of entry be named after a person. It just seems off, tacky. This is reminiscent of the renaming of National Airport in Washington, DC after Ronald Reagan, while he was still alive. I’ll also point to what happened to Burbank Airport, renamed after Bob Hope, and subsequently changed to “Hollywood Burbank Airport” in what strikes me as a bit of an insult to the noted actor. But might not the same happen to Aznavour?

Now, on to the U.S. It’s unfortunate that an Armenian running for congress feels the need to stoop to making ridiculous accusations against Armenians and Armenian organizations, just to draw some attention to his failing and flailing candidacy. This is done either directly by him or supporters, largely on Facebook. It’s degrading for him and embarrassing for our community since he is not a viable candidate and his incumbent opponent is Adam Schiff who has been extremely supportive of Armenian issues. While it’s laudable that he chose to run as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic district keeping alive at least a semblance of a race and campaign of opposing ideas, at this point, Johnny Nalbandian is doing a disservice to himself, his congressional district, and the Armenian community at large.

The last silly-stupid-suspicious statement I’ll address appeared in the LA Times in a letter to the editor from an Armenian who lives just a little north of the 28th Congressional District discussed in the previous paragraph. In it, he belittles the plight of those in the caravan of Central American migrants wending their way to the U.S.-Mexico border. He “challenges” them to demonstrate their conditions are as woeful as those of our ancestors during the Genocide, as if suffering is a competition. Luckily, he received a fitting response from another reader a few days later. What that response did not include is a reference to the poem “American Colossus” (of which a friend reminded) by Emma Lazarus now mounted inside the Stature of Liberty’s pedestal which reads in part, “”Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

Please help end this season of silly-stupid-suspicious statements by pushing back against them in all forms and forums. Speak up and denounce such damaging blather.

Garen Yegparian

Garen Yegparian is a fat, bald guy who has too much to say and do for his own good. So, you know he loves mouthing off weekly in the Weekly about anything he damn well pleases to write about that he can remotely tie in to things Armenian. He’s got a checkered past: principal of an Armenian school, project manager on a housing development, ANC-WR Executive Director, AYF Field worker (again on the left coast), Operations Director for a telecom startup, and a City of LA employee most recently (in three different departments so far). Plus, he’s got delusions of breaking into electoral politics, meanwhile participating in other aspects of it and making sure to stay in trouble.

Latest posts by Garen Yegparian (see all)

Source: https://armenianweekly.com/2018/11/07/silly-stupid-suspicious-statement-season/

[nedsvallesny]

Supply Chain Security is the Whole Enchilada, But Who’s Willing to Pay for It?

From time to time, there emerge cybersecurity stories of such potential impact that they have the effect of making all other security concerns seem minuscule and trifling by comparison. Yesterday was one of those times. Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday published a bombshell investigation alleging that Chinese cyber spies had used a U.S.-based tech firm to secretly embed tiny computer chips into electronic devices purchased and used by almost 30 different companies. There aren’t any corroborating accounts of this scoop so far, but it is both fascinating and terrifying to look at why threats to the global technology supply chain can be so difficult to detect, verify and counter.

In the context of computer and Internet security, supply chain security refers to the challenge of validating that a given piece of electronics — and by extension the software that powers those computing parts — does not include any extraneous or fraudulent components beyond what was specified by the company that paid for the production of said item.

In a nutshell, the Bloomberg story claims that San Jose, Calif. based tech giant Supermicro was somehow caught up in a plan to quietly insert a rice-sized computer chip on the circuit boards that get put into a variety of servers and electronic components purchased by major vendors, allegedly including Amazon and Apple. The chips were alleged to have spied on users of the devices and sent unspecified data back to the Chinese military.

It’s critical to note up top that Amazon, Apple and Supermicro have categorically denied most of the claims in the Bloomberg piece. That is, their positions refuting core components of the story would appear to leave little wiggle room for future backtracking on those statements. Amazon also penned a blog post that more emphatically stated their objections to the Bloomberg piece.

Nevertheless, Bloomberg reporters write that “the companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation.”

The story continues:

Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.

Many readers have asked for my take on this piece. I heard similar allegations earlier this year about Supermicro and tried mightily to verify them but could not. That in itself should be zero gauge of the story’s potential merit. After all, I am just one guy, whereas this is the type of scoop that usually takes entire portions of a newsroom to research, report and vet. By Bloomberg’s own account, the story took more than a year to report and write, and cites 17 anonymous sources as confirming the activity.

Most of what I have to share here is based on conversations with some clueful people over the years who would probably find themselves confined to a tiny, windowless room for an extended period if their names or quotes ever showed up in a story like this, so I will tread carefully around this subject.

