#and that was a cryptographic thing

[autogeneity]

Hi, I was looking into computer science and I wanted to ask you what drew you to it and how you feel about it as a career choice?

I don't think my reasons for getting into it are likely to be very helpful to anyone else because they are very specific to my life at the time and not actually much about computer science at all. Skip to the last section for more relevant things.

But here is my story —

I went into university with a starry-eyed idea of understanding the True Fundamentals of Everything and was majoring in maths, physics, and philosophy. also my brain was broken and I had a very fuckd't relationship to reality as a concept (mega derealisation with substantial perceptual distortions and potentially some delusional features) and some part of me saw this as Deep Philosophical Insight, while another hoped getting The Answers would solve it.

after a year it became apparent that this was probably at least a little silly and not going to happen, and I didn't actually see myself being a professional physicist irl.

additionally, I felt more drawn to doing something with more tangible outcomes in the real world rather than chasing maximum abstraction. I had a growing interest in neuroscience and AI and simulation, but also could maybe see myself becoming a professional mathematician. so I kept the maths and switched the others to computer science and psychology.

I guess the specific CS appeals were: I already knew some programming and had found it basically trivial to learn, so I sort of figured it is probably a good match for my brain. and I like puzzles (actually when I first got to uni all the departments were doing little recruitment speech thingies and the CS department actually gave us puzzles! I somehow imagined this would be representative of literally anything (it is not)). I still find those, like, code challenge type problems a lot of fun though.

the final thing that sealed the deal was the availability of a scholarship for maths+cs major, and the fact that it could provide a backup plan if my academia plans failed.

---

As for how I feel about it — well, my academia plans did fail so I am very glad I had a backup in place. Even if they hadn't gone wrong at the time, it's pretty clear to me now that the many mental health issues I continued to deal with in the time since would have led to me fucking up in academia sooner or later in a way they did not in my job. There is much, much more latitude here.

And it's pretty alright as a job; I'm not ecstatic about it but I don't really mind overall and it is sometimes fun. I actually like bug-fixing, lol — the kind where there's an immediately-obvious mistake and I just gotta correct it is boring but the hunt is fun. In general I dislike the amount of small, tedious tasks where I just gotta do some obvious thing, but I like it when I get to build something more substantive that requires more figuring out. I am somewhat fond of the way the shape of the things feels in my brain (not sure that makes any sense lmao). Albeit there are not really many puzzles. :(

But I'm not intending to stay in my current work. I worked briefly in data science and found it much more engaging. I plan to move towards that and/or stuff in the direction of bioinformatics or scientific computing or computational neuroscience. Which is all still computer science but not. software development.

---

Which is probably the biggest thing I would want to highlight for someone considering computer science. In general working in software development (the most typical career path) is very different to working in computer science. Very often someone interested in the one will not be very happy with the other. I would encourage identifying which is your interest, and seeing what they both actually entail, before pursuing anything.

Because like, if you want a run-of-the-mill programming job, in many places it might be worth considering just doing some sort of bootcamp and projects. The company I work at gets probably like 20% of their graduate hires from that stream. Much cheaper and faster than a degree! Or for various other types of work certifications might be a good approach.

If you like mathy things, you probably want computer science proper. If you like engineering, tiny technical details, performance focus, etc, you probably do want formal education and may want to look at things requiring low-level languages, e.g. embedded software. I think people who like twiddling and configuring enjoy cloud shit? or infrastructure and ops work more generally but I think these days most places that looks like cloud shit. If you like the big picture, modeling, and the human side, you may be interested in systems analysis (I find this Very Shaped tbh but am not up for the human side and honestly don't like making big judgement calls).

Somehow I don't actually know what the people who like everyday application development actually like about it specifically lmao? even though they are surely the majority. But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#asks #shinyangelwombatknight #long post #guess I took the opportunity to go off #I am sort of contemplating my career future and motivations and recently applied for a masters and several jobs #so thinking out loud somewhat also #also it is technically not true that the puzzles are not relevant to anything #they are relevant to job interviews. for some reason. #I have encountered a situation where I needed to apply that sort of thinking exactly one time #and that was a cryptographic thing #I don't really understand what they are proxying

[mypoisonedvine]

𝐚 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 | riley poole x reader

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 - having a girlfriend who can decode secret messages comes in handy when you're a treasure hunter; and having a clingy, needy treasure hunter boyfriend can be annoying when you're trying to decode something, but you find a way to compromise.

𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 - 4.4k

𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 - SMUT (18+ only, and honestly who under 18 is watching this 20 year old movie about the declaration of independence? regardless, minors go away), established relationship, free use kink, touch of dumbification kink, FLIP PHONES (oh the noughties nostalgia), a totally unnecessary plot because everyone deserves a dose of colonial american history with their filth, riley and reader being nerdlove goals

(honestly can't believe I actually wrote this but now that I did I'm like hold up... is this my new obsession??)

When Ben answered the door obviously not ready, and obviously surprised by Riley’s presence, it didn’t take a genius to put together that he’d forgotten about tonight— which Riley had sort of seen coming, with how many times this one thing had been put off or rescheduled at the last minute.  One of the downsides of being a treasure hunter?  Your coworkers tend to be somewhat… unreliable.

“Riley— what are you doing here?” Ben wondered.

“Warm greeting as always…” Riley sighed before answering the question: “I'm here to pick you up.”

Ben gave Riley an even more confused look.

“For dinner,” Riley added flatly.  “At Talerico’s.  To meet my—”

“To meet your new girlfriend, oh god,” Ben realized, “was that tonight?”

“No, it's tomorrow, I'm just picking you up twenty-four hours in advance,” Riley replied snarkily.

“I'm sorry, Riley,” Ben sighed, “I really— I do wanna meet her, Abigail did too— but I completely forgot— can we move this to another night?”

“Ben, we've moved this so many times that she's not even a new girlfriend anymore,” Riley sighed.

“I know, I know, but we can't tonight— Abigail just went out,” Ben justified.

“Where'd the missus go?”

“The library, she's trying to help me with something.”

“A clue?  It's another clue, isn't it,” Riley realized, not trying very hard to hide his excitement.

“I was going to call you tomorrow,” Ben explained.  “Come in, I’ll show you.”

After walking into Ben’s house and upstairs to the study, Riley wrinkled his brow when Ben handed him the coded message.  “Well, that’s just a whole bunch of letters,” Riley noticed.

“Astute as always, Riley,” Ben frowned.  “We found them in a journal that belonged to James Madison.”

“Why would James Madison write down a bunch of random letters in his journal?”

“No— each letter was underlined in a different entry.  And, at the back, we found this,” Ben continued, showing Riley a scanned parchment.

“GABE FADECCE,” Riley read aloud, changing his mind a few times about the pronunciation.  “It’s a name, right?”

“It must be,” Ben shrugged, “but we’ve been searching online for any evidence of a Fadecce family or a Gabriel that worked for or with Madison, and we haven’t found anyone.  That’s what Abigail went to the library for.”

“It sounds Italian, could he be Italian?” Riley wondered as Ben set down the images with a sigh.

“I don’t know— possibly, but we’re at a dead end at this point,” Ben replied.  “I’m sure we’d have a lot more to work with if we could decipher those letters from the journal entries, but we were up all night trying to figure it out—”

“Not what I’d be up all night doing with my girlfriend, but okay,” Riley interjected.

“And I haven’t gotten anywhere with it,” Ben concluded.

“Wait— you can't solve it?” Riley challenged with a smug grin.  “The Ben Gates can't solve a clue?”

“It's not that I can't, it's just that a code like this requires a lot of time,” Ben explained.  “I'm a historian, not a cryptographer.”

“We need a codebreaker,” Riley nodded thoughtfully, “somebody who can decode something this complex, and knows enough about the Founding Fathers to have some context for the message...”  He tapped on his chin like he was really thinking about it, before proudly smiling and tilting his head in faux-realization.  “Hey, how about a former intelligence agent who specialized in decryption, with a master's in world history and beautiful eyes that you can get lost in for hours?”

Ben raised an eyebrow at Riley.  “Yes, that would be great— give or take the eyes thing— but where are you gonna find one of those?”

“At Talerico’s,” Riley announced, “waiting at a table for four.”

“Your girlfriend is a cryptographer?” Ben realized with wide eyes.

“I told you you'd like her,” Riley beamed.

~

Riley was engrossed in his game, furiously clicking the mouse and clacking at the keyboard before mumbling a curse of defeat and pulling the headset off; sighing, he turned around and looked over the back of the couch at you.

He'd only started playing the game because you weren't giving him attention, so it made sense that as soon as he died, he'd go back to bugging you.  “Hey,” he greeted plainly, smiling yet clearly fighting the urge to pout.

You were laying on your stomach on the bed, half-dressed, looking at the pages Ben had given you and scribbling notes on a pad.  “Hey,” you returned flatly after a pause, adjusting your reading glasses before taking a few more notes.

“You look cute doing that,” he hummed.

“Doing what?”

“Thinking.”

You frowned a little in concentration but didn't look away from your papers.  “I like to think I'm always thinking…”

“No wonder you're so cute all the time then,” he cooed, leaning in closer and resting his chin in his hands.

He waited for a moment for you to keep the conversation going, but sighed when you simply continued working on the cipher without paying him any mind.

Getting off the couch with a sigh, he hopped onto the bed and laid beside you, making the mattress bounce a few times.  He kept looking at you for a little while, eventually reaching out and rubbing your back for a moment, before sliding himself even closer to you and planting a kiss on your shoulder.

Even with ninety-five percent of your attention on the puzzle in front of you, you could still tell what sort of mood Riley was getting himself into.  “Well, there is one thing that makes you stop thinking…” he recalled in a purr, nuzzling into the crook of your neck and giving you a teasing trail of kisses there.

You sighed a little and shrugged him away.  “Riley, I need to focus.”

“Baaabe,” he pouted.  “I can't help it, you're just so— how am I supposed to resist you like this?”

“I'm literally just laying here,” you noticed.

“You know what you do to me in those bifocals, sweetheart.”

You snorted and finally looked back at him, admiring the puppy dog eyes he was giving you— they almost always worked on you, and he knew it.  Sighing in relent, you looked back at the pages in front of you.  “I need to get this done, I promised your friend I would finish it in twenty-four hours,” you explained, “but you can go ahead.”

“Go ahead?” he repeated, confused.

“You can just use me, while I work,” you offered flippantly, hardly noticing the way his face turned red.

“R-right… I can just, um… use you.  That's— okay, sure,” he coughed nervously.

“Just be quick,” you insisted.

“Yeah, that's a challenge,” he scoffed, shuffling on the bed to straddle your legs and run his hands over your back.  “I, uh, like when you wear my shirts,” he informed you, as if feeling his erection press against your ass wasn’t enough of a clue.

“Just get on with it, please?” you groaned.

