#privacy means privacy

[bronnybridgerton]

Who has broken every rule and boundaries that Nic and Luke have in place for their privacy, some how now she is apparently taking the moral high ground now that’s bloody rich coming from her.

1. She stalked Luke and Nic

2. She found out were they lived

3. She makes weird posts saying she wished she was the card on Nic’s boobs

4. She hangs out outside of the bridgerton set more often than most fans

5. She moved 3 house down from Luke

6. She got into Luke’s old building and looked through his windows

7. She’s played both sides of the fandom of against each other

8. Making up a random fandom from Nic hanging out with her friend Jake

None of this is normal behaviour it’s stalking and obsessive behaviour, I stopped following her a long time ago for the weird feeling she gave me, she has no clue what privacy means

If I were you I’d block her and not give her the time of day, she deserves nothing from this fandom or Luke and Nic

Thank you for taking the time to read this

I’m just trying to give everyone a heads up and a little advice

Thanks bronny xx

[shittybundaskenyer]

And they ask me // Is it going good in the garden? // I say I'm lost but I beg no pardon

[smithcollegegirls2004]

people talking about how they want mean lesbians and they cant even handle chappell roan

[the-blue-tempest]

It's Biceptember- surely he's allowed to be confident in front of the mirror at least ONCE

...Right?

[violentdelightshavevioletends]

“Dain is just an imperfect 21-year-old kid who trusted his dad, and is a little over-protective telling his chronically ill friend to sit the fuck down.”

[sortanonymous]

[konigsblog]

One thing about Kidnapper-König is that he doesn't allow you to do basic human actions or make your own decision. After all, you're not a human when you're around König, or at least that's what he claims. Being a person would mean that you're equal to him, and you're nothing but a disobedient mutt.

He restricts you of your rights. Oh, you want to walk? Unfortunately, you only have permission to crawