#this is not a defense of like. staff pushing the algorithm

[the-four-humors]

Saw someone arguing with an actual staff member - who was confirming that, behind the scenes, your definition of what Tumblr 'is' as a user is different from the actual metrics - that Tumblr is "the fandom website" and implied that it always has been.

Which is just............. demonstrably wrong?

There were YEARS where The Bit that everyone committed to on this website was 'hipster blog vs fandom blog'. There have ALWAYS been Normies on Tumblr, and they make up a MUCH bigger part of the userbase than anyone wants to admit, because they're the quiet majority.

They're the ones reposting memes and making moodboards. They're the ones making Taylor Swift a trending tag. They're the ones that people on Twitter wax nostalgic about.

While staff have been more involved with the fandom side of Tumblr lately, fandom blogs have never been the priority.

[mr-camhed]

Name: Algorithmaster

Age: 5.07 million years

Gender: Male

Faction: Decepticon

Assigned Forces: Decepticon Department of Security and Intelligence

Role: Reconnaissance communication, combat analyst.

Motto: "Mass data and algorithm are The most covert weapon of victory. "

Personality: Algorithmaster prefers a Elegant way of life and a low profile. Most of the time, he is in his van mode simply rolling down The road or parked somewhere with its antennas rotating lazily. However, under this "ordinary" facade is a massively powerful data processing center that are processing as much data as an average Transformer would in their Lifetime every second, which are transmitted to any Decepticon high command who required them. If You're not high on the hierarchy to or were unable to make contact with Soundwave, the Algorithmaster who prefers to be in a lower position is your best choice. However, under The unremarkable Appearance, Algorithmaster is a rather twisted and perversed individual. When he is not at full workload, Algorithmaster likes to cause chaos and suffering with his abilities, such as hijacking or overloading the systems of public transport and TV Broadcasting as a prank, deliberately sabotage infrastructure to cause accidents just for fun, and even kidnap and enslave innocent lives to be sold for his profit.

Alternate mode: Algorithmaster transforms into a black high top long wheelbase Mercedes Benz Vario 815 D Armored van with "TVMK" Livery on The side and equipments such as satellite dishes, telescopic antenna mast and spotlight on The top.

Appearance: Algorithmaster has a transformation scheme similar to Prime breakdown, albeit more slender and less stocky, with less protruding chestplate. He is 15.4m tall in robot mode, and The equipments such as antennas and spotlight are located on his shoulder. His headsculpt is similar to that of Beast wars Tarantulas' toy's non-mutant head, with a face similar to that of G1 Astrotrain. He has no visible Decepticon badge save for a tiny one on The tip of his satellite dish in vehicle mode, but in robot mode, he has a Decepticon rubsign oh his chest and a regular Deception badge on his left knee.

Weaponry: Algorithmaster is rather strong and has a very high intelligence. In both modes, Algorithmaster can use his internal computers to process up to a few hundred thousand terabyte of data in a few miliseconds, and transfer them to millions of lightyear away within seconds. He can also generate massive amount of junk data and inject them straight into electronic equipment or even The cerebral module of other Mechanical lifeforms to paralyze, hijack or even completely overwrite their core data without killing them, which he can use to take over control of vehicles, spacecrafts, radiotelevision Signals and even drones and even Mechanical lifeforms such as Transformers. In vehicle mode, Algorithmaster can drive for over 6000 miles at The top speed of 164 kph, and push any obstacle aside with The push bar on The from fascia. It was alleged that he can incapacitate and control organic lifeforms remotely, although it was yet to be confirmed. In robot mode, Algorithmaster has a thrust Rifle and a heavy plasma pistol as a weapon of self defense, and to directly inject toxin and junk data into his enemy, he has a pair of blades implanted in his lower right arm. He also has two loyal(ly brainwashed) minicon named Synchronize(alt mode is a quadcopter) and Skyspy(alt mode is a reaper drone) as his spy and proxy.

Character Biography: Algorithmaster from Iacon was a forged point one percenter. He was an administrative staff of The Iacon telecommunications center during The golden Age. However, he was also secretly in connection with The criminal underworld, Corrupted Autobot Senate members and The Institute. However, his coworker Whitenoise grew suspicious as he seems to be spending much more than his salary would allow, and his attempt on coverup and silencing Whitnoise before she can blow The whistle royally backfired into a police sting operation and ended up with him and several of his coconspirators in jail to cover for The Senators, crime lords and The Institute. However, he somehow broke out of prison and was secretly employed by the Senate, although he had realized The Senate's days are numbered and has secretly built connection to The Decepticon movement with The connection he had with a fellow fall bot named Maspectra. And after the collapse of The Senate and the beginning of The war, he fled Cybertron on the first transport out of there, and has been hiding in Alien civilizations ever since.

Weakness: Algorithmaster's Antennas are very brittle, and can be damaged with relative ease to greatly reduce his power to transmit data. And under vehicle mode, he has a rather tall center of gravity and large side profile, which means he is prone to shaking and even falling over which would also break The antenna when he was turning or encountering crosswind.

Commentary: Algorithmaster has a very close connection with many illegal blacksmiths and modifiers who he would go to receive upgrade at.

[waynedunlaptheorgandonor]

watched s11ep1

i will provide you with a quick review before i disappear back into the ether of twd avoidance

lots of spoilers under the cut. also i wrote way too much and i worked all night and haven’t slept so i didn’t bother to reread literally any of it, so it might be completely nonsensical, tho if you don’t expect that from me by this point idk whose blog you’ve been reading

enjoy:

hokay, first off, i’ll start by saying that i enjoyed it more than i expected to. i’ve been avoiding any sort of discussion about stuff, but my google algorithm is so fucked at this point that i still get recommended articles and stuff every now and then, so i was already pretty aware of what i was walking into, and was expecting it to be eh, but actually i prob enjoyed it more than i enjoyed the finale

(don’t get too excited tho, the finale was rly boring lmfao)

anyway

episode starts off with a tense scouting mission

it takes .005 seconds into the episode for caryl to exchange a look of longing, establishing that they are still having weird conflict and are both too fucking stubborn to do anything about it even tho they hate it desperately

i imagine that will continue for a while

rosita, kelly, carol, maggie, what’s her face with the bad hair, and lydia (i think that’s everyone?) lower down to some army bunker or something, where a bunch of walkers are taking a snooze, and the girls are very respectful of walker naptime, and do their best not to wake them up

obviously they eventually wake up, but i’ll get to that in a sec

as they’re tiptoeing through the walker tulips, there’s this split second where carol spots a machine gun, and looks at maggie with a face like, “can i plzzzz, i am mad horny for that machine gun,” but maggie tells her no. (i 110% expected her to defy orders and accidentally wake up all the walkers, but she actually behaved herself for once. well. mostly)

never fear, tho, after the girl gang collects a bunch of MREs they go back to wait for the dudes waiting up top to pull them up, and bc men ruin everything, one of the ropes break, and daryl catches it before it falls, but then a slow motion drop of blood falls on a walker’s face, and just like that, walker naptime is over, and carol uses her bow and arrow for two seconds before she is like “fuck this” and whips out the machine gun

yes, she is super hot using it

yes, daryl watches her do it

anyway, all the other girls get rescued, and carol is about to be pulled up, but bc she is a #girlboss, she first makes a beeline for one more crate full of MREs. daryl covers her while she gets the loot, and when she gets back up top they have another charged moment as carol hands him back his knife

just fuck already, jfc

titles!

cut to alexandria where everything is still not smilestimes

BUT, we do get to see uncle daryl run and hug rj and judith (and dog), and FUCKING HERSHEL JR, LIGHT OF MY LIFE is also there

istg, they could not have casted a better child, i a d o r e him

oh, and some friends of maggie’s show up too, idk

cut to a staff meeting where everyone is like, whomp whomp, we’re all gonna starve to death unless we figure out something quick

cue maggie going, “oh, i know where food is, but it requires me to tell you my tragic backstory, in case anyone didn’t watch my bottle episode”

she tells her dramatic backstory about all her friends getting slaughtered by the reapers for no apparent reason, and then she’s like “anyway, let’s go back there!”

no one thinks it’s a great idea, but a group of people decide to go anyway, including daryl and gabriel. rosita is super pissed that gabriel is going, and carol doesn’t go, probably partly bc it’s a shitty fucking idea, and also bc they have to keep caryl apart bc otherwise they’ll fix their problems ahead of schedule and they won’t be able to drag out the needless angst

daryl looks kind of annoyed that carol doesn’t volunteer to go 

bitch, i thought you wanted her to stop putting herself in the line of fire! make up your damn mind!

moving on

cut to a thunderstorm, where, if you look closely, you’ll notice daryl is wearing the STUPIDEST hat i’ve ever seen. just get an umbrella, jfc

for some reason negan is with them, bc ig he knows his way around washington dc, and no one in six years has bothered to figure out how to get around the city and/or get a map, and he is like “hey guys, maybe we shouldn’t try to walk in this fucking hurricane,” and everyone is like “FUCK YOU NEGAN, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF US!!!” 

this will be a common occurrence 

but eventually daryl is even like “actually, it’s rly unpleasant out here, and my hat is mad stupid, can we go inside plz?”

so they go inside an old metro station, which is actually a rly cool cinematic choice. i rly like the idea, and they executed it rly well

speaking of executions

there are some fucking RULL CREEPY walkers. idk why they bothered me so badly, but they were what they at first assumed were corpses wrapped up in tarps, but turns out none of them had been properly put down, so they go through killing these rotted bodies that had supposedly been there since The Fall, and it’s very gross and cool

this entire time, btw, negan is like “hey, i know i’m a shitty person, but i have some rational arguments about why we shouldn’t be doing this right now,” and everyone is like, “FUCK YOU NEGAN, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF US!!!” and he’s just like “god fucking damnit”

(i forgot to mention that at one point, when they’re headed into the metro station, negan is trying to warn ppl of the potential danger, and everyone is ignoring him, and he tries to talk to daryl, and daryl is like “fuck you, you think we’re BUDDIES?” and negan is like “oh, ok, so you’re gonna be like that too? fanfreakingtastic” and it’s very funny)

anyway. a fat monster zombie escapes its tarp at one point, and tries to eat some npc, and negan saves him, again is like “hey, anyone else realize that this is a FUCKING BAD PLAN?”, and everyone is like “we don’t care, you’re still shitty and we’re not listening to you, and you don’t actually care about random npc i would literally not be able to pick out in a lineup bc his face is so generic, you’re not the boss of us!!!”

it’s at this point that negan finally is like, “why am i even here? bc i know how to get around washington dc? do none of you have a map?” and i was like, “right?! that’s what i said!” 

it’s then revealed that maggie only brought negan along to murder him under the guise of “oops, he got hurt in the line of duty, it wasn’t my fault,” and daryl has this look on his face that says, “i seriously need to stop hanging out with lethal women bent on revenge bc it’s gonna give me high blood pressure,” and maggie has a badass moment where she points a gun she has for some reason at negan and is like “i have like, one shred of human compassion left inside of me, and if you keep pushing me i will fucking kill you without a second thought, so shut the hell up”

(in her defense, negan had just dropped glenn’s name to purposely antagonize her, which was rude as hell)

(for the record, i’m completely on maggie’s side here, but negan still is right that trapping themselves in a metro station is a bad call)

anyway, moving away from that briefly

i think this jump cut happens sooner, i don’t actually remember, but whatever who cares, point is, we get to the part of the show that actually matters, and that’s anything involving my love, juanita “princess” sanchez

and also eugene, yumiko, and ezekiel

they are being asked increasingly invasive questions by commonwealth ppl, some of which i wish they actually would of answered (what do they use to wipe their asses with?? surely toilet paper has long since become extinct)

zeke, who is so much more tolerable as a character now that he’s not larping as a king, has this incredibly weird and sort of sexually charged moment with a dude in an orange stormtrooper costume, where he’s like, “i bet you were an asshole cop back before The Fall, you stupid fascist, #fuckthepolice, mb literally? idk, this moment has a lot of pent up aggression that could easily translate to hate sex, it might just be the intense eye contact, but w/e, let’s just move along,” and then he has a coughing fit to remind the audience that he’s currently dying of cancer, and orange stormtrooper is like “lolz, loser, drink some water you dumb piece of shit”

cut to the wholesome foursome sitting at a picnic table in a guarded courtyard eating gruel, and yumkio, who finally has a personality, and princess are like “hey, this place fucking sucks, can we leave?” and zeke is like, “yeah, i met this orange stormtrooper who i think might be dtf and/or murder, so we should probably bounce”

but eugene is like, “but i want some hot stephanie ass, and also some bullshit excuse about how mb commonewealth will save alexandria” which, they left before things went super downhill, right? idr. it was after hilltop fell, but they don’t know alexandria got fucked either, if i recall? w/e, not important

two seconds after he says this, they talk to some people who are like “we’ve been here for four months, or maybe it’s been nine, i don’t actually remember, i’ve stopped processing the passage of time,” and the wholesome foursome takes this as a bad sign, tho that’s just the life i’ve lived as a night worker during a pandemic, so i was like #mood

but then they watch some guy get dragged away screaming to get “reprocessed” and eugene is like “ok, nvm, let’s bounce”

(my theory on what “reprocessing” is, is that they’re stuck in a room and have to watch hours and hours of customer service training videos on vhs from the 90s)

i definitely got my jump cut scenes mixed up bc i think the negan accusing maggie of a murder plot thing happened in between this scene and then the next commonwealth scene, but w/e, i’ll just finish what happens in the commonwealth arch

the wholesome foursome are trying to hatch a plan to escape, except princess, my love, is distracted watching some stormtroopers flirt, and the other three are like “wtf, dude, how can you even tell any of them apart?” and princess then tells them every stormtroopers backstory bc she is brilliant and pays rly close attention to shit, and the other three are like, “this is useful information, thank you for being an insane person”

their plan involves yumiko and eugene dressing up as stormtroopers and leading princess and zeke out of the place, which works fine actually, except on their way out they come across the Depressing Wall of Probably Mostly Dead Missing Loved Ones

they’re about to leave, when princess is like, “wait, yumiko, you’re on here, that’s weird huh?”

sure enough, yumiko  is on the wall, with a note from ig her sister 

the scene ends with yumiko going, “guys...i can’t leave...i have tragic backstory to unveil”

tragic backstory to be continued ig

back in murder metro town, npc and some other npc have stolen all the supplies, there’s a train blocking the track, and a horde of walkers are coming towards them, so things are not going fantastic

they horde is too big to take down, so they start to climb on top of the train car to get away

but dog runs away!

and daryl, being every pet owner ever, is like “gotta go get my dog, guys, try not to get killed while i’m gone, c u soon!” and he ducks under the train and disappears

#priorities

the episode ends with maggie climbing up the train car but getting grabbed by a walker and dangling off the edge, and negan is there and they have a lion king moment where maggie is like, “scar! help me!” and negan is like “long live the king, bitch” and walks away into the shadows, leaving maggie to a potential death

which, while i know isn’t actually going to happen, would be a really fucking funny move on the writers’ part

like, “look, lauren’s back! and now she’s dead, bet you didn’t expect that!”

anyway

my assumption is negan will actually end up helping her up or something, continuing his ambiguous morality bullshit that actually isn’t ambiguous bc he BEAT GLENN TO DEATH WITH A FUCKING BAT WRAPPED IN BARBED WIRE IN FRONT OF HIS PREGNANT WIFE

the maggie/negan arch is kind of dumb, but whatevs, i’ll tolerate it, as long as my boy glenn gets justice in the end

anyway, cue credits!

final assessment: good episode. i’m much more interested in commonwealth than the reapers, tho i am hoping that daryl’s personality-less ex turns out to be a monster killing machine with no conscience, that’ll be fun. princess is a gift from god. hershel jr needs his own tv show. needs more carol (and caryl)

the end! going back into my walking dead free chamber! see you next episode!

-diz

[fanfictrashdump]

Queening a Pawn, 9

[Am I procrastinating? Damn right, I am! 2020 is just a throw-away year, y’all. Strap in, it’s a long one.]

Summary: During the Time Heist, Loki stole the Tesseract and escaped. He did not expect, however, to be pulled through a Time Loop that delivered him to a Midgard more than a decade older, wiser, and bitterer. Having just lived through his unsuccessful attack in New York, Loki must learn to live in Midgard after the defeat of Thanos (post-Endgame). The question is, who is Loki without a quest for a throne or total domination?

Pairings: Loki x OC

=

Delilah flipped through the papers in her hand, filing cabinet drawer open, as she put them away in their designated location. Her day had been the normal array of meetings and putting out imaginary fires before she had been left alone to her fortress of paperwork a half hour earlier. It was getting late into the evening, and though Lilah knew she should have called it quits hours ago, she had decided that finishing this menial, mindless task, would be the perfect excuse for sleeping in tomorrow.

She slid another file into its allotted slot, when the hair on the back of her neck all stood at attention. It wasn't that playful sensation in the back of her head when she felt Loki was trying to scare her, and it wasn't the cursory glance of the maintenance staff cleaning up, after hours. No, she was being well and truly observed. She couldn't see anyone out of her peripheral vision, but she could practically feel their heartbeat. 

Bending to lower some files into the lowest drawer, she silently unholstered a pistol taped to the side of the furniture. She wanted to groan. That gun had been there since her first day of work nearly a decade ago and this was the first time she had ever needed to reach for it.

Straightening up, she took a few steadying breaths. Turning on a dime, she shot a single round, catching the intruder in the chest. For a moment, she debated between throwing up and screaming for help, but neither would do her any good at this time of night. Instead, she stepped lightly to the lifeless figure. He was dressed head to toe in tactical gear, several guns strapped to his person, and Delilah had managed to catch him just above the bullet vest. This was unlikely to be an isolated incident, and she didn't want to wait for his friends to show up.

With a weapon raised, she quietly hurried down the corridor, using any and every shortcut she knew to get back to the rooms. If she could have FRIDAY wake the agents, they could possibly live to see another day, but she did not enjoy the fact their fate depended on the least trained individual in the entire building.

"I really need to go to more voluntary training," she muttered to herself, turning down a hallway, only to find a group in the same tactical gear. She shuffled backwards, gasping. Her feet lost their grip on the ground below and she was forced back into a closet, hand over her mouth to keep her quiet.

"It's me. It's only me." Her struggles settled down to a bare pant at Loki's voice. "There was a patrolman coming up behind you." He turned her to face him, moving her face this way and that to assess the damage. "Are you alright? I heard gunfire."

"That was me." Loki looked oddly impressed at the response. "I'm not entirely useless."

"You're entirely too modest. Where were you scurrying off to?"

Delilah sighed, puffing her cheeks out as she thought. "They disabled FRIDAY. I need to reach a securely rooted computer to sound the alarm." There was shuffling just behind the door. Loki and Delilah held their breaths, trying to think themselves invisible as the intruders ran past. The echo of gunfire further away made her start, and she found herself clutching onto the front of Loki's shirt, rooted to the spot.

"Hey. Hey! Where's the nearest secure whatever you need?" Loki cupped her face with both hands, forcing her to focus on him, rather than the thunder-like sound of bullets. It was a helpful distraction, but it made her no less terrified of what lay beyond their door.