The U.S. Government isn’t eager to admit it, but there has long been an unofficial inventory of tech components and vendors that are forbidden to buy from if you’re in charge of procuring products or services on behalf of the U.S. Government. Call it the “brown list, “black list,” “entity list” or what have you, but it’s basically an indelible index of companies that are on the permanent Shit List of Uncle Sam for having been caught pulling some kind of supply chain shenanigans.

More than a decade ago when I was a reporter with The Washington Post, I heard from an extremely well-placed source that one Chinese tech company had made it onto Uncle Sam’s entity list because they sold a custom hardware component for many Internet-enabled printers that secretly made a copy of every document or image sent to the printer and forwarded that to a server allegedly controlled by hackers aligned with the Chinese government.

That example gives a whole new meaning to the term “supply chain,” doesn’t it? If Bloomberg’s reporting is accurate, that’s more or less what we’re dealing with here in Supermicro as well.

But here’s the thing: Even if you identify which technology vendors are guilty of supply-chain hacks, it can be difficult to enforce their banishment from the procurement chain. One reason is that it is often tough to tell from the brand name of a given gizmo who actually makes all the multifarious components that go into any one electronic device sold today.

Take, for instance, the problem right now with insecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices — cheapo security cameras, Internet routers and digital video recorders — sold at places like Amazon and Walmart. Many of these IoT devices have become a major security problem because they are massively insecure by default and difficult if not also impractical to secure after they are sold and put into use.

For every company in China that produces these IoT devices, there are dozens of “white label” firms that market and/or sell the core electronic components as their own. So while security researchers might identify a set of security holes in IoT products made by one company whose products are white labeled by others, actually informing consumers about which third-party products include those vulnerabilities can be extremely challenging. In some cases, a technology vendor responsible for some part of this mess may simply go out of business or close its doors and re-emerge under different names and managers.

Mind you, there is no indication anyone is purposefully engineering so many of these IoT products to be insecure; a more likely explanation is that building in more security tends to make devices considerably more expensive and slower to market. In many cases, their insecurity stems from a combination of factors: They ship with every imaginable feature turned on by default; they bundle outdated software and firmware components; and their default settings are difficult or impossible for users to change.

We don’t often hear about intentional efforts to subvert the security of the technology supply chain simply because these incidents tend to get quickly classified by the military when they are discovered. But the U.S. Congress has held multiple hearings about supply chain security challenges, and the U.S. government has taken steps on several occasions to block Chinese tech companies from doing business with the federal government and/or U.S.-based firms.

Most recently, the Pentagon banned the sale of Chinese-made ZTE and Huawei phones on military bases, according to a Defense Department directive that cites security risks posed by the devices. The U.S. Department of Commerce also has instituted a seven-year export restriction for ZTE, resulting in a ban on U.S. component makers selling to ZTE.

Still, the issue here isn’t that we can’t trust technology products made in China. Indeed there are numerous examples of other countries — including the United States and its allies — slipping their own “backdoors” into hardware and software products.

Like it or not, the vast majority of electronics are made in China, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. The central issue is that we don’t have any other choice right now. The reason is that by nearly all accounts it would be punishingly expensive to replicate that manufacturing process here in the United States.

Even if the U.S. government and Silicon Valley somehow mustered the funding and political will to do that, insisting that products sold to U.S. consumers or the U.S. government be made only with components made here in the U.S.A. would massively drive up the cost of all forms of technology. Consumers would almost certainly balk at buying these way more expensive devices. Years of experience has shown that consumers aren’t interested in paying a huge premium for security when a comparable product with the features they want is available much more cheaply.

Indeed, noted security expert Bruce Schneier calls supply-chain security “an insurmountably hard problem.”

“Our IT industry is inexorably international, and anyone involved in the process can subvert the security of the end product,” Schneier wrote in an opinion piece published earlier this year in The Washington Post. “No one wants to even think about a US-only anything; prices would multiply many times over. We cannot trust anyone, yet we have no choice but to trust everyone. No one is ready for the costs that solving this would entail.”

The Bloomberg piece also addresses this elephant in the room:

“The problem under discussion wasn’t just technological. It spoke to decisions made decades ago to send advanced production work to Southeast Asia. In the intervening years, low-cost Chinese manufacturing had come to underpin the business models of many of America’s largest technology companies. Early on, Apple, for instance, made many of its most sophisticated electronics domestically. Then in 1992, it closed a state-of-the-art plant for motherboard and computer assembly in Fremont, Calif., and sent much of that work overseas.

Over the decades, the security of the supply chain became an article of faith despite repeated warnings by Western officials. A belief formed that China was unlikely to jeopardize its position as workshop to the world by letting its spies meddle in its factories. That left the decision about where to build commercial systems resting largely on where capacity was greatest and cheapest. “You end up with a classic Satan’s bargain,” one former U.S. official says. “You can have less supply than you want and guarantee it’s secure, or you can have the supply you need, but there will be risk. Every organization has accepted the second proposition.”

