#iOS Vulnerabilities

[coldshrugs]

wip (almost) wednesday

ty for the tag @lavampira 💗💗 and i'll forward that along to: @scionshtola @hythlodaes @galadae @lilas @razrogue @bee-a-ts @fourteenthz @greyyourwarden (no pressure but i'd love to see what you guys are working on for art/writing!!)

here's some heavensward roadtrip for a single word prompt i've been spinning around:

This far into the journey, there is no need to discuss the watch schedule.

Every night, Io takes first watch and promises to wake Ysayle just past the new day’s first bell. Every night, Io breaks this promise, letting her sleep instead. Estinien wakes in the hours of early morning and, in the dark and the quiet, they exchange responsibility for their party's safety with the stiff courtesy of pursed-lipped smiles. They talk a bit during the day, circling the edge of something like camaraderie.

They don't talk at night.

The moon drifts across the sky, little more than a muted glow, shapeless behind the dense, wind-whipped clouds. It is difficult to track its position and discern the time when the stars are hidden, but Io breathes a sigh of relief when Ysayle does not wake at her appointed hour.

It would be needless to bother Ysayle when the simple kindness of restful sleep is more than she experiences from those allied with Ishgard, and still less than she deserves. Even more unnecessary to disturb Alphinaud when he still sees fresh blood on his young hands. Why make a fuss at all, when she can push through for another few bells, and he doesn't seem to mind doing the same?

The beast calls again, a song scratching across the quiet night, high and rough and lonesome.

It is like no music Io has heard before, but some part of her feels she could join in. Hearts in perfect harmony, defeated and defiant. She understands why they’ve named the war for such a lament… A shiver runs down her spine.

Only the wind, she thinks for a moment as the grass rustles again.

Only the wind, until the sound loses its rhythm. There's a dull thud against the ground, then another. Io looks away from the fire, toward the source of the noise: Estinien is shaking in his bedroll.

[vivaciouscynner]

Idk whether you’re an iPhone user or not but what are your thoughts on iOS 18.3 and whether or not it’s a good idea to go ahead and update to it? I’ve seen sound arguments both ways and was curious if you had any thoughts about it

Good question tbh. Unfortunately, for this question, I am an android user.

I DID do a quick little search on it, though:

Just from a glance, OOF, what a bunch of bugs. Sounds like they've got a handful of things to fix in this release. I do believe there are also a handful of workarounds, too.

HOWEVER - with that said, the update does fix some 20+ vulnerabilities. Here's the list:

but they may NOT apply to you and you can just continue with what you have until they do a hot fix for all the things they broke. You can also weigh how LIKELY you'd be a target for any of the vulnerabilities that DO apply. Most people really AREN'T - just depends on everyone's unique scenario. If you spend a lot of time on public wifi, download a lot of apps, visit not-so-secure sites a lot, maybe consider an upgrade. Otherwise, if you're the careful-with-your-data type, you could probably wait.

But if you want to know more about the vulnerabilities, you can search any of those CVEs here:

Search any of the CVE codes and it'll basically tell you how an attacker exploits the vulnerability. You can just read the simple description otherwise, if you're like me, you'll go down a rabbit hole learning how to reproduce.

Hope this helps!

[incendiorum-arch]

I really enjoy writing things that give away io's trust in a person. how much lu likes a person or acts with them is a direct link to how much io trusts them. i.e. lu is most affectionate (besides with io) with latona, who is someone io trusts the most they themself possibly can.

[autismking]

feeling fucking buck wild tonight i been messaging people from my past with reckless abandon

[limitbreaker]

everything simply repeats.

[headlinehorizon]

Beware of Keyboard Spy Hackers: Protect Yourself with These Tips

Discover the latest news about a troubling vulnerability in iOS that allows hackers to spy on you through your keyboard. Find out how they bypass Apple's security measures and learn how to protect your personal information from being compromised.

[exploitlogos]

iLeakage

A transient execution side channel targeting the Safari web browser present on Macs, iPads and iPhones.