“Yeah, yeah— sorry…” he mumbled, moving his hands down to your panties which he traced slowly.  “These are cute,” he noticed aloud anyways, and you sighed a bit to yourself as you realized how futile it was to try to keep him from talking.  You were just going to have to tune him out to get this done.

His fingers shakily hooked into the elastic and pulled your panties down, a low hum echoing in his chest as he looked at you.  Grabbing handfuls of your ass and kneading them gently, he mumbled something to himself that you weren’t really paying attention to— until he got your attention suddenly with a quick slap.  “Hey!” you yelped, jumping slightly.

“Sorry, sorry,” he breathed through a grin, “couldn’t help myself.  I-I won’t distract you anymore, okay?  Just, you know, keep working…”

You did just that, of course, re-ordering the papers in your hand to look at the scanned back page again.

He went on mumbling to himself as he shoved his sweatpants down to his thighs to free his cock: “juuuust keep working,” he breathed.

He spit into his hand quickly and smeared it on himself, before nudging in between your legs and pressing himself to your opening.

Admittedly, you did react slightly when he pushed inside you— a wince from the stretch of it, especially without much preparation— but you managed to keep quiet and focus on your work again.  “God, so tight,” he groaned, digging his fingers into your hips slightly as he slid deeper.  “You're too good to me, baby…”

He pushed as deep as he could go, which was honestly a bit further than you expected at this angle, and leaned over you slightly as he started to move.

“You feel so good,” he praised through a heavy breath, not taking very long to savor the moment before picking up speed.  You knew if you reacted too strongly to what he was doing, he'd notice instantly and start trying to pull you away from your work; so, you did your best to focus on the problem, even if you found yourself gripping the pages a bit tighter.

Even if your attention was straight ahead, you almost wished you could see him now— but then again, you had a pretty good idea of what you would see if you looked back: his mouth parted slightly with sighs of pleasure, a subtle pink flush across his face, his eyes going a little glassy as they drifted over you.  In fact, you could sometimes feel his gaze on you, especially at those times that his fingers traced your back and hips.

Realizing something suddenly about the cipher in front of you, you put your pen between your teeth and pulled the cap off, biting down on it slightly to hold it in place so you could keep writing on the paper your other hand held.  “Fuck, you're so hot,” Riley groaned, starting to thrust a bit more urgently.  Resisting the urge to smile to yourself too much, you kept taking your notes and didn't especially pay attention to him behind you, even when his occasional whimpers started to grow louder.

For the most part, you were able to keep your focus.  It wasn’t that Riley was especially easy to ignore— certainly not with him going just a bit faster with every thrust— but you were finally on a roll with this puzzle; maybe you would’ve already solved it if it weren’t for your boyfriend, even if he was a welcome distraction.

He panted with each movement, holding on tighter to your hips.  “Fuck,” he whispered, leaning down after a moment to rest his forehead on your shoulder.  Normally, you would have to stop yourself from reaching back to run your fingers through his hair, but you were too engrossed in your work; and it was a good thing, too, because if you’d done that he almost certainly would’ve grabbed the papers and tossed them away, impatiently demanding for you finish that later and let him finish now.

Instead, it seemed like the pace and intensity of both your decryption and his movements grew together: your writing was hurried while his thrusts were faster and harder suddenly, until you could hear skin hitting skin, his groans muffled slightly as they came out through his teeth.

“Oh my god,” you gasped, taking your pen away from the paper abruptly and looking at your work.

“Yeah, you like that?” he encouraged in a rough voice.

“Oh my god, I solved it,” you announced, hardly noticing how he'd misunderstood your exclamation.

That seemed to break him out of his focus for a moment, and he stopped moving as he leaned down over you, resting his chin on your shoulder to read the page you were holding.  “At the place of eighty-five pleas, remove the Crucifiction keys,” he read aloud from the paper— once he managed to navigate your disorganized notes.

“It's a polyalphabetic substitution cipher,” you explained excitedly.  “Once I realized the key word was his wife’s name it was relatively simple— aside from having to reverse engineer some Vignere tables—”

“But what does it mean?” he wondered.  “What even is a Crucifiction key?  Please don’t tell me Ben’s gonna rob some nuns.”

“This was Madison’s journal,” you recalled, “and he co-wrote the Federalist papers with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay— eighty-five pleas— but Hamilton wrote the majority in his home.  I think we need to go to his estate, and see if they still have any of the instruments he owned.”

“Instruments?” 

“The Crucifiction keys, that threw me off too,” you admitted, “but Hamilton was a pretty accomplished pianist— but he would’ve played the colonial precursor to the piano, the fortepiano, which was created by an Italian inventor named Cristofori.  Cristo as in Christ, obviously, and fori meaning ‘holes’.  The Crucifiction!  The keys are piano keys!”

“But who’s Gabe Fadecce?” he pressed.

“It’s not a name,” you answered, “it’s a song.  G, A, B, E, F…” you hummed each note as best you could recall.  “If we start at the first key in the bass and take out the first G, A, and so on up the scales, I’m guessing there will be another clue beneath them, or on the back or something.”

“You're amazing,” he smiled, kissing you on the cheek proudly.

“I'll call Ben,” you decided, reaching to pick up your phone from nearby on the bed and flip it open; you hadn't even opened your contacts yet before Riley wrapped his hand around yours and— gently— pulled it away and closed it.

“I'll call Ben,” he offered, “later.”

You turned to look at him, and he smiled at you, though there was something softer and darker about his gaze as it fell slowly to your lips.

“You and I have unfinished business first,” he continued softly before kissing you with more patience than you expected from him after all that…

When he pulled away, you reached up to take off your glasses, but he clicked his tongue as he stopped your hand from moving any further.

“No no no, leave those on,” he encouraged.  You grinned before he kissed you again, his weight sinking into your back as he slipped an arm around your shoulders.  You moaned softly into the kiss when he started moving again; it was a relaxed pace, but with him draped over you like this, he seemed to go so much deeper.

When he pulled away, you found yourself leaning towards him for more— but he just smirked at you and propped himself upright again, starting to move faster behind you.

“Look back at me,” he requested in a softer voice, and when you turned to look over your shoulder at him behind you, you found him biting his lip at the sight.  “Oh god,” he choked on a groan, meeting your gaze before shutting his eyes and tilting his head back.  “Fuck, is it weird that you ignoring me kinda turned me on?”

You laughed a little, and shook your head.  “No, that's fine… I can go back to it, if you want—”

“No, please— I still like you better like this,” he insisted.  “I like how responsive you are.”

He ran his hand up your back and you shivered, rocking your hips up slightly as he ran his fingers over your hair before taking a hold of your shoulder.

“Yeah,” he breathed, something beautifully dark to his voice, “like that.”

He began to fuck you hard— not fast, but intense and deep and just the right amount of impatient— and you didn't even try to hold back the loud whine of pleasure that jumped from your chest.  “Fuck,” you gasped, “oh my god, yes…”

“Uh huh?” he encouraged, watching with half-lidded eyes at the way you moved under him, your body naturally starting to rock back towards his.  “Tell me how that feels.”

“Good,” you panted.

“But not good enough to distract you from your work, huh?” he challenged.

“Well, to be fair, nothing feels better than cracking a code,” you giggled.

“Oh, baby,” he groaned, putting his hands on either side of you on the bed so he could lean down and kiss your neck, only to bite it a second later— not too hard, but a little harder than just playful.  You felt him smile when you yelped softly.  “You’re trying to piss me off, right?”

“Maybe,” you shrugged a little bit.

He sat back up and pulled out of you unexpectedly, but thankfully explained himself before you would’ve likely let out a pathetic whine that he would’ve held against you.  “Turn over,” he instructed, “and take that shirt off.”

You flipped onto your back with a smile; “I thought you liked how I look in your shirts,” you reminded him as he helped you pull it over your head and toss it aside.

“Yeah, but I like how you look without them even more,” he explained, running his hands along your sides before surprising you as he suddenly bent down to swirl his tongue around a hardening nipple.

“Fuck,” you gasped, grabbing onto his hair as he moved to the other, first with his eyes shut and then opening them to look up at you as your back arched.

“You’re so pretty,” he praised as his lips traveled to your neck; he yanked you closer by your hips, making you laugh slightly with surprise as you slid across the bed, though it turned into a moan when he thrust into you again in one go.

This time, he didn’t hold back at all: rough, needy, hungry.  You moaned louder than you planned to, grabbing onto his shoulders through his t-shirt.

“Sorry,” he panted out through a thin laugh, “but I can’t slow down now— not after you drove me crazy like that.  God, baby, you’re so fucking wet—”

You choked on the back of your own throat; you couldn’t help it, you just loved the way he said that.

“— this is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Uh huh,” you mumbled, 

“You like when I use you, huh?” he taunted, and you bit your lip before nodding.  “That’s pretty kinky, you know.  Is that all you wanna be?  A fucktoy?”

“Oh god,” you groaned, accidentally digging your nails into his shoulder, though he didn’t seem to mind.

“Want me to just fuck you whenever I feel like it, whatever you’re doing?” he continued.

“Yes,” you admitted in a hiss, head dropping back onto the bed.

“You're really trying to spoil me,” he cooed, leaning down to kiss your neck in between words.  “Be careful what you wish for, sweetheart— I might end up fucking you five times a day.  At least.”

You moaned lowly, feeling your muscles seize up on him briefly, making him laugh in the most condescending-yet-sexy way.

“Oh, fuck— you want that!” he realized, and his voice dropped to a low growl again as he thrusted even faster, teeth teasing your pulse.  “You can never get enough, can you?”

Not that you ever really thought your response to that was going to be especially coherent… but the way you cried out totally gave yourself away; how had he made you so desperate so fast?!

“Oh, poor baby,” he offered pityingly, only to fuck you even faster until you whined pathetically.  “You don’t wanna think, huh?  Just wanna be my hole.”

“Y-yeah,” you gasped, “fuck…”

“You’re too fucking perfect, you know that?” he praised.  “The only thing sexier than fucking you while you use that gorgeous brain of yours, is fucking you until you can’t.”

Your moan was sort of trapped in the back of your throat as you tried to swallow it down; you wished you had the wherewithal to hold it back better, but you weren’t really used to him talking like this.  Normally he would just go on tangents of praise and begging (as needed), and even though it wasn’t your first glimpse of his more dominant side, this all felt a bit different.  Even the way he was looking at you seemed different— a sort of pride in his eyes, pride in his own ability to turn you into a wet and whimpering mess.

“So fucking good,” he cooed, “you’re so good, baby— my good, dumb little fucktoy.”

“G-god,” you choked, holding on tighter to the sheets under you, trying to hold yourself together.

“You’d better come fast, ‘cause I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he warned with a sigh— which would be a much more credible threat if he’d ever left you hanging.  But no, those times Riley’s stamina hadn’t taken you all the way, he was more than happy to put his mouth on you and let it do the rest of the work.

This time, though, all he needed was a thumb drawing rough circles on your clit to help you along.  You hadn’t even noticed how sensitive it had become, not until your back arched and a needy whine jumped from your chest.  “Oh fuck, Riley, I’m close,” you yelped.