Another huge challenge of securing the technology supply chain is that it’s quite time consuming and expensive to detect when products may have been intentionally compromised during some part of the manufacturing process. Your typical motherboard of the kind produced by a company like Supermicro can include hundreds of chips, but it only takes one hinky chip to subvert the security of the entire product.

Also, most of the U.S. government’s efforts to police the global technology supply chain seem to be focused on preventing counterfeits — not finding secretly added spying components.

Finally, it’s not clear that private industry is up to the job, either. At least not yet.

“In the three years since the briefing in McLean, no commercially viable way to detect attacks like the one on Supermicro’s motherboards has emerged—or has looked likely to emerge,” the Bloomberg story concludes. “Few companies have the resources of Apple and Amazon, and it took some luck even for them to spot the problem. ‘This stuff is at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, and there is no easy technological solution,’ one of the people present in McLean says. ‘You have to invest in things that the world wants. You cannot invest in things that the world is not ready to accept yet.'”

For my part, I try not to spin my wheels worrying about things I can’t change, and the supply chain challenges definitely fit into that category. I’ll have some more thoughts on the supply chain problem and what we can do about it in an interview to be published next week.

But for the time being, there are some things worth thinking about that can help mitigate the threat from stealthy supply chain hacks. Writing for this week’s newsletter put out by the SANS Institute, a security training company based in Bethesda, Md., editorial board member William Hugh Murray has a few provocative thoughts:

Abandon the password for all but trivial applications. Steve Jobs and the ubiquitous mobile computer have lowered the cost and improved the convenience of strong authentication enough to overcome all arguments against it.

Abandon the flat network. Secure and trusted communication now trump ease of any-to-any communication.

Move traffic monitoring from encouraged to essential.

Establish and maintain end-to-end encryption for all applications. Think TLS, VPNs, VLANs and physically segmented networks. Software Defined Networks put this within the budget of most enterprises.

Abandon the convenient but dangerously permissive default access control rule of “read/write/execute” in favor of restrictive “read/execute-only” or even better, “Least privilege.” Least privilege is expensive to administer but it is effective. Our current strategy of “ship low-quality early/patch late” is proving to be ineffective and more expensive in maintenance and breaches than we could ever have imagined.

from Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/10/supply-chain-security-is-the-whole-enchilada-but-whos-willing-to-pay-for-it/

[jennifersnyderca90]

Supply Chain Security is the Whole Enchilada, But Who’s Willing to Pay for It?

From time to time, there emerge cybersecurity stories of such potential impact that they have the effect of making all other security concerns seem minuscule and trifling by comparison. Yesterday was one of those times. Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday published a bombshell investigation alleging that Chinese cyber spies had used a U.S.-based tech firm to secretly embed tiny computer chips into electronic devices purchased and used by almost 30 different companies. There aren’t any corroborating accounts of this scoop so far, but it is both fascinating and terrifying to look at why threats to the global technology supply chain can be so difficult to detect, verify and counter.

In the context of computer and Internet security, supply chain security refers to the challenge of validating that a given piece of electronics — and by extension the software that powers those computing parts — does not include any extraneous or fraudulent components beyond what was specified by the company that paid for the production of said item.

In a nutshell, the Bloomberg story claims that San Jose, Calif. based tech giant Supermicro was somehow caught up in a plan to quietly insert a rice-sized computer chip on the circuit boards that get put into a variety of servers and electronic components purchased by major vendors, allegedly including Amazon and Apple. The chips were alleged to have spied on users of the devices and sent unspecified data back to the Chinese military.

It’s critical to note up top that Amazon, Apple and Supermicro have categorically denied most of the claims in the Bloomberg piece. That is, their positions refuting core components of the story would appear to leave little wiggle room for future backtracking on those statements. Amazon also penned a blog post that more emphatically stated their objections to the Bloomberg piece.

Nevertheless, Bloomberg reporters write that “the companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation.”

The story continues:

Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.

Many readers have asked for my take on this piece. I heard similar allegations earlier this year about Supermicro and tried mightily to verify them but could not. That in itself should be zero gauge of the story’s potential merit. After all, I am just one guy, whereas this is the type of scoop that usually takes entire portions of a newsroom to research, report and vet. By Bloomberg’s own account, the story took more than a year to report and write, and cites 17 anonymous sources as confirming the activity.

Most of what I have to share here is based on conversations with some clueful people over the years who would probably find themselves confined to a tiny, windowless room for an extended period if their names or quotes ever showed up in a story like this, so I will tread carefully around this subject.