Delilah stuttered, her brain a mess. The adrenaline had started to fade and her fear had begun to take over. Not to mention the guilt of having put a bullet through someone's chest just a few minutes prior. "Um… I–I… er…" Her eyes caught the barest piece of an insignia for Stark Industries and lightbulb came on in her brain. "Tony. We need to get to Tony's case."

He rolled his eyes, groaning. "Nowhere better, really?"

"Loki–!"

He clapped his hand over her mouth. "Don't yell, you imp! You'll give us away!" Eyes wide, she nodded frantically, and he lowered his hand. "On the count of three, we'll go through the door, take a right and we'll walk as quietly as possible to the Memorial Hall. OK?" She nodded again. "If someone comes and they shoot, you get behind me. If I die, you run. Do you understand?"

"No, but–"

"Do you understand?"

There was a beat of tense silence between them before she nodded and Loki grasped at the doorknob with determination. He mouthed his count: One, Two, Three, and swung the door open. They crept away to the right. As they turned the corner, two figures were incoming. With a flourish of his hand, there was a dagger in one of their chests, but before he could reach for another blade, thunder rolled beside him, leaving him slightly deaf in one ear. The figure crumpled to the ground in a heap.

"Color me impressed," he whispered, taking Delilah's hand and pulling her along. He stopped only to collect his dagger, as well as the daggers attached to the fallen men. Loki sighed. No magic meant he had to police his daggers like a commoner, but it didn't mean his aim was any less true.

Down the hall, they could see the shining beacon of Tony's hologram in the darkened room. Lilah ran ahead, sliding to a stop in front of the case while Loki dealt with a couple of intruders who had just stumbled into the hall. She dropped to her knees, opening the panel just below the hologram as Loki rejoined her.

"Pygmy puff, what the hell is going on?" The hologram whispered, bending down to talk to her.

"Not sure. All I know is that someone's put FRIDAY offline. I need to sound a warning."

"Behind you!" Tony warned, and Loki spun, digging the blade of his weapon to the hilt before kicking the attacker back to retrieve it. "What's he doing here?" Tony eyed Loki distrustfully, and on any other day Delilah would have thought it was sweet, but right now, she had to figure out what the hell had happened to their security system.

"Saving my ass. What’s it look like, Tony?" She groaned. "Where the fuck is the keyboard!?"

"Jesus, settle down, Li! It's under the external drive." The projection held his hands up in defense. "Be gentle. It's my first time," he joked as she stuck her arm into the box and dislodged the keyboard from its hidden recess. "It's gonna get a little loud here, kids." From atop the box, two miniature missiles flew out and locked onto a new wave of attackers. Neither Loki nor Delilah were surprised.

"Tony, someone's been tweaking your algorithm." Delilah commented, her fingers a blur over the keyboard.

"What?" He bent over her work with a frown. "That's not my coding."

"I know! Do you recognize it?"

"No, I don't know anyone who's that sloppy," he retorted. "Other than Criss Angel here."

"Not the time, Tony!" A peal of automatic gun fire echoed the room. Loki had snatched her back so fast, she felt a little like a ragdoll, and the hologram was quick to wave them both behind the display. "Really? Bulletproof glass?"

"I'm worth it!" He said defensively. "You didn't seem to mind when I was saving your behind earlier."

"Well, yeah, but–" More gunfire followed, and Delilah let out a scream of pain.

Loki bundled her up, pulling her further behind the display, leaving the extra screen and keyboard forgotten. He smoothed his hands over her, looking for a source of pain. "Delilah? Talk to me."

"Fucking ricochet off the fucking glass," she hissed, holding onto her leg with a groan.

"We need to get you to the infirmary and–"

"I'm fine." She groaned, though he continued fussing over her. It took a jolt of her pulling on his shirt to rouse him from the panic. "Loki, I'm fine. I swear. It's just a graze."

"Oh, God. Are you two–"

"Shut up, Stark!" Loki and Delilah both echoed, narrowing their eyes at the projection.

Delilah reached for the keyboard and continued trying to restart FRIDAY from Tony's hub, to no avail. "Tony, how do we get FRI up and running?"

"There's a failsafe in the basement. It'll override any programming that they've coded into her. In it’s a drawer labeled Taxes. Problem is, you're gonna need Bruce for the final jolt."

She nodded, pulling herself up to test putting weight on her leg. It was blindingly painful, but she could walk. "That's fine. Lo, you go get Bruce, and I'll start the resetting FRIDAY downstairs, OK?" She had intended to just run the opposite direction to Loki, but he reached out to grab her wrist at the last moment, pulling her back roughly.  

"I'm not leaving you, if that's what you're suggesting." Loki announced, decided.

His human companion growled. "For fuck's sake–we don't have time for this, Loki! Just go get Bruce."

"Are you mental? You'd have to navigate several floors on your own. They might be waiting to ambush you!"

Delilah pushed at his chest, trying to usher him the other way. "Loki, you are the patron sinner of logic and thinking three steps ahead and you know splitting up makes sense!"

His thumb, index and forefingers gripped her face at the hollows of her cheeks. In the low light, he looked eerily like a nightmare creature, angry and out for blood, but more importantly, worried out of his mind. The expression wasn't a particularly common sight on his face, and his hesitation sent a cold drip of fear down her spine. "I don't give a flying fuck what I would do on my own in the name of logic. Those rules are non-existent for you." Delilah raised her eyebrows in surprise. Cussing wasn't Loki's style (at least any cuss words used in the current century), so it was particularly impactful when he slung the phrase out like it was nothing.

Delilah bit her tongue, taking a deep breath and concentrating, instead, on the burning in her leg. "Where's Bruce, Tony?"

Tony looked like he was thinking as he accessed the building cameras. "Mess hall. Trying not to go savage." Loki and Lilah nodded to each other. "Hey, hey, hey. You keep an eye on her, Danny Phantom. Got it?"

"Won't let her leave my sight, I assure you," Loki called over his shoulder as he ran after Delilah. 

He pressed her back against the wall as a group of soldiers in black, trying not to stare at the long swooping eyelashes that were fluttering against her cheek. Loki shushed her quietly when she went to say something, holding a finger to her lips. Another three watchmen strolled past and neither moved for a few seconds after the coast was clear. It was an open area to the mess and they'd be exposed all the way there. Not to mention, they didn't know what would await them on the other side of the door. Taking in a shuddering breath, Delilah offered her hand, waiting for Loki to thread his fingers through hers. With a nod, they shot off, Loki dragging Delilah after him because of his significantly longer strides, and they slid into the mess hall with a sigh.

Bruce swept Delilah into his arms and squeezed her as tightly as he dared before setting her back down, leaving her to teeter uncomfortably on her feet. "Finally! Are you OK? Who the hell are these people?"

"I don't know, but they took down FRIDAY. I need you to help me reboot."

"Are they with him?" His voice grew into a roar as he stared down at Loki, eyes dark.

"No," she assured, turning back to glance at Loki, who seemed fidgety around the gentle giant. "At least I don't think so. It'd be too much of a hassle to keep me alive all night if this were all him."

"It wouldn't be the first–" The snarky remark was cut short by a knife whizzing through the air beside him and finding its mark in the chest of an intruder who had attempted to sneak up.

"Not that I don't adore the scathing review of my character, could we please not give these people an opportunity to kill agents in their beds?" Loki rolled his eyes, his hand instinctually reaching for Lilah to have her lead ahead.

The basement was nothing remarkable. There were boilers, power switch boxes, and server panels that kept the compound running. Loki looked at the room as if it were the landscape of some distant planet. Delilah had tugged him to some dark recess in the room, past mountains of circuit boards and wires. She opened a drawer in one of the various cabinets against the wall, labeled Taxes, and just as Tony had promised there were two terminals and a set of relays with the words Smash Here written on some silver duct tape. Beneath, there was a set of laminated instructions which she quickly glanced over, bottom lip trapped between her teeth.

"Loki, I need some help!"

He was beside her a moment later, wiping blood off his knife. "Yes?"

"I need you to help me type. To reset FRIDAY, commands have to be typed into both terminals at the same time," she explained, pushing one of the keyboards towards him.

Loki hesitated. "I… maybe I should get Banner in. He's better at this–"

"You can drive spaceships. I'm pretty sure you can handle typing."

"We have no use for this crude technology."

"Yeah, well, right now this crude technology is all that's standing between us and reinforcements, and Bruce's fingers are too big for this keyboard."

He looked like he wanted to protest, but her narrowed eyes offered little purpose in complaining. "What do I have to do?" His dagger disappeared into a sheath behind his back and he reached for the keyboard.

"There's a reset code, but in true Tony fashion, it can only work if they're typed at the exact same time. I'm going to need you to keep perfect pace with me, or…"

"Or?"

"It might completely wipe FRIDAY's interface off the server, but, you know, no pressure."

"Just keep pace with you." He stared at her for a second too long, enough for her to shift her gaze at him and tilt her head in question. "I can do that." He studied the keys with rapt interest. "Norns know I try hard enough," he added under his breath, leaving Delilah to ponder the severity of his words.

"Alright. Take a breath and in 3, 2, 1…" She started calling out the code, line by line, watching as Loki carefully matched the clacking of her keys with his own. It was a long program and Lilah was sure the Science Bros™ had made it so infuriatingly difficult just for giggles– she didn't think they could ever foresee FRIDAY going dark because of some crappy Trojan. When the final return was entered, the screen flickered with the message Pressure realignment pending. "Bruce!"

A scuffle was heard just outside the door before Bruce peeked into the server room, carefully skirting towers of data to avoid collision and potential loss. Delilah set the relay on a countertop and gestured the green genius with her hand. Banner stared at the thing for just a second before letting out a roar and driving his fist down on it, leaving the counter creaking and slightly dented. A second later a beep, followed by a Good evening, Strongest Avenger echoed.

"Oh, thank God! FRIDAY, code purple. Security code three-six-eight dash fourteen thirty."

"It looks like someone jammed the locks on the agent barracks. Do you want me to remotely unlock the hallway, Del?"

"Yes, please!"

"It's too bad you won't be able to see them free, Lilah." The trio turned. At the door stood five men, guns raised with Dwyer leading the pack. Banner lumbered, ready to pounce, but a small dart cut through the air and stuck into his neck before he even had a chance to make any headway. He fell unconscious with a mighty thud.

Loki hastily shoved Delilah behind him and brandished his dagger. "Oh, I knew I didn't like you even before you drugged me."

"And if you had just died, Delilah wouldn't have to die now." Dwyer sighed.

A sadistic sort of smirk tilted the corners of Loki's mouth. "If you come near us, I'll slit your throat, you pustulous bilge snipe."

"Oh, I'm not going to do a thing. You are." If the Asgardian was confused by the comment, he didn't mention it. "Those drugs weren't just for me to watch you trip. They had a special little ingredient to help ply your mind. Thor will be so distraught, he'll beg to join our cause. Magic is the devil's plaything, after all."

Loki caught Delilah by the wrist, pulling her back behind him when her ire got the better of her and meant to smack the self-satisfied grin off his face. "Thor trusts me about as far as I can throw Mjolnir. Why would he be surprised if I went feral again?"

"I'm afraid you've missed a lot. It's not your fault, really." He sighed wistfully, though it was all for show. "I mean, he didn't even want you out of your prison cell. Said it was better for everyone if you were kept there or taken back to New Asgard. That you didn't belong in the world." Loki glanced over his shoulder. Lilah was staring at the floor with a frown and his heart sank. "If it wasn't for Delilah you'd still be rotting in the dungeons. Not that she's any better. I mean, she'll let you walk around with the rest of the humans, but will sure as hell leave you collared like a dog. When's the last time you even thought about doing magic?"

"He never asked me to take them off, so I haven't. He's already adjusting to a whole new decade, much less–" Delilah snapped, nearly growling.

"You don't fucking trust him!"

"Standing next to Loki is a risk. There's nothing he wants that he doesn't get and the bracelets can only motivate him. I wouldn't be in this room, with him if I didn't trust him with my life!"

"Then take them off!"

"No," she hissed, glaring daggers at the man. "If the choice is you killing me or turning him into a weapon, then shoot me now."

Dwyer laughed. "Oh, I’m turning him into a weapon regardless." He dug into his pocket and pulled a glowing yellow stone that made Loki blanch even paler than his usual self and take a half-step backwards. "What? You don't like your friend, anymore."

"You don't know what you're playing with, Dwyer," Loki said, carefully. "The Stone controls you as much, if not more, than you control it."

"Oh, this isn't the original stone. Stark got desperate, at one point, and tried to recreate the stones to undo everything Thanos had done. This was the only one he got close to replicating with Vision's help." He tossed it into the air, like a penny. "Much less fuss, just as effective. Now, ask her to unbind you."

"What?"

"She said she would do it if you asked. So, ask her. It's obvious Lilah already kneels for you quite readily. Might as well make it worth my while. I don't want to waste the stone's power on her."

"Keep her name out of your mouth or I'll relieve you of your tongue!" Loki growled and it was Delilah's turn to hold him back.

"It's OK." Loki pulled away from her, holding his hands to his chest. "It's happening one way or another. I'd rather consciously free you, if that's alright with you."

"You have nothing to prove to him," Loki whispered.

Delilah smiled and brushed his cheek with her thumb. "I know, Lo. It's not for him."

"Or me." He added, passionately.

Lilah sighed, looking between the men before gesturing to Loki's hands. "No. Keep the dagger," Dwyer urged when Loki offered her the hilt without hesitation. 

Delilah slid her fingers over the pressured pins on his wrists, the metal detecting her fingerprints before clicking quietly and dropping to the floor with a deafening clatter. Her fingers twisted into his and squeezed reassuringly. As much as he tried, he couldn't find it within him to look away from soft eyes. It hurt how little fear he saw, the blind trust. When had he earned this no-questions-asked vote of confidence? He felt the magic trickle down his spine and couldn't even bring himself to feel glad to have it back. Not when he was sure that was coming would be awful.

"How's it feel to be a big boy again?" He hated Dwyer's voice for breaking through what should have been a private moment; that he too could see Delilah laying herself bare to his tempest. "It's not going to feel good for long." He whispered some words to the stone and it only glowed brighter, forcing Loki to look away.

"Loki," she whispered as he teetered, his head bowing. "Focus. You can do this."

Loki straightened up, his eyes wrenched closed. Blindly, he reached for her, closing his fingers around her wrist uncomfortably tight. "Delilah, please go."

"Don't give up on me, Lo. Just–"

"LILAH!" He snapped in a half-growl. He was gritting his teeth now and the hand on her was shaking uncontrollably with effort. "Lilah, please. My love, please run." He blinked his eyes up, eerie blue and shining with tears. "Go now. Run." She hesitated again, frozen in place. "RUN!" With a start, she stumbled back, bolting out the back of the room and into the emergency stairwell.

Despite the blood rushing in her ears, she could hear the pounding footsteps behind her, like a predator stalking her every move. A blade whizzed past her. Then another. And another. He was playing with her, enjoying watching her squirm as she feared for her life and scurried like a mouse. When she exited the stairwell at the next floor, he was standing right outside the door. She yelped, stumbling back against the slab of metal when he swung a blade at her head and just narrowly missed her. 

Lilah drove her elbow against the still-sore ribs on his left side, watching him stumble back with a hiss, but return with even more fervor. A swipe of the blade cut a path across her jaw, just shy of slicing into her jugular. With a jolt, he rammed her into the wall, knife at her neck just barely skimming as he slowly pressed the blade into her warm skin. The pain radiated through her body, fueling her adrenaline and she kicked him square in the chest, knocking him onto the floor. The crack of his head on the floor jarred his brain enough that he blinked in confusion for a moment.

"Loki, snap the fuck out of it!" He hoisted himself back onto his feet and charged. Delilah remained in a fighter's stance, fists up, aiming at anything she could reach while also avoiding his daggers. She managed another jab at his head and stomach, slowing him down. "What are you doing? Letting your mind being invaded by some mortal with some sick delusion of grandeur to get you to act for him? You know me–I’m your friend!" He faltered. "Since when do you obey anyone other than yourself?"

The dagger ready to fly towards her head dropped to his side as he considered. Lilah would have laughed if she wasn't in active danger– leave Loki's ego to save the day. If she could count on two things in the Universe, it was that the Sun would rise and Loki would think very highly of himself. She inched carefully towards him, his ghostly stare following her across the hallway, though his body remained unmoving. He was now within arm's reach. He didn't react when she touched his chest, her palm sliding up his front, winding up his neck and onto his cheek. There was the slightest change of pressure and she realized it was him barely pressing his jaw onto her palm out of instinct.

"God, I'm so sorry for this," she whispered as she reared back and decked him in the jaw so hard it made her whole arm ache. Loki raised a hand to his face and hissed, turning his eyes back on the panting woman for her to notice that his eyes were the seaglass green she was so familiar with. "Good to know this stone has the same design flaws as the other one."

It was a minute or two of quiet contemplation and confusion before Loki managed to return to the present. There was blood on her neck that he knew he was responsible for. The reality of the situation flooded him with a gasp and he threw his arms around her form and pulled her into his chest. "I nearly killed you. Oh, gods, I very nearly killed you."

"You're OK. Everything is OK." She whispered, carding her fingers through his hair as he panted. Delilah bridged the gap between them with her lips. She had nearly died and she would be damned if she dared feel guilty for indulging in a kiss. Not when he tasted like cinnamon from the pastries he hoarded in his rooms, spicy and familiar. He clung to her form, fists grabbing handfuls of her shirt as if she'd disappeared if he let go.

"You're bleeding. I– I… you're bleeding and I nearly–"

Lilah smiled through tears. "You didn't. Thankfully, you obey no one but yourself."

"No," he objected, vehemently. "It was you. No one but you." His mouth desperately searched for purchase on hers repeatedly, as if it were the only thing keeping him from breaking. And it may as well have been, for all either of them knew. "I'm so sorry."

"I know you are, Lo. And you can make it up to me later, but right now, maniac with a Mind Stone– what are we doing?"

"Running sounds like a champion idea," he said after a moment's hesitation.

"Loki–"

"I know, I know." He was silent before reluctantly loosening his grip on her with a sigh. He rubbed at the marks where his manacles had been with a conflicted look in his eyes. "I may have an idea."

Ten minutes later, he marched back into the basement, eyes glowing blue and tossed the bloodied, carved body that was once Delilah onto the floor before Dwyer's feet. He let out a chuckle, nudging her slack head with the toe of his boot. "Oh, that didn't end too good for her, did it? How'd it feel, Loki? Dispensing with the only person who would have given you a second, third, or millionth chance in the world? You really are just a snake in the grass." Loki stood still, shoulders squared and awaiting his next command. "You seemed to fawn after her, too. Did you like her?"

"More than anyone," he replied, mechanically and the villain laughed.

"Oh, that's even better! You've always been such a good pawn– for your parents, for Thanos, the Avengers, me. Now, before you make your exit, how about you leave your brother a little goodbye note. Make it poignant, OK?" Loki flourished his hands and a projection of him glimmered in pale blue light, moving as it spoke a pre-recorded message of revenge on humans and vengeance on his enemies. "Good boy. Now, put the shackles back on." Loki collected the metal manacles and slid them onto his wrists, feeling the instant relief of no magic in his veins to cloud his judgement. "Any last words?"