“Yeah?” he whined— actually, he repeated it a few times as he watched you get closer to your peak, but it was all falling on deaf ears as your moans got louder and louder.

“Yes!” you cried out, shaking under him; even with his weight pressing you down into the bed, it began to feel like you were floating somehow.  It was one of those orgasms that left you a little numb, with little jolts of raw pleasure that were almost too much— but your only defense was holding tighter onto him, inside and out.

“O-oh god,” he choked weakly, the movement of his thumb slowing but his hips going faster than ever.  “Fuck, fuck!”

He stopped all at once, burying himself in one last stroke as deep as he could reach, moaning lowly against the crook of your neck as he went mostly limp atop you.

After catching your breath for a few moments, you hummed softly in contentment and he carefully lifted himself up just to fall back down beside you on the bed.  He looked at you with heavy eyes but a huge smile; “You wear me out, you know that?” he breathed, reaching up to move some hair stuck to your face.

“You distract me from my work, you know that?” you countered.

“Hey, you got it done,” he defended.  “We’ll let Ben know as soon as I… you know, remember how to exist.  And use cell phones.”

“And maybe after a shower…” you suggested.  As soon as you saw the sparkle in Riley’s eye you added: “Separately.  I’ll pass out before we can make it to dinner tonight if we just end up fucking again.”

“I mean, they’ve been putting off dinner for months— why can’t we blow them off for once?” he suggested with a smirk, moving closer to you on the bed.

“I thought I’d worn you out,” you remembered with a breathless laugh, and he wrapped an arm around you to pull you into him.

“You did,” he sighed against your neck, “I’m just… easily re-inspired.”

~

It was a good thing this place was mostly empty, since this was technically somewhat sensitive information, but you figured anyone who overheard wouldn’t know enough about the conversation to glean anything too significant.  You found yourself rubbing your hands together under the table anxious as you watched Ben across from you, holding your work, and waited for his response.

“This is incredible,” Ben smiled as he read your decryption, making both you and Riley smile back with pride.  “A polyalphabetic substitution cipher, I should’ve known.”

“Yeah, any idiot would’ve known that,” Riley joked flatly.

“Where’d you find this girl?” Ben asked him, and you glanced at your boyfriend to find a little flush on his cheeks.

“You know, the technical answer is that we met at a panel lecture proposing that certain ‘random’—” he accentuated the word with a sarcastic tone and air-quotes— “radio frequencies detected by military technology might be messages from extraterrestrials—”

Ben rolled his eyes even at the passing mention of one of Riley’s more absurd conspiracy theories.

“But,” Riley continued, “I have a theory that she was actually created in a lab, specifically for me, by a team of scientists with the inexplicable goal of making me happy.”

“Oh, come on,” you giggled nervously, shoving Riley on the shoulder but failing to stop him from giving you a kiss on your heated cheek.

“That line working on you really is a testament to the fact that you’re made for each other,” Ben offered, and you decided to ignore the backhanded element of the compliment because of your sense that there was something very genuine about it.

“Look who’s here,” Riley pointed towards the front door of the restaurant, over Ben’s shoulder, causing the latter to turn in his seat and look back.  “Abigail, over here!”

She waved when she saw you, quickly approaching the table and taking her seat as she apologized for being tardy; “This is Dr. Abigail Chase,” Ben introduced her with a proud smile.

“Oh, don’t be so formal,” she gently scolded him (maybe everything she said sounded that nice with her accent, though), but she beamed as she grabbed your extended hand to shake it.  “It’s so nice to meet you, finally— I’ve heard so much from Riley.  He’s been bragging about you so much these past few months, I feel like I already know you!”

“Apparently he met her attending some panel about secret alien messages from space,” Ben told her with a smile and a yeah, I know, it’s crazy look in his eyes.

“Attending?” Riley repeated with a scoff.  “We were both speakers!”

Abigail was a little better at hiding any judgmental instinct; “How perfect,” she announced sweetly.

“She’s a real whiz with decryption though— look at this,” Ben instructed, handing the (condensed) page of your notes over to Abigail, who took it and tilted her head as she read to herself.  

“Wow,” she sighed, “you made quick work of it: Hamilton’s fortepiano?  That must be in a museum somewhere.”

“It’s still in his home in New York,” you replied quickly, “we already looked into it.”

“Did you help her at all with the solve?” Ben asked Riley suddenly, who turned to you with a slightly mischievous look in his eyes.  

“Uh,” he stalled before clearing his throat nervously, but never looking away from you— “y-yeah, I helped… in my own way.”

#riley poole x reader #riley poole smut #national treasure #justin bartha

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Demon-haunted computers are back, baby

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

As a science fiction writer, I am professionally irritated by a lot of sf movies. Not only do those writers get paid a lot more than I do, they insist on including things like "self-destruct" buttons on the bridges of their starships.

Look, I get it. When the evil empire is closing in on your flagship with its secret transdimensional technology, it's important that you keep those secrets out of the emperor's hand. An irrevocable self-destruct switch there on the bridge gets the job done! (It has to be irrevocable, otherwise the baddies'll just swarm the bridge and toggle it off).

But c'mon. If there's a facility built into your spaceship that causes it to explode no matter what the people on the bridge do, that is also a pretty big security risk! What if the bad guy figures out how to hijack the measure that – by design – the people who depend on the spaceship as a matter of life and death can't detect or override?

I mean, sure, you can try to simplify that self-destruct system to make it easier to audit and assure yourself that it doesn't have any bugs in it, but remember Schneier's Law: anyone can design a security system that works so well that they themselves can't think of a flaw in it. That doesn't mean you've made a security system that works – only that you've made a security system that works on people stupider than you.

I know it's weird to be worried about realism in movies that pretend we will ever find a practical means to visit other star systems and shuttle back and forth between them (which we are very, very unlikely to do):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

But this kind of foolishness galls me. It galls me even more when it happens in the real world of technology design, which is why I've spent the past quarter-century being very cross about Digital Rights Management in general, and trusted computing in particular.

It all starts in 2002, when a team from Microsoft visited our offices at EFF to tell us about this new thing they'd dreamed up called "trusted computing":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The big idea was to stick a second computer inside your computer, a very secure little co-processor, that you couldn't access directly, let alone reprogram or interfere with. As far as this "trusted platform module" was concerned, you were the enemy. The "trust" in trusted computing was about other people being able to trust your computer, even if they didn't trust you.

So that little TPM would do all kinds of cute tricks. It could observe and produce a cryptographically signed manifest of the entire boot-chain of your computer, which was meant to be an unforgeable certificate attesting to which kind of computer you were running and what software you were running on it. That meant that programs on other computers could decide whether to talk to your computer based on whether they agreed with your choices about which code to run.

This process, called "remote attestation," is generally billed as a way to identify and block computers that have been compromised by malware, or to identify gamers who are running cheats and refuse to play with them. But inevitably it turns into a way to refuse service to computers that have privacy blockers turned on, or are running stream-ripping software, or whose owners are blocking ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

After all, a system that treats the device's owner as an adversary is a natural ally for the owner's other, human adversaries. The rubric for treating the owner as an adversary focuses on the way that users can be fooled by bad people with bad programs. If your computer gets taken over by malicious software, that malware might intercept queries from your antivirus program and send it false data that lulls it into thinking your computer is fine, even as your private data is being plundered and your system is being used to launch malware attacks on others.

These separate, non-user-accessible, non-updateable secure systems serve a nubs of certainty, a remote fortress that observes and faithfully reports on the interior workings of your computer. This separate system can't be user-modifiable or field-updateable, because then malicious software could impersonate the user and disable the security chip.

It's true that compromised computers are a real and terrifying problem. Your computer is privy to your most intimate secrets and an attacker who can turn it against you can harm you in untold ways. But the widespread redesign of out computers to treat us as their enemies gives rise to a range of completely predictable and – I would argue – even worse harms. Building computers that treat their owners as untrusted parties is a system that works well, but fails badly.

First of all, there are the ways that trusted computing is designed to hurt you. The most reliable way to enshittify something is to supply it over a computer that runs programs you can't alter, and that rats you out to third parties if you run counter-programs that disenshittify the service you're using. That's how we get inkjet printers that refuse to use perfectly good third-party ink and cars that refuse to accept perfectly good engine repairs if they are performed by third-party mechanics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

It's how we get cursed devices and appliances, from the juicer that won't squeeze third-party juice to the insulin pump that won't connect to a third-party continuous glucose monitor:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

But trusted computing doesn't just create an opaque veil between your computer and the programs you use to inspect and control it. Trusted computing creates a no-go zone where programs can change their behavior based on whether they think they're being observed.

The most prominent example of this is Dieselgate, where auto manufacturers murdered hundreds of people by gimmicking their cars to emit illegal amount of NOX. Key to Dieselgate was a program that sought to determine whether it was being observed by regulators (it checked for the telltale signs of the standard test-suite) and changed its behavior to color within the lines.

Software that is seeking to harm the owner of the device that's running it must be able to detect when it is being run inside a simulation, a test-suite, a virtual machine, or any other hallucinatory virtual world. Just as Descartes couldn't know whether anything was real until he assured himself that he could trust his senses, malware is always questing to discover whether it is running in the real universe, or in a simulation created by a wicked god:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/descartes-was-an-optimist/#uh-oh

That's why mobile malware uses clever gambits like periodically checking for readings from your device's accelerometer, on the theory that a virtual mobile phone running on a security researcher's test bench won't have the fidelity to generate plausible jiggles to match the real data that comes from a phone in your pocket:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/google-play-malware-used-phones-motion-sensors-to-conceal-itself/

Sometimes this backfires in absolutely delightful ways. When the Wannacry ransomware was holding the world hostage, the security researcher Marcus Hutchins noticed that its code made reference to a very weird website: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com. Hutchins stood up a website at that address and every Wannacry-infection in the world went instantly dormant:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#the-matrix

It turns out that Wannacry's authors were using that ferkakte URL the same way that mobile malware authors were using accelerometer readings – to fulfill Descartes' imperative to distinguish the Matrix from reality. The malware authors knew that security researchers often ran malicious code inside sandboxes that answered every network query with fake data in hopes of eliciting responses that could be analyzed for weaknesses. So the Wannacry worm would periodically poll this nonexistent website and, if it got an answer, it would assume that it was being monitored by a security researcher and it would retreat to an encrypted blob, ceasing to operate lest it give intelligence to the enemy. When Hutchins put a webserver up at iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com, every Wannacry instance in the world was instantly convinced that it was running on an enemy's simulator and withdrew into sulky hibernation.

The arms race to distinguish simulation from reality is critical and the stakes only get higher by the day. Malware abounds, even as our devices grow more intimately woven through our lives. We put our bodies into computers – cars, buildings – and computers inside our bodies. We absolutely want our computers to be able to faithfully convey what's going on inside them.