The U.S. Government isn’t eager to admit it, but there has long been an unofficial inventory of tech components and vendors that are forbidden to buy from if you’re in charge of procuring products or services on behalf of the U.S. Government. Call it the “brown list, “black list,” “entity list” or what have you, but it’s basically an indelible index of companies that are on the permanent Shit List of Uncle Sam for having been caught pulling some kind of supply chain shenanigans.

More than a decade ago when I was a reporter with The Washington Post, I heard from an extremely well-placed source that one Chinese tech company had made it onto Uncle Sam’s entity list because they sold a custom hardware component for many Internet-enabled printers that secretly made a copy of every document or image sent to the printer and forwarded that to a server allegedly controlled by hackers aligned with the Chinese government.

That example gives a whole new meaning to the term “supply chain,” doesn’t it? If Bloomberg’s reporting is accurate, that’s more or less what we’re dealing with here in Supermicro as well.

But here’s the thing: Even if you identify which technology vendors are guilty of supply-chain hacks, it can be difficult to enforce their banishment from the procurement chain. One reason is that it is often tough to tell from the brand name of a given gizmo who actually makes all the multifarious components that go into any one electronic device sold today.

Take, for instance, the problem right now with insecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices — cheapo security cameras, Internet routers and digital video recorders — sold at places like Amazon and Walmart. Many of these IoT devices have become a major security problem because they are massively insecure by default and difficult if not also impractical to secure after they are sold and put into use.

For every company in China that produces these IoT devices, there are dozens of “white label” firms that market and/or sell the core electronic components as their own. So while security researchers might identify a set of security holes in IoT products made by one company whose products are white labeled by others, actually informing consumers about which third-party products include those vulnerabilities can be extremely challenging. In some cases, a technology vendor responsible for some part of this mess may simply go out of business or close its doors and re-emerge under different names and managers.

Mind you, there is no indication anyone is purposefully engineering so many of these IoT products to be insecure; a more likely explanation is that building in more security tends to make devices considerably more expensive and slower to market. In many cases, their insecurity stems from a combination of factors: They ship with every imaginable feature turned on by default; they bundle outdated software and firmware components; and their default settings are difficult or impossible for users to change.

We don’t often hear about intentional efforts to subvert the security of the technology supply chain simply because these incidents tend to get quickly classified by the military when they are discovered. But the U.S. Congress has held multiple hearings about supply chain security challenges, and the U.S. government has taken steps on several occasions to block Chinese tech companies from doing business with the federal government and/or U.S.-based firms.

Most recently, the Pentagon banned the sale of Chinese-made ZTE and Huawei phones on military bases, according to a Defense Department directive that cites security risks posed by the devices. The U.S. Department of Commerce also has instituted a seven-year export restriction for ZTE, resulting in a ban on U.S. component makers selling to ZTE.

Still, the issue here isn’t that we can’t trust technology products made in China. Indeed there are numerous examples of other countries — including the United States and its allies — slipping their own “backdoors” into hardware and software products.

Like it or not, the vast majority of electronics are made in China, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. The central issue is that we don’t have any other choice right now. The reason is that by nearly all accounts it would be punishingly expensive to replicate that manufacturing process here in the United States.

Even if the U.S. government and Silicon Valley somehow mustered the funding and political will to do that, insisting that products sold to U.S. consumers or the U.S. government be made only with components made here in the U.S.A. would massively drive up the cost of all forms of technology. Consumers would almost certainly balk at buying these way more expensive devices. Years of experience has shown that consumers aren’t interested in paying a huge premium for security when a comparable product with the features they want is available much more cheaply.

Indeed, noted security expert Bruce Schneier calls supply-chain security “an insurmountably hard problem.”

“Our IT industry is inexorably international, and anyone involved in the process can subvert the security of the end product,” Schneier wrote in an opinion piece published earlier this year in The Washington Post. “No one wants to even think about a US-only anything; prices would multiply many times over. We cannot trust anyone, yet we have no choice but to trust everyone. No one is ready for the costs that solving this would entail.”

The Bloomberg piece also addresses this elephant in the room:

“The problem under discussion wasn’t just technological. It spoke to decisions made decades ago to send advanced production work to Southeast Asia. In the intervening years, low-cost Chinese manufacturing had come to underpin the business models of many of America’s largest technology companies. Early on, Apple, for instance, made many of its most sophisticated electronics domestically. Then in 1992, it closed a state-of-the-art plant for motherboard and computer assembly in Fremont, Calif., and sent much of that work overseas.

Over the decades, the security of the supply chain became an article of faith despite repeated warnings by Western officials. A belief formed that China was unlikely to jeopardize its position as workshop to the world by letting its spies meddle in its factories. That left the decision about where to build commercial systems resting largely on where capacity was greatest and cheapest. “You end up with a classic Satan’s bargain,” one former U.S. official says. “You can have less supply than you want and guarantee it’s secure, or you can have the supply you need, but there will be risk. Every organization has accepted the second proposition.”