Loki smirked, the expression looking manic on his bloodied face. He sank slowly to his knees with one fist over his heart. "My Queen. Precisely on time." Dwyer turned, suddenly. At the door, Delilah stood, gun loaded and raised with Sam, Bucky, and a dozen SHIELD and STARK agents, in tow. The body on the floor had lost its glamour and turned into one of the black-clad intruders.

"You tried to trick the trickster god? How stupid are you? Really?" Bucky asked, weapon at the ready.

Dwyer cackled, hands raised in surrender. "This is cute. You think this was the big one? You haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg. How's your Doctor Strange doing?"

"I'll check in with Stephen– you rally these people up and destroy that stone replica." Delilah's gun lowered, clicking softly as she put the safety back on and sliding into the back of her trousers. "Lo?"

Loki shook the cobwebs out of his mind and offered her a weak smile. He felt heavy and confused. The short freedom from his shackles should have been a breath of fresh air, and it turned into the worst nightmare he had had in a long while. Not to mention there was the issue of his brother. He had never expected Thor to simply give up on him, much less without a needlessly emotional conversation beforehand.

"Are you OK?" Lilah looked worried and it was actually painful for him to see her bleeding by his blade and still worried about him, of all people– Loki of Asgard, a snake in the grass.

He nodded, his eyes falling to the ground. "Mind is a little muddled, is all."

Delilah offered him a sad smile. “How about we get you home?”She gestured with her head to the door. "Come on. I'll call Stephen on my way to yours."

[writesandramblings]

The Captain’s Secret - p.97

“Facing the Music”

A/N: This takes place during episode 14, "The War Without, the War Within."

If you’re wondering why this and the previous chapter are coming to tumblr late, it’s the abusive trolls on this site. Honestly, that person was so ridiculous and mean-spirited, I was sorely tempted to post this and the previous chapter without any readmore cuts at all just to spite them. Since I didn’t want to do that to my actual followers, I waited until the urge had passed.

Full Chapter List Part 1 - Objects in Motion << 96 - Nowhere and Everywhere 98 - A Fate Worse Than Death >>

They were home, but they had not arrived as intended.

Nine months. That was how far they had missed their mark. They had been thrown nine months forward in time and the war they left was not the war they returned to. As the strategic display automatically updated itself with the latest battle and territory information from Federation communication relays, Saru and the bridge crew watched the map turn from blue to red and faced the grim reality of their new circumstance.

They had been gone nine months and the Klingons had won. The Federation lay almost wholly under Klingon control.

Their first order of business was to try and contact whatever remained of Starfleet, but there was no response.

The second was to assess the state of the ship. Riding the mycelial shockwave had left Discovery heavily damaged and on auxiliary power. Saru ordered all available personnel to repair assignments. Under the circumstances, they could not expect any help to come.

That left the matter of unwanted passengers. Lorca was not in sickbay as Saru, Burnham, and Georgiou expected. They found an entirely different set of patients laid out under the bright, silvery-white lights, and one very agitated, hovering lawyer who, when questioned as to the whereabouts of their former captain, said with a shrug:

"Dead."

Georgiou smirked with a mixture of satisfaction and curiosity. "Is he, now."

"Yeah, that's what happens when you're stabbed through the chest," Groves spat. The words verged on comical, but the tone was angry and bitter.

As the medical staff treated Georgiou behind the vague safety of an isolation forcefield, Saru attempted to ascertain what had happened to O'Malley and Mischkelovitz. This time Groves' explanation was less clear.

"I don’t know. He—Lorca was dying and Lalana said goodbye and Mac had—was injured, and Melly tried... something, I don't know what, and..."

When it came to lies, Groves really put all of them to shame. He had learned at a very young age how to appear convincingly flummoxed. He was the perfect combination of confusion and nerves, frustration and upset. He sounded completely unrehearsed and in the middle of processing the situation. Burnham and Saru judged him to be a complete wreck. But then, from where they were standing, he was a civilian who never should have been on the ship in the first place. They hardly expected grace under pressure from someone who lacked the experience and training to be on a mission in deep space or a ship in the midst of war. When Groves asked to leave, claiming he could no longer bear being in the room, Saru granted the request.

Neither of them realized exactly how right Lalana was about the similarities between Groves and Lorca. Like Lorca and Lalana, Groves knew the kernel of a good lie was a central truth and when he spoke the words in the moment, he truly did not know what had happened to Mischkelovitz, which made it the perfect excuse to go and find out from someone who did.

Dr. Pollard offered her medical assessment of the patients. "The colonel has lost a significant amount of blood, but he'll make a full recovery. Dr. Mischkelovitz..." Pollard took a breath. The exact nature of the issue was confusing. "It appears her implants overloaded, terminating her neural activity."

"Alert me to any changes," instructed Saru. Pollard returned to her patients. Saru addressed Burnham again. "I must inform you as to a change in our status. As of our last jump..."

Most anyone else on the ship would have been elated to learn that Discovery had returned to its home universe, but Burnham, with her Vulcan upbringing, received the information calmly and coolly, glancing at Georgiou as she processed the ramifications.

"Which makes this a very sensitive situation," Saru concluded. "I must ask, what were you thinking?"

Burnham shook her head sadly. "The truth is that I just couldn't watch her die again, Saru. I wanted to offer her more. I am sorry."

"Saving Georgiou may indeed prove to be a grave error in judgment, but, no one else could have done what you did aboard that Terran flagship. You are alive, and we are home."

The medical technician assessing Georgiou completed his examination and the forcefield lowered. "I told you I did not require assistance," was Georgiou's seething indictment as security personnel moved to surround her. She sneered at the display of supposed strength. She could have taken all four of the officers with ease, but not the many dozens that would have followed on a ship that she did not control.

"It is protocol," Saru informed her.

"Where I come from, protocol demands that I eat you," said Georgiou.

Burnham moved between Georgiou and Saru defensively. "This Kelpien is my captain."

"You let livestock command your ships? Yesterday we dined on the entrails of his brethren."

Saru's mouth tightened. Burnham, as always, was treating Saru as if he was incapable of fighting his own battles, and then there was the clear implication that Burnham had eaten at least one member of his species during her time with the Terrans. His voice was firm as he ordered, "Transport our visitor to guest quarters on deck three and confine her there now."

"Is that what I am? Your guest?"

"For now," said Saru as the white light of the transport enveloped the former emperor. He turned to Burnham.

"I'm sorry. I hoped to spare you the pain," Burnham offered.

Saru grimaced. Perhaps she had, but it still hurt to know that out of everyone Saru had ever met, the person who respected him the least was the one he had known the longest. He pushed the matter aside for the moment and addressed the room. "The presence of a Terran defector on this ship is to be regarded as classified. Its utterance will carry a penalty of treason. Is that understood?"

The chorus of ayes in the room reflected the truth. Burnham might not have moved past her perceptions of Saru from their history together, but everyone else had.

Saru returned to the bridge just as scanners picked up an approaching vessel with a Federation signature. "Hail them at once," said Saru, taking over the captain's chair from Airiam.

The hail was not returned. "Captain," said Owosekun, "its shields are up. I-it's phasers are charged and targeting."

"Shields up!" said Saru, but it was too late.

"I'm picking up incoming transporter signatures," said Rhys. "We're being boarded."

Armed figures appeared in cascades of light around the bridge. Saru's command was simultaneous to the eruption of chaos and confusion as the intruders took up positions targeting each station and hapless crewmembers withdrew their hands from their controls. "Identify yourselves!"

The boarding party was being led by a familiar face, Captain Sherak. "Hands where we can see them!" he ordered.

"I demand an explanation for this intrusion," said Saru.

"We ask the questions," Sherak warned. "Clear for transport."

Two final figures appeared on the bridge. Ambassador Sarek and Admiral Cornwell.

"Where's Captain Lorca?" Cornwell demanded. When the answer did not come quickly enough, she followed with, "Computer, initiate command level override. Authorization, Admiral Katrina Cornwell, Pi-Beta-6. Start with him."

Sarek strode towards Saru. "Ambassador, what are you doing!"

"What the times require," said Sarek, pressing his hands to Saru's face. "My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts."

Saru's jaw clicked in distress as Sarek overrode his psyche, peeling away the layers like petals on a flower and digging deep into the events of the past few days because for Discovery, that was all it had been.

"Mr. Saru is who he appears to be," Sarek concluded, but the calm Vulcan exterior broke a moment. "The Discovery has been through an inconceivable ordeal."

"Then where the hell is her commanding officer?"

Sarek turned back to Cornwell, emotionless façade restored. "Captain Lorca is dead."

Cornwell convened a meeting in the conference room with Saru, Sarek, Burnham, and Stamets. Hearing the full details of Lorca's subterfuge, Cornwell could scarcely contain her shock and anger. To think the man she had been championing, consoling, and had slept with all those months ago had been an impostor the whole time. She took her phaser, adjusted it to full, and fired on a bowl of fortune cookies sitting on the table. Her outburst concluded, they proceeded with other subjects.

The situation was as bad as it seemed. There was one spark of hope in all the calamity: Discovery had not returned from the other universe empty-handed, it had brought with it the cloak-breaking algorithm. Cornwell had immediately disseminated the algorithm to Starfleet's remaining ships, but as she explained the tactical situation to Saru, Burnham, and Stamets, she expressed the very real possibility that the cloaking algorithm had arrived far too late to make a difference.

As she listed out atrocities committed by the Klingons during their advance, the situation began to seem worse and worse. One-third of the fleet had been eradicated. Outposts, starbases, and whole colonies had been wiped from the map. Kol's death had fractured the Klingon leadership and now all twenty-four houses were acting as independent marauders, greedily engulfing Federation territory as they competed for renown and glory, making impossible any negotiation.

Cornwell's directive was clear. "Discovery will jump to Starbase 1 immediately. All evidence of your recent journey will be classified and destroyed. We cannot risk the knowledge of this alternate universe leaving the confines of Discovery."

Stamets shook his head. "We used up the last of our supply of spores to get us home and I can't jump without them."

They would have to make the journey at warp, across sectors full of Klingons.

"We will also have to dispose of Lorca's remains," said Saru.

A ripple of shock passed across Cornwell's face. "He's... he's here on Discovery?"

"His body was recovered," confirmed Saru.

"I would like to see it for myself," announced Burnham. It seemed an odd request, but Georgiou had put a kernel of doubt in the back of Burnham's mind back in sickbay. Such doubts were not easily shaken.

"Admiral?"

"Make sure it's incinerated," was all Cornwell said. Perhaps the better thing would have been to see the body herself, obtain some closure, but it felt like the only closure she needed was knowing every last trace of that impostor was gone from their universe.

When Burnham and Saru stepped into the turbolift, Stamets stepped in with them. "Deck nine," said Saru, and Stamets did not call out otherwise. It turned out they were all headed for the same destination.

"You have some business in Lab 26, lieutenant?" asked Saru.

"Just a quick word with Lalana," said Stamets.

"Who is Lalana?"

Saru and Stamets realized Burnham had never encountered the lului. "That's..." Stamets was unsure how to answer the question. A friend of Lorca's? A secret crewmember? A hitchhiker?

"She is a member of a classified research team," said Saru. "She was... acquainted with the captain."

"Are you familiar with 'Lorca's alien?'" offered Stamets, because that was what Lorca had called her when they first met and he had forgotten the actual species name. The designation did not ring any bells for Burnham.

"She is a lului," clarified Saru.

"Ah," said Burnham, "the technophobic species discovered in 2247 and designated as a Federation protectorate." She knew several other facts from the anthropological report but kept them to herself.

The Lab 26 doors did not answer to Saru's command. They had to wait for Groves to let them in, which took so long that two security personnel arrived with a gurney to move the body while they waited and Saru began to feel agitated, sensing something was up.

When the doors finally opened, Groves mumbled a vague apology about the delay, citing "O'Malley's security procedures."

The lab felt empty without Mischkelovitz. Evidence of her was everywhere—in the piles of abandoned junk and half-finished engineering projects scattered throughout the room—but there was an unsettling quietude to the place.

"He's in there," Groves told them when asked, waving his hand in the direction of Lalana's door. "But I wouldn't go in if I were you."

"We have seen dead bodies before, specialist," Saru said reassuringly. Groves only shrugged, thinking that it was their funeral.

They had seen dead bodies, but they were unprepared for what awaited them. The body lay on a couch soaked through by an enormous black stain of dried blood extending all the way to the carpet. Burnham, Saru, and Stamets recognized the dark uniform and silver-black armor worn by Lorca aboard the Charon and the familiar crop of short, brown-black hair on his head, but little else. There was a void of raw flesh and exposed bone where his face should have been. Lalana was crouched on the back of the couch above him, her tail draped down across his collar.

If they had looked closely enough, they would have noticed a distinctive, lacelike pattern of brown across the body's hands and the fact the hands were too big for the man they thought they were looking at, but no one wanted to look that closely.

"What did you do?" asked Burnham, the only one with enough presence of mind to ask the question.

"His face was my most favorite part of him, so I made it a part of me," said Lalana.

Stamets covered his mouth, feeling bile rise in the back of his throat. Beside him, Saru straightened, shocked by the idea of it. He had seen images of his own kind flayed for food, so the sight of this mutilated corpse was not wholly unfamiliar, but it felt too close to that not-so-distant reality.

Lalana could see their revulsion and confusion. She happily explained, "I know cannibalism is not favored among your species, but it is among mine. The original Captain Lorca's body was incinerated, so there was nothing for me to eat. I am very glad to have gotten the chance to amend that."

"I warned you," Groves called out from the main lab area. There was a reason he had chosen not to reenter the room.

The security officers went to work, sealing the body in a bag and lifting it onto the gurney to move to the corridor outside where it could be beamed away. Burnham left with them, having confirmed what she came for, but Saru remained in the main lab to order Groves to disable the lab's independent security protocols. Groves uncharacteristically mumbled an explanation about having coopted O'Malley's security protocols in the event of an incursion while they were under Terran threat and being unable to reset them.

The whole time, Stamets stood there wondering if he had made a mistake, but he was there because he wanted to say something important, difficult as it was after what he had just witnessed. It felt important because he was not sure anyone would say it to Lalana and in the wake of his own loss, someone ought to. "I'm sorry. I know he meant something to you."

"Thank you, Paul. You meant something to him, too. You were... he... he very much enjoyed..."

Something happened in Lalana's eyes. Her pupils quivered, dilating and constricting, as if rapidly shifting focus. She seemed to wobble on her perch. Then she pitched forward on the couch, half-rolling, half-bouncing off the cushions and slamming against the edge of the coffee table as she landed between the table and couch. Mischkelovitz's leftover tools clattered loudly against the glass surface of the table.

Stamets rushed forward, yelling for Saru, but stopped short of actually touching Lalana. Black ichor bubbled up from various spots along her body. Her tongue shifted, barely managing to produce syllables, but the translator eked out, "Too much... poison..."

Saru attempted to contact sickbay. "Unable to comply," intoned the computer.

"Probably something she ate," Groves quipped. "Don't worry, I know what to do. I'll take care of it."

"She has been poisoned," said Saru. "We must begin biological containment procedures until we have identified the contaminant. Contact the medical bay immediately, Specialist Groves."

"I'll take her there myself! Here, just let me—" Stamets blocked Groves. The black ichor, for all they knew, was toxic to the touch.

"Specialist! That was an order," Saru said in a tone that invited no further objections.

Groves stood there, staring blankly at Saru and failing to comply. The minute someone walked in with a medical tricorder, the jig was going to be up. Any scan of the room would make obvious the subterfuge. "Trust me, you don't want me to do that. Everything in existence is at stake—"

"You will comply immediately or—"

There was a bang from the wall to the left of the couch. A muffled voice came from within. "Give it up, Groves! Let me out!"

Even muffled it was clear who the voice belonged to. That voice had been barking orders at them all for months now. Stamets noticed a panel fastening tool incongruously sitting on the floor at the base of the wall and grabbed it, prying open the panel. Lorca pushed from the inside and the panel went careening away to the side, falling flat against the ground and reverberating like a gong.

"What is going on here!" exclaimed Saru.

"What the hell does it look like, Saru," said Lorca acidly as he stepped down from the alcove in the wall, rubbing his shoulder at the lingering ache of being shoved into an access space not designed for a human.

"I do not think you want me to answer that," Saru replied sharply, "as it appears we have yet again fallen prey to another of your manipulations."

"You think I did this?" asked Lorca with exaggerated incredulity. "I'm the victim here!"

"If anyone's the victim, it's your little alien friend!" exclaimed Stamets.

"She'll be fine," Lorca replied. "Poison's out. She just needs to rest."

Groves was genuinely panicked. "Everyone, stop! Shut up and listen to me!"

The one thing Groves' explanation made clear was that he believed the idea of a manifest paradox with such fervency he was willing to do almost anything to make sure no one knew Lorca was alive. Saru and Stamets listened carefully and concluded that, as uncertain as this was, there was a nonzero chance Groves was right. There was no telling what would happen if some action taken in the future destabilized the probability of an event in the past. So far, they would seem to have disrupted nothing, and the safest course of action was to make sure this remained true.

The only person who seemed not to believe Groves was Lorca. He still found the paradox theory more frustrating than believable and its only virtue from his perspective was that it provided an incentive to give him what he wanted. "Look, you're back on your feet," he said to Stamets casually, "just jump me home. No one will ever know I was alive if I'm not here. And I'll shut down the reactor on the Charon, I promise. There's no Stamets over there to turn it back on, so reality'll be safe."

It sounded like Lorca was spinning a fairytale and clearly he was missing some key facts, but Stamets' first instinct was to clear up the last part of Lorca's statement. "What happened to the other me? Did—did you kill him?" (He knew, from his dreamlike encounter with the other Stamets in the mycelial network during his period of unconsciousness, that his counterpart had no love for Lorca.)

"You wouldn't have liked him, anyway," shrugged Lorca.

"I met him. I didn't like him. The point still stands!"

"It does not matter," said Saru, "as we have no spores left and the reactor has already been destroyed."

"I couldn't jump you anywhere even if I wanted to," said Stamets curtly, making it very clear he had zero intention of doing any more jumps for Lorca.

Shocked, Lorca sat down on the couch, dried blood crunching beneath him. The bulk of his most loyal supporters and his most powerful asset had just been stripped away. His position was untenable.

A fury rose in Lorca so black it could have collapsed the room into a hole. He slammed both his fists down so hard on the coffee table everything on its surface bounced several inches into the air and objects went flying off onto the floor like engineering confetti, but the synthetic glass was too strong to break under the impact and the force traveled back up his arms. He grabbed his chest in pain. A gasp escaped, soundless but for the croak of air in his throat, and he doubled over. A moment later, he upended the table with a kick that sent it tumbling halfway to the door. Then he sat in quiet agony with his head by his knees, air hissing through his teeth.

"Where is the recording from the alternate future?" asked Saru. His ganglia itched along the back of his skull.