But we keep running as hard as we can in the opposite direction, leaning harder into secure computing models built on subsystems in our computers that treat us as the threat. Take UEFI, the ubiquitous security system that observes your computer's boot process, halting it if it sees something it doesn't approve of. On the one hand, this has made installing GNU/Linux and other alternative OSes vastly harder across a wide variety of devices. This means that when a vendor end-of-lifes a gadget, no one can make an alternative OS for it, so off the landfill it goes.

It doesn't help that UEFI – and other trusted computing modules – are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to publish information that can bypass or weaken the system. The threat of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine means that UEFI and other trusted computing systems are understudied, leaving them festering with longstanding bugs:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

Here's where it gets really bad. If an attacker can get inside UEFI, they can run malicious software that – by design – no program running on our computers can detect or block. That badware is running in "Ring -1" – a zone of privilege that overrides the operating system itself.

Here's the bad news: UEFI malware has already been detected in the wild:

https://securelist.com/cosmicstrand-uefi-firmware-rootkit/106973/

And here's the worst news: researchers have just identified another exploitable UEFI bug, dubbed Pixiefail:

https://blog.quarkslab.com/pixiefail-nine-vulnerabilities-in-tianocores-edk-ii-ipv6-network-stack.html

Writing in Ars Technica, Dan Goodin breaks down Pixiefail, describing how anyone on the same LAN as a vulnerable computer can infect its firmware:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/new-uefi-vulnerabilities-send-firmware-devs-across-an-entire-ecosystem-scrambling/

That vulnerability extends to computers in a data-center where the attacker has a cloud computing instance. PXE – the system that Pixiefail attacks – isn't widely used in home or office environments, but it's very common in data-centers.

Again, once a computer is exploited with Pixiefail, software running on that computer can't detect or delete the Pixiefail code. When the compromised computer is queried by the operating system, Pixiefail undetectably lies to the OS. "Hey, OS, does this drive have a file called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope." "Hey, OS, are you running a process called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope."

This is a self-destruct switch that's been compromised by the enemy, and which no one on the bridge can de-activate – by design. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

There are models for helping your computer bust out of the Matrix. Back in 2016, Edward Snowden and bunnie Huang prototyped and published source code and schematics for an "introspection engine":

https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf

This is a single-board computer that lives in an ultraslim shim that you slide between your iPhone's mainboard and its case, leaving a ribbon cable poking out of the SIM slot. This connects to a case that has its own OLED display. The board has leads that physically contact each of the network interfaces on the phone, conveying any data they transit to the screen so that you can observe the data your phone is sending without having to trust your phone.

(I liked this gadget so much that I included it as a major plot point in my 2020 novel Attack Surface, the third book in the Little Brother series):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/

We don't have to cede control over our devices in order to secure them. Indeed, we can't ever secure them unless we can control them. Self-destruct switches don't belong on the bridge of your spaceship, and trusted computing modules don't belong in your devices.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

Image: Mike (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stillwellmike/15676883261/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic #uefi #owner override #user override #jailbreaking #dmca 1201 #schneiers law #descartes #nub of certainty #self-destruct button #trusted computing #secure enclaves #drm #ngscb #next generation secure computing base #palladium #pixiefail #infosec

[hey-scully-itsme]

underrated stephen maturin thing is when sailors get convinced the ship is haunted and/or cursed and he goes and performs exorcisms to calm them down. he does it at least twice and i think it’s a really funny thing to add to his CV. physician, naturalist, polyglot, cryptographer, cellist, sometime exorcist. truly who is doing it like him.

#put that man in a horror movie he wouldn’t even notice #There’s a joke to be made here with the exorcist book/movie but I can’t find it #more seriously I think he’s got a really interesting relationship with his faith #i wish it had been elaborated on more #the way he’s more visibly religious - visibly Catholic - after Surgeon’s Mate gets to me #it’s an integral part of who he is #and clearly has shaped him significantly in ways he’s not fully aware of (though admittedly that goes for a lot of things with him lol) #stephen maturin #aubreyad

[andmaybegayer]

annoyingly the most influential thing in my head from Murderbot is the Feed. The Feed is so appealing as a concept. A universally comprehensible and widely accessible mesh-based standard for mixed machine and human communication with a reliable subscription service, that has a ton of things publishing constantly by default but with a robust (assuming no rogue antisocial biological hypercomputers) cryptographic system for secret data. The Feed very clearly can scale up to an entire space station network or down to one person and their accoutrements forming a personal area network.

Some kind of hierarchical MQTT implemented on a mesh network with public key cryptography could get you so close if you just standardized ways to get the MQTT schema of any given endpoint. After that it's all dashboarding. Publish as much or as little information as you want and allow any given device to access that data and respond to it.

Some of this is probably leftovers from $PREVJOB. When I was doing industrial automation our entire fleet of devices lived on a strict schema under one MQTT server that I had complete read/write for so by doing clever subscriptions I could sample anything from a temperature reading from a single appliance in the back of the restaurant I was standing in to accumulating the overall power draw of every single business we were working with all at once.

On more than one occasion something silently broke and I drove up near the back of a facility in my car where I knew the IoT gateway was, connected to our local IoT network over wifi, fixed the issue, and left without telling anyone.

Unfortunately if the Feed existed people like me would make extremely annoying endpoints. To be fair canonically the Feed is absolute dogshit unless you have an Adblock. So really it would be exactly the same as in the books.

#the murderbot diaries

[rubberduckyrye]

LET'S GIVE IT EVERYTHING WE'VE GOT--

IT'S PUNISHMENT TIME!

His name is Kurochi Ouma. He just kicked the chair out from under him.

He is hanging by a noose that crushes his wind pipe, making him unable to breathe.

But in his final moments he realized all too late one crucial mistake--that he doesn't want to die. That he has things to live for.

He is the Ultimate Cryptographer. He is good at puzzle solving and mathematics. He is smart.

But smarts can't save him now. There are no ledges to stand on. There are no tools in his reach.

He tries and tries to solve the puzzle to save his own life. But he fails. This maze of Sudoku will be his tomb.

He wants to live. He wants to live. He wants to l i v e.

But it's too late.

He's already kicked the chair from under him.

#Kurochi Ouma #Danganronpa V3 #DRV3 #New Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony #Kokichi Ouma #Fanart #Fan art #my art #Execution art #I LITERALLY PUT EVERYTHING I HAD INTO THIS ART PIECE LETS GOOOOO #SO MANY SHADING LAYERS #THE EFFECTS #LITERALLY EVERYTHING I COULD #I'M SO EXCITED #ENJOY THE PAIN EVERYONE #Also I STG if tumblr doesn't put this in his tag I'm going to be FURIOUS. #References to Suicide tw #Sudoku Suicide

[ms-demeanor]

hi okay sorry idk if it's okay to ask this or not so,,,, i am a bit hesitant.

here's the thing - i just finished my bachelor's and I'm looking for a job in cybersecurity. BUT i don't know how to get into the industry or get an entry level job and i am soooo overwhelmed. and here on tumblr some of your posts made me think it's a field you work in.. so, could you give me some tips?

again sorry if this was inappropriate i am very out of my depth rn skdhdkh

So I don't really work in cybersecurity, I'm an office admin at an MSP, I'm not even a tech, it's just that I've been hanging out with hackers for so long that I'm our default security guy because I know the *bare ass minimum* about okay security practices.

That said, I got my job because of a friend I met at a hacker meetup and I know a ton of people in the industry who got jobs in the industry exactly the same way so my advice is networking, and specifically networking with infosec nerds.

This is actually easier than it might sound because infosec nerds are fucking terrible at networking AND socializing so they've set up several easy ways to be in contact with one another regularly (though this does require seeing real human beings in person).

I'd say to start looking for hackerspaces that are local to you, nearby infosec conferences, and local infosec meetups. DC (Defcon) Groups are pretty widespread groups of people who do security stuff in geographical areas that you can find based on area code, for instance I used to go to DC 213 and I know a bunch of the people in DC 949. Check to see if there's a DC group in your area and when they have open meetups and see about getting involved with them. 2600 meetups are monthly infosec meetups that happen in large-ish cities. Search the largest nearby metro area + 2600 to see if there's a meetup that happens near you (so for instance Seattle 2600, Las Vegas 2600, Little Rock 2600).

Like. How to be "in cybersecurity" can cover a lot of ground, but one of the better ways to get into it is to go find people who work in the field. And if you're not up for a meeting at this point, find the socials of these local groups and see what they're doing and what they're talking about.

If you're looking for just any "foot in the door" basic experience in cybersecurity job, the one that is ubiquitous and kind of annoying but hey it'll get you in a building and building experience is Compliance as a Service - a lot of CaaS stuff is about the basics of incident response, access policies, and setting up secure environments. If you get started doing compliance it's a pretty easy jump to doing stuff like pentesting and that opens up more opportunities depending on where you want to go with it. But. Yeah. "cybersecurity" is so broad that I'm not sure whether you're looking to find work doing serious cryptographic math stuff or if you're interested in being a contractor for an insurance company handling cyber liability stuff. The latter is a lot easier to get into, and if you're brushing up on skills by doing the latter and going to infosec meetups and cons and stuff you're going to run into people doing the former who are going to be happy to point you at stuff you're looking for.

[chocochipbiscuit]

Last Line Challenge, WIP Whenever

I was tagged by @the-cryptographer to post the last line of what I just wrote, and @anneapocalypse and @razrogue for WIP Whenever, and I've not responded to anything for a while, so! Combo platter!

Significantly more than a line, but it's the last thing I wrote for this WIP rewrite of the Awoo AU. :)

“Ms. Pentaghast?” Cassandra stiffened. The French-accented words had been spoken by an elegant woman with glossy black hair, and the sort of indeterminate age that spoke of wealth and carefully-maintained vanity more than any number of designer bags. She smelled…smoky, in a way that Cassandra had difficulty defining. Like a whiff outside an expensive cigar shop, something velvety against the back of the throat. “I don’t know you,” Cassandra said crisply. “That is true,” the other woman said. Her patronizing smile made Cassandra itch. “But I knew your brother. It is a shame that he’s died so young, no?” A cold prickle started at the back of Cassandra’s neck. She tilted her phone, quickly swiping towards Leliana’s number. Stiffly, she said, “The police are still investigating it as a missing person’s report.” “He was getting into things that he shouldn’t have. I do hope you won’t be following his steps, hm?”

I tag: @ialpiriel, @bittylildragon, @razrogue (yes, it's a tagback, but it's been a while!), @hcbunzie, @euhemeria, and @meikuree , and @foibles-fables if you are so inclined!