Another huge challenge of securing the technology supply chain is that it’s quite time consuming and expensive to detect when products may have been intentionally compromised during some part of the manufacturing process. Your typical motherboard of the kind produced by a company like Supermicro can include hundreds of chips, but it only takes one hinky chip to subvert the security of the entire product.

Also, most of the U.S. government’s efforts to police the global technology supply chain seem to be focused on preventing counterfeits — not finding secretly added spying components.

Finally, it’s not clear that private industry is up to the job, either. At least not yet.

“In the three years since the briefing in McLean, no commercially viable way to detect attacks like the one on Supermicro’s motherboards has emerged—or has looked likely to emerge,” the Bloomberg story concludes. “Few companies have the resources of Apple and Amazon, and it took some luck even for them to spot the problem. ‘This stuff is at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, and there is no easy technological solution,’ one of the people present in McLean says. ‘You have to invest in things that the world wants. You cannot invest in things that the world is not ready to accept yet.'”

For my part, I try not to spin my wheels worrying about things I can’t change, and the supply chain challenges definitely fit into that category. I’ll have some more thoughts on the supply chain problem and what we can do about it in an interview to be published next week.

But for the time being, there are some things worth thinking about that can help mitigate the threat from stealthy supply chain hacks. Writing for this week’s newsletter put out by the SANS Institute, a security training company based in Bethesda, Md., editorial board member William Hugh Murray has a few provocative thoughts:

Abandon the password for all but trivial applications. Steve Jobs and the ubiquitous mobile computer have lowered the cost and improved the convenience of strong authentication enough to overcome all arguments against it.

Abandon the flat network. Secure and trusted communication now trump ease of any-to-any communication.

Move traffic monitoring from encouraged to essential.

Establish and maintain end-to-end encryption for all applications. Think TLS, VPNs, VLANs and physically segmented networks. Software Defined Networks put this within the budget of most enterprises.

Abandon the convenient but dangerously permissive default access control rule of “read/write/execute” in favor of restrictive “read/execute-only” or even better, “Least privilege.” Least privilege is expensive to administer but it is effective. Our current strategy of “ship low-quality early/patch late” is proving to be ineffective and more expensive in maintenance and breaches than we could ever have imagined.

from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/10/supply-chain-security-is-the-whole-enchilada-but-whos-willing-to-pay-for-it/

[amberdscott2]

Supply Chain Security is the Whole Enchilada, But Who’s Willing to Pay for It?

From time to time, there emerge cybersecurity stories of such potential impact that they have the effect of making all other security concerns seem minuscule and trifling by comparison. Yesterday was one of those times. Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday published a bombshell investigation alleging that Chinese cyber spies had used a U.S.-based tech firm to secretly embed tiny computer chips into electronic devices purchased and used by almost 30 different companies. There aren’t any corroborating accounts of this scoop so far, but it is both fascinating and terrifying to look at why threats to the global technology supply chain can be so difficult to detect, verify and counter.

In the context of computer and Internet security, supply chain security refers to the challenge of validating that a given piece of electronics — and by extension the software that powers those computing parts — does not include any extraneous or fraudulent components beyond what was specified by the company that paid for the production of said item.

In a nutshell, the Bloomberg story claims that San Jose, Calif. based tech giant Supermicro was somehow caught up in a plan to quietly insert a rice-sized computer chip on the circuit boards that get put into a variety of servers and electronic components purchased by major vendors, allegedly including Amazon and Apple. The chips were alleged to have spied on users of the devices and sent unspecified data back to the Chinese military.

It’s critical to note up top that Amazon, Apple and Supermicro have categorically denied most of the claims in the Bloomberg piece. That is, their positions refuting core components of the story would appear to leave little wiggle room for future backtracking on those statements. Amazon also penned a blog post that more emphatically stated their objections to the Bloomberg piece.

Nevertheless, Bloomberg reporters write that “the companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation.”

The story continues:

Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.

Many readers have asked for my take on this piece. I heard similar allegations earlier this year about Supermicro and tried mightily to verify them but could not. That in itself should be zero gauge of the story’s potential merit. After all, I am just one guy, whereas this is the type of scoop that usually takes entire portions of a newsroom to research, report and vet. By Bloomberg’s own account, the story took more than a year to report and write, and cites 17 anonymous sources as confirming the activity.

Most of what I have to share here is based on conversations with some clueful people over the years who would probably find themselves confined to a tiny, windowless room for an extended period if their names or quotes ever showed up in a story like this, so I will tread carefully around this subject.

