SCP
The SCP Foundation is a collaborative speculative fiction project hosted on a wiki platform, depicting a clandestine organization dedicated to identifying, securing, containing, and protecting anomalous objects, entities, locations, and phenomena that defy natural laws, thereby safeguarding global normalcy from existential threats.[1] Originating from an anonymous post on 4chan's /x/ paranormal board in June 2007, which introduced SCP-173—a kinetic concrete statue that attacks when unobserved and cannot be destroyed by conventional means—the concept quickly expanded through user contributions, evolving into a structured repository of procedural documentation styled as redacted government reports.[2][3] By January 2008, the project migrated to a dedicated Wikidot site, fostering a community-driven ecosystem where contributors author entries under strict creative guidelines emphasizing clinical tone, internal consistency, and emergent lore without a single canonical narrative.[1] As of 2025, the archive encompasses over 7,000 primary SCP entries alongside ancillary tales, canons, and GOI (Groups of Interest) files, blending elements of cosmic horror, science fiction, and urban fantasy to explore themes of bureaucratic containment versus uncontrollable anomaly.[1] The project's influence extends to licensed media adaptations, including indie video games like SCP: Containment Breach (2012), animated series, and prose anthologies, while its open-licensing model under Creative Commons has sustained a decentralized, volunteer-moderated community resistant to corporate co-option.[3] Defining characteristics include the absence of protagonists or overarching plot, prioritizing reader immersion through fragmented, amnestic-laced narratives that simulate classified dossiers, though this format has occasionally amplified pseudoscientific mimicry leading to real-world misinformation risks in unvetted discussions.[4]Organizations
Political parties
The initials SCP denote several political parties, primarily in Sudan and Syria, reflecting communist and social democratic ideologies amid regional histories of authoritarianism and civil conflict. The Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), founded in 1946 as an anticolonial movement initially known as HASITO, evolved into a Marxist-Leninist organization that played a pivotal role in Sudan's early independence era, including participation in governments and opposition against military regimes.[5] The party faced repeated bans and internal splits, such as the 1971 formation of the Revolutionary Leadership faction following a failed coup, yet maintained underground influence through labor unions and intellectual networks.[6] By the 2019 revolution, the SCP advocated for civilian rule and critiqued Islamist governance, though its rigid ideological stance limited broader alliances.[7] The Syrian Communist Party (SCP), tracing origins to communist cells in the 1920s and formal adherence to the Comintern in 1928, achieved historic visibility when leader Khalid Bakdash secured a parliamentary seat in 1954, marking the first elected communist in an Arab legislature.[8] As the second-largest legal opposition party by 1987 under Ba'athist rule, it navigated repression by aligning selectively with the regime against Islamists while preserving doctrinal commitments to class struggle and anti-imperialism.[9] Factional divisions, including the Political Bureau variant, persisted into the 21st century, with the party condemning the 2011 uprising's militarization as a deviation from mass mobilization.[8] The Sudanese Congress Party (SCP), established in 1986 from earlier Umma Party dissidents, positions itself as a centre-left, pro-secular force emphasizing social democracy, decentralization, and conflict resolution through federalism.[10] It contributed to the 2019 transitional frameworks post-Bashir but criticized delays in civilian handover, prioritizing policies on human rights, alternative energy, and ending root causes of war like resource inequities.[11] The party's platform, outlined in its 2016 manifesto, rejects single-party dominance in favor of pluralistic governance.[12] Less prominently, the Socialist Republican Party (SCP) in Turkey, a Maoist group refounded in 2010 from the Workers' Peasants' Party, pursues national democratic revolution against perceived bourgeois nationalism, though it holds marginal electoral sway.Companies
SCP Distributors LLC operates as the world's largest wholesale distributor of swimming pool supplies, equipment, and related leisure products.[13] Headquartered in Florida, it forms part of Pool Corporation's distribution network, supplying chemicals, maintenance items, and outdoor leisure goods to retailers across North America and beyond.[14] The company handles imports and logistics for pool-related imports, supporting seasonal demand fluctuations in the industry.[15] Structured Cable Products (SCP) manufactures and distributes low voltage cables, including Category/LAN, coaxial, fiber optic, and security variants, along with accessories like HDMI and tools for AV, DataCom, electrical, and security applications.[16] Operating for over 20 years with more than 1,400 stock-keeping units and 250 million feet of cable inventory, SCP serves custom installation, education, hospitality, and ProAV markets globally across over 80 countries, with distribution centers in Florida, Texas, and the Netherlands.[17] SCP Health delivers clinical integration services, including emergency department management, hospitalist programs, and value-based care models for hospitals and health systems.[18] Originally established as Schumacher Clinical Partners, the firm emphasizes clinician-led operations and has expanded to cover multispecialty physician services nationwide. SCP Partners, a private equity and venture capital firm founded in 1996, focuses investments on information and communications technology, life sciences, services, defense, and security from its headquarters in Malvern, Pennsylvania.[19] The firm targets growth-stage companies, providing capital for expansion and buyouts in these sectors.[20] SCP Resource Finance functions as an independent broker-dealer specializing in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and research for the global mining industry, with emphasis on precious metals and energy transition commodities.[21] Launched in May 2023 following a management buyout and rebranding from Sprott Capital Partners, it operates under regulatory oversight in Canada.[22]Schools
The School for Command Preparation (SCP) is a component of the United States Army Command and General Staff College located at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Established to develop command skills for Army officers, it conducts resident courses focused on leadership preparation and synchronizes broader Army Command Team Preparation Programs, including pre-command training for battalion and brigade commanders.[23] Stanton College Preparatory School (SCP), situated in Jacksonville, Florida, operates as a public magnet high school within the Duval County Public Schools district. Founded in 1960, it enrolls approximately 1,600 students and emphasizes rigorous academics through Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and Career and Technical Education (CTE) pathways, consistently ranking among top performers nationally with high college readiness metrics.[24][25]Other organizations