#choco's premium original content #choco writes

[bestworstcase]

have you heard of and/or do you have a take on the gun theory?

unfortunately.

ok. my introduction to the g.u.n. theory occurred when somebody tagged the the narnia post ‘rwby gun theory’ and i went “the hell is that” and promptly found out.

that was two years ago jesus christ

since then it has occupied the dragon’s hoard of spurious fandom bullshit i keep in my brain to provide enrichment for my flock of scathing little carrion bird thoughts. i haven’t talked about it here because i do actually make an effort to be civil.

so.

the g.u.n. theory is underpinned by a fundamental misunderstanding of symbolism and allusion. both misunderstandings arise from the same analytical error, which is the presupposition that the text is written in code. it is, so to speak, a cryptographic reading.

before getting into the weeds i will say this: as a writer, i find this cryptographic approach genuinely a little offensive in, like, an “if you even look at my writing i will beat you to death and then eat you alive” knee-jerk fuck you kind of way. and that’s because this:

a theory that there is a second, completely different interpretation of RWBY from the apparent and generally accepted one […] that RWBY contains many, many more allusions than the creators let on. [they] are intentionally hiding these allusions […] by layering them, so that something that alludes to one thing on the surface also alludes to something else on a level beneath that, resulting in the audience easily seeing the top-level allusion but missing the lower level allusion- or allusions- unless they are paying very very close attention. [ src. ]

is fucking insulting. it is anti-storytelling. the point of a story is to tell a story, not to obfuscate itself by encoding the secret ‘real’ story in the proverbial fucking blue curtains. storytelling is communicative. storytellers WANT you to understand the story, the telling, that is the whole entire fucking point. symbolism is not a secret code. it’s a flag. it’s a trail-marker. it’s a tool for guiding attention and helping the audience connect the dots.

sometimes it’s accidental because writers make subconscious connections or just repeat a motif a lot for aesthetic reasons. (<- my thing is birds. if you’ve ever read bitter snow and wondered why everything is birds it’s because i just think that birds) sometimes it’s on purpose and sometimes it is On Purpose. but it is never, ever there to tell a secret hidden story that is not the story the story appears to be. stories say what they mean and mean what they say.

yes even allegories, fables, satire, et cetera. subtext is not “”hidden meaning“” it’s just narrative information conveyed implicitly. theme is not “”hidden meaning“” it’s the abstract ideas realized through the narrative. these are things the audience is supposed to pick up on, even if they lack the analytical skill to identify and articulate precisely how or why and even if they don’t consciously recognize it. storytellers want you to get it.

ok? ok.

takes off the writer hat.

the g.u.n. theory—like all cryptographic readings—begs the question. it’s a “method of further appreciating, understanding and even predicting the events of [RWBY]” by examining the story “as a confluence of dozens of familiar fantasy and fictional narratives and influences” because the story is actually something “completely different” from what it appears to be. the g.u.n. theory purports to excavate the deeper real story from the obfuscating “surface” story, which is an obviously insane thing to do unless you first accept the premise that the actual text—the things the characters do and say on the screen—is not what the story is.

the g.u.n. theory requires that “what happens in star wars?” is more relevant to interpreting rwby than “what happens in rwby?”

that is ludicrous. it is facile. it’s nonsense.

it would be nonsense even if the g.u.n. theory limited itself to genuine allusions (like ‘the marvelous land of oz’), because while rwby is retelling marvelous land pretty fucking overtly, you do in fact have to read marvelous land in context with a) what happens in rwby and b) specifically how rwby leverages marvelous land to construct its own story, which means you also need to read it in context with the other core allusions (maiden-in-tower tales, the little prince, cinderella) and the way the rwby narrative fits the pieces together. if that sounds complicated yes, but also no, because rwby is really very straightforward about it.

but the g.u.n. theory is the brainchild of people who think the core allusions are [checks notes] lord of the rings, star wars, avatar: the last airbender, fullmetal alchemist, and sailor moon. that the atlas arc is based on the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe (on this see The Narnia Post). that salem’s primary character allusions are the wicked witch of the west, sauron, cinderella’s evil stepmother, emperor palpatine, two presumably villainous fullmetal alchemist characters, and inexplicably maleficent?—but notably NOT rapunzel / persinette / petrosinella despite her being, yanno, explicitly the girl in the tower.

looks into the camera like i’m on the office.

what is happening here—this becomes obvious the instant g.u.n. theorists construct an argument for an allusion—is a conflation of common tropes and archetypes with narratively meaningful allusion. thus, “winter is jadis because she enters in a fancy airship, wields a sword and a smaller sword that kind of looks like a wand, there’s a stone lion-head fountain in this one scene, she’s short-tempered, and she’s from the frozen polar kingdom that oppresses the animal people” which is, um, stupid.

i am like five fucking thousand words deep in comparative analysis of salem and job arguing that rwby is a jobian narrative and i will still asterisk the book of job to hell and back as probably not a deliberate allusion because the comparison relies so much on subtext and i am waiting (very! patiently!) for salem to start talking before i’ll commit to arguing for intention. there are people who are convinced winter is jadis because her main gauche vaguely resembles a wand and she’s from the polar kingdom and, like, presents as an archetypal Ice Lady.

i just—

snarls. see the narnia post.

the point is that the g.u.n. theory’s analytical framework is both explicitly countertextual (the text is not the story) and interested in aesthetics and archetypal similarity almost to the exclusion of everything else.

joseph campbell would be proud.

that interest in aesthetics, combined with the g.u.n. theory’s cryptographic approach to analysis, is why prognostication guided by the g.u.n. theory turned out wrong with stunning regularity, and also why there are g.u.n. theory posts out there that make nonsense claims like “x symbol and y symbol have the same meaning and are interchangeable because they resemble each other and are connected to the same character” (<- snarls in ‘the broken moon = the burning rose’).

i’m glad V8 put it in the ground because if i had seen g.u.n. theorists babbling nonsense about alice in wonderland during V9 i would have been unkind

#it’s bad.

[tesco-finest-aromantics]

why did cryptographers have to name this thing that...

trying to get through a computer science summer camp with the lecturer talking about nonces is not good for the lecturer nor the teenagers they're presenting to. every time they say nonce there's just a snigger across the whole room

i sure wish it was avoided in our course

#caique posts #yes we're not being mature about it but

[understandableparadox]

tHE HOMESTUCK OC TUMBLR POLL TOURNAMENT!!! YOUR CONTESTENTS!

@ineffable-gallimaufry

Tamiss Eriism

They're my trollsona! Here's the bio I used for art fight:

Your name is TAMISS ERIISM.  

Flowing through your veins is good thick VIOLET blood. While you don't care much for the hemospectrum overall, you still find yourself admiring the way it looks. You think it is VERY PRETTY, you love living underwater, and the perks it gives you are TRULY ENVIABLE.

Perhaps connected to your high status within the hemospectrum is your MASSIVE GOD COMPLEX. In your opinion, you might be the best person on the entire planet, maybe even better than THE CONDESCE HERSELF. Though you probably wouldn't say that to her face. You'll prove your great power one day by overthrowing her so everyone will respect you for your TRUE POWER. Though that's not making very much headway. Maybe some day though, with your SICKLE in hand, you'll finally prove yourself.

You are ever so slightly obsessed with CULINARY and CRYPTOGRAPHICAL HISTORY. You are in fact quite fond of most HISTORIES, and take an interest in many forms of the PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE. You even model many aspects of yourself after HEROES you saw in your books. One, a cobalt blood, gave you a great appreciation of SPIDERS AND ALL SORTS OF INSECTS, though your lifestyle gives you hardly any opportunity to view any for real. There was another from the same place on the hemospectrum as you who you also found REALLY COOL. He inspired much of your personality such as your INTEREST IN DRAMA, ROMANTIC NATURE, and AMAZING HAIR STRIPE. Sometimes you even feel like you can HEAR THEIR VOICES but that's probably normal. Despite how TOTALLY COOL you are, people hardly tend to notice you. Once your plans are complete though, that WON'T HAPPEN ANYMORE.

You also like READING TOMES OF KNOWLEDGE. Though most of the knowledge is either on BEING A HUGE LESBIAN or MATH YOU DO NOT QUITE UNDERSTAND. Or communism. It is quite a ball though.  

Your trolltag is atlanteanAscension and you speak iin a wway remiiniiscent 8f y8ur favv8riite her8es.

Halpetasprite

She's just like... well it's like if Lil Hal got tossed into Nepetasprite instead of Equiussprite. he/she pronouns. 

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

@vi-timepiece

Luciol Lanten

Limeblood, mutant, based off a firefly. The stripes on her body can glow. She/it, nonbinary. Enjoys stargazing. Matesprits with Vichtr Unikke 

Vichtr Unikke

Supposed to be goldblood, is blackblood instead because mutation. Has difficulty controlling psionics. He/they, trans man. Likes robotics. Matesprits with Luciol Lanten

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

Starlight-prism.tumblr.com

Chylia Merian

Handle: achromaticAdversary

Classpect: Sylph of Doom (Derse)

Pronouns: she/they

Chylia is a hemoanonymous limeblood troll (dancestor ghost) who is great with survival and fighting thanks to the sabertooth lusus that miraculously saved her from culling. She's very competent and was the only member of her Sgrub team to reach god tier. But they also take themself too seriously in such a way that they wind back to being silly! Like half of the things they do are for the aesthetic, to be honest. They wear a dramatic black mask and cape, and they use a giant machine gun to feel powerful and edgy. They used to dye their hair fully black, but now they partially dye it so the white roots can be partially seen. Chylia is a total edgelord and I love her and I hope you do too after reading this!

Full information and backstory here, as well as more art: https://toyhou.se/23778562.chylia-merian

Erizoh Stilde

Handle: pincushionsApex

Classpect: Knight of Rage

Pronouns: he/him

Erizoh is a jadeblood who rejected the role of his caste from an early age, faking his culling upon receiving invitation to come live in hiding with the heiress instead. He took up the hobby of plushmaking at the heiress's suggestion, and he also dabbles in cross-stitch and crochet. He's honestly pretty pretentious about his art, and is kind of an asshole, but in a certain "wet-cat" way that makes people like him regardless. He has a weird fixation with his grubhood self, specifically stabbing a plush version of it with pins. He was the first troll OC I made, and he came from a dream where he was trying to sell me a cow plushie and guilted me into buying it. I love Erizoh, he's such a loser.

More information here, as well as more art: https://toyhou.se/22085532.erizoh-stilde

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Venom draws on tumblr

Garlik Femara

A 9ft tall purple blood

She isn't the brightest (bimbo energy) and is all around friendly

She was "brainwashed" by the clurch because they saw her as a useful asset but she did not want to be a subjugulator and was showing signs of rebellion.

She is a killing machine but the circumstances are very specific, he trigger is a list. Most specifically a list of names but if given any list something in her brain is triggered to bring forward the highblood rage.

Nahlee Rovian

He is just silly.

He is just a guy who would eat a slice of cheese off of the floor, cheese of unknown origin. 

He is a sweet and funny guy and is way too easily trusting. 

If this guy was a playlist it would be "weird al" and "ninja sex party".

He smells funny.

No rizz.