The U.S. Government isn’t eager to admit it, but there has long been an unofficial inventory of tech components and vendors that are forbidden to buy from if you’re in charge of procuring products or services on behalf of the U.S. Government. Call it the “brown list, “black list,” “entity list” or what have you, but it’s basically an indelible index of companies that are on the permanent Shit List of Uncle Sam for having been caught pulling some kind of supply chain shenanigans.

More than a decade ago when I was a reporter with The Washington Post, I heard from an extremely well-placed source that one Chinese tech company had made it onto Uncle Sam’s entity list because they sold a custom hardware component for many Internet-enabled printers that secretly made a copy of every document or image sent to the printer and forwarded that to a server allegedly controlled by hackers aligned with the Chinese government.

That example gives a whole new meaning to the term “supply chain,” doesn’t it? If Bloomberg’s reporting is accurate, that’s more or less what we’re dealing with here in Supermicro as well.

But here’s the thing: Even if you identify which technology vendors are guilty of supply-chain hacks, it can be difficult to enforce their banishment from the procurement chain. One reason is that it is often tough to tell from the brand name of a given gizmo who actually makes all the multifarious components that go into any one electronic device sold today.

Take, for instance, the problem right now with insecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices — cheapo security cameras, Internet routers and digital video recorders — sold at places like Amazon and Walmart. Many of these IoT devices have become a major security problem because they are massively insecure by default and difficult if not also impractical to secure after they are sold and put into use.

For every company in China that produces these IoT devices, there are dozens of “white label” firms that market and/or sell the core electronic components as their own. So while security researchers might identify a set of security holes in IoT products made by one company whose products are white labeled by others, actually informing consumers about which third-party products include those vulnerabilities can be extremely challenging. In some cases, a technology vendor responsible for some part of this mess may simply go out of business or close its doors and re-emerge under different names and managers.

Mind you, there is no indication anyone is purposefully engineering so many of these IoT products to be insecure; a more likely explanation is that building in more security tends to make devices considerably more expensive and slower to market. In many cases, their insecurity stems from a combination of factors: They ship with every imaginable feature turned on by default; they bundle outdated software and firmware components; and their default settings are difficult or impossible for users to change.

We don’t often hear about intentional efforts to subvert the security of the technology supply chain simply because these incidents tend to get quickly classified by the military when they are discovered. But the U.S. Congress has held multiple hearings about supply chain security challenges, and the U.S. government has taken steps on several occasions to block Chinese tech companies from doing business with the federal government and/or U.S.-based firms.

Most recently, the Pentagon banned the sale of Chinese-made ZTE and Huawei phones on military bases, according to a Defense Department directive that cites security risks posed by the devices. The U.S. Department of Commerce also has instituted a seven-year export restriction for ZTE, resulting in a ban on U.S. component makers selling to ZTE.

Still, the issue here isn’t that we can’t trust technology products made in China. Indeed there are numerous examples of other countries — including the United States and its allies — slipping their own “backdoors” into hardware and software products.

Like it or not, the vast majority of electronics are made in China, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. The central issue is that we don’t have any other choice right now. The reason is that by nearly all accounts it would be punishingly expensive to replicate that manufacturing process here in the United States.

Even if the U.S. government and Silicon Valley somehow mustered the funding and political will to do that, insisting that products sold to U.S. consumers or the U.S. government be made only with components made here in the U.S.A. would massively drive up the cost of all forms of technology. Consumers would almost certainly balk at buying these way more expensive devices. Years of experience has shown that consumers aren’t interested in paying a huge premium for security when a comparable product with the features they want is available much more cheaply.

Indeed, noted security expert Bruce Schneier calls supply-chain security “an insurmountably hard problem.”

“Our IT industry is inexorably international, and anyone involved in the process can subvert the security of the end product,” Schneier wrote in an opinion piece published earlier this year in The Washington Post. “No one wants to even think about a US-only anything; prices would multiply many times over. We cannot trust anyone, yet we have no choice but to trust everyone. No one is ready for the costs that solving this would entail.”

The Bloomberg piece also addresses this elephant in the room:

“The problem under discussion wasn’t just technological. It spoke to decisions made decades ago to send advanced production work to Southeast Asia. In the intervening years, low-cost Chinese manufacturing had come to underpin the business models of many of America’s largest technology companies. Early on, Apple, for instance, made many of its most sophisticated electronics domestically. Then in 1992, it closed a state-of-the-art plant for motherboard and computer assembly in Fremont, Calif., and sent much of that work overseas.

Over the decades, the security of the supply chain became an article of faith despite repeated warnings by Western officials. A belief formed that China was unlikely to jeopardize its position as workshop to the world by letting its spies meddle in its factories. That left the decision about where to build commercial systems resting largely on where capacity was greatest and cheapest. “You end up with a classic Satan’s bargain,” one former U.S. official says. “You can have less supply than you want and guarantee it’s secure, or you can have the supply you need, but there will be risk. Every organization has accepted the second proposition.”