[romanceclubofficial]

Dear Friends,

As you know, we always strive to be transparent with you about everything happening with Romance Club.

We want to inform you about two security issues recently discovered, one of which has already been resolved.

Issue #1: It was discovered that account data could be at risk if your UID is shared publicly. While the risk is very low, we recommend keeping your UID private and sharing it only through personal messages, not on public forums. This vulnerability has been addressed in version 1.0.38100 (which should be already available on the App/Play Store or coming very soon). Please note that after updating to version 1.0.38100, your account will no longer work on earlier versions of the game.

Issue #2: We are investigating a Windows/Steam issue that could allow access to some existing profiles on these platforms. This issue does not affect iOS or Android users. We take this matter very seriously and are committed to further enhancing the security of Windows/Steam accounts in future updates.

If you have any additional concerns about your account, feel free to contact us at support@yourstoryinteractive.com, and we’ll be happy to assist you.

Thank you for trusting us and for playing Romance Club!

[tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors]

Do you have any plans for future wedding fic like LAMP, remile, and thomas/harley got?? The fae ones like Io/Remus or Linda/Percy are ESPECIALLY interesting to think about

i havent quite decided how i want to handle prindas (culturally) or where i want to put it in the timeline. and my concern with remusio is that a purely fae wedding may not actually be all that interesting to most folks

like, LAMP used the fae vows, each spouse gets an attendant, traditionally a sibling or dear friend to tie the knot - and thats it. fae weddings are almost always done in secret, in a very private place, no guests, often they dont even tell anyone other than the attendants and the tying friend. they take about 15 minutes, and there is no reception.

this is because the vow itself is so big and complex and binding for fae that theyre dangerously vulnerable during the ceremony. Virgil and Bell were sweating BULLETS during LAMPs wedding, and virgil only went along with it because he knew it was important to LMP to have their families there. the park was chosen because it was the center of the mortal town, far away from any other fae

like think about how bad it was when bell and roman and remus were wearing half-fealty oaths, and think about how potentially catastrophic it would be to be interrupted mid wedding vow.

so the remusio wedding im worried might be a little disappointing to folks, because it would be much shorter and a little more Anxious than the other weddings ive written. im still puzzling out how i want to deal with it, and how linda and percy would split the difference between remusio and LAMP

[coldshrugs]

don't say it's unholy

characters: io laithe, haurchefant greystone, mentions of estinien varlineau word count: 924 rating: explicit - minors do not interact note: set in affair AU, where io is married to haurchefant out of obligation post-HW. something i wrote for a prompt on discord. not a fun time for them, but the awkwardness is fun for me :>

The fire is low in the Commander’s chamber of Camp Dragonhead. Even in the dim light, the room is unchanged since Io was here last; cluttered shelves and a desk overflowing with missives and reports show Haurchefant’s procrastination. It was charming once. Now, like so many little things, Io only finds it tedious.

Still, they fumble through the motions. Clumsy, misaligned touches and kisses they don’t allow to linger. Io’s hand in his trousers, stroking him until he's hard enough. Haurchefant’s fingers rub at some arbitrary place very near the place, but he is careless to try harder. He dips lower, an investigation. Has their half-assed effort to arouse made a crack in today's annoyances?

“Have you missed me, darling?” His voice darkens, affected lust barely concealing their shared frustration. They've had a bad day. A series of bad days, really, where their best parts erode with every hour they share.

No, the words stick behind her teeth, I relish the quiet when you are gone. I only needed to get out.

“Fuck me,” she whispers into his mouth. Kisses him hard, sloppy, then pulls him into bed.

Haurchefant falls over her. “Ill-advised as your trip has been, I sometimes forget just how dauntless you can be. Do you remember the first time I had you, here in this room?” Io makes a noise of affirmation as she reaches between them, guiding him where she needs him most. This is the only thing she needs from him right now. He continues, “Let us make tonight an ode to that beginning.”

He fills her with a rough grunt, and his dick suffices for her purpose—a good distraction, the easy way to scratch an itch. They haven’t been together like this in weeks. She should want to see him, to witness his eyes unfocus and his mouth loll open as he thrusts.