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@chococookiez

Novasu Kirazi

- not pictured: her limeblood matesprit who she would kill for

- would overthrow the government and destroy the hemospectrum if they could

- WILL defeat you with the power of friendship and a gun she found

Mauami Sigera

- who is this creature and how did it get here

- perpetual °^° face and may or may not have arms

- it's just trying it's best

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@thehomestucker-surgeburbofficial

Gaemir Jurami

Your name is GAEMIR JURAMI. 

You tend to enjoy things like DIGGING UP FOSSILS and PRESERVED ORGANISMS. You also like to COLLECT COOL ROCKS you find outside your hive. Occasionally you will BREAK THEM OPEN to see if ANYTHING IS INSIDE. You enjoy watching DRAMATIC AND SAD FILMS from time to time, as well as ROMANCE MOVIES. Your favorite actor has to be by far, TROLL TOM HANKS.

On DIGCORB, your trolltag is skeletalTragedy and you tend to speak R4ther dully. In short, brief sentences. Usu4lly in 4 very serious m4tter.

He/They

Ceferi Fetris

Your name is CEFERI FETRIS.

You enjoy GARDENING. Mostly things like PUMPKINS or BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS that you give to your MATESPRIT and MOIRAIL. You also enjoy STARGAZING. It never fails to relax you. You tend to DRAW WHAT YOU SEE in the stars as well. Sometimes it's just MEANINGLESS SYMBOLS, other times it’s FULL SCENARIOS. You may even indulge in your hobby of PHOTOGRAPHY and TAKE PHOTOS OF THE STARS too. You also have a BIG LIBRARY, full of FICTION BOOKS, mostly the GOOD SCI-FI ONES and MAGICAL STORIES of WIZARDS.

Your trolltag is floralGallery and you speak wit>h hope and beaut>y in your heart. Al>l> is wel>l> in t>he presence of you.

(SIDE NOTE: She Is Also A Trans Woman!!!) She/Vir

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@spaceypineapple

Fendir Sanqui

fendir's a bronzeblood adventurer who idolizes troll indiana jones! hes got a pretty large collection of artifacts and loves learning about history. he also really likes myths and legends!! hes a very emotional guy who wears his heart on his sleeve, though he often (unintentionally) ignores the emotions of others. he's very very silly.

Trenas Maladi

trenas is a rustblood author who has the worst case of writers block ever seen. she's very tired all of the time and comes off a bit harsh, but she means well!! she's very nosy and knowing other people's business. she's very good at giving out advice to people too. she enjoys monsters and romance stories ABOUT monsters.

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@hareofhrairHareofhrair

Shafan Nishal

Shafan has been around since 2015, making friends in the tumblr ftc! They're a Brer Rabbit pastiche, a laid back traveling musician, trickster and occasional smuggler, and they love nothing better than sharing a smoke, swapping a story, and stealing from rich folks. A more or less homeless vagrant they wander from place to place, breaking hearts and singing songs. They make friends wherever they go, but they have a powerful fear of commitment that keeps them from getting too close to anyone. As soon as someone starts looking too attached, they skip town, and boy can they run! Shafan is faster on foot across open ground than just about any troll alive, at least according to them, and they're always happy to prove it with a race. So if you've got a story to tell, a song to share, or you just need someone to deal you weed for a (mostly) fair price, look for the white haired rusty playing banjo on the corner and come say hello!

Popahv Arlech

Popahv came from an amazing homestuck ttrpg campaign called Binary System, which we even tried turning into a fanventure for a little bit there! Popahv is just a sweet little guy with some serious attachment issues. He loves his friends more than anything and thinks it's his responsibility to take care of them, whether they want him to or not. Add this to an exploit in the game giving him some extremely overpowered mind control powers, and Popahv becomes just a little problematic! He means well, honestly. He just wants everyone to be happy and peaceful and never ever leave him. Meet the original Friendship Yandere, Popahv!

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Mythfan12.tumblr.com

Meadys Serpin

A rustblood museum curator/rebel supplier, Sylph of Rage, living embodiment of customer service face hiding blind fury

Wessun Ghunne

Oliveblood living out in the desert since birth, Maid of Void, you know those background applications that you never see pop up but are vital to the computer running? that's him

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@ask-swagger-dagger-trolls

Taluco Ialens

First started as a Trollsona, but after a while turned into her own thing and became a Fantroll. She is a Mutantblood due to some deep lore which will take to long to explain. She is an Artist and a big fan of fruity drinks

Soyuka Detoxa

Soyuka was a former escort in a corrupted church, with the help of Taluco (First Character Entry), she was able to turn the once brothel into a proper place of worship. She managed to be quaded with a Death God and a Rebel Leader...so...bonus bragging points for her. She speaks Alternian Spanish.

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@dzcool3

Teranz Zitchk

he found his own corpse in the woods and that made him a channer. he taxidermies badly and hates everyone. has a real self-pity complex

Kizats Hatrak

a member of the troll men in black. a wildly incompetent bully who still manages to make and believe wildly inaccurate conspiracy theories despite being behind many herself. She knows shes kind of a terrible person.  

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@sekhmentson

Cysgod Quared

Mad scientist

Betroy Focalx

Local Horoscope Writer

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@tasonix10 for tumblr and Tasonix12 on Twitter 8-]3

Noizod Explos 

Noizod Explos is the dancestor of Terriy Explos (My trollsona). Noizod is a troll with an interest of the weird and mysterious, mainly in mad scientists and old food mascots! Noizod is a heir of time/heart, a derse dreamer, And A rust blood. Their typing quirk is misspelling words sometimes and replacing every 7th word with the number 7.

Noizod has low psionics, yet is cursed with the visions of the past, which has led them to try and be like their ancestor, the Observer.

Noizod’s strife Kind is A yo-yo, and lacks a lusus.

Turpen Cansoi

Turpen Cansoi is an indigo blood that owes money to higher bloods, and because of this he’s been DEMOTED TO LOWER CASTE STATUS. Now he lives his life as a low caste blood and tries to make a Quick buck for a living. Turpen is either a maid/Page of breath And a derse dreamer.

There’s Not that much about Turpen other than that. Except the casino theme and being The Session starter, thus Why his trollian Tag is “wheezingCoupier”

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@ethersmith

Sutoka Reddol

4 foot 5. Lesbiab. About 9 sweeps old but sgrub.

A rustblooded thief and thief of void skilled in pocketpicking, lockpicking, parkouring, sneaking, knife throwing, yoyo tricks and flute playing. She happens to possess psionics that let her hide her horns and grip onto surfaces. She's also immune to most poisons. Except alcohol. She'll pass out at the slightest sip of alcoholic beverages. Gunfire stuns her. Her lusus is a rat and her typing quirk adds a lowercase letter after a capital letter. Llike Tthis.

Eeliza Lindel

8 foot. 11 sweeps old.

Just about the least competent fuchsiablood to live twice. Her skills include being okay at leadership, insulting lower castes and making enemies. Formerly the heiress of her planet Liesteria, now the boss of a mafia known as the Kalpon gang. Her lusus is a big ol' gaggle of eels that do not make the same enemies as her. Her quirk surrounds individual words in square brackets and duplicates the letter e.

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@waffletardis

Sarnen Rambuc

Sarnen is a talented prankster, thief, and craftswoman. She mostly tinkers but loves to try inventing her own machines, staying positive throughout the trials and errors. Her favorite prank involves the use of her robotic hands hidden under her gloves, they are detachable, so imagine someone’s surprise when they try to give her a handshake and they seemingly pull her hand straight off! Despite her apparent hunger for shenanigans, she genuinely cares about others, and no one will earn the ire of her foolery unless they are rude to someone she cares about. (Such as her matesprit, she loves her matesprit so much she will not hesitate to tell someone about her matesprit) 

Idzill Stoatl

Idzill has a passionate love for art, and can be seen displaying many skills of the craft. Although Idzill is also quite impatient if they are not actively doing anything, and usually goes straight from a zero to one hundred when trying to solve a problem. Tongue gets stuck on something frozen? Try to skillfully use a knife. Art not making the money you want? Go straight to becoming a vigilante assassin… Idzill uses their dexterous skills to be quite the terrifying assassin, though they try their best to only accept hits for people they would consider bad. Idzill does not speak and uses signs 🪧 with their quirk painted onto them to communicate, that’s one way to view sign language i suppose…

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Part 1

#homestuck #polls #tumblr polls #fan kids #fan trolls #fan charubs

[neo-axe-oc-thoughts]

𓆟 COD OC - Guppy 𓆟

Quick note Guppy is an COD AU OC, xyr AU is a mix of Black Ops (I, II and Cold War) and the Rebooted Modern Warfare (I, II, III). I'll make a separate post about the universe timeline, and what is/isn't canon.

General

Name : Harlow Rayner

Nickname(s) : Guppy

Age : 26

Birthday : Feb 9th 1997

Nationality : Australian

Language(s) : English, Auslan

Blood Type : A- (A NEG)

Disability : Autism

Gender : Queer

Sexuality : Grey AroAce

Pronouns : xe/xem/xyrs | ze/zir | they/them

Affiliations : Cryptologic Systems Op Navy, Aus Intelligence Corps Army

Rank : Intelligence Analyst

Callsign : Prophet 0-1

Affiliations

Cryptographer "Bell"

Agent Alex Mason

Special Agent Frank Woods

Lieutenant Commander David Mason

Station Chief Laswell

Sergeant John "Soap" MacTavish

Sergeant Kyle "Gaz" Garrick

Lieutenant Simon "Ghost" Riley

Captain John Price

Relationships

Sibling : Isaac Rayner , younger brother - Alive, minimal contact

Father : Charlie Rayner - Alive, no contact

Mother : Evelyn Rayner - Alive, no contact

Bell their Zizi, (uncle/aunt not biologically related)

Appearance

Hair Colour : Dark Auburn Brown

Hair Style : Man bun, wavy/curly hair

Eye Colour : Brown Dravite

Height : 166cm / 5' 5" ft

Build : average

Beauty Marks : Light freckles across bridge of nose, moles scattered across body, stretch marks mainly on hips, upper thighs and upper arms

Scars : top surgery, chip missing from right ear

Tattoos : 3 Gill like tattoos across sides of ribcage, jelly fish wrapped across mid right bicep, two guppies on inner top of zir left forearm, wave band on right leg, a coral piece from left hip down thigh, circuit inspired tattoo from left collar bone to top left shoulder blade.

Face Claim : Erika Lindner

Voice Claim : Soren (GOG) /Rai Thistlethwayte (Thirsty Merc) /Kaoru Kurita (Wonder Egg Priority)

Personality and Negative Traits

Guppy comes across as strange or awkward to neurotypical individuals, and mostly gets along better with other neurodivergent people.

Guppy is very hard working, if the project is important they are unwilling to stop working even if it means ignoring xyrs body's needs.

Dependable : When it comes to those xe trusts, Guppy is incredibly trustworthy and reliable. A steady presence in their life, who would do absolutely anything to make them feel safe.

Intuitive : but often second guesses zirself, and ends up ignoring xyr intuition.

Has a habit of isolating themselves away from others, as well as repressing zir emotions often bottling them up since they struggle to express xem in a way that makes sense to others.

Overly empathetic as a response to zir being parentified during childhood.

Stubborn : Often unwilling to do things that go against what xe believes or what those xe trust has taught them.

Virtues and Vices : self-reliance, stubbornness, obsessive (wont stop until something is done), caution, dependability, Intuition, Tenacity, Impatience, Ingenuity.

Skills and Abilities

Basic Combat Training

Special Skills : Analyst, Cryptography, coding, hacking and intel gathering.

Favourites

Colour : dusty orange

Food : chicken parmi

Drink : Mocha

Flower : Purple Phlox subulata

Trivia

Guppy is right-handed, but working towards being ambidextrous.

Zir listens to music sung in other languages or metal to focus, annoying whoever they share a workspace with.

Has a more dark sense of humor, but hates that that sort of stuff makes xem almost laugh.

Spent most of zir spare time with Bell, and has picked up a couple Russian words and their knowledge on cryptography.

Surprisingly xe is a good cook and baker, spending time learning different recipes especially ones that Bell remembers enjoying from their childhood.

AN : I'm going to be making xyr backstory a separate post, since it's still a work in progress. I might post a small bit about Guppy's current concept/idea for their place in the story.

I also took inspiration from @/kaitaiga and @/sleepyconfusedpotato COD OC posts. Which is the second time I've taken inspiration from Sleepy, first time being my COD MW age head canon post.

#cod oc #my oc #call of duty #call of duty oc #mwii #cod mwii #call of duty mwii #call of duty modern warfare #modern warfare #black ops cold war #military oc #australian oc #cod mw2 #oc profile #original character #cod oc profile #oc reference #oc reference sheet #original character profile #task force 141 #task force 141 oc #call of duty original character

[mitigatedchaos]

Asker,

Obviously, many people will have trouble accepting your sincerity, as they have no means to tell it apart from a less sincere maneuver.

I am not going to post a detailed analysis of your situation and provide detailed advice. I am not going to explain the reasoning behind that; a full explanation would be quite lengthy, constituting its own long post.

However, I can provide the following general advice, as it is applicable to sincere members of all contemporary political factions.

It is not known exactly what will occur in the future. It is also not known which contemporary political faction, if any, will win.

However, given that political movements in the present attempt to misrepresent and censor information about the past, it is likely that political movements in the future will attempt to misrepresent and censor information about the present.

Books last a long time if kept in a controlled environment, but computers are typically inoperable within 20 years. It is therefore recommended that sincere members of contemporary political factions archive information to long-lasting, offline, optical media, particularly official reports and documents produced by major institutions.

When the censoring wing of a political faction is powerful, they will remove media from public and institutional libraries and destroy it. This is the obvious attack, and there are reports that this is going on right now.

Less obvious, but still the obvious criticism of archiving, is that the censoring faction will attempt to disconnect censored works from institutional authority, denying their use in open political arguments, increasing the amount of work that an opponent has to do by requiring them to re-connect the work to authority. (Other times they may simply alter documents years later - if they own the server that stores them, they can do so.)

However, if the work is at least archived, then a successor government can use it to restore the historical record, as part of constructing their new legitimizing basis for supplanting the previous government, and more distant governments can use it to maintain the historical record.

Comparison to past documents obviously won't move the minds of footsoldiers, but it does help to contextualize things for people who aren't as tribalistic.

(There's more to be said about this, and a more detailed analysis to be conducted. Also you should probably use some kind of cryptographic signature.)

#politics #asks #metapolitics

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Async mugwump linkdump

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON: YA Fantasy, Room 207, 10 a.m.; Signing, 11 a.m.; Teaching Writing, 2 p.m., Room 213CD.

For 20+ years, I've processed all the information that came over my transom by blogging – mulling on why something I saw in the world caught my attention and trying to summarize it for strangers. This turns out to be a very powerful way to do a lot of different kinds of mental work:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

With Pluralistic, the solo blog I founded 4 years ago, I've moved into longer, more synthetic essays that try to connect the things that caught my attention today with all those things I've written about for the past two decades. That's also proven very fruitful:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

But this move to longer works has a downside: sometimes I'll arrive at the week's end and have a list of things that caught my attention without there being any obvious way to connect them, and when that happens, I devote a Saturday edition to a linkdump. There's been 15 of these so far:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Welcome, then, to the 16th Pluralistic linkdump, and a warning, this one starts with an obituary.

Ross Anderson was one of the heroes of the cryptographic revolution, a brilliant scientist and communicator, a fantastic activist, and a scorching curmudgeon. Ross died this week. He was 67, and had chronic heart issues as well as long covid:

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2024/03/29/rip-ross-anderson/

There's so much that's been written about Ross and his legacy already, and there's doubtless more to come, but I've picked out two pieces to point you to. The first is from Danny O'Brien, who was also the guy who talked me down off the ledge the first time Ross flamed me on a public mailing list, leaving me bleeding and furious:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868983

As Danny says, Ross was "the model of a politically and socially involved computer scientist," a man whose blazing intellect, fierce moral center and relentless curiosity inspired a generation of technologists to think about politics, and a generation of political activists to think about technology. Few of Ross's eulogizers (thus far) have mentioned how Ross's passion came out as fury, and – as someone who counted Ross as a friend and inspiration – I think this is a serious omission. It's hard to imagine Ross doing all that he did without understanding the anger that – along with his ethics – fueled his passion.

(Compare with @neil-gaiman's classic essay on the anger of Terry Pratchett:)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-angry-not-jolly-neil-gaiman

The other obit that I want to point you to comes from Bill Buchanan, one of Ross's closest collaborators. Buchanan's memorial for Ross does a superb job of rounding up Ross's technical contributions to the field of security engineering:

https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/ross-anderson-rip-59233c75fadf

Buchanan embeds videos for some of Ross's best speeches, links to his key papers (including the classic "Programming Satan's Computer," on "programming a computer which gives answers that are subtly and maliciously wrong at the most inconvenient moment possible), reminiscences of Great Moments In Ross Anderson, and terrific, lay-friendly breakdowns of some of Ross's key mathematical work.

As an unreasonable, angry person, I take great inspiration from people who channel their unreasonable anger to socially beneficial conduct – like whistleblowers. After Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge was totaled by the 95,000-ton cargo ship MV *Dali(, a vast cohort of instant experts in structural engineering, sea freight and shipbuilding has taken to the internet with a slurry of takes on the Meaning Of the Bridge.

Some of these are very stupid indeed, like the idea that somehow "DEI" caused the collision. But you don't have to be an expert in maritime issues or civil engineering to understand the importance of this report from The Lever about shipping giant Maersk's culture of retaliation against whistleblowers:

https://www.levernews.com/feds-recently-hit-cargo-giant-in-baltimore-disaster-for-silencing-whistleblowers/

Maersk is the company that chartered the MV Dali; Maersk is also a key player in the cartel that controls the world's shipping. Maersk was just sanctioned by the Labor Department for retaliating against a whistleblower who complained of unsafe conditions on the ships that Maersk chartered:

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/OPA/news%20releases/Maersk-Sec%20Findings%20-FINAL%20071423_Redacted.pdf

Maersk's policy required employees to bring concerns to their supervisors before alerting the Coast Guard or others. This is not how that stuff is supposed to work. OSHA called this policy “repugnant” and a “reprehensible and an egregious violation of the rights of employees,” which “chills them from contacting the [Coast Guard] or other authorities without contacting the company first.”

The whistleblower – chief mate on the Safmarine Mafadi – complained of "unrepaired leaks, unpermitted alcohol consumption onboard, inoperable lifeboats, faulty emergency fire suppression equipment, and other issues." We don't know (yet) what happened on the Dali, but it's obvious that a company that retaliates against whistleblowers, rather than heeding their warnings, is prioritizing covering its ass, not operating safely.

Which brings me (inevitably) to Boeing, and to poor John "Swampy" Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower who took his own life earlier this month. Barnett's suicide has stirred up similar low-yield online chatter focused on whether Boeing assassinated Barnett, a question that categorically cannot be answered through the method of arguing with internet strangers.

But there is a lot to say about Barnett: in particular, there's the substance of his whistleblowing, the specifics of his complaints about Boeing. For that, we can turn to the always-fantastic Maureen Tkacik, whose American Prospect piece "Suicide Mission" is definitive:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

Tkacik does a great job of painting a picture of Swampy as a member of the tribe of unreasonable and angry people who refuse to sideline principle in order to get along. More importantly, Tkacik shows us what made Swampy so angry: a company that was hell-bent on lobotimizing itself by forcing out any technical expert who might point out inconvenient truths about the safety risks of high-profit strategies.

As Tkacik writes, Boeing once thought about "knowledge" in terms of expertise that could be brought to bear on the unimaginably complex task of making reliable, airworthy jets. But under the "value-engineering" financialized culture that arose after the McDonnell-Douglas merger, the company viewed knowledge as "intellectual property, trade secrets, and data." In other words, the point of knowledge was rent-extraction, not safety.

At the root of this transformation was the Jack Welch protege Jim "Prince Jim" McNerney, the former 3M CEO who took the helm at Boeing. McNerney was openly contemptuous of the company's senior engineers, branding them "phenomenally talented assholes" and rewarding managers who found ways to force them out of the company. It was McNerney who decided to produce the 787 "Dreamliner" in non-union shops, far from Seattle and its phenomenally talented assholes. Instead of these engineers, McNerney turned to Boeing suppliers to do the major engineering work on the 787 – despite the fact that many of these suppliers "lacked engineering departments."

The 787 was, infamously, a $80b-over-budget boondoggle, haunted by technical failures. Swampy was part of the "cleanup crew" that tried to salvage the 787, and witnessed first-hand how the company purged all the engineers who managed to ship the 787 despite McNerney and his "value engineers" and retaliated against workers who tried to unionize the South Carolina facility.

In particular, it was safety inspector who came in for the most savage punishment. When the FAA decided to let Boeing mark its own homework – hiring in-house safety inspectors to replace government inspectors – they pretended to believe that these Boeing-payrolled inspectors would be able to operate independently of Boeing's leadership. The inspectors tried to operate this way (not least because they were criminally liable for oversights that occurred on their watch) and McNerney's Boeing came down on them like a ton of aviation-grade aluminum.

To further neuter these inspectors, Boeing management ordered the inspectors to outsource their work to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising – that is, the FAA outsourced safety checks to Boeing inspectors, and the inspectors outsourced those checks to the mechanics themselves. Tkacik: "Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter."

Swampy kept careful records of every way in which this system produced unsafe aircraft and an unsafe workplace – including the day he discovered that someone had removed 400+ defective parts from the rejects box and installed them in aircraft in order to meet deadlines. Swampy's reports were key to establishing that the company's much-trumpeted "improvements" in safety reports were down to a culture of "bullying" – not any improvement in safety itself.