They searched the room, a task made harder by the scattered mess Lorca had created. The holodisc was missing. Suspicion immediately fell on Lorca, but when he turned out his pockets in furious annoyance, the only thing he had on him was Allan's tooth. (Saru wondered why Lorca had a human tooth in his pocket but decided it was better not to ask.)

"It's possible," said Groves, "that the disc vanished because we're experiencing temporal instability."

"More likely it rolled off into a corner when you threw it," Lorca sniped at Groves. He nudged Lalana's shoulder with his foot, reaching a hand down towards her.

"I wouldn't do that, she's covered in poison," Stamets advised.

Lorca's shirt was in a sorry state after everything he had been through, slashed and cut and soaked through with dried blood. "I would." He pulled it off and wrapped Lalana in it, grimacing and grunting as he lifted her up and carried her to the back wall. His chest screamed at him. It was a welcome sensation, a physical pain to match the acute disappointment he was feeling.

On a hunch, Lorca went for the biggest storage compartment and was rewarded by the sight of a sealed vat of biomimetic gel sliding out. He carefully lowered Lalana inside and stood there, frowning and shirtless, leaning with his hands on the edge of the drawer. Lalana's eyes stared blankly up at him, the pupils fully constricted.

"This is completely unacceptable," Saru admonished Groves. "We must inform the admiral. Release the control override on the lab."

"You're gonna sell me out to that Vulcan taskmaster?" asked Lorca, wiping the gel from his forearms. "After everything I've done for you?"

"I do not know where Admiral Terral is. Admiral Cornwell is aboard Discovery."

Lorca shook his head and sneered with disdain. Unbelievable. He described Cornwell in a set of entirely unflattering and unrepeatable terms, adding, "I spent two days in Klingon prison and she thinks I should be stripped of command? They've had her for weeks! The gall of it."

"It has been nine months since Admiral Cornwell was captured," corrected Saru.

Groves saw an opportunity to hit Lorca in the side of the head with a proverbial curveball and jumped on it gleefully. "Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you. We're nine months in the future from when we left. We didn't just slip through two universes, we basically slipped on a banana peel through time."

Something happened none of them had ever seen before.

Lorca's face went blank.

Cornwell's arrival provided Petrellovitz a unique opportunity and created a pressing need for her to execute her plan swiftly lest the assembled pieces become scattered.

"I'll bring you out soon," were the last words she said to L'Rell as she tucked a pile of blankets into her bunk and beamed out of the brig while the guard was distracted by a strange whistling sound coming from behind a wall panel. A minor tweak to the pressure of a plasma conduit. Discovery's crew was largely young and inexperienced and easy to trick. After a few minutes of frustration, the guard called for a repair tech to come address the issue and resumed his watch of the brig cells, confident he was looking at one sleeping human and one scarily alert Klingon, none the wiser as to the deception.

Next came the call: the Klingon prisoner was being transported to the USS Khorana. Brig to brig transport, nothing to be concerned about. The guard accepted the command completely, accompanied as it was by the proper security codes authorizing the transfer.

L'Rell found herself in a cargo bay surrounded by crates of supplies. Petrellovitz was putting on a set of fabricated surgical clothing, momentarily naked and entirely concerned about it. "If you're thinking about overpowering me, know that the computer will automatically alert them to your presence if I don't supply it with the correct codeword every ten minutes. You might get to the shuttlebay, but I wouldn't count on getting much farther." She finished off her look with a surgical mask and a short blonde wig. Then she briefly conversed with the medical bay, alerting them that a specialist was coming over from the Khorana to take a look at Mischkelovitz, and beamed away.

L'Rell stood in the cargo bay and waited. Two minutes later, the light of the transporter enveloped her again.

This time, she materialized in one of the private offices off the main area of the medical bay. The lights were low, the window was set to opaque for privacy, and it was presently configured as a surgical suite.

The woman on the slab was identical to Petrellovitz in almost every regard except one. Where Petrellovitz was marked by countless scars on her face and body, the woman on the slab was entirely unblemished. Other than that, they could have been the same person, so close was the resemblance. L'Rell gazed in amazement. Now she understood Petrellovitz's previous questions. "This is... How?"

"We're clones," said Petrellovitz flatly. "I hope this is everything you need."

A wide array of surgical tools lay at L'Rell's disposal. "Yes, this will do. Computer, lights to full." Petrellovitz winced at the change.

"What is wrong with you?" asked L'Rell, noticing the reaction to the lights. She had seen that reaction before with Lorca when she was torturing him.

"Minor radiation incident," muttered Petrellovitz. "Give me her eyes if you can."

"Could you not simply fix your scars?"

The difference in quantum signatures between the two universes was not limited to inanimate objects. In time, Petrellovitz's own skin would be replaced by skin that matched this universe as her cells were naturally replaced by new ones created after ingesting this universe's food and drink, but until then, she was taking no chances. "I prefer this. It's symbolic."

L'Rell began. Every ten minutes, as promised, the computer prompted Petrellovitz for a word. "Fox" was the first one. The implants on either side of the skull provided some trouble—they seemed to be integrated into the surrounding tissue to an alarming extent—but L'Rell managed to cut around them and excised the face into a fleshy sleeve ready for transplant. The next step was to remove Petrellovitz's skin.

"Albatross," said Petrellovitz.

"Give me the words in case you lose consciousness," said L'Rell.

"I won't," promised Petrellovitz. "Do your worst."

L'Rell removed Petrellovitz's skin in record time. There was no need to do a clean job; the skin was not going to be retained. Remarkably, Petrellovitz stayed awake as L'Rell worked from back to front, administering her own local anesthetic. The sounds she occasionally made did not seem to be of pain. "Most humans would not be able to take this," noted L'Rell, reminded again of Lorca.

"There's no one else like me." It seemed an odd statement from an admitted clone. Petrellovitz stopped L'Rell only when the Klingon was about to remove the first eye. "I'm trusting you."

"And I am trusting you," replied L'Rell.

"The next word is zebra, followed by turtle and canary."

"Zebra, turtle, canary," repeated L'Rell, and repeated the words again when the computer prompted. Petrellovitz did not completely lose consciousness, but she did begin to drift in and out.

L'Rell finished the first eye. "Marvelous," said Petrellovitz, testing the function. It was a little blurry, but the bright lights in the room were no longer an issue. L'Rell moved on to the next and marveled at how easy this was when the source and target were so similar. There weren't even any tissue compatibility issues to worry about; Petrellovitz's biology accepted the transplanted material as if it were her own native biology.

Horse and rattlesnake came and went. L'Rell finished the skull work and began on the first hand, emboldened by their quick progress to take almost the whole forearm up to the elbow. She was sliding it into place when the alarm sounded.

"Forget the left hand," said Petrellovitz, keying commands into the terminal beside her. "Close up. I can buy us a few minutes."

Petrellovitz dispensed something in a hypospray. L'Rell asked what it was. "Vetroxican. Should knock me out for an hour or two. Take her." Petrellovitz shoved her double's body off the slab into L'Rell's waiting arms and took Mischkelovitz's place. "Stick to the story. We sink or swim on how well you play this."

Cornwell ordered every record of Discovery's jaunt into the mirror universe destroyed. The risk of proof escaping the ship and disrupting everything in their universe was too great.

To her surprise, someone had beaten her to the punch. All the security footage was already gone.

"That's convenient," said Cornwell darkly.

"I'm sorry, admiral," said Rhys, roughly the third time in as many minutes he had spoken those words. He was updating her as to the situation in the captain's ready room. Cornwell had set the lights higher so the room felt less like Lorca. "The system registered a power overload when we jumped. It wiped everything, main and backups."

Cornwell chewed her lip. "You're telling me this was an accidental power overload? That only wiped your security footage?"

Rhys visibly paled. "I'm sorry, admiral. That's what it looks like."

That made no sense. It reeked of sabotage. But who would want the footage wiped? And why? "What about the prisoners in the brig?" Georgiou was not the only refugee that would need to be dealt with, though she was the one less inclined to try and take over the ship.

"We just have the one, ah, Emellia Petrellovitz—"

"Hang on. What about L'Rell?"

"The Klingon? She was transferred to the Khorana."

"On whose authority!"

Somehow Rhys got paler. The authorization codes were right there on the padd in his hand. "Yours?"

"Give me that," said Cornwell, snatching the padd and glancing down at it. There it was, plain as day. The same authorization codes she had used to take command of Discovery were staring her in the face. "I didn't order that. Contact the Khorana." This took some doing—Sherak was running his ship as stealthily as possible—but they eventually made contact and Cornwell took the reply hail from the captain's chair on the bridge.

The Khorana did not have the Klingon. "There are no records of any transport," said Sherak. "We have no prisoners in our brig and all life signs are accounted for. I will check again if you require, admiral." If Sherak sounded curt, it was largely because all tempers were frayed at this point, Cornwell's included. No one in Starfleet much cared for niceties these days.

"No, Cornwell out. Lieutenant, scan and account for all life signs on this ship."

Owosekun hastened to comply and immediately identified the problem. "Admiral, the internal scanners have been compromised."

"What?"

"Attempting to bypass." The full technical explanation was too much to relay to Cornwell in the moment, but Owosekun could clearly see someone had told the computer to pull its internal scanner data not from the scanners themselves but from a set of dummy data. "It's the Mudd protocols. After Mudd took over the ship, we developed a backdoor in the event someone boarded."

There was more to the protocol than a simple command backdoor. It also let the intruder think they had control of the ship so that the officer who was actually in control could retake the ship at a moment's notice once the time was right, and allowed all authorized personnel to maintain covert communications access. All in all, Lorca had been very pleased with the idea, especially since at the time it had been keyed to revert all control to him should someone like Mudd or Cornwell come aboard.

In other words, the protocol contravened the very thing Cornwell's command codes were supposed to let her do: walk onto a starship and seize control from its captain.

"Who is in command of this ship!"

Owosekun traced the protocol. The answer to that question should have been Saru, but someone had coopted the protocol. "It's... the Brig Chess program! I'm locked out of it."

At her station, Airiam immediately launched into an investigation of her own. Owosekun was locked out, but Airiam had her personal alert node, provided to her by Groves. "I can access the program," she reported. "One moment." She sat at her engineering console, stiff and upright, appearing to do nothing. In her head, she was parsing the recent player access logs.

There was Groves, his last access right at the moment of their jump back home, but since then, he had been inactive and the only active player was... "Pet 'R,'" reported Airiam, turning to face the captain's chair. "The Terran, Petra."

"She's in the brig," Rhys said, bringing up the security feed to the main viewscreen, but immediately realized the error of his statement. From the camera angle offered by the security feed in the cell, it was clear they were looking at a pile of blankets. (There was only supposed to be a single blanket in the cell, but Petrellovitz had deemed it insufficient to craft her hoax and told the computer to provide her a couple extra.)

"Red alert," said Cornwell.

"Wait!" said Owosekun, but too late. Rhys had already triggered the alarm. For a moment, Owosekun wished Lorca were in command. Cornwell had just tipped Petrellovitz off and Lorca would have seen that from a mile away. Lorca always made it a point to mislead his enemies. His allies, too, when it came down to it. "She's in the system again."

The bridge crew sprang to life around Cornwell like a well-oiled machine. The admiral was entirely redundant in the face of their collective competency.

"Attempting to locate her access point," Owosekun declared.

"Revoking Brig Chess command access," said Airiam, mentally throwing a message to Groves as she did.

"Checking transporter logs," Bryce reported from his station.

"Dispatching security teams to shuttlebay and transporter rooms," said Rhys. "Turbolifts are locked." He reorganized the orders to have any available personnel at critical positions arm themselves in place.

"Find her!" demanded Cornwell. If anyone heard her desperate attempt at relevance, they made no sign of it.

Saru was already en route to the bridge when the red alert sounded. "Bridge," he said as he stepped into the turbolift. The doors closed and the turbolift began to move.

Then it stopped.

After spending the better part of an hour in a room whose security protocols had been coopted by a civilian and having reached a decision that same civilian did not agree with, Saru had a guess as to what was going on. "Saru to Groves! This is a red alert! Release the turbolift immediately!"

"It's not me!"

Saru could hear the panic in Groves' voice. "Saru to bridge! Status report."

Bryce was not panicked. "Sir, the Terran prisoner escaped the brig and took control of the Mudd protocols."

"Keep me updated," was Saru's order. He knew the two best people to handle that problem on the ship were Owosekun and Airiam, both of whom were currently on the bridge.

After a few minutes, Bryce reported the protocols were disabled and the turbolift resumed. Saru found the bridge fully engaged in the task at hand. He stepped into position at the science console.

"I've located them. They're in Cargo Bay 3," said Owosekun.

"Dispatching," confirmed Rhys, bringing up the security feeds. Most of the views were obstructed by rows of cargo crates stacked to the ceiling, but in one angle, L'Rell was visible pummeling a body clad in a brig-issue jumpsuit. Her fists had reduced the head to a pulp.

The security team beamed in at a safe distance from L'Rell, shouting and raising their weapons towards her. Saru watched the Klingon's shoulders rise and fall with deep breaths of exertion as she released the body and turned to face the officers, raising her hands in surrender.

"Take her to the brig," ordered Cornwell, rising from the captain's chair.

"Admiral, there is something I must speak to you about. In private," Saru said.

"I look forward to hearing it," said Cornwell joylessly. "Commander, with me."

In the turbolift, Cornwell requested Saru speak his mind.

"It is of a classified nature," said Saru. The turbolift was hardly a secure space to speak. The same went for the brig, where L'Rell offered an explanation as to what had happened.

"She took me," said L'Rell, "said she wanted to broadcast to my people and turn over Discovery. She did not understand that I left, or that there are many Klingon houses. She made me tell her about them. I did. Then you became aware of her. She was distracted dealing with your people. I stopped her."

A crucial detail Saru had missed during his turbolift confinement was that the Mudd protocols had been overridden not thanks to the combined skills of Owosekun, Airiam, and Groves, but because their opponent had suddenly stopped fighting.

"Brig Chess," said Cornwell when they were back in the hall.

"It was a program that was added during the null time incident when Mr. Groves was confined to the brig," said Saru. It seemed unwise to mention the program's enduring popularity in light of the problems it had caused.

"Who added it?"

"Dr. Mischkelovitz."

"I want to talk to her."

"Dr. Pollard does not think it likely she will recover from her neural injury."

Cornwell grimaced, pressing her thumb to her mouth in agitated thought. "I want a full review of that program."

"I recommend Commander Airiam lead the investigation. There is also the other issue I must speak with you about," Saru reminded her.

They headed back to the bridge, intending to use the ready room, but when Airiam was informed of her new task, she asked, "Should I ask Mr. Groves to assist?"

"Groves?" echoed Saru, feeling a gnawing alarm in his stomach.

"He wrote the program."

"You said it was Mischkelovitz," said Cornwell.

Saru assumed it was Mischkelovitz because Groves had been in the brig. Groves could not have...

But he had. The Lab 26 protocols, which he claimed were O'Malley's. Saru realized the reason his mind had jumped to Groves when the turbolift stopped working was that, subconsciously, he had already figured it out.

"Admiral, I did not think it possible, but I believe Mr. Groves programmed the game from the confines of the brig. I must speak with you immediately. It cannot wait any longer."

Groves let them into the lab because resistance would have been futile in the long run. "You have to keep this secret or the whole universe is gonna go poof," was his greeting to Cornwell.

"Be that as it may, Mr. Groves," said Saru, "it has come to our attention that you have compromised several of the ship's systems and I'm afraid I must take you into custody."

"Know a good lawyer?" said Groves, smiling with amusement at his own terrible joke.

Cornwell did not hang around to hear Groves plead his case with Saru. She was no longer interested in Groves or his chess program. She attempted to open the door to Lalana's room, the controls buzzing negatively in response, and Groves opened the door for her from across the room.

For a long moment after she entered and the door slid shut behind her, there were no words. Cornwell stared at Lorca, his bare chest displaying the confused mess of tissue left by Mischkelovitz, and he stared at her from his position on the couch, trying to find something in her face besides bitter anger. "Kat," he finally said.

"You," she seethed, "do not get to call me that. You do not get to speak. You... monster."

Lorca's face settled into a dry glower. Not everyone hated monsters as much as Cornwell apparently did. "Guess the cat's out of the bag." It was as much an admission that he was a monster as a clever little workaround to show that, even if he wasn't using her nickname, he could still use it. He could still play tricks on her and get the better of her.

Cornwell drew her phaser and pointed it at Lorca, exactly as she had done with the bowl of fortune cookies. Her finger hovered on the trigger.

"You gonna kill me?" he asked. "That's very Starfleet of you."

"You don't know anything about Starfleet," she said.

"Don't I? I know that you're the self-proclaimed good guys, protecting innocent aliens. Like I did at Pahvo. But you were still gonna take my ship away, weren't you?"

She could scarcely believe her ears. Her mouth fell open. The shock lasted only a moment. "This isn't your ship!" Her phaser pointed away from him, at least, because she was so angry she realized she was at risk of shooting him unintentionally.

"I built this ship!" Lorca shouted back. "I gave you the idea! Win the war with science and cookies, the 'Starfleet' way. You crewed me up with a bunch of damn cadets and I turned them into a fighting force capable of winning this war. All you had to do was let me keep Discovery! But you couldn't do that, could you? Because—"

"Because you aren't him! You lied to me!"

Lorca's face twisted into mocking indignation. "You think he never lied to you?"

Cornwell gasped involuntarily. They had that in common, the two of them. They were always playing with their cards against their chest, never sharing, misdirecting to get what they wanted, using her affection as a way to get what they wanted. They were both of them manipulative bastards and they always had been.

"Don't you dare," she said, wagging her finger, but she put her phaser back in its holster. "You don't know anything about my Gabriel."

The truth was Lorca knew more about her Lorca than she did not just because Lalana had told him the man's entire life story, but because he knew for a fact he thought like the other Lorca did. He had realized as much reading the other Lorca's logs. They were more alike than probably anyone wanted to admit. (Except Lalana, who was clinging to this fact like it was a tree in San Francisco.)

Lorca could have pressed the point with Cornwell, really beaten her up with it, but there seemed to be nothing more to gain from the venture. Instead, he said, "I know that he wouldn't be capable of winning this war, but I am."

There was a point in there. Perhaps a Terran could win this war, but Cornwell was dead-set on making sure it would not be Lorca. "You're too late. We've been overrun. The Klingons are everywhere."

This was Lorca's first update as to the tactical situation and it did not mesh with what he expected to hear. "How—I destroyed the Sarcophagus for you!"

"And now, instead of one enemy to negotiate with, we have twenty-four."

Lorca immediately realized that, while the destruction of the Sarcophagus should have given Starfleet the opportunity to retaliate in full force against a disorganized enemy, rather than go on the offensive, the Federation had probably turned the momentary strategic advantage into an attempt to negotiate. (They had. Any advantage Kol's death offered was lost when the Federation reached out, suggested this was an opportunity for peaceful resolution while the Klingons recovered from the loss of their leader, and twenty-four Klingon houses had laughed at the implication Kol's death meant anything to them and gone on to prove exactly how wrong the Federation was.)

"You—nimrods! You had everything you needed to win! I handed you victory on a platter!"

"You took our cloaking algorithm to another universe! Nine months!"