Another huge challenge of securing the technology supply chain is that it’s quite time consuming and expensive to detect when products may have been intentionally compromised during some part of the manufacturing process. Your typical motherboard of the kind produced by a company like Supermicro can include hundreds of chips, but it only takes one hinky chip to subvert the security of the entire product.

Also, most of the U.S. government’s efforts to police the global technology supply chain seem to be focused on preventing counterfeits — not finding secretly added spying components.

Finally, it’s not clear that private industry is up to the job, either. At least not yet.

“In the three years since the briefing in McLean, no commercially viable way to detect attacks like the one on Supermicro’s motherboards has emerged—or has looked likely to emerge,” the Bloomberg story concludes. “Few companies have the resources of Apple and Amazon, and it took some luck even for them to spot the problem. ‘This stuff is at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, and there is no easy technological solution,’ one of the people present in McLean says. ‘You have to invest in things that the world wants. You cannot invest in things that the world is not ready to accept yet.'”

For my part, I try not to spin my wheels worrying about things I can’t change, and the supply chain challenges definitely fit into that category. I’ll have some more thoughts on the supply chain problem and what we can do about it in an interview to be published next week.

But for the time being, there are some things worth thinking about that can help mitigate the threat from stealthy supply chain hacks. Writing for this week’s newsletter put out by the SANS Institute, a security training company based in Bethesda, Md., editorial board member William Hugh Murray has a few provocative thoughts:

Abandon the password for all but trivial applications. Steve Jobs and the ubiquitous mobile computer have lowered the cost and improved the convenience of strong authentication enough to overcome all arguments against it.

Abandon the flat network. Secure and trusted communication now trump ease of any-to-any communication.

Move traffic monitoring from encouraged to essential.

Establish and maintain end-to-end encryption for all applications. Think TLS, VPNs, VLANs and physically segmented networks. Software Defined Networks put this within the budget of most enterprises.

Abandon the convenient but dangerously permissive default access control rule of “read/write/execute” in favor of restrictive “read/execute-only” or even better, “Least privilege.” Least privilege is expensive to administer but it is effective. Our current strategy of “ship low-quality early/patch late” is proving to be ineffective and more expensive in maintenance and breaches than we could ever have imagined.

from Amber Scott Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/10/supply-chain-security-is-the-whole-enchilada-but-whos-willing-to-pay-for-it/

[celticnoise]

Sevco are spending their way to an early grave.

There’s no other way to put that, no way to sugar coat it for their fans, no way to dress it up or write it in nicer language. They are buying tickets to oblivion, and not even bothering to fly second class, in the cheap seats. They are going First Class, drinking champagne, wolfing down caviar, jollying it up and enjoying the journey. And on some level they know where it might end.

They are gambling. They are doubling-down on the strategy that killed Rangers, hoping it saves them from the same fate. It is madness, of course, but their peculiar brand of it.

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See, I’ve done this, and that’s why it’s easy to recognise.

Back in my second year at university, when the funds were running low and there wasn’t much work to be had in a small town like Stirling, I had an epiphany standing in the bookies one afternoon. Yes, I was in a bookies even though I was running low on cash.

It’s times like that when the bookies seems like the best idea. I’d had some wins that year already, and was getting pretty good. I had this idea that every week one game jumps out at you, and offers you a chance at quick cash. That’s exactly what happened that day. I picked up a coupon for the Champions League games and one of the odds screamed from the page at me; it was Rangers v Manchester United at Ibrox. United were evens to win.

Evens. “Oh wow,” I thought. “Free money.”

I had a couple of hundred quid left in the bank; I stuck almost every penny on Manchester United. So optimistic was I that the enthusiasm jumped to my flatmates, who decided to stick some cash of their own on the game. My mate Paul had £80 left; he stuck the lot on the United win. Was I nervous? Not when it was just my cash on the line, but I had convinced them to bet theirs. That somehow added to the pressure.

We went to the pub to watch the game, and I spent the rest of my money eating as well as I could; a nice three courser with mussels, steak and desert. Because why not? If I was right I was going to be able to pay my rent for another month. If I was wrong I’d be eating beans on toast and seriously sweating. But standing in that bookies I had already been seriously sweating, so the risk seemed like it was at least worth a shot.

The game that night passed like treacle running down a wall. It was messy and it went in a crawl. Manchester United won the game by a single Phil Neville goal … but it was close. Rangers hit the post. The Manchester United keeper had an inspired game. It was a cold sweat evening, and in no way justified my confidence of earlier that day.

One break of the ball and I’d have lost.