When Boeing went to war against Swampy, they barely bothered to pretend that they were playing by the rules. He was told one day that he was four-weeks into a 60-day "corrective action" that no one had told him about. The "corrective action" paperwork had a blank for Swampy's comments. He wrote, "Leadership wants nothing in email so they maintain plausible deniability. It is obvious leadership is just looking for items to criticize me on so I stop identifying issues. I will conform!"

Shortly thereafter, he was forced out altogether. Managers who tried to bring him on their teams were told that no one was allowed to hire John Barnett. His name appeared on a secret internal memo entitled "Quality Managers to Fire." Meanwhile, the value of Boeing shares had tripled.

After Boeing's 737 Maxes started falling out of the sky, Swampy's painstaking documentation of the flaws in the 787's production took on a new urgency. A program of random inspections of 787s found major defects in all of them ("Boeing Looked for Flaws in Its Dreamliner and Couldn’t Stop Finding Them" –WSJ). An Aviation Week diagram of problem spots with the 787 marked red arrows over "every single section, from the tip of the nose to the horizontal stabilizers":

https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/new-boeing-787-fix-details-reveal-extent-gap-check-challenge

Boeing's war on "brilliance" did its work: after everyone who understood how to make a safe aircraft was forced out of the company, financialized CEOs were able to cut corners on safety, triple the share-price, scoop up billions in government subsidies and bailouts, all without those pesky "phenomenally talented assholes" pointing out that they were going get (lots of) people killed.

Tkacik closes by saying that Swampy's former work colleagues refuse to believe he killed himself. A former executive told her "I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys…It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere." I confess that I don't know what to make of that, but I'll say this: if Boeing killed Swampy, that's just one of hundreds of murders they committed. Whether or not Swampy's death was their fault, the deaths of everyone who went down on the 737 Maxes that crashed is on their hands.

That's what "profits before people" means, after all: sacrificing human lives to make yourself richer. It's the foundational tenet of the conservative movement, though that impulse is often checked by other factors, like human decency. It's only when sociopaths get a sustained run at leadership that you see what they really want.

Which brings me to the UK, which has been governed by the Conservative Party for 14 years. The Tories are tipped to get destroyed in the next election, and a long article in the New Yorker by Sam Knight catalogs the many ways in which Tory rule has devastated the UK:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/01/what-have-fourteen-years-of-conservative-rule-done-to-britain

The thing is, after 14 years, it's impossible for the Tories to blame anyone else for the state of the UK. With strong Parliamentary majorities, Conservatives were able to govern as they pleased – the only compromises they made were between their own internal factions. The ideological commitment to making the rich richer, privatizing everything, subordinating governance to market forces – that's all them.

It's all them: the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars, on them. The catastrophic traffic, housing, jobs market, and precarity, on them. Plummeting health, on them. The austerity, on them. The withering of the country's courts and prisons and police, its wilderness, its programs for young people and pensioners, its public health, its diplomatic corps, its road maintenance – on them.

A country where the police can't afford to prosecute burglaries – on them (4% of burglaries are prosecuted). The 2.5 year delay between a rape arrest and its trial? On them. Mass closures of schools that are literally crumbling? On them.

43% of the countries courts have closed. On them. Cuts to prison funding, coupled with longer sentences? On them.

And of course, Brexit – on them. Every part of it. The referendum. The referendum question. The failure to negotiate a deal with the EU. All on them. The collapse in British living standards, all on them. The fact that the 20% richest households in the UK have been untouched by all this? Also on them. But you might not notice it in London, where people earn an average of 400% more than people in Nottingham.

The only growth sector outside of London are the Citizens Advice Bureaux, whose client rosters are growing even as their funding is cut. Where the CAB once primarily catered to people who couldn't make ends meet due to disability, unemployment and other reliable predictors of economic distress, today, CAB advisors are seeing homeowners, people working two jobs. Desperation is "like a black hole, dragging more and more people in,"

More Conservative growth: Tories presided over a doubling in the rate of NHS antidepressant prescriptions, and a 20% rise in long-term health conditions. No wonder Tory Britain had the world's worst pandemic outcomes for a wealthy nation – that's on them, too.

Knight's article closes with a Tory MP who believes that "the key thing for the Conservatives now is to be more conservative…Toryism must have its day again."

We can't count on oligarchs to rescue us from oligarchy – not even when oligarchy's failures push society to the breaking point. There's always a rationalization explaining why we just had to lean harder into oligarchy.

You hear echoes of this in the pro-monopoly choir, whose squeals of outrage at the rise of a new anti-monopoly movement grow louder even as monopolism's failures grow clearer. One of the more tangible expressions of monopoly's failures is the Ticketmaster/Livenation octopus, which controls the entire live music industry – key venues, promotions, and ticketing. Ticketmaster fucks over music fans, but it also cheats famous musicians, the kinds of people with big microphones, so we know a lot about how bad it is:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/

Of course, the fact that Swifties hate Ticketmaster lets the pro-monopolists dismiss critics as foolish young girls, not Very Serious People Who Understand Economics and thus can see that Ticketmaster's monopoly is Good, Actually.

Last week, Congressman Bill Pascrell dumped a ton of litigation documents related to Ticketmaster's sleaze, and Matt Stoller broke them down:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/explosive-new-documents-unearthed

The docs reveal how Ticketmaster's system of (formerly) secret kickbacks let it choke out any competitor, so that it could charge fans more and pay artists less. The mechanics of the scam are beautifully laid out in Stoller's post – as is the many ways in which it violated both the law and Ticketmaster's numerous consent decrees arising from its previous lawbreaking.

This kind of scam breakdown is essential. It's easy to think that we, as mere normies, can't hope to understand the machinations of the corporations that prey on us. But once you pierce the veil of performative complexity, what's left behind is a set of crude tricks and transparent ruses.

Here's one of those transparent ruses: Discord's terms of service require Discord users to actively opt out of its "binding arbitration" system. Binding arbitration is when you sign a contract saying you can't sue the company no matter how much it harms you – instead, you promise to have your disputes heard by an "arbitrator" (a fake judge paid by the company that screwed you). Unsurprisingly, these fake judges are awfully tolerant of their employers' crimes.

Discord says that once you click through its garbage legalese novella, you have just a few days to opt out of this binding arbitration clause – if you happen to miss that fine print, you have "consented" to giving up your legal rights.

But every time Discord changes its ToS, the clock for opting out starts ticking again, and Discord has just changed (that is, worsened) its ToS again:

https://discord.com/terms

That means that if you send an email right now to [email protected] with "I am confirming that as of the date of this email, I am choosing to opt out of binding arbitration to settle disputes with Discord" in the body, you can escape this consent theater:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112175832989845038

Consent theater is a particularly galling corporate ruse – the idea that we chose to allow them to abuse us. Consent theater gets more outrageous by the day. Take Soofa, who operate streetside digital kiosks that identify you by grabbing your phone's unique wifi and Bluetooth identifiers:

https://gizmodo.com/digital-kiosks-snatch-your-phones-data-when-you-walk-by-1851368948

Soofa sells this data to advertisers – claiming that by walking down a public street, you "consented" to being tracked and sold.

The only reason this flies is that the US hasn't passed a federal consumer privacy law since 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from telling people which VHS cassettes you took home. Congress keeps on failing to pass a privacy law, despite garbage companies like Soofa.

But that hasn't stopped the administrative agencies from acting to defend your privacy! The FTC just dropped its latest Privacy and Data Security Update, a greatest hits list of the actions the Commission took while Congress failed:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2024.03.21-PrivacyandDataSecurityUpdate-508.pdf

One of the best things about the current administration is the number of extremely competent regulators who know exactly how much power they have and aren't afraid to use it to help the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

The new FTC report, which details how the Commission's existing powers let it go after the commercial surveillance industry from smart doorbells to review fraud, from kids' programming to medical data, from lax security to data-breaches, is a bright spot in an otherwise grim week.

One more bright spot, then, before I wind up this linkdump. All week, I've been humming a half-remembered lyric, "come on baby/you're a link in this chain/put your hands together/and get free of the pain." For the life of me, I couldn't place it.

Last night, I searched for it (using Kagi, the post-Google search engine I've been paying for for the past month, and which I'm loving) and discovered that I had somehow completely forgotten a whole-ass band that I once loved: Toronto's Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, whom I saw live on many occasions.

The mystery lyric came from "Death is the Great Awakener," a fucking banger of a post-gospel track that I've been listening to on nonstop repeat as I wrote this. It's a hell of a tune and I'm intensely grateful to have it back in my life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6RUb63Tx3w

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/30/dewey-502/#rip-ross-anderson

Image: Waffleboy https://www.flickr.com/photos/waffleboy/28198395465/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#linkdump #linkdumps #obits #ross anderson #rip #cryptographers #ftc #privacy #deliverism #tories #ukpoli #locational privacy #soofa #consent #consent theater #whistleblowers #corruption #francis scott key bridge #baltimore #maersk #osha #dali #boeing #John Barnett #aviation #maureen Tkacik #binding arbitration #discord #monopoly #ticketmaster

[burntotears]

all alex & kyle scenes | 110 i don't want to miss a thing ⇨ part two

I'll start with the Fibonacci sequence, and then maybe Shor's algorithm. My dad wasn't some type of genius cryptographer. He was a small-town man. You're right. Well, maybe he used these alien symbols to send you a coded message. The symbols representing the English alphabet. It's possible.

#alex manes #kyle valenti #kylex #roswell new mexico #rnmedit #roswellnmedit #roswell nm #roswellnm #rnm #tyler blackburn #michael trevino #cwladsdaily #(rnm) #(alex) #(kyle) #(kylex) #(my gif) #(mine) #(visual) #kylexscenes

[eightyonekilograms]

Suppose we discovered that Snow Crash-style mind viruses-- i.e. images which killed you if you looked at them-- were real and we knew how to make them. The inevitable result would be total authoritarian lockdown of the Internet and computing infrastructure in general: no more sharing images, all computers would have cryptographically-verified boot chains and run only government-authorized OS images and applications, etc. There would be a lot of protesting about this, but ultimately the stakes would be so high that really no other outcome would be possible. This doesn't mean it would be a good thing: it would suck complete ass, but that suckage doesn't mean it wouldn't happen or, arguably, need to happen.

I think this is an underdiscussed worry of mine about AI. There are a bunch of AI-riskers now making the case that AI safety requires extensive regulation and monitoring of AI-capable computing devices (which in practice, is all of them, since computers are general-purpose devices), and in response, a bunch of classical technolibertarian types going "they're lying to you, don't fall for it! it's all a scheme for power centralization!", and, like, I've seen very few people mention that these two positions aren't mutually exclusive. It could be simultaneously true that AI is so dangerous that by its very nature it necessitates stringent control of computing resources and that this would be really shitty and in practice mostly used for oppressive government control of society.

And yeah, that's a really depressing thought. A lot about this is really depressing.