In nine months, they had not been able to craft another, not without the spore drive to gather all the data before the Klingons could disable any sensors planted on their ships. They had tried it and failed. Lorca's anger fell away, replaced by a very real regret. It was a look of regret she recognized from their ill-fated night together. "I didn't mean to," he said.

"That doesn't change the fact you did," she said, icily now that she realized this had not been his ultimate intention.

"I thought Discovery'd be gone a few weeks," he said. "Just long enough..." He looked away.

"Just long enough for us to think we needed you?" she asked. He swallowed and grimaced; that was a yes. "We did need you. As much as it pains me to admit it."

"I'm here now," he said.

Her head shook faintly. "I don't know you are. Who are you?" She had been asking that question ever since the moment she learned the truth.

"I'm Gabriel Lorca." And as if he needed to convince himself of it as much as her: "I'm still Gabriel Lorca."

Part 98

[orbemnews]

Tech’s Legal Shield Appears Likely to Survive as Congress Focuses on Details WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump called multiple times for repealing the law that shields tech companies from legal responsibility over what people post. President Biden, as a candidate, said the law should be “revoked.” But the lawmakers aiming to weaken the law have started to agree on a different approach. They are increasingly focused on eliminating protections for specific kinds of content rather than making wholesale changes to the law or eliminating it entirely. That has still left them a question with potentially wide-ranging outcomes: What, exactly, should lawmakers cut? One bill introduced last month would strip the protections from content the companies are paid to distribute, like ads, among other categories. A different proposal, expected to be reintroduced from the last congressional session, would allow people to sue when a platform amplified content linked to terrorism. And another that is likely to return would exempt content from the law only when a platform failed to follow a court’s order to take it down. Even these more modest proposals to the legal shield, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, could ripple across the internet. The adjustments could give companies like Facebook and YouTube an incentive to take down certain types of content while leaving up others. Critics of the ideas also say there is a huge potential for unintended consequences, citing a 2018 law that stripped the immunity from platforms that knowingly facilitated sex trafficking, making some sex work more unsafe. “I think we are trying to say, ‘How can you narrowly draw some exceptions to 230 in a way that doesn’t interfere with your free speech rights?’” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who has introduced legislation to trim the law with a fellow Democrat, Senator Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii. The calls for change gained momentum after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which was carried out in part by people linked to QAnon and other conspiracy theories that thrive on social media. Critics say the shield has let the tech giants ignore criminal activity, hate speech and extremist content posted on their services. The law protects websites from many lawsuits over content posted by their users or the way sites choose to moderate that content. Passed in 1996, it enabled the rise of large online services because they didn’t need to assume new legal liability each time they added another one of their billions of users. Major tech companies have said they are open to trimming the law, an effort to shape changes they see as increasingly likely to happen. Facebook and Google, the owner of YouTube, have signaled that they are willing to work with lawmakers changing the law, and some smaller companies recently formed a lobbying group to shape any changes. Some small steps — like pushing for content to be taken down after a court order — could earn the support of tech companies. But others, like stripping immunity from all ads, would probably not. Many lawmakers say creating carve-outs to the law would allow them to tackle the most pernicious instances of disinformation or hate speech online without disrupting the entire internet economy, steamrollering small websites or running afoul of free speech rights. “There isn’t any legislation that deals with everything,” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, a California Democrat who has proposed carving out certain content from the law. “When someone says eliminate Section 230, the first thing it says to me is that they don’t really understand it.” But there are many other unresolved issues. Lawmakers must decide how close they want to get to the core business models of the platforms versus just encouraging better moderation. One way to cut to the core would be to limit the shield when a post is amplified by the proprietary algorithms that rank, sort and recommend content to users, as Ms. Eshoo’s bill would in some cases. Or, as Mr. Warner’s bill does, lawmakers could simply say Section 230 shouldn’t apply to any ads at all. And they must grapple with the question of whether any changes should apply only to the biggest platforms, like Facebook and YouTube, or take effect across the entire internet. Smaller companies have argued that they should be exempt from many changes. “I think we want to take as modest of a step as possible,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who researches misinformation. “Give it a year or two, see how it unfolds and make adjustments.” The lawmakers’ focus on targeted changes to the law is a familiar one. In 2018, Congress passed a law that removed Section 230 protections when platforms knowingly facilitated sex trafficking. But Mr. Trump was focused on repealing the law. In his final weeks in the White House, he pushed congressional Republicans to end the protections in an unrelated defense funding bill. His supporters and allies may not be satisfied by the targeted changes proposed by the Democrats who now control both the Senate and the House. The White House did not immediately offer a comment on the issue on Monday. But a December op-ed that was co-written by Bruce Reed, Mr. Biden’s deputy chief of staff, said that “platforms should be held accountable for any content that generates revenue.” The op-ed also said that while carving out specific types of content was a start, lawmakers would do well to consider giving platforms the entire liability shield only on the condition that they properly moderate content. Supporters of Section 230 say even small changes could hurt vulnerable people. They point to the 2018 anti-trafficking bill, which sex workers say made it harder to vet potential clients online after some of the services they used closed, fearing new legal liability. Instead, sex workers have said they must now risk meeting with clients in person without using the internet to ascertain their intentions at a safe distance. Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who co-wrote Section 230 while in the House, said measures meant to address disinformation on the right could be used against other political groups in the future. “If you remember 9/11, and you had all these knee-jerk reactions to those horrible tragedies,” he said. “I think it would be a huge mistake to use the disgusting, nauseating attacks on the Capitol as a vehicle to suppress free speech.” Industry officials say carve-outs to the law could nonetheless be extremely difficult to carry out. “I appreciate that some policymakers are trying to be more specific about what they don’t like online,” said Kate Tummarello, the executive director of Engine, an advocacy group for small companies. “But there’s no universe in which platforms, especially small platforms, will automatically know when and where illegal speech is happening on their site.” The issue may take center stage when the chief executives of Google, Facebook and Twitter testify late this month before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has been examining the future of the law. “I think it’s going to be a huge issue,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, the committee’s top Republican. “Section 230 is really driving it.” Source link Orbem News #Appears #Congress #Details #focuses #Legal #shield #Survive #Techs

[wsmith215]

AI Weekly: Dismantle white supremacy for the good of us all

I still haven’t watched the full 8 minutes and 46 seconds of a knee on the neck of George Floyd that an independent autopsy confirms killed him. I skip or pause or turn it off when Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting came on TV in recent months. And I’ve never been able to finish watching Eric Garner’s killing where he, like Floyd, gasps “I can’t breathe.” I can’t watch anymore. It’s torture, and part of a centuries-old struggle against racism sanctioned by the U.S. government.

This week the world saw massive protests against white supremacy in all 50 states, looting, violence against protesters and journalists, and curfews in major cities. For the first time ever this week, the United States now appears on a list of most dangerous places in the world for journalists. Protests are expected to continue this weekend. A march on Washington will be held in August with the Floyd family to demand federal police reform.

More happened this week than it seems possible to keep up with. The Robert E. Lee statue came down in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. On Thursday, the U.S. Senate’s only three African American members moved forward a bill to make lynching a hate crime. On Friday, following a week of militarization of the nation’s capital, Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington D.C. had “BLACK LIVES MATTER” painted in giant yellow letters on the street leading to the White House and renamed the area in honor of the movement.

In business, employees demanded an end to government contracts and staged efforts to fight institutional racism, such as the virtual walkout by Facebook employees on Monday. Recommendation algorithms that companies like Facebook and YouTube use often increase engagement by spreading hate.

VB Transform 2020 Online – July 15-17. Join leading AI executives: Register for the free livestream.

Following President Donald Trump’s tweet threatening to shoot people in the streets and the tear-gassing of protestors for a photo-op with a Bible, former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis called him a threat to the U.S. Constitution and the first president in Mattis’ lifetime working to actively divide the American people. Other former military leaders also spoke out this week, including General John Allen, former leader of forces in Afghanistan, who criticized Trump for empowering white supremacists and behaving like an authoritarian leader, positing that June 1 may be known as the “beginning of the end of the American experiment.”

We also saw footage of extreme violence and killings by police and against police while simultaneous protests against white supremacy in the United States took place around the world.

After more than a week of protests, protests are expected to continue this weekend, and George Floyd will be laid to rest in his hometown of Houston on Tuesday. After Floyd’s burial, more attention will begin to turn to specific policy proposals crystallizing now. Members of Congress are considering a prohibition on the sale of military weapons to police departments. Former President Barack Obama is calling for community policing reform akin to the kind implemented during his time in office. People from several corners of society are ratcheting up campaigns to defund the police. Some law enforcement agencies have already stopped usage of knee-on-neck restraints. Like the military distancing itself from the president, schools and universities in some places are cutting ties with local police departments.

But racism against black people is rampant, and in this moment the lack of progress toward racial equity and the backsliding after making progress in the past is glaring. In education, the reform promised by the 1950s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling to desegregate schools has not come to fruition; school integration began to backslide in the 1980s. This despite the fact that desegregation is one of the most effective tools for closing scholastic achievement gaps.

In the workplace, a Washington Post analysis this week found that the economic gap between black and white households is the same as it was in 1968.

In business and tech, a majority of VC firms have no black investors, and only a small percentage of venture capital funding goes to startups led by black founders. The couch cushion donation of $2.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz this week, a firm with nearly $3 billion under management, is frankly offensive. Only four Fortune 500 CEOs are black men.

Like tech, newsrooms have a history of sluggish progress on diversity, and this week heard pushes for reform. After the New York Times ran an op-ed urging President Trump to “send in the military,” black reporters publicly called the opinion a threat to their lives. Leadership claims the opinion section vows changes in the future; the episode led to the greatest number of subscription cancellations in a one-hour period recorded in company history.

The Philadelphia Inquirer also saw pushback from black reporters, who protested the front-page headline “Buildings Matter, Too.” Paper editors apologized Wednesday for equating the value of a black life and property in a nation where ownership of black Americans used to be a legal right.

The unfortunate truth is that VentureBeat has its own troubles. With a few exceptions, all AI and games journalists and editors at VentureBeat are white men. VentureBeat hasn’t employed a female reporter since February 2019. I found all of this disturbing and said so. It should have been the responsibility of my white male editors to push for a more pluralistic newsroom, something I called for internally since August 2018. This week, VentureBeat agreed to make its next editorial hire a woman and plans to start a paid internship for journalists of color, though management says due to economic conditions it’s unclear when VentureBeat will hire new writers. Look for more details from founder Matt Marshall in the coming weeks.

History can make it hard to be hopeful, but what gives me a lot of hope is seeing protestors in the street that look like a cross-spectrum of society, and hearing people like Al Sharpton who have spent their entire lives marching against racism say this time might be different.

An anti-white supremacy protest in San Francisco on Wednesday honored the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and so many others killed by people willing to treat black people as less than human.

Top of mind for speakers on the steps of Mission High School was the hypocrisy of tech companies like Facebook and Twitter. There was a sprinkling of “Black Lives Matter” signs alongside allies with signs bearing slogans like “Latinx for Black Lives,” “Filipinx for Black Lives,” “Queer Asians for Black Lives,” and “Nurses for Black Lives.”

One of my favorites was “Your Kid = My Kid.”

While pondering what policy steps might deliver meaningful change, people need to ask themselves “What is patriotism?” Patriotism is demanding your government applies “Equal Justice Under the Law,” as protesters in all 50 states have done this week. Patriotism is doing what’s right for your kids or the next generation. Patriotism is leadership that recognizes that together is the only way forward.

For people making AI, as I wrote two weeks ago in a story about a fight for the soul of machine learning, I believe it’s a question of how people building systems that work best on white men want to be viewed by history in a diverse world.

As feminists like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said and Al Sharpton paraphrased at the George Floyd memorial service Thursday: We ask no favor, just that you take your knee off our neck.

George Floyd’s daughter Gianna and the people at protest walks across the U.S. look like the future of this nation. If you’re passionate about solutions to urgent problems we collectively face — global pandemics, climate change, historic economic problems that weigh heavily on black people and the young — dismantle white supremacy and discriminatory systems for our kids.

And please take care of yourself. Love yourself, and if you attended a protest in the past week, please consider getting tested for COVID-19. For AI coverage, send news tips to Khari Johnson and Kyle Wiggers — and be sure to subscribe to the AI Weekly newsletter and bookmark our AI Channel.

Thanks for reading,

Khari Johnson

Senior AI Staff Writer

Source link

The post AI Weekly: Dismantle white supremacy for the good of us all appeared first on The Bleak Report.

from WordPress https://bleakreport.com/ai-weekly-dismantle-white-supremacy-for-the-good-of-us-all/

[automaticpostinfluencer]

Elections amid coronavirus: How officials aim to keep voters safe

Voters in Washington state on March 9 turning in ballots amid the coronavirus outbreak.

John Moore/Getty Images

For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO website.

This story is part of Elections 2020, CNET’s full coverage of the 2020 elections.

The coronavirus outbreak has put much of the US out of service, shutting down schools, stores and sports events for the foreseeable future. With several crucial primaries coming up in the US presidential race, election officials need to figure out how to get the vote out while handling a public health crisis. 

On Monday, we got a sign of just how fluid the situation is, as Ohio planned to postpone its primary, a day ahead of scheduled voting. Three other states — Arizona, Florida and Illinois — are forging ahead with their primaries Tuesday. 

It was just on Friday that election officials for those states issued a group statement saying they planned to keep the primaries going, despite the outbreak. Several of those states are considered battleground states for the presidency.

“They voted during the Civil War. We’re going to vote,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a press conference Friday.

That was two days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Sunday urged against gatherings of more than 50 people throughout the next eight weeks.

Then on Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump advised against gatherings of more than 10 people. At around the same time, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced that he planned to postpone the state’s primary to June 2. 

Now playing: Watch this: Coronavirus care gets help from AI

0:26

Controlling the spread of the coronavirus and of COVID-19, the disease that results from it, is reliant on limiting crowd sizes and practicing social distancing, which could be hard to do at polling places. Voting machine manufacturers have told election officials how to best clean machines, but that may not be enough to overcome larger public health concerns.

“We cannot conduct this election tomorrow, the in-person voting for 13 hours tomorrow, and conform to [CDC] guidelines,” DeWine said at a press conference.

While primaries in Georgia and Louisiana have been delayed, and other states are looking at alternative procedures, the general election in November cannot be postponed, meaning that election officials will have to find a way to maintain the race amidst a pandemic. 

The alternatives

Lawmakers like Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, have proposed legislation that would require all states to offer voters the option to vote by mail. The emergency mandate would go into effect if 25% of states declared a state emergency related to a public health crisis like COVID-19, the senator said. Oregon, nearly 20 years, became the first state to move to voting entirely by mail. 

“No voter should have to choose between exercising their constitutional right and putting their health at risk,” Wyden said in a statement. “When disaster strikes, the safest route for seniors, individuals with compromised immune systems or other at-risk populations is to provide every voter with a paper ballot they can return by mail or drop-off site. This is a nonpartisan, commonsense solution to the very real threat looming this November.”

The bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota who suspended her presidential campaign earlier this month.

“Americans are facing unprecedented disruptions to their daily lives, and we need to make sure that in the midst of this pandemic, Americans don’t also lose their ability to vote,” Klobuchar said in a statement. 

“We cannot conduct this election tomorrow, the in-person voting for 13 hours tomorrow, and conform to [CDC] guidelines.”  

Ohio governor Mike DeWine

Wyoming, which is supposed to have a caucus on April 4, suspended the in-person vote and is encouraging people to vote by mail instead. 

In Wisconsin, election officials are planning to go on with that state’s primary on April 7, but they would prefer people voted remotely. 

“At this point, we are focusing on strongly encouraging everyone to vote absentee by mail in Wisconsin for April 7,” a Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesman said in an email. 

While states like Wisconsin and Washington have the opportunity to vote by mail, 16 states in the US don’t, raising concerns for both public health and voter turnout this election. 

Election officials have already released cleaning guidelines for voting machines, asking poll workers to regularly clean machines, but with warnings about prolonged exposure to disinfectants damaging the touchscreen. 

Another set of cleaning guidelines stated that the voting machines will be cleaned only at the beginning and end of the day — and that their cleanliness would be mostly reliant on voters using hand sanitizers and washing hands in between. 

On Tuesday, the Elections Assistance Commission announced that it was allowing state officials to use funds intended for voting machine upgrades to pay for disinfecting wipes and cleaning supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“”Election officials are contingency planners and have been grappling with the tough choices regarding the safety of voters, election workers, and their staff since the threat of this virus emerged,” said EAC Chairman Ben Hovland. “We have immense respect for their leadership and the difficult decisions they are making.” 

Wisconsin voting officials don’t see any election security concerns with mail-in ballots, a method that’s considered more secure than online voting. 

Interest in voting by app

Voting online is a controversial subject among election security experts. Many argue that there are simply too many vulnerabilities in the chain to ensure a safe, tamper-free ballot. 

Despite the warnings, voting by a mobile app has happened in West Virginia, and web voting is allowed in states such as Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and North Dakota. 

Voatz CEO Nimit Sawhney said that election officials have been reaching out with more interest about using the company’s mobile voting app. 

Startup Voatz uses blockchain technology to record votes that overseas citizens and military personnel can make with their smartphones.

West Virginia Secretary of State; screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET

“We’re seeing that the elderly and those with compromised health face a potential life-threatening risk,” Sawhney said in an email. “The conversation about voting resilience, especially in this important election year, is paramount to design in the midst of this uncertainty.” 

The company didn’t clarify which states these voting officials represent, or how serious these conversations have been. 

Voatz has been used in 50 elections since 2016, with more than 80,000 votes cast on the app. The company says it secures votes from cyberattacks using blockchain to encrypt the data. It also says it’s open to conversations about offering its software for free during the pandemic, though it’s unclear if states’ voting system guidelines would allow a massive switch to a new system at the last minute, since they vary by state.

Even if election officials were allowed to adopt Voatz in response to the coronavirus outbreak, the company is still plagued by cybersecurity concerns. On Friday, cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits published a security assessment of Voatz, with granted access to the company’s core server and backend software. 

The research confirmed issues raised by MIT researchers about the app. The MIT review, published in February, warned about vulnerabilities that could allow potential attackers to change votes and de-anonymize voters. 

Voatz hired Trail of Bits to conduct a security review last December and found 79 issues with the software — one-third of which were considered high-severity. Those issues included improper use of cryptographic algorithms, personal information that can be leaked to attackers and insufficient monitoring for potential attacks. 

Trail of Bits said that Voatz addressed some of the concerns raised, but that 34 of the issues have still not been addressed. In a blog post from Friday, Voatz said that it would be publishing more reports on its own security audits. 

“Across our corporate and elections infrastructure, we follow industry best practices, including end-to-end encryption and layered security to provide defense in-depth, and our intention is to continue these practices as we work to help whomever is in need of a safe, alternative method of voting this year,” Sawhney said. 

The statement contradicts Trail of Bits’ findings, which note that Voatz’s ballots don’t protect voter identities and are tied to device IDs that are also collected by advertising companies.

Wyden has said he’s skeptical of online voting, and he’s proposed bans on federal funds being used for that purpose. 