Io adjusts so his face is buried between her shoulder and neck. 

Her mind wanders elsewhere—to the hinterlands at sunset in the company of another, and the friendly rivalry tingling along her skin during a hunt. Hope swelling in her chest each time Estinien smiled. She leaned into him, head on his shoulder, and he wrapped his arm around her waist. It was enough to leave her questioning if the shelter she felt in his company was her invention or something more.

Then there was the ball… Io thought she might ask him to dance, or invite him to step away from the party for a moment of peace, but Estinien made things spectacularly clear that night. She’s made herself a puppet, and he is right to want nothing to do with her. Knowing that doesn’t patch the wound.

Haurchefant sucks her neck. It's almost pleasant if she tunes out his voice. Perhaps her cooling embers can still be stoked into a blaze. There is some pleasure in the act itself, after all, even if her affection for the partner has dwindled.

Io runs her hands down her husband’s back, avoiding the thick, knotted scar along his spine—he has asked her to stay clear, so she will. She imagines a different landscape, vividly etched in her mind from the few times Estinien let her help with his bandages. He’d watched her cautiously, the way a mistreated dog warily eyes an open hand. Vulnerable and ready to bite. He trembled through it, held in place, she assumed, by trust and a need to learn if he could be handled gently, after everything.

Haurchefant moving inside her does not compare to that kind of intimacy.

How is she meant to think of anything besides what Estinien’s weight might feel like if he were the one pressing her into his bed, or his reaction after brushing strands of silver from his eyes? Would he watch her in his quiet, knowing way, sharp eyes softened by another kind of vulnerability?

These thoughts are only hypothetical. They are no longer friends. And there are things on this star she was never meant to have, much less keep.

Haurchefant rolls them so she sits high on his lap. “You seem far away, my lady. I trust all is well?”

Everything is wrong.

“Forgive me. I lost myself in a memory, the same as you.”

Can’t you see it? How wrong this is?

He looks tired, lips pursed in a disappointed line. “The lead is yours, find your pleasure as you like.”

Io closes her eyes and rocks her hips. Haurchefant gives her thighs a cursory squeeze as she takes over, but there is no fire in his stationary touch. The thin thread of Io’s longing unravels, and she is not surprised: it was not for him anyway. If sex is to be a marital utility instead of a shared joy, she will await his monthly visits to Fortemps Manor. She will be a dutiful wife and only half a lover.

Haurchefant comes, his teeth gritted in concentration. A strange comfort, seeing him claw his way to orgasm. The one she lost is less of a pity. For better or worse, they endure this together.

They clean up. He adds a few logs to the hearth. They tangle together under a thick quilt, but it feels like a performance—another thing they force. The silence thickens around them. Neither asks about recent activities or interests, nor recounts previously unheard tales. For the first time, Io is eager to return to Ishgard.

It must be the small hours of the morning before Io drifts toward sleep. She prays gray eyes visit her dreams.

[incendiorum-arch]

I think that io veers heavily towards being a more dominant partner for a lot of reasons, but I think a big portion has to do with trust. io doesn't want to let just anyone hold some modicum of power over them even during intimacy. only the people they love and trust get to do that for them, and even that is kinda... hard to make happen.

[datarevived]

Cont. from ★ w/ @of-golden-guns

Nessus.

It was to be a patrol, safe from her most recent nightmare turmoil, the Taken. A step back in her ventures of stoawaying to the next undetermined destination, & more direct than her most recent voyage to Io with the brash Titan. This one had been advocated by none other than Hawthorne herself, something about scouts collecting data on the Vex and some sort of disclosure revolving around odd readings near the Grave.

However, her recent companion had been tasked with unrelated means near the outskirts of Mars, leaving she to mask with strangers who settled as a pair of three to take front. Both of which wasted no time leaving her between the fog - the sounds of the Vex transmatting in soon to follow.