The Society of Catholic Priests (SCP) is an international dispersed religious community comprising ordained clergy and consecrated religious from Anglican and other traditions who adhere to Catholic doctrine and practice. Founded in 1994, it emphasizes priestly formation, mutual support, and advocacy for traditional Catholic teachings within Anglicanism, including opposition to innovations such as the ordination of women to the priesthood. Membership includes priests, deacons, and vowed religious, with activities centered on retreats, publications like the journal Priest, and rule-based spiritual discipline.[26] The Society of Counseling Psychology (SCP), also known as Division 17 of the American Psychological Association, promotes the science and practice of counseling psychology through research, education, and professional development. Established in 1946, it focuses on preventive and developmental interventions, multicultural competence, and advocacy for diverse populations, while maintaining standards for ethical practice and training. SCP publishes the Counselling Psychology Quarterly and hosts annual conferences to advance evidence-based counseling approaches.[27] The Society of Consulting Psychology (SCP) is a professional organization dedicated to applying psychological principles to organizational consulting, leadership development, and executive coaching. It fosters excellence in consulting psychology by offering training, ethical guidelines, and networking for members, with an emphasis on evidence-based interventions for workplace effectiveness. SCP organizes conferences and disseminates resources through its journal Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research.[28] The Society of Christian Philosophers (SCP) supports scholarly inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and Christian faith, promoting rigorous analysis of theological and metaphysical issues. Founded in 1978, it publishes the journal Faith and Philosophy and convenes biennial conferences to facilitate dialogue among academic philosophers who identify as Christian. Membership is open to those affirming Christian commitments, emphasizing intellectual integrity over denominational boundaries. The Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP) is a Christian apologetics ministry examining non-Christian spiritual movements and cultural ideologies from a biblical perspective. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it critiques New Age, occult, and alternative religious influences, providing resources like newsletters and books to discern what it views as incompatible with orthodox Christianity. SCP's work includes investigative journalism on cults and worldview analysis.[29]Technology and computing
Secure Copy Protocol
The Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) is a network protocol and associated command-line utility for securely transferring files and directories between a local host and a remote host, or between two remote hosts, utilizing the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol for encryption and authentication.[30][31] It serves as a secure replacement for the unencrypted Remote Copy Protocol (rcp) from BSD Unix, preserving file attributes such as permissions and timestamps during transfer.[32] SCP operates over SSH port 22 by default, ensuring confidentiality through symmetric encryption and integrity via message authentication codes inherent to SSH.[33] SCP originated in 1995 as part of the initial SSH-1 implementation developed by Finnish researcher Tatu Ylönen at Helsinki University of Technology, motivated by vulnerabilities in tools like rcp following a password-sniffing incident on his university network.[34][35] The protocol was designed to mirror rcp's simplicity but tunnel it over SSH for security, with the first free release included in SSH version 1.2.12. OpenSSH, the widely used open-source SSH suite forked from Ylönen's early code, incorporated SCP as a standard tool, though later versions (e.g., OpenSSH 9.0 in 2022) deprecated the original SCP wire protocol in favor of the SFTP backend for improved compatibility and fixes to longstanding issues like poor handling of special characters in filenames.[36] In operation, SCP establishes an SSH connection for authentication—typically via passwords or public-key pairs—then initiates a non-interactive file transfer session, streaming data in a single connection without built-in support for resuming interrupted transfers or interactive directory navigation.[30] The basic syntax isscp [options] [source](/page/Source) destination, where source and destination specify paths, optionally prefixed with user@host: for remote access.[37] For example, to copy a local file to a remote server: scp localfile.txt user@remotehost:/path/to/destination; for remote-to-local: scp user@remotehost:/path/to/file.txt .; and for remote-to-remote: scp user1@host1:/[source](/page/Source) user2@host2:/destination.[37] Common options include -r for recursive directory copies (e.g., scp -r localdir user@host:/remote), -p to preserve modification times, permissions, and access times, and -P to specify a non-standard port.[37] Transfers authenticate via SSH keys for automation, requiring prior setup of public keys in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the target host.[30]
Security in SCP derives entirely from the underlying SSH transport layer, which employs algorithms like AES for encryption and supports key-based authentication to mitigate risks such as password exposure.[32] However, the SCP protocol itself exhibits limitations, including inflexibility in protocol extensions, vulnerability to command injection if paths contain shell metacharacters (mitigated in modern OpenSSH by SFTP fallback), and lack of standardization beyond SSH integration, rendering it less robust against certain man-in-the-middle attacks without SSH's strict host key checking.[38] OpenSSH developers have described the original SCP protocol as "outdated, inflexible and not readily fixed," recommending SFTP or rsync-over-SSH for new implementations due to SCP's absence of features like partial uploads or directory listings.[38]
Compared to SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol), SCP prioritizes simplicity and speed for batch scripting but sacrifices interactivity and functionality; SFTP supports commands like ls, mkdir, and resumable transfers over a persistent session, making it preferable for complex operations despite potential overhead from acknowledgments.[39][40] SCP remains in use for its familiarity in Unix-like environments but is increasingly supplanted by SFTP in tools like OpenSSH's scp, which defaults to SFTP protocol emulation for backward compatibility while addressing SCP's protocol flaws.[38]