“Just last week a damning audit showed that not only was Voatz dangerously insecure, but the company had lied about previous audits that showed security holes,” Wyden said. “Internet voting is the wrong answer to this crisis.”

Some primaries will go on, for now

While the coronavirus outbreak has raised concerns about both public health and voter turnout, digital alternatives haven’t been a major part of discussions. 

The focus among counties has been to control crowds by either encouraging people to vote by mail — which is already set up in some states — or pushing people to vote in intervals. 

“Early voting continues today, and we continue to encourage early voting as a way to limit election polling place traffic,” Matt Dietrich, a public information officer for the Illinois State Board of Elections, said Monday. 

The state has had 504,000 early votes cast, and 294,000 mail ballots sent, and expects to set records for early and mail voting in Illinois. 

Congress needs to act immediately to ensure Americans don’t need to choose between their health and their constitutional rights. 

Sen. Ron Wyden

Rather than hastily introducing a new online voting method, election experts are opting for measured approaches to getting the vote out while keeping people safe from coronavirus. That means improving access for early voting, keeping both voting machines and voters clean, and moving polling locations away from where communities could be affected by the outbreak like retirement homes. 

Those are all local decisions by county officials, who set the guidelines for how elections are run in each region. That means that by the time the primaries arrive in your state, the coronavirus’ effect on voter turnout could be significantly different. 

If Wyden and Klobuchar’s legislation passes, it would mandate an option to vote by mail across the US, not just in 34 states. 

“Congress needs to act immediately to ensure Americans don’t need to choose between their health and their constitutional rights,” Wyden said. “My bill with Senator Klobuchar will ensure every American has the chance to vote by mail, and give states the support they need to go ahead with elections in the face of this unprecedented emergency.”

Source link

from WordPress http://justtoosilly.com/2020/03/17/elections-amid-coronavirus-how-officials-aim-to-keep-voters-safe/

[empathiqbotaniste-blog]

Gladiator Heroes Hack

Gladiator Heroes Will Immediately Help New AR Characteristic In IOS eleven

Staff Z - League Of Heroes is an fascinating new RPG from Genera Games, an organization which is liable for fashionable titles resembling Gladiator Heroes and Shrek Sugar Fever to name just a few. Some maverick emperors with a perverted sense of humour made higher-class Romans (of both sexes) combat within the arena. However, so long as they did not obtain a price for their participation, such persons can be exempt from the stain of infamia, the legal disability that connected to the practitioners of disreputable professions resembling these of gladiators, actors and prostitutes.

There are different sorts of units obtainable that you'll be able to use relying on the way you advance by the game and how you need to combat against your enemies (although they won't provide you with too many options): from essentially the most primary gladiator with a sword and defend to fiercest of them all, the lancer able to attacking from a distance. Begin downloading this APK right now and take advantage of this great actual-time strategy title that undoubtedly won't disappoint you.

Need to get a excessive rating on Gladiator Heroes? We now have loads of movies to look at and learn how to play or enhance your gameplay. ​As your empire grows more prosperous, your gladiators and weaponry may also turn out to be extra powerful and useful. Design, train, and outfit your warriors, after which lead them into deadly battles the place they can exhibit their newly acquired expertise and weapons.

The exhibition unfolds on two paths revealing two protagonists interwoven by destiny: The Gladiators and the Colosseum, the largest area of the antiquity. The Sword and Protect Coaching Ground, for instance, works solely for Sword and Protect gladiators. These gladiators have the best gladiator heroes free gems defense and are the one sort of gladiator that may resist back attacks. The Sword and Protect Gladiator is the primary gladiator you should have at your disposal, and they can adapt to any state of affairs.

Though creating and upgrading buildings is important, the upkeep duties of this sport additionally include improving your gladiators, in addition to therapeutic anybody who is presently injured. Prepare gladiators who additionally serve you effectively in battle, and if the opportunity arises, degree them up. A properly-run metropolis can be a busy one, so guantee that there's one thing going on in all areas. That is proper metropolis maintenance, if you ask us.

This is Gladiator Heroes Wood, Gold, Gems generator. Enter your username, choose the number of resource you wish to generate. -Open Google Play Store and search Gladiator Heroes and Download. This half consists equally of action and management points. You will have to recruit and train gladiator heroes free gems your gladiators before you'll be able to deploy them in battle. Beneath the gladiators constructing class one can find the Gladiator Residence. This constructing lets you recruit the gladiators.

Gladiator Heroes for laptop: craft and broaden your individual metropolis. Practice highly effective gladiators, take command over warriors in the battles on totally different arenas. Increase the boundaries of your empire in this thrilling Android recreation. Construct barracks, workshops, arsenals and different useful constructions within the metropolis. Unlock new gladiators having distinctive preventing abilities. Power-up your gladiators. Take part in battles on sandy arenas of the south or snowy arenas of the north. Develop a method which will bring you victory in the battles all around the world.

"Gladiator Heroes" is a Conflict of Clans-fashion construct and battle themed on gladiators. Keep tuned for more updates as the sport arrived freshly for Android players. the devoted cell app of Gladiator Heroes for COMPUTER as effectively and place it in your desktop for fast entry. When you're satisfied with your brutish, force of gladiators, you possibly can utilize their talents further by strategically inserting them towards your opponents, this is especially fun for those who're playing multiplayer.

Two-Handed gladiators are heavier types who are higher-fitted to crowd control — they will get rid of a number of enemies, and never only do they deal out quite a lot of damage, it's onerous for opponents to push them again. While Sword and Defend sorts might sound like the tanks of the game, Two-Handed gladiators fill this bill more precisely, albeit with plenty of offense and skills to go around with.

If you wish to make a suggestion that Gladiator Heroes Android Sport be higher and extra smoothly to run android app please contact the developer to get a response back from the advice you give. You may also report a bug in Gladiator Heroes Android Recreation so that Sport developers will give options and improvements and updates to your Sport Gladiator Heroes Software Android instantly.

As Sun Tzu famously said it's essential to know the enemy and know thyself”, in order that if forces are united, separate them”. As in so many avenues of life, this is notably necessary in Gladiator Heroes. Because of the limited control algorithms of the sport this can be very troublesome gladiator heroes free gems generator to completely control the automated actions of Heroes, but by cautious selection of troops and placement earlier than battle, players can draw opponents into desired positions and out flank enemies from behind or from the side to shortly dismantle a lot stronger foes.

Gladiator heroes - craft and develop your personal city. Practice powerful gladiators, take command over warriors in the battles on totally different arenas. Expand the boundaries of your empire in this exciting Android game. Construct barracks, workshops, arsenals and other useful constructions within gladiator heroes free gems hack the metropolis. Unlock new gladiators having unique preventing abilities. Power-up your gladiators. Participate in battles on sandy arenas of the south or snowy arenas of the north. Develop a strategy which is able to carry you victory in the battles everywhere in the world.

The animation and graphics are crisp and nicely designed as are the benefit of navigation between menus and redesigning base layouts. Similar in style to Postknight and Tiny Gladiators , Gladiator Heroes has much more to it than first appears. That mentioned however gladiator heroes hack ios, with all of the potential that the game has, there is nonetheless just a little one thing that doesn't quite take it all the way in which. Three and a half stars out of five.

Examined and undetectable in Gladiator Heroes hack apk. Gladiator Heroes Hack for iOS Android UNLIMITED FREE GOLD will not solely work on MAC but it is going to work on HOME WINDOWS 10 AND SEVEN and iOS, Android. As a result of out instruments is adapted to all fashionable platforms, and we working to add more platforms on daily basis. But Our predominant focus is Apple Macintosh working systems.

[raystart]

Technology, Innovation, and Modern War – Class 11 – Cyberwarfare –– Sumit Agarwal

We just held our eleventh session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy.

Today’s topic was Military Applications of Cyber.

Catch up with the class by reading our summaries of the previous ten classes here.

Some of the readings for this week’s included:

DoD Cyber Strategy, How to compete in cyberspace, Defense Primer: Cyberspace Operations, Geopolitical Impact on Cyber Threats from Nation State Actors, Divided by a Common Language: Cyber Definitions in Chinese, Russian and English.

Our guest speaker was Sumit Agarwal, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Senior Advisor for Cyber Innovation. Out of MIT, Sumit joined the US Air Force as part of Cyber Command and was one of the first officers in network warfare. He’s spent almost 20 years in the National Guard. But in the private sector he’s done a number of amazing things; he headed up mobile at Google, then went back into the Pentagon where he was the youngest Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense ever in the Pentagon. Then most recently, he co-founded Shape Security, one of the leading cybersecurity companies in the country. Earlier this year, Shape Security was sold to F5 for over a billion dollars.

I’ve extracted and paraphrased a few of Sumit’s key insights and urge you to read the entire transcript here and watch the video.

Safety and Security Online The way we are going about creating safety and security online in cybersecurity and defending against cybercrime isn’t quite rational. In cybersecurity, any individual, any business of any size, from a small business all the way up to a giant bank, is at the end of the day subjected to the worst that adversaries of any sort – foreign nations, organized criminal gangs – can throw their way. And that makes no sense.

The thinking about online security is absolutely at odds with how we think about security on the land, sea, air and space. Our Army, Navy, Air Force defend our borders. So the result of no defenders in cyberspace is what one would predict. It’s a mismatch. The result is that we are less secure. You end up with companies that are losing more money online, losing more assets that belong to them and more customer data that they’re in trusted with, than they would ever lose in an offline context. And so that’s a really strange thing in the domain that we created, we are having a harder time safeguarding and securing ourselves than we do in the national domains.

I think that it’s a matter of understanding who has the authorities and the norms to defend. Who has the right to defend? Who has the obligation to defend? So that was my thesis when I left the Pentagon in 2011.

How Would You Architect a More Secure Environment? It’s not okay the way it is. it’s as if the military said, “Hey, we protect U.S. citizens as long as they’re hanging out on a military base. I’m sorry, but if you’re not on a military base, you are totally exposed to any form of threat that can possibly exist in the world.” That is absurd in the real world.

I think that there are two or three fundamental components to it. The first one is, we as a society have spy agencies like NSA that have the preponderance of cybersecurity expertise and capability. At the national level, there really are not a lot of other agencies that have that level of expertise. What you end up with is a choice that we as a society have been unwilling to make. Which is, do we let a spy agency safeguard us domestically at home on the internet? Or do we say, it’s the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security who is the only one chartered with the mission and has the authorities to safeguard U.S. persons or people at home?

That choice is profoundly broken because DHS does not have the necessary level of capability. So with the benefit of hindsight, I think what we need is an agency that has every bit the level of technological expertise that NSA does in the area of cybersecurity, that is not a spy agency. And that agency would need to have the titles and the authority, and the charter to protect U.S. persons. And you see that same dichotomy in the FBI versus the CIA. The CIA is externally facing, it’s effectively a spy agency. FBI is all about domestic issues that exist primarily at home. So that is a very clear, bright shiny line, which we didn’t really realize in the ‘80s and ‘90s, was going to become such a problem. But at this point, we have two unpalatable choices. You can let a spy agency be in charge. Or you can let DHS which has the charter be in charge but doesn’t have the expertise. And so what you end up with is no defense. So that’s what I would do at the national level in terms of creating an agency and organizing things differently and better.

On the second piece, which is how do you create a little bit more clarity between what’s real and what’s fake? That is very challenging, because anonymity is a key, cherished belief system and value online. We all prize privacy and anonymity. So if you swing the pendulum over to say, we would have a lot more secure online experience if everybody had a hard identity. And you needed to basically jack your driver’s license into a little key card reader in order to get online, you would have a more secure environment. (A CAC card for civilians.) You would have a lot less vitriol, you’d have a lot less trolling, you’d have a lot less of the nasty things that we don’t like online, including crime. But what you would lose is anonymity and privacy. A CAC card is what we use in the military.

I’m not sure if there’s a good answer to how would I balance the reality that it’s a totally insecure, wild, wild west on the Internet, with the idea that the privacy and anonymity of the Internet, in many countries, is really important. It’s allowed the Internet to be a tool of great good, not just great bad.

What Trends Are You Seeing That Attackers Are Doing? Attackers are always going after the softest targets. So in many ways, the softest target is everybody in society. The people who are least capable of defending themselves against sophisticated attackers are not the large corporations that have billion-dollar cybersecurity budgets, that have IT staffs and teams of professionals. It’s either small businesses, or individuals.

The number one thing that we see attackers doing is emulating real people. This is my work in identity and the idea of real versus fake on the Internet. You know, in 1993, there was that old New Yorker cartoon with the dog logging onto a computer and it said, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.“ But ironically, 27 plus years later, on the Internet, no one knows if you’re Joe dot Felter at Gmail, or Raj Shah, at diux.co, or whatever.

Identity and Truth on the Internet. Online you can be almost anybody you want to be. And it is so easy to social engineer, to phish, to put malware on someone’s machine and to gain access to the things that represent their identity. If you know someone’s username and password, you’ve effectively got their identity. There’s no holographic mark in the upper left corner. There’s no signature in the background, there’s no watermark, there’s no special place that can validate those photos. I mean, it’s literally less secure than college kids cutting photos out to get into bars with identities that don’t belong to them on a driver’s license. It’s that insecure.

And so amazingly, the Internet still works despite this profound lack of true security. But the trend that I always follow is, how do you tell what’s real from what’s fake? Is the thing interacting with you a human or a nonhuman? So much of what criminals do is really about writing programs and bots that simulate human behavior to do human-like things. They then use those stolen identities to have what is truly a fully synthetic actor.

It’s a little bot that has some aspect of your identity, and it will run around on the Internet trying to log into something or trying to represent itself as you. And the impact of this is far worse than the economic harm of losing $1,000. Banks are probably losing hundreds of millions of dollars on a quarterly basis. No consumer knows about it, because those funds are silently put back. No bank wants you to know how porous the banking environment is. They simply want to absorb those losses so that you don’t lose confidence. And that’s actually okay from a societal point of view.

Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior A far worse aspect of the usage of synthetic identities is what we call Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior, CIB. For example, bad actors getting on Facebook, Twitter or TikTok and creating what appears to be a groundswell of activity and effort and belief around a particular ideology, a particular idea or a concept, none of which are true.

Even right now in our election there is coordinated inauthentic behavior that is pushing ideas and concepts that are driven by actors that are trying to interfere in our election. (In 2016, it was absolutely rampant. There’s less of that happening in 2020.) So what happens when there’s interference by Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior? When there are millions of actions, likes and posts and clicks and forwards that are inauthentic, you end up with a perversion of democracy. So this idea of real versus fake is incredibly pernicious. And it’s something that I think, is worthy of a lot of time and attention by anybody that that wants to pursue a career in cybersecurity.

Deep Fakes Deep fakes are a really, really challenging problem. So far, there are a few technological solutions that can do frame-by-frame and pixel-by-pixel comparison and figure out when various kinds of algorithms are being used to make a mouth move saying words other than what was said in the original video. Same for images.

I’m not aware of what the fundamental long-term defense is going to be against deep fakes. However, we can create more security around official communication. If I wanted to have an official White House video, or even an official video from me, I could create that. There are long-standing concepts that have nothing to do with cyber security that you could use.

I think what we’re going end up with is the following: Official communication, like a video of Biden or Trump is eventually going to have enough watermarking and fingerprinting technology, that the major social media platforms will be able to verify authenticity. You could even use blockchain-related concepts to say, here’s the original source of that video that’s been uploaded to the public blockchain. And we know how to verify against that.

The part I have a lot more difficulty with is user-generated content. What if the video we care about is not necessarily that of a famous person? How do you solve the problem that there is no real authentication mechanism when a video or a photo is being shared and propagated and virally explodes on social media? There is no one thing to say, is this authentic? Does it have the right watermarks and digital fingerprints? When it is content that’s being generated by individuals I think it’s going to be hard for us to decide whether that video is real or fake. So a very, very complicated space that’s still emerging.

What Are Some Developments in Cyber That Might Change Offense and Defense? I think there are two. The first one is homomorphic encryption (fully encrypted communication, without having to decrypt the underlying data.) We’re getting to the point where the compute burden on being able to take two numbers – just take the number one and the number two – and let’s encrypt them. We don’t want anyone to know what two numbers we’re adding together. And we want to add them to get the solution, which is three. In the traditional way you share keys, exchange secrets with whoever you want to be able to perform that computation. They decrypt the two numbers, add them up and get the solution – three. And they encrypt the answer and then they transmit that back to you. So that’s the old school way of doing things. And it has two fundamental problems. One, it’s vulnerable, because you have to decrypt the things that were meant to be secret. And anywhere in the process, if you have to decrypt them, that’s problematic. And the second is, you have to exchange secrets with anybody that you want to do business with.

That is fine at a limited scale, when you have a small number of partners. But when you want to have a heterogenous environment, maybe an international coalition, it doesn’t scale very well. So for a long time, DARPA has been chasing after this idea of being able to perform computation on encrypted data without decrypting it. And the problem was that as of 2010, when I was at DoD, there was a 10 to the sixth compute penalty. So a million x compute penalty on adding the number one and the number two together if you left them encrypted. And so over the last 10 years, we’ve been knocking down that exponent, and I think we’re right on the verge of being at the level of 10 to the first or ten the second. And that’s a very tolerable cost for fully encrypted compute, without having to decrypt the underlying data. That’s one exciting area.

And the other one is quantum computing. We’re getting very, very close to the point that quantum computing, certainly for defense may be available. And that is going to change everything about security online. Because at the core of security online today is about computational expense of factoring very large prime numbers. And quantum computing gives you so much more capacity, that you can in fact find many more such primes.

Do our Constitutional Protections in the U.S. Put Us at a Disadvantage Compared to Adversaries That Don’t Share Our Values? I think the answer is 100% yes, at a tactical level, some of those constitutional freedoms put us at a slight disadvantage. But the answer is less about cybersecurity and more about liberal democracies. I think that the question that is, do liberal democracies do better than more authoritarian regimes over a much longer period of time? Because when it comes to getting something done, you don’t need to develop political will in an authoritarian regime to the same degree as in a liberal democracy.

What Do You Think Needs to Happen for Liberal Democracies to Prevail and Feel Safe? I think that the future of warfare is going to be less and less overt, less and less hot. It’s going to be less and less about putting kinetics on a target. It’s going to be about influencing large numbers of people in very subtle ways. If you can influence people, it’s that old thing about winning hearts and minds. If you can just influence them in a certain direction, you may be able to win without fighting at all. And so you end up with a war of ideology and a war of culture in open countries.

I think that the big challenge for liberal democracies is, how do we ensure that the conversation we’re having is a real and authentic conversation with the people we think we’re having it with? I think the conversation happening on Facebook right now is incredibly polluted by people who have ill will and Ill intention. And I worry. I’m going to devote a large number of my career years to figuring out how to kind of stem that tide of inauthentic.

In terms of what the government can do, I think we’re going to have to take a more active role. We’re going to have to figure out a contract with American society that does that in a way that you’re comfortable letting us help create a lot more safety and security.