She was not familiar with the Vex nor their strategies yet. Neither the Cabal, who also accompanied the planet in mass (though she knew not to what degree, as she had yet to make it beyond that of the ample Harpies & Hydras that drained her will at this point). All she knew is that she was quickly losing count to the times of Darkness, that her body was beginning to feel ill even after Data's recovery & that her mental fortitude was on a single thread to regretting choice words towards the Vanguard.

How ironic - that it is among them one she faces now. Recognizing the one from the Hanger instantly - immediate embarrassment & need to depart scratching like the claws that dug into her sleeve. Her breathing picks up in the moment, eyes darting anywhere but the concerned azure optics as she half debates running off.

" I -- "

Voice cracking in deciding tongue, the sudden touch takes her vulnerable focus to merit. A decision made for her, that she cannot back out now. The lump in her throat swelled as if wanting to still retort - but her body moves for her, forward -- following the Exo like a shadowed mutt to the camp.

You're foolish, she hears herself speak in the moments trending. The camp not too far from where she was found, a small light ignited beneath kindled fire & several other Guardians resting nearby. None to which looked at all familiar, but enough so for the time being, she felt... safer, if just a small bit than she did before. Her shoulders slumping in a relief among the pained expression that still wilted her face.

She takes a seat at the furthest available, bringing her half-padded leggings to her chest as she rests her chin upon scuffed knee. Quietly observing the camp with what energy remained, the motions & half-heard conversations; acting in avoidance with the one individual who was going out of their way until fully approached.

Weeks... how long had she been around, exactly?

" M'.. I don't.. " her words remain noncompliant, causing a small light to spark in her steed.

" Two months, almost. Though the first was uh... kept in the City, " the Ghost whirls, blinking in a sympathetic tone. " This past month has been heavily trial and error. But she does not adapt to change very well. "

[gemsofgreece]

UPDATE:

It’s 5 am, Greece time. (Yes I am a bat)

Since midnight, so in the last five hours the earthquake swarm has given a new 5 R, five 4+ R ones and thirty four of a 3+ R magnitude.

That’s just for reference. The main reason I am writing this is to remind that we say the Santorini earthquake swarm blah blah blah with coverage from Santorini, however a lot of these earthquakes have epicenters closer to the island of Amorgos and a few are close to Anafi and Ios.

All the coverage and most measures and interest are for Santorini but the people of these other islands - especially Amorgos, a gorgeous island with very significant monuments - have it just as bad and nobody bothers with them.

I read a rare article about how they are dealing with it, hence this post.

All in all, there are five Greek Red Cross rescuers and two social workers in the island to offer psychological support to the locals.

People have been staying wide awake for several nights due to the tremors and the anxiety. They said their biggest fear is that the big earthquake will catch them in their sleep. The farmers are reporting changes in the behaviour of the animals.

I thought it should be said. There are a lot of places which are vulnerable to what is happening.

[mariacallous]

The eye-popping scandal surrounding the Trump cabinet’s accidental invitation to The Atlantic’s editor in chief to join a text-message group secretly planning a bombing in Yemen has rolled into its third day, and that controversy now has a name: SignalGate, a reference to the fact that the conversation took place on the end-to-end encrypted free messaging tool Signal.

As that name becomes a shorthand for the biggest public blunder of the second Trump administration to date, however, security and privacy experts who have promoted Signal as the best encrypted messaging tool available to the public want to be clear about one thing: SignalGate is not about Signal.

Since The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed Monday that he was mistakenly included in a Signal group chat earlier this month created to plan US airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the reaction from the Trump cabinet’s critics and even the administration itself has in some cases seemed to cast blame on Signal for the security breach. Some commentators have pointed to reports last month of Signal-targeted phishing by Russian spies. National security adviser Michael Waltz, who reportedly invited Goldberg to the Signal group chat, has even suggested that Goldberg may have hacked into it.

On Wednesday afternoon, even President Donald Trump suggested Signal was somehow responsible for the group chat fiasco. “I don't know that Signal works,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you.”

The real lesson is much simpler, says Kenn White, a security and cryptography researcher who has conducted audits on widely used encryption tools in the past as the director of the Open Crypto Audit Project: Don’t invite untrusted contacts into your Signal group chat. And if you’re a government official working with highly sensitive or classified information, use the encrypted communication tools that run on restricted, often air-gapped devices intended for a top-secret setting rather than the unauthorized devices that can run publicly available apps like Signal.

“Unequivocally, no blame in this falls on Signal,” says White. “Signal is a communication tool designed for confidential conversations. If someone's brought into a conversation who’s not meant to be part of it, that's not a technology problem. That's an operator issue.”

Cryptographer Matt Green, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, puts it more simply. “Signal is a tool. If you misuse a tool, bad things are going to happen,” says Green. “If you hit yourself in the face with a hammer, it’s not the hammer’s fault. It’s really on you to make sure you know who you’re talking to.”

The only sense in which SignalGate is a Signal-related scandal, White adds, is that the use of Signal suggests that the cabinet-level officials involved in the Houthi bombing plans, including secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, were conducting the conversation on internet-connected devices—possibly even including personal ones—since Signal wouldn’t typically be allowed on the official, highly restricted machines intended for such conversations. “In past administrations, at least, that would be absolutely forbidden, especially for classified communications,” says White.

Indeed, using Signal on internet-connected commercial devices doesn’t just leave communications open to anyone who can somehow exploit a hackable vulnerability in Signal, but anyone who can hack the iOS, Android, Windows, or Mac devices that might be running the Signal mobile or desktop apps.

This is why US agencies in general, and the Department of Defense in particular, conduct business on specially managed federal devices that are specially provisioned to control what software is installed and which features are available. Whether the cabinet members had conducted the discussion on Signal or another consumer platform, the core issue was communicating about incredibly high-stakes, secret military operations using inappropriate devices or software.

One of the most straightforward reasons that communication apps like Signal and WhatsApp are not suitable for classified government work is that they offer “disappearing message” features—mechanisms to automatically delete messages after a preset amount of time—that are incompatible with federal record retention laws. This issue was on full display in the principals’ chat about the impending strike on Yemen, which was originally set for one-week auto-delete before the Michael Waltz account changed the timer to four-week auto-delete, according to screenshots of the chat published by The Atlantic on Wednesday. Had The Atlantic’s Goldberg not been mistakenly included in the chat, its contents might not have been preserved in accordance with long-standing government requirements.

In congressional testimony on Wednesday, US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that Signal can come preinstalled on government devices. Multiple sources tell WIRED that this is not the norm, though, and noted specifically that downloading consumer apps like Signal to Defense Department devices is highly restricted and often banned. The fact that Hegseth, the defense secretary, participated in the chat indicates that he either obtained an extremely unusual waiver to install Signal on a department device, bypassed the standard process for seeking such a waiver, or was using a non-DOD device for the chat. According to political consultant and podcaster Fred Wellman, DOD “political appointees” demanded that Signal be installed on their government devices last month.

Core to the Trump administration’s defense of the behavior is the claim that no classified material was discussed in the Signal chat. In particular, Gabbard and others have noted that Hegseth himself is the classification authority for the information. Multiple sources tell WIRED, though, that this authority does not make a consumer application the right forum for such a discussion.

“The way this was being communicated, the conversation had no formal designation like 'for official use only' or something. But whether it should have been classified or not, whatever it was, it was obviously sensitive operational information that no soldier or officer would be expected to release to the public—but they had added a member of the media into the chat,” says Andy Jabbour, a US Army veteran and founder of the domestic security risk-management firm Gate 15.

Jabbour adds that military personnel undergo annual information awareness and security training to reinforce operating procedures for handling all levels of nonpublic information. Multiple sources emphasize to WIRED that while the information in the Yemen strike chat appears to meet the standard for classification, even nonclassified material can be extremely sensitive and is typically carefully protected.

“Putting aside for a moment that classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system, it’s also just mind-boggling to me that all of these senior folks who were on this line and nobody bothered to even check, security hygiene 101, who are all the names? Who are they?” US senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said during Tuesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

According to The Atlantic, 12 Trump administration officials were in the Signal group chat, including vice president JD Vance, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and Trump adviser Susie Wiles. Jabbour adds that even with ​​decisionmaking authorities present and participating in a communication, establishing an information designation or declassifying information happens through an established, proactive process. As he puts it, “If you spill milk on the floor, you can’t just say, ‘That’s actually not spilled milk, because I intended to spill it.’”

All of which is to say, SignalGate raises plenty of security, privacy, and legal issues. But the security of Signal itself is not one of them. Despite that, in the wake of The Atlantic’s story on Monday, some have sought tenuous connections between the Trump cabinet’s security breach and Signal vulnerabilities. On Tuesday, for example, a Pentagon adviser echoed a report from Google’s security researchers, who alerted Signal earlier this year to a phishing technique that Russian military intelligence used to target the app’s users in Ukraine. But Signal pushed out an update to make that tactic—which tricks users into adding a hacker as a secondary device on their account—far harder to pull off, and the same tactic also targeted some accounts on the messaging services WhatsApp and Telegram.

“Phishing attacks against people using popular applications and websites are a fact of life on the internet,” Signal spokesperson Jun Harada tells WIRED. “Once we learned that Signal users were being targeted, and how they were being targeted, we introduced additional safeguards and in-app warnings to help protect people from falling victim to phishing attacks. This work was completed months ago."

In fact, says White, the cryptography researcher, if the Trump administration is going to put secret communications at risk by discussing war plans on unapproved commercial devices and freely available messaging apps, they could have done much worse than to choose Signal for those conversations, given its reputation and track record among security experts.

“Signal is the consensus recommendation for highly at-risk communities—human rights activists, attorneys, and confidential sources for journalists,” says White. Just not, as this week has made clear, executive branch officials planning airstrikes.

[hereticdrws]

Mizu headcannons

Warnings: panic attacks, nightmares, mizu being a dick in the beginning

a/n: every day I wake up and check tumblr to see if anyone has posted a new mizu fanfic so I have stupidly decided to take it into my own hands 🥲/j

- ⚔ - enjoy my lovelies - ⚔ -

• mizu is definitely very distant during the beginning of yalls friendship/relationship, mostly because she doesn't want to be hurt again (m*k*io)

•she also will try to push you away later on like, showing you her scars, revealing she's a woman, and js showing all her flaws (not all of them all of them but most) in an attempt to scare you away

•you both still love each other in a friendly way like when her clothes get cut up you sew them together, when she's hurt/sick you'll do everything in your power to heal her/protect her until she's better and vice versa

• while she does try and scare you away with her flaws she also tries to show you she doesn't care abt you by kinda being a bitch

As I walked behind her, I wasn't aware of the hole in the ground covered by snow and leaves, I ended up tripping falling into her back.

"Watch it!"

She said in an angry tone, glaring at me as I looked up to her from the snow.

"Get up, we don't have any time to take naps"

She sneered.

"I clearly wasn't taking a nap, I fell, you don't have to be such a bitch about it"

I said under my breath.

"What did you say?"

She said, almost seething.

"Didn't say anything"

I shrugged... she simply glared at me before turning back to the road, mumbling about me under her breath.

• she definitely becomes more bitchier once she realizes she has a crush on you

• when she realizes she has a crush on you she kinda freaks out, telling herself there's no way you would ever like her back because you were both women

•she tries to push you away even more when she realizes but you don't budge, mostly because you know why she's trying to push you away (I mean cmon, girl can't hide her feelings for shit tbh 😭)

• once you realize 'oh shit she likes me' you DEFINITELY tease the ever-loving shit out of her but in a low key way

I walked beside mizu into the crowd of people, we had just arrived in a town near kohana, mizus old village, after visiting her sword father. The crowd seemed to basically part once mizu stept through, making way for the 'man' but the second mizu passed all I felt was shoulders bumping me and pushing me away from her.. at least that was my excuse.

I grabbed her hand as to stay near her, pulling myself towards her and wrapping my arm around hers.

"What are you doing?" She said in a low angry tone, though the subtle blush creeping onto her cheeks proved her tone other wise.

"Trying to stay on my feet without being pushed down, why is there something wrong?" I said with a slight smirk, raising my eyebrow at the 'samurai not samurai'

•you are definitely the first to confess feelings for mizu, but mizu is the first to initiate the kiss

•she's taken of guard by you telling her how much/long you love her

•her eyes kinda brimmed w tears when you confessed because she was so used to the feeling of never being loved

•when you fist kissed she was definitely very passionate when it came to it, being the touch starved woman she is 😌 for ex: she would push you down onto the cot (small bed) and make out with you like you were her last meal, she would definitely leave marks but it would stay at that, nothing nsfw....... yet.

•when you too finally become a 'couple' mizu is like 1000% more protective of you, always has to have her hands on you, whether it be in a crowd, the forest, a brothel, or even a tea house, if any danger comes the first thing on her mind is to protect you and vice versa

• she's definitely a cuddler, like she has had damn near no loving touch in her life so when she finally dates you, she can't keep her hands off

•she isn't big on pda since she has to protect her identity and being vulnerable in any way in public is js asking for danger

•but she would still keep her hands near you, whether it be around your waist, your arm, or your hand

•she has a few nicknames for you. Ex: honey, baby, love, and doll or dove bit that's only special occasions 😌

• she's also definitely the type to get jealous, she can't stand when your around taigen because of his flirty nature, ofc if you wanted to be friends with him, she wouldn't stop you, she doesn't want you to feel controlled or stuck

•but she'll get kinda petty abt it like she'll start ignoring you and kind of avoiding you, but you'll talk it out and everything will be fine (ik ik lazy writing don't judge 😔)

•it takes awhile for mizu to open up about her past, like allll of it, but when she does your right there holding her, stroking her hair as she tells you everything

•when mizu sleeps she tends to have nightmares alot due to her past and present (girl cannot catch a break for the life of her) so some nights she'll wake up screaming with her chest pounding, flying to her feet into a defensive position, but once her eyes adjust she'll sink onto the ground holding her chest. You'll shoot out of bed, slowly coming towards her, whispering every move your going to make to her so you don't frighten her more, once she catches her breath she'll fall into your hands, letting you pull her back to bed.

Ladies, gentlemen, and absolutely everyone else thank you for reading this, my asks are open for art reqs and any little oneshots or headcannons or literally whatever else I haven't written in ever 🥲 I hope you enjoyed, reblogs r highly appreciated!! I love yall tysm for reading 😊

-rowan

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Being watched sucks. Of all the parenting mistakes I've made, none haunt me more than the times my daughter caught me watching her while she was learning to do something, discovered she was being observed in a vulnerable moment, and abandoned her attempt:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/may/09/cybersecurity-begins-with-integrity-not-surveillance

It's hard to be your authentic self while you're under surveillance. For that reason alone, the rise and rise of the surveillance industry – an unholy public-private partnership between cops, spooks, and ad-tech scum – is a plague on humanity and a scourge on the Earth:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

But beyond the psychic damage surveillance metes out, there are immediate, concrete ways in which surveillance brings us to harm. Ad-tech follows us into abortion clinics and then sells the info to the cops back home in the forced birth states run by Handmaid's Tale LARPers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/29/no-i-in-uter-us/#egged-on

And even if you have the good fortune to live in a state whose motto isn't "There's no 'I" in uter-US," ad-tech also lets anti-abortion propagandists trick you into visiting fake "clinics" who defraud you into giving birth by running out the clock on terminating your pregnancy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/paid-medical-disinformation/#crisis-pregnancy-centers

The commercial surveillance industry fuels SWATting, where sociopaths who don't like your internet opinions or are steamed because you beat them at Call of Duty trick the cops into thinking that there's an "active shooter" at your house, provoking the kind of American policing autoimmune reaction that can get you killed:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/14/us/swatting-sentence-casey-viner/index.html

There's just a lot of ways that compiling deep, nonconsensual, population-scale surveillance dossiers can bring safety and financial harm to the unwilling subjects of our experiment in digital spying. The wave of "business email compromises" (the infosec term for impersonating your boss to you and tricking you into cleaning out the company bank accounts)? They start with spear phishing, a phishing attack that uses personal information – bought from commercial sources or ganked from leaks – to craft a virtual Big Store con:

https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes/business-email-compromise

It's not just spear-phishers. There are plenty of financial predators who run petty grifts – stock swindles, identity theft, and other petty cons. These scams depend on commercial surveillance, both to target victims (e.g. buying Facebook ads targeting people struggling with medical debt and worried about losing their homes) and to run the con itself (by getting the information needed to pull of a successful identity theft).

In "Consumer Surveillance and Financial Fraud," a new National Bureau of Academic Research paper, a trio of business-school profs – Bo Bian (UBC), Michaela Pagel (WUSTL) and Huan Tang (Wharton) quantify the commercial surveillance industry's relationship to finance crimes:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31692

The authors take advantage of a time-series of ZIP-code-accurate fraud complaint data from the Consumer Finance Protection Board, supplemented by complaints from the FTC, along with Apple's rollout of App Tracking Transparency, a change to app-based tracking on Apple mobile devices that turned of third-party commercial surveillance unless users explicitly opted into being spied on. More than 96% of Apple users blocked spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

In other words, they were able to see, neighborhood by neighborhood, what happened to financial fraud when users were able to block commercial surveillance.

What happened is, fraud plunged. Deprived of the raw material for committing fraud, criminals were substantially hampered in their ability to steal from internet users.

While this is something that security professionals have understood for years, this study puts some empirical spine into the large corpus of qualitative accounts of the surveillance-to-fraud pipeline.

As the authors note in their conclusion, this analysis is timely. Google has just rolled out a new surveillance system, the deceptively named "Privacy Sandbox," that every Chrome user is being opted in to unless they find and untick three separate preference tickboxes. You should find and untick these boxes:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/how-turn-googles-privacy-sandbox-ad-tracking-and-why-you-should

Google has spun, lied and bullied Privacy Sandbox into existence; whenever this program draws enough fire, they rename it (it used to be called FLoC). But as the Apple example showed, no one wants to be spied on – that's why Google makes you find and untick three boxes to opt out of this new form of surveillance.

There is no consensual basis for mass commercial surveillance. The story that "people don't mind ads so long as they're relevant" is a lie. But even if it was true, it wouldn't be enough, because beyond the harms to being our authentic selves that come from the knowledge that we're being observed, surveillance data is a crucial ingredient for all kinds of crime, harassment, and deception.

We can't rely on companies to spy on us responsibly. Apple may have blocked third-party app spying, but they effect nonconsensual, continuous surveillance of every Apple mobile device user, and lie about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

That's why we should ban commercial surveillance. We should outlaw surveillance advertising. Period:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising

Contrary to the claims of surveillance profiteers, this wouldn't reduce the income to ad-supported news and other media – it would increase their revenues, by letting them place ads without relying on the surveillance troves assembled by the Google/Meta ad-tech duopoly, who take the majority of ad-revenue:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

We're 30 years into the commercial surveillance pandemic and Congress still hasn't passed a federal privacy law with a private right of action. But other agencies aren't waiting for Congress. The FTC and DoJ Antitrust Divsision have proposed new merger guidelines that allow regulators to consider privacy harms when companies merge:

https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FTC-2023-0043-1569

Think here of how Google devoured Fitbit and claimed massive troves of extremely personal data, much of which was collected because employers required workers to wear biometric trackers to get the best deal on health care:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/google-fitbit-merger-would-cement-googles-data-empire

Companies can't be trusted to collect, retain or use our personal data wisely. The right "balance" here is to simply ban that collection, without an explicit opt-in. The way this should work is that companies can't collect private data unless users hunt down and untick three "don't spy on me" boxes. After all, that's the standard that Google has set.

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/2023/09/29/ban-surveillance-ads/#sucker-funnel

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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