They are the margins between victory and defeat. Between glory and disaster. It seems inconceivable that a club which had risen from the ashes of a liquidated one could play a similar risk-all game with their future, but that’s where we are.

Desperate men are bad enough.

Desperate men who like to gamble … worse.

Does anyone doubt King is a gambler?

Not only is he, but he’s a reckless one who bets everything in single moments when the odds aren’t even particularly favourable. His gamble with the South African tax authorities was the biggest of his life thus far, the gamble to take on Ashley was ridiculous, the one to roll the dice on Warburton a big one but not all-in … and then there’s this one; betting on a Portuguese manager with no real record of achievement, who was coaching in Qatar, and giving him funds that Warburton and McCoist would have killed for.

Their club is skint. Where are they getting the money for such recklessness? The answer is that they aren’t. It’s not there. King has green-lit this, but this is a guy who might not be at the club for the long haul either, and so it’s nonsense, isn’t it?

What are they betting on? Taking the title from us? Even if they raise their game by 30% it won’t be enough if we produce another season on a par with the last one, even if it doesn’t end in an unbeaten run. We win the two home games against them and we need a draw at Ibrox and that’s their league challenge dead on its arse.

They can’t believe they have a squad – or the chance of building a squad – capable of making it to the Europa League Group stages can they? Even if they did, where’s the big money? We should know; we didn’t exactly fill the coffers the last two years we got there.

They’ve yet to get rid of a single player, in spite of their entire first team squad being available for transfer. So these guys are additional players on top of the dreck already there. And South American players, coming to Scotland? I get that all these guys want to play in Europe but they don’t all go to Portugal, Italy and Spain just for the money. There’s a reason they don’t come to Scotland and play out their match-days on soggy turf in the pouring rain.

And there’s a reason why other Scottish clubs don’t buy them.

This is a gamble and a half, with the future of their whole club, and their fans are gleeful about it although it makes exactly zero commercial sense at all. They were losing money before this; God alone knows how bad their final accounts for last season were. Who is carrying those losses? Dodgy Dave King sure as Hell isn’t. If their directors are funding this from their own pockets that’s insane, and it’s also as gross a violation of Financial Fair Play rules as you’re likely to see.

Which of course matters less in Scotland than it should.

Other clubs should be clamouring for the introduction of these regulations, domestically, in the off-season, but will they? Will they Hell is the answer I expect us to get. No-one’s interested in it, and I’ve stopped trying to give their fans a jolt. They don’t want to know.

Over on The Scottish Football Monitor the resident Hearts fans accept that Sevco are pissing all over their club, but they also say Hearts won’t challenge it because neither they nor St Johnstone believes there’s anything to be gained by it, when neither club feels ready for European football.

As if that’s the point. As if it’s not about fairness and a level playing field for all.

I can’t understand this reticence, or this attitude.

Nor do I understand Aberdeen, who have just signed Hayes up on an extended contract and are willing to part with him – allegedly their best player – for just shy of £1 million. Where is their ambition? Where is their intent? Why don’t any of these clubs want to be the biggest in the country bar one?

They are, all of them, just waiting for Sevco to take the place of Rangers.

It’s incredible.

But that would be a lot more likely to happen if Sevco itself wasn’t on such a suicidal trajectory.

Looking back on the crazy bet I laid that night I can’t believe I was so confident.

Would I have bet my degree on a season-long outcome?

Hell no, because that … that would have been bonkers.

That’s what they are doing, with the future of their entire club.

“Where’s the money coming from?” someone asked me on Facebook earlier in the week, before adding that they “don’t believe Sevco will ever go bust.”

And it’s simple, said I; if they keep spending like this it’s a matter of time.

It’s not a case of if it happens but when it happens. It is a certainty.

So few people believe that, somehow. As if you can keep on living that way and spending what you don’t have without it catching up to you. They say it will never happen at Sevco, will never be “allowed” to happen, as money in the bank simply regenerates instead of having to be earned and put there, as if it never happened at Ibrox before.

How quickly the lessons of history are forgotten.

Because, of course, it did happen. And the board over there is doing its damndest to see that it happens again. They are on course for a colossal crash.

And in the meantime they have their feet up on the leather, sipping chilled wine, eating their mussels and enjoying the party. The hour draws late, but it’s one last celebration before the end. Even if they win – and the only win worth this risk is taking us down and that’s simply not going to happen, people – they still can’t sustain this kind of spending.

What’s the plan? What’s the strategy? Who says there is one?

The endgame is obvious though.

You bet everything on one roll of the dice you better get a six. You keep on betting everything on one roll of the dice you better walk away from the table when the going is good. This ends in only one way, the way it did before, with the For Sale sign hanging on those wrought metal gates.

Believe it. Those who won’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

They’re on “express elevator to Hell, going down.”

At least the ride will be interesting.

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