There’s a distinction between policing what happens on a social media platform – that seems very active and heavy handed – versus saying, we can ensure authenticity without compromising security and privacy. There are a lot of companies that are failing to take steps that are readily attainable that would help with this problem. And so I think that there’s also a regulatory component that says, you have to safeguard yourself using these technologies that we’ve identified. We need a much more robust framework that says, if you’re going to have an online system, this is what security means.

I’ll give you one of my favorite examples. The doors that separate your bedroom from the hallway, or the hallway from the garage are rated for a certain number of hours that they can burn in the event of a fire. So the idea of safety and security in the real world is baked into every component of the physical world with which we interact. That level of intensity has got to go into constructing a major website or a major web platform if you have any hope of it being safe or secure. Instead of the current regime, which is really everybody do their best and we’ll hope it doesn’t turn out too badly.

What Gives You the Greatest Optimism Looking Forward? Over the long haul a freer and more open, more liberal society can suffer a lot of bruises and bumps but can find its way back to a civil discourse. As much as the brand-new tools of communication and aggregation and finding community are creating craziness like QAnon and extremist behavior. I think that there’s still an opportunity for some better version, some good version of communication, collaboration and people coming together to exist. It’s hard to point to quantitative examples of that right now, but I do believe that we will get there. These are growing pains, and growing pains take a decade or two to work their way through the system. But the entire Internet, the way we know it, is barely 25 years old. So it’s barely a young adult. There’s a lot of stories still left to be told.

—

Read the entire transcript of Sumit Agarwal’s talk here and watch the video below.

  If you can’t see the video click here

Lessons Learned

Cybersecurity for U.S. civilians and business is not protected by the government

The U.S. military protects only its systems and people

Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior

Ideas and concepts that are driven by bad actors around a particular ideology, a particular idea or a concept, none of which are true

Deep fakes are a really challenging problem

Solvable for official communications through watermarking and fingerprinting

Really hard to solve otherwise for user-generated content.

Worse when it goes viral

The future of warfare is going to be less and less overt

It’s going to be about influencing large numbers of people in very subtle ways

if you can just influence people in a certain direction, you may be able to win without fighting at all.

And so you end up with a war of ideology and a war of culture in liberal democracies

[dorcasrempel]

Highly sensitive trigger enables rapid detection of biological agents

Any space, enclosed or open, can be vulnerable to the dispersal of harmful airborne biological agents. Silent and near-invisible, these bioagents can sicken or kill living things before steps can be taken to mitigate the bioagents’ effects. Venues where crowds congregate are prime targets for biowarfare strikes engineered by terrorists, but expanses of fields or forests could be victimized by an aerial bioattack. Early warning of suspicious biological aerosols can speed up remedial responses to releases of biological agents; the sooner cleanup and treatment begin, the better the outcome for the sites and people affected.  

MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers have developed a highly sensitive and reliable trigger for the U.S. military’s early warning system for biological warfare agents.

“The trigger is the key mechanism in a detection system because its continual monitoring of the ambient air in a location picks up the presence of aerosolized particles that may be threat agents,” says Shane Tysk, principal investigator of the laboratory’s bioaerosol trigger, the Rapid Agent Aerosol Detector (RAAD), and a member of the technical staff in the laboratory’s Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group.

The trigger cues the detection system to collect particle specimens and then to initiate the process to identify particles as potentially dangerous bioagents. The RAAD has demonstrated a significant reduction in false positive rates while maintaining detection performance that matches or exceeds that of today’s best deployed systems. Additionally, early testing has shown that the RAAD has significantly improved reliability compared to currently deployed systems.

RAAD process

The RAAD determines the presence of biological warfare agents through a multistep process. First, aerosols are pulled into the detector by the combined agency of an aerosol cyclone that uses high-speed rotation to cull out the small particles, and an aerodynamic lens that focuses the particles into a condensed (i.e., enriched) volume, or beam, of aerosol. The RAAD aerodynamic lens provides more efficient aerosol enrichment than any other air-to-air concentrator.

Then, a near-infrared (NIR) laser diode creates a structured trigger beam that detects the presence, size, and trajectory of an individual aerosol particle. If the particle is large enough to adversely affect the respiratory tract — roughly 1 to 10 micrometers — a 266-nanometer ultravolet (UV) laser is activated to illuminate the particle, and multiband laser-induced fluorescence is collected.

The detection process continues as an embedded logic decision, referred to as the “spectral trigger,” uses scattering from the NIR light and UV fluorescence data to predict if the particle’s composition appears to correspond to that of a threat-like bioagent. “If the particle seems threat-like, then spark-induced breakdown spectroscopy is enabled to vaporize the particle and collect atomic emission to characterize the particle’s elemental content,” says Tysk.

Spark-induced breakdown spectroscopy is the last measurement stage. This spectroscopy system measures the elemental content of the particle, and its measurements involve creating a high-temperature plasma, vaporizing the aerosol particle, and measuring the atomic emission from the thermally excited states of the aerosol. 

The measurement stages — structured trigger beam, UV-excited fluorescence, and spark-induced breakdown spectroscopy — are integrated into a tiered system that provides seven measurements on each particle of interest. Of the hundreds of particles entering the measurement process each second, a small subset of particles are down-selected for measurement in all three stages. The RAAD algorithm searches the data stream for changes in the particle set’s temporal and spectral characteristics. If a sufficient number of threat-like particles are found, the RAAD issues an alarm that a biological aerosol threat is present.

RAAD design advantages

“Because RAAD is intended to be operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week for long periods, we incorporated a number of features and technologies to improve system reliability and make the RAAD easy to maintain,” says Brad Perkins, another staff member on the RAAD development team. For example, Perkins goes on to explain, the entire air-handling unit is a module that is mounted on the exterior of the RAAD to allow for easy servicing of the items most likely to need replacement, such as filters, the air-to-air concentrator, and pumps that wear out with use.

To improve detection reliability, the RAAD team chose to use carbon-filtered, HEPA-filtered, and dehumidified sheathing air and purge air (compressed air that pushes out extraneous gases) around the optical components. This approach ensures that contaminants from the outside air do not deposit onto the optical surfaces of the RAAD, potentially causing reductions in sensitivity or false alarms.

The RAAD has undergone more than 16,000 hours of field testing, during which it has demonstrated an extremely low false-alarm rate that is unprecedented for a biological trigger with such a high level of sensitivity. “What sets RAAD apart from its competitors is the number, variety, and fidelity of the measurements made on each individual aerosol particle,” Tysk says. These multiple measurements on individual aerosol particles as they flow through the system enable the trigger to accurately discriminate biological warfare agents from ambient air at a rapid rate. Because RAAD does not name the particular bioagent detected, further laboratory testing of the specimen would have to be done to determine its exact identity.

The RAAD was developed under sponsorship from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and Joint Program Executive Office for CBRN Defense. The technology is currently being transitioned for production from Lincoln Laboratory to Chemring Sensors and Electronic Systems.

Highly sensitive trigger enables rapid detection of biological agents syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[kristinsimmons]

The Dilemma of the Black Patient

By YOLONDA Y. WILSON, PhD

Last week a nurse posted a video of herself on Twitter mocking patients with the caption “We know when y’all are faking” followed by laughing emojis. Twitter responded with the hashtag #patientsarenotfaking, created by Imani Barbarin, and a slew of testimonials of negligent medical care. While the nurse’s video was not explicitly racialized, plenty in the black community felt a particular sting: there is clear evidence that this attitude contributes to the problem of black patients receiving substandard care, and that negative behavioral traits like faking or exaggerating symptoms are more likely to be attributed to black patients. The problem is so bad that it turns out racial bias is built right into an algorithm widely used by hospitals to determine patient need. 

Since we can’t rely on the system or algorithms, many health organizations and the popular media encourage patients to advocate for themselves and their loved ones by, for example, asking questions, asking for second (or more) opinions, “trusting [their] guts,” and not being afraid to speak up for themselves or their loved ones. But this ubiquitous advice to “be your own advocate” doesn’t take into account that not all “advocacy” is interpreted in the same way—especially when the advocacy comes from a black person. Sometimes a patient’s self-advocacy is dismissed as “faking;” sometimes it is regarded as anger or hostility.

Black male faces showing neutral expressions are more likely than white faces to be interpreted as angry, violent, or hostile, while black women are often perceived as ill-tempered and angry. These stereotypes can have a chilling effect on a person’s decision to advocate for themselves, or it can prompt violent reaction.       

This past August, LeeAnn Bienaime delivered her firstborn child, with the assistance of her husband, in the couple’s bathtub. No, the couple had not planned a home birth. Instead, they were turned away from Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, VA even though Bienaime was in active labor. Thankfully, she and her baby were healthy. In discussing her ordeal, Ms. Bienaime said, “In hindsight I would have stood my ground and not left.” 

Consider what happened to Barbara Dawson when she stood her ground. Ms. Dawson was having trouble breathing and went to Calhoun Liberty Hospital in Blountstown, Florida. The emergency room docs determined that she was stable and discharged her. However, Ms. Dawson, knowing that something was not right with her body, refused to leave and pled to be examined further. Hospital staff responded by calling the police, who promptly arrested her for trespassing and disorderly conduct. Even after she collapsed outside of the arresting officer’s patrol vehicle, the officer assumed she was faking and can be heard on the dashcam video telling an unresponsive Dawson, “Falling down like this, laying down, that’s not going to stop you from going to jail.” Within hours, Ms. Dawson was dead from a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in her lungs.

It’s an open secret in US hospitals that some patients and families are “good” and others are labeled “difficult.” “Good” patients and families are (or are perceived to be) compliant: they refrain from complaining or pushing back against medical advice or evaluations and abide by social norms of manners and politeness. “Difficult” patients and families challenge hospital staff.They may not easily acquiesce to hospital directives, they may ask questions, or they may have feelings.

But many patients and families who are regarded as “difficult” are merely trying to understand and advocate for themselves or their loved ones the best way they know how. Patients who speak up tend to be more satisfied with their medical encounter and gain better information about their medical conditions. Additionally, patient self-advocacy is thought to be on element in the prevention of medical mistakes. As Dr. Louise Aronson writes in defense of difficult patients in The New England Journal of Medicine, “There will always be patients and families who are considered high maintenance, challenging, or both by health care providers. Among them are a few with evident mental illness, but most are simply trying their best to understand and manage their own or their loved ones’ illness.” Dr. Aronson found herself reluctant to speak up for her father, who was a hospital patient, out of worry of being labeled “difficult” by the hospital staff. She spoke up anyway and likely saved her father’s life.   

For black patients, the consequence of being “difficult” can be as deadly as any disease, injury, or illness, while the consequence of notstanding firmly for oneself can also be dangerous. It has been well-documented that black patients don’t get adequate pain relief: a 2016 study of 418 medical students and residents found that approximately 50 percent believed that black patients have “thicker skin,”and are, therefore, unable to feel pain to the extent that white patients do. Black women are three times more likely to die during and shortly after pregnancy than white women—research has connected this disparity directly to institutional racism. Even wealthy, high-profile pregnant black women, like Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Serena Williams, had their symptoms minimized or ignored, leading to critical complications. 

So what is a black patient to do?  Despite medical personnel’s insistence that she was simply “confused” as a result of her pain medications, Serena Williams could afford to not back down. Not everyone can. And the consequences can linger long past the medical encounter. Black patients who find themselves with biased providers tend to have shorter medical encounters. And those who pick up on a physician’s bias tend to have greater difficulty recalling the treatment plan, further contributing to worsened health outcomes.         

Medical personnel do not leave their biases at the door when they enter healthcare spaces and don their scrubs. In fact, data show that medical professionals exhibit similar levels of implicit bias as the general population, and that these biases seem to have at least some effect on treatment and care decisions.

There is some recognition that it is not black patients’ responsibility to effectively respond to bias. In September, the California State Legislature passed a bill that would require implicit bias training for healthcare workers. Ideally, such training would make healthcare workers cognizant of the racialized dynamics that can shape the medical encounter, including whether patients advocate for themselves and how their advocacy is perceived. While not a panacea and at minimum requires a long-term commitment to change, more states should take this first step. It could save lives. 

Yolonda Willson, PhD, is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center and an Encore Public Voices fellow with the OpEd Project.

The post The Dilemma of the Black Patient appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

The Dilemma of the Black Patient published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

[lauramalchowblog]

The Dilemma of the Black Patient

By YOLONDA Y. WILSON, PhD

Last week a nurse posted a video of herself on Twitter mocking patients with the caption “We know when y’all are faking” followed by laughing emojis. Twitter responded with the hashtag #patientsarenotfaking, created by Imani Barbarin, and a slew of testimonials of negligent medical care. While the nurse’s video was not explicitly racialized, plenty in the black community felt a particular sting: there is clear evidence that this attitude contributes to the problem of black patients receiving substandard care, and that negative behavioral traits like faking or exaggerating symptoms are more likely to be attributed to black patients. The problem is so bad that it turns out racial bias is built right into an algorithm widely used by hospitals to determine patient need. 

Since we can’t rely on the system or algorithms, many health organizations and the popular media encourage patients to advocate for themselves and their loved ones by, for example, asking questions, asking for second (or more) opinions, “trusting [their] guts,” and not being afraid to speak up for themselves or their loved ones. But this ubiquitous advice to “be your own advocate” doesn’t take into account that not all “advocacy” is interpreted in the same way—especially when the advocacy comes from a black person. Sometimes a patient’s self-advocacy is dismissed as “faking;” sometimes it is regarded as anger or hostility.

Black male faces showing neutral expressions are more likely than white faces to be interpreted as angry, violent, or hostile, while black women are often perceived as ill-tempered and angry. These stereotypes can have a chilling effect on a person’s decision to advocate for themselves, or it can prompt violent reaction.       

This past August, LeeAnn Bienaime delivered her firstborn child, with the assistance of her husband, in the couple’s bathtub. No, the couple had not planned a home birth. Instead, they were turned away from Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, VA even though Bienaime was in active labor. Thankfully, she and her baby were healthy. In discussing her ordeal, Ms. Bienaime said, “In hindsight I would have stood my ground and not left.” 

Consider what happened to Barbara Dawson when she stood her ground. Ms. Dawson was having trouble breathing and went to Calhoun Liberty Hospital in Blountstown, Florida. The emergency room docs determined that she was stable and discharged her. However, Ms. Dawson, knowing that something was not right with her body, refused to leave and pled to be examined further. Hospital staff responded by calling the police, who promptly arrested her for trespassing and disorderly conduct. Even after she collapsed outside of the arresting officer’s patrol vehicle, the officer assumed she was faking and can be heard on the dashcam video telling an unresponsive Dawson, “Falling down like this, laying down, that’s not going to stop you from going to jail.” Within hours, Ms. Dawson was dead from a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in her lungs.

It’s an open secret in US hospitals that some patients and families are “good” and others are labeled “difficult.” “Good” patients and families are (or are perceived to be) compliant: they refrain from complaining or pushing back against medical advice or evaluations and abide by social norms of manners and politeness. “Difficult” patients and families challenge hospital staff.They may not easily acquiesce to hospital directives, they may ask questions, or they may have feelings.

But many patients and families who are regarded as “difficult” are merely trying to understand and advocate for themselves or their loved ones the best way they know how. Patients who speak up tend to be more satisfied with their medical encounter and gain better information about their medical conditions. Additionally, patient self-advocacy is thought to be on element in the prevention of medical mistakes. As Dr. Louise Aronson writes in defense of difficult patients in The New England Journal of Medicine, “There will always be patients and families who are considered high maintenance, challenging, or both by health care providers. Among them are a few with evident mental illness, but most are simply trying their best to understand and manage their own or their loved ones’ illness.” Dr. Aronson found herself reluctant to speak up for her father, who was a hospital patient, out of worry of being labeled “difficult” by the hospital staff. She spoke up anyway and likely saved her father’s life.   

For black patients, the consequence of being “difficult” can be as deadly as any disease, injury, or illness, while the consequence of notstanding firmly for oneself can also be dangerous. It has been well-documented that black patients don’t get adequate pain relief: a 2016 study of 418 medical students and residents found that approximately 50 percent believed that black patients have “thicker skin,”and are, therefore, unable to feel pain to the extent that white patients do. Black women are three times more likely to die during and shortly after pregnancy than white women—research has connected this disparity directly to institutional racism. Even wealthy, high-profile pregnant black women, like Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Serena Williams, had their symptoms minimized or ignored, leading to critical complications. 

So what is a black patient to do?  Despite medical personnel’s insistence that she was simply “confused” as a result of her pain medications, Serena Williams could afford to not back down. Not everyone can. And the consequences can linger long past the medical encounter. Black patients who find themselves with biased providers tend to have shorter medical encounters. And those who pick up on a physician’s bias tend to have greater difficulty recalling the treatment plan, further contributing to worsened health outcomes.         

Medical personnel do not leave their biases at the door when they enter healthcare spaces and don their scrubs. In fact, data show that medical professionals exhibit similar levels of implicit bias as the general population, and that these biases seem to have at least some effect on treatment and care decisions.

There is some recognition that it is not black patients’ responsibility to effectively respond to bias. In September, the California State Legislature passed a bill that would require implicit bias training for healthcare workers. Ideally, such training would make healthcare workers cognizant of the racialized dynamics that can shape the medical encounter, including whether patients advocate for themselves and how their advocacy is perceived. While not a panacea and at minimum requires a long-term commitment to change, more states should take this first step. It could save lives. 

Yolonda Willson, PhD, is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center and an Encore Public Voices fellow with the OpEd Project.

The post The Dilemma of the Black Patient appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

The Dilemma of the Black Patient published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

[itsfinancethings]

October 19, 2019 at 07:00AM

When a White House whistleblower reported that Donald Trump asked a foreign nation to “do us a favor” if it wanted U.S. military aid, it didn’t just start an impeachment. It started a war playing out on your screens that could determine the outcome.

Over the last generation, nations, militaries, businesses, and political parties have all come to grips with the threat of computer networks being hacked, commonly thought of as “cyberwar.”

Yet these efforts to steal information now come with a twin that tries to spread it, often with even more powerful results. As illustration, while the DNC may have been famously hacked during the 2016 election of greater import was that over half the US population in 2016 was unknowingly exposed to Russian propaganda via their Facebook accounts. Indeed, as a bipartisan Senate report revealed last week, Russian information warriors literally celebrated their success with a toast of champagne. If “cyberwar” is the hacking of networks, this kind of “likewar” is the hacking of people on them, by driving ideas viral through likes, shares, and sometimes lies.

Just as in 2016, we’re now seeing all the elements of likewar deployed into the battle over impeachment. Supporters of the president have funded crowdsourced manhunts, mining the web for clues to the whistleblower’s identity. If they are found, any tiny nuggets in their background will then be weaponized, not just to try to discredit them via some unrelated belief or gaffe posted years back, but to threaten them and their family. Indeed, the risk of violence has been already been massively spurred on by the loudest voice on social media of all, who described the whistleblower and then those supporting impeachment as committing a crime punishable by death. Given the history of past mass killers echoing Trump’s words, this falls somewhere between a direct call to violence and what is known as “stochastic terrorism,” where you create the supporting conditions for it.

In turn, opponents of the president are engaged in their own online hunt for open-source intelligence of a kind even the CIA found hard to collect a decade back. Networks of anti-Trump activists are mining everything from old Pentagon documents on delayed missile deliveries to the travel history of Ukrainian oligarchs to see when and where they crossed paths with Rudy Giuliani and even Jared Kushner.

While truth may be surfaced by these dueling hunts, the response to it is to follow the lessons of Russian information warfare: bury it underneath a sea of lies. Online warfare is fought not by consistency, but a constantly altering set of explanations and “alternative facts.” The day by day shift of the contents of the infamous call or whether Giuliani was acting as the president’s personal lawyer or not is a deliberate feature not a bug. Russia may have pioneered this tactic (such as how it responded to to its 2014 shootdown of the airliner over Ukraine, by pushing out a dozen different conflicting stories in its defense ) but it is now the new normal in our own politics, appearing in everything from the impeachment debate (where the President and his staff have said he did and didn’t demand a quid pro quo with Ukraine, with his chief of staff Mick Mulvaney literally providing both versions over the course of mere hours) to the Syria withdrawal (where the President has pushed out at least a half dozen different explanations for why he did and didn’t greenlight the Turkish invasion and abandonment of America’s Kurdish allies). Simply put, if you can muddy the waters enough, then you might just be able to daze and confuse your audience into submission, or at least just have them think that “both sides” are the same.

In these battles for virality, all the familiar tactics and tools are being deployed. The whistleblower’s memo has already been turned into a series of gifs, using Internet memes like scenes from Anchorman, to leverage web culture to help it take off. In turn, opponents to the memo are leaning into classic conspiracy theories to try to undermine its spread, such as the old stand-by that somehow George Soros and the “globalists” (I.E. the Jews) are involved. Even the efforts to push out multiple competing hashtagged names for the affair are part of an effort to keep it from coalescing in the public mind. As long as there is no equivalent to #watergate , there is no single way for the public to unite around it.

This back and forth can be shrugged off as mere online games, but the effect is real. What shapes social media shapes not just what you see on your screen, and then share with your friends and family to echo out repeatedly wider. It also shapes what happens on other media, with over 90% of journalists regularly using social media for their work. What trends online, even if artificially driven, helps influence everything from what stories newspaper reporters pursue to which guests radio show producers book.

Again and again, we have seen how an influence operation-shaped shift in online trends and then perceptions can shape elections (ranging from Brazil to Brexit) to even congressional votes. Indeed, almost exactly one year ago it swung the hearings for Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh. When Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford, an obscure Internet conspiracy theory that mixed was created in his defense, that Kavanaugh somehow had a doppelganger, who had actually committed the sexual assault. It was originally mocked and even led to its originator to resign his job from a DC thinktank in shame. Yet, as the theory subsequently went viral, it gave moderate Republican senators a narrative to vote to confirm Kavanaugh, without explicitly calling his accuser a liar. The same model may have already happened in the looming battle over impeachment, where a false claim that the “deep state” secretly altered U.S. whistleblower law first popped in online conservative forms. Despite being debunked repeatedly, it has gone viral with amplifying repeats by the President and GOP House Leader Kevin McCarthy.

The next few weeks will be a crucial moment for American democracy. As the battle over impeachment plays out, we all need to wise up to this online war that is targeting each of us. Both the public and media need to understand its features and be careful to distinguish when something is organic and when both we and the algorithms of the networks are being played with. Most of all, we need to recognize our own power and responsibility. It will be us who will ultimately determine if it is veracity or virality that matters most in our democracy.

[terabitweb]

Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Victor M. Thomas

Imagine sitting at the end of a fishing pier staring at the ocean on a fine summer afternoon with hardly a breeze in the air. The sea is flat and quiet while you hear the lapping of waves on the beach. You know that beneath that calm surface might well be sharks, jellyfish, eels, manta rays, the Atacama Snailfish, or any number of predators. The sea might look quiet but it is anything but.

The same could be said for an IT security staffer as he or she looks out over a calm and quiet office while all the time knowing hidden just outside its network are cybercriminals, hackers, and script kiddies who are trying to force their destructive ways on a company’s critical business systems.

For IT security teams, that constant battle is made even more difficult because no one knows for sure what type of attacks will be next, meaning security workers have to be ready for anything at any time. Like the Atacama Snailfish, apparently an ancient predator that was only recently discovered nearly 27,000 feet deep on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, cyber predators have a knack for keeping themselves well hidden, only coming into the light if they are identified accidentally.

CISOs and security teams use many types of cyberdefenses, ranging from antivirus and antimalware to threat prevention software; identity and access management software to security appliances such as firewalls, universal threat management systems, and gateways; to a plethora of other hardware and software tools. But with new attack vectors being unveiled by the bad guys all the time, IT security leaders must always be thinking and looking ahead for the next potential security vulnerabilities and attack targets so they can prevent or minimize successful attacks against their businesses.

The questions the cybersecurity leads ask themselves tend to fall within a common set of priorities: Where should IT teams start today? How can IT security leaders prepare themselves and their systems for new kinds of attacks, some of which they’ve probably not imagined before? How can they fight back effectively and protect their company’s key IT assets? How can they stay a step ahead of the bad guys, no matter what shows up at their firewalls and digital doorsteps? In many ways, these are the same questions CISOs ask themselves about zero-day attacks. The difference is, here there are many more variables to consider.

Attacks today are often masked as valid data transmissions or come in as simple emails or messages, fileless attacks that take the form of queries that ask a user to take an action, which if initiated will unknowingly create a breach. This makes some of the latest attacks even more treacherous because they can unleash something that a company’s standard security software and hardware defensive measures fail to identify as malicious.

Creative defenses

The threat landscape has been changing especially quickly in the past few months, says Alessio De Luca, a security consultant and digital transformation manager for Florence Consulting Group in Florence, Italy.

“The most important trend that IT security pros need to recognize is the evolution of malware against signature-based, traditional antivirus systems,” says De Luca. “From fileless malware to zero-day attacks, the traditional analysis of fighting threats already known by antivirus systems is not enough anymore. Unknown threats are the real issue nowadays.”

The clear pattern being seen in IT security today is that static defenses are no longer a reasonable way to protect companies, he adds. Worse, due to the evolving methods used by attackers, the most dangerous new threats will come from apparently valid system processes that take advantage of the trust or familiarity of users.

Alessio De Luca, security consultant and digital transformation manager, Florence Consulting Group

“Every endpoint should be protected,” says De Luca. “Threats are increasingly moving from the core to the edge of the network.” And to make those endpoints most effective, they should include strong artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) features that use algorithms that change and counter in real time when threat landscapes change, he says. “It’s the best option we can choose at the moment to protect companies’ infrastructures.”

AI and ML are powerful and essential up and coming tools in the fight for more secure IT systems because instead of just comparing network activities to a static list of known threats, ML and AI examine user and application behaviors in real time, recognizing suspicious activities even when threats are unknown or processes are masked as valid, says  De Luca.

Using AI and ML tools, IT security teams will gain many innovations in the fight against cybercrime. “The growing number of attacks won’t be manageable without the computing power of AI and ML,” he says.

Another nascent trend is the inclusion of more security features at the hardware level, rather than just through software barriers, De Luca says. A breached hardware component will block itself to protect the rest of the network, making it an important tool in a company’s security perimeter.

“There’s no such thing as 100 percent security, which is a truth that IT pros often fail to recognize,” says De Luca. “All that we can do is compartmentalize the company systems into smaller sections and apply the latest innovations to improve the overall security.”

Human-centric security

Not everything in IT security involves hardware and software, notes Steven Durbin, the managing director of the London-based Information Security Forum (ISF), an independent, non-profit global authority on cybersecurity and risk management.

Anticipating tomorrow’s IT security attacks also means understanding human behavior in the workplace, says Durbin. “We know that IT security guys are always trying to just keep the wheels on to keep things going. I think they’re relatively okay with being able to deal with it provided they can anticipate it. The piece they’re not so good at involves the people-centric area, the humancentric security needs. It’s really about trying to understand how people act, respond, and behave.”

In that case, what is needed is a new approach for IT — understanding more about the psychology of their users, says Durbin. That means educating users so they do not continue to click on phishing emails from people they do not know and other common security gaffs, despite constant lectures about avoiding such behaviors.

“That is the root, the really challenging piece, because those skill sets are not natural for an IT security guy or for the CISO,” says Durbin. “Some of the smarter organizations I’m aware of are doing things like hiring psychologists to help them understand how users react and to get a better handle on what might be implemented from a security standpoint in order to get a better level of acceptance from the user community,” he notes.

Steven Durbin, managing director, Information Security Forum

Emphasizing the point, Durbin adds: “Yes, I mean having such staff in the security department — a trained psychologist,” he says. The ISF is conducting research on this topic along with several universities because it is an issue that more and more companies will likely begin to address, he adds.

That’s right. Durbin thinks more businesses need to hire psychoanalysts to help change the poor IT habits of their users.

“Before you roll out any new piece of a security program, you need to be positioning it with the people who are going to be receiving it and understand how to position it so you get their emotional buy-in,” he says.

The idea, he says, is that users react best to security lessons if the lessons really hit them hard emotionally, like when the lessons relate to protecting their children from online threats. If IT departments provide training in that context, the lessons will hit with much more impact for users and they will remember the lessons and even share them with others at work, he says.

“The whole thing that we’re missing is that people in business are also people in their homes,” says Durbin. “So, if you teach me, or if you give me guidance on how to keep my kids safe online, I will remember that.”

Those connections will help corporate workers bridge that gap between what happens in their workplace and at home and will help achieve a much higher degree of security effectiveness than those that focus solely on the business environment, according to Durbin.

Don’t forget IoT insecurities

As CISOs, CTOs and other IT security leaders plan their strategies, they also must give more attention to another emerging security issue that is affecting every company — the increasing use of internet of things (IoT) devices across the corporate landscape.

“The IoT issue is where the next IT security wave is at,” says Terrill L. Frantz, an associate professor of eBusiness and cybersecurity at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Harrisburg, Penn. “We’re crossing that horizon now. If you think securing a smartphone or a laptop is hard, multiply that by several hundred million or a billion devices that are unique.”

The problem is that all those mostly uncontrolled devices, which do not get regular security updates like computers and smartphones typically receive, are potential security threats to organizations because they can be used as attack vectors.

Braden Perry, attorney, Kennyhertz Perry LLC

“There’s not going to be a Microsoft to push out new firmware for these devices,” says Frantz. “In the IoT space, you’ve got anybody writing anything. You have all these devices that are bare-backed on the internet. Think of it as a distributed world of little firecrackers. Each one on its own isn’t a big deal but then you put them all together collectively and a bad guy can make use of that.”

The problem is that business IT leaders are not really paying much attention to this conundrum, says Frantz. “That’s something that will we will see more of down the road. That’s something we are not prepared for — not even close.”

And finding the right answers to solve the challenge is still an unknown, he adds.

“Unfortunately, problem solving usually occurs after a problem occurs,” says Frantz. “We don’t know what these incidents will look like or how to prevent them” since companies have not moved to fully utilize IoT devices and strategies, he says.

“They have to decide what they want to do and then plan how they will use IoT and how to protect against attacks,” he adds. “They don’t have a choice but to do something about it. It’s going to be brought to them whether they like or not in terms of threat prevention and identification. The technical people are becoming aware of it, but it hasn’t filtered up yet.”

Legal issues for tomorrow’s attacks

When it comes to trying to anticipate the security threats of tomorrow, don’t forget to consider the related legal scenarios, says Braden Perry, a cybersecurity attorney with KennyhertzPerry LLC in Kansas City, Mo.

“Cybersecurity, it’s easy in theory to do it,” says Perry. “But if you’re not doing it in practice, it’s absolutely no help to you when it comes to these types of issues.”

Having strong security policies in place and engagement from senior management has been an ongoing mantra in IT for several years, but that also needs to include a company’s board of directors who really need to focus on these types of issues, says Perry. At the same time, executives need to take a new look at their IT departments and become more connected to them in terms of communications, leadership and strategy, he adds.

“In the past IT was one of those basement departments that you didn’t really want to see until something happened,” he says. “That’s no longer the case, especially with breach management, privacy issues and those types of topics which now need to be top of mind for companies. And to do so you need to have that senior management involvement to make sure the entire organization knows that this is the priority.”

Terrill Frantz, associate professor of eBusiness and cybersecurity, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology

A critical step that CISOs and their companies can take is to be more proactive by trying to determine what the next types and vectors of attacks will be, as well as the security trends, so they can figure out how to battle them, says Perry. That means spending money.

“One way is by having good personnel and being able to put out the capital to have that personnel,” he says. “When it comes to the legal department and to IT, those are not ordinary profit centers for a company. You need to make sure that companies are aware that putting resources into those non-profit resource centers will save the company money down the road. If you are lax in those areas, it can really hurt a company from a financial, as well as a reputational, level.”

Perry acknowledges that he still talks regularly with executives at companies where IT security is not taken as seriously as it should be because the company has not yet suffered an attack or that they have endured an attack and just don’t know it yet. Another possibility is that these executives do not have the resources to realize that they already are under attack but they just do not know it yet.

“It seems like it’s common sense, but until they experience an intrusion, a breach or some sort of an issue, many companies don’t really think about cybersecurity in the way that they need to be thinking about it, even today,” says Perry.

“What I’m trying to do is making sure that they are thinking about this in a proactive way where they don’t become the next Home Depot or [one of the] other companies that have [had] mass breaches of information. It really does take proactive activity to get this done,” he adds.

A beacon of hope

When looking for up-and-coming, next-generation IT security analysis tools, IT leaders also should be taking a close look at beacon detection capabilities, which carefully scan network traffic identifying and calling out anomalies, says Joe Sullivan, the principal security strategist for Crossroads Information Security and the CISO for RCB Bank headquartered in Claremore, Okla.

To get ahead of new kinds of IT system attacks, beacon detection is a promising tool, he says. Beacons tell IT teams when an unusual heartbeat is seen within the network traffic, notifying them that something could be amiss and needs their attention, he says.

“It will get pointed out and will rise to the top,” says Sullivan. IT workers can then see they have an infected machine that in the past could have gone undetected.

But while new tools can be helpful, bolstered skill sets and work experience for today’s CISOs, CTOs and other top IT security executives should also be considered.

“For CISOs and CIOs — CISOs especially — the roles are changing, so companies are realizing that if they’re going to hold that position accountable for technical controls that are in place that those leaders need to have better technical skills,” says Sullivan.

In the past, CISOs, CTOs and others were heavy on team and departmental leadership skills and maybe were less experienced and skilled when it came down to technical expertise, he says.

“You’re starting to see companies shift towards having a CISO who is more technically oriented, who has threat hunting experience, forensic experience, incident response experience and more, as opposed to just straight business and finance experience,” says Sullivan. “Absolutely, yes, it’s where we’re going right now and people are slowly starting to realize this. It’s kind of under the radar.”

The post Tomorrow’s attacks today: How to defend against next-generation cyberattacks appeared first on SC Media.

#gallery-0-5 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-5 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Go to Source Author: Victor M. Thomas Tomorrow’s attacks today: How to defend against next-generation cyberattacks Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Victor M. Thomas Imagine sitting at the end of a fishing pier staring at the…

[thegloober]

IBM brings artificial intelligence to the heart of cybersecurity strategies

IBM has launched IBM Security Connect, a new platform designed to bring vendors, developers, AI, and data together to improve cyber incident response and abilities.

More security news

On Monday, the New York-based technology company unveiled the open platform, which IBM says “is the first security cloud platform built on open technologies, with AI at its core, to analyze federated security data across previously unconnected tools and environments.”

An analysis conducted by IBM suggests that cybersecurity teams in the enterprise use, on average, over 80 cybersecurity solutions provided by roughly 40 vendors.

This is a potential recipe for chaos and may reduce the overall effectiveness of security and defense.

IBM Security Connect makes use of both cloud technology and AI. Users of the platform will be able to apply machine learning and AI, including Watson for Cyber Security, to cybersecurity products to increase their effectiveness.

At launch, over a dozen security vendors and business partners have signed up.

“IBM Security Connect will help tackle some of the biggest security challenges today via open standards, which can help pave the way toward collaborative innovation,” the tech giant says. “As it is built on open standards, it can help companies build unique microservices, develop new security applications, integrate existing security solutions, and leverage data from open shared services.”

Artificial intelligence, which includes neural networking, machine learning, analytics, and the use of algorithms to complete tasks, allows machines to learn from experience.

In cybersecurity, the machine learning subset of AI has the most use — at least at this stage in AI development. While there is little use of ‘true’ cognitive AI, machine learning can provide a springboard from traditional, signature-based antivirus and cybersecurity solutions to a more extensive means of protection through data collection and analysis.

See also: IBM: We’re protesting over Pentagon’s $10bn winner-take-all JEDI cloud deal | IBM Food Trust blockchain network available, Carrefour joins retailer roster | | IBM banks on the blockchain to boost financial services innovation | IBM launches pretrained Watson packs for industries

When machine learning systems are given a large enough data pool to digest and analyze, this can be used to help shrink attack surfaces through predictive analytics, the detection of what is likely to be suspicious behavior, and this, in turn, eases the burden on cybersecurity staff who often have to triage cybersecurity-related events on a daily basis.

AI and machine learning are not perfect and cannot be considered a silver bullet for cybersecurity defense. However, solutions and platforms which leverage these technologies can give the enterprise an additional way to defend themselves against cyberattacks which are constantly evolving and increasing in sophistication.

IBM appears to have recognized this opportunity in the cybersecurity market. Alongside the firm’s IBM Security Connect, the firm’s Security Operations Centers (SOCs) and Watson for Cyber Security are key elements of IBM’s move into the AI for cybersecurity market.

The firm’s SOCs are found in countries including the US, India, Japan, and Poland. The SOCs act as X-Force training hubs which offer training and cyberattack simulations, of which virtual environments are used to interact with real-life scenarios.

The centers process over one trillion security events every month to generate threat intelligence.

CNET: IBM offers up Watson Assistant, its answer to Amazon’s Alexa

Big Blue’s Watson was integrated into a security offering last year. The supercomputer, which combines AI and data analytics, acts as a knowledge repository for cybersecurity professionals using IBM’s Cognitive Security Operations Center platform.

These services are not reserved purely for the enterprise; IBM also caters for government and federal agencies.

The ongoing effort to develop AI solutions for modern businesses is further achieved with the launch of IBM AI OpenScale, an enterprise platform for the creation and management of artificial intelligence applications.

TechRepublic: Why IBM is offering $200K to developers to create tech solutions for natural disaster relief

In addition to IBM Security Connect, the company also announced a new addition to its Security Operations Center, a mobile unit called the IBM X-Force Command Cyber Tactical Operations Center (C-TOC).

The mobile unit will travel to companies in the US and Europe and offer training on incident response, defense strategies, and crisis leadership.

IBM has been pushing for the integration and further development of AI solutions in the enterprise and by taking up a vendor-agnostic stance in the AI realm especially when the need for cybersecurity solutions is great, the company is setting itself up as one of the major AI-security players not only in the present but potentially the future.

Previous and related coverage

Source: https://bloghyped.com/ibm-brings-artificial-intelligence-to-the-heart-of-cybersecurity-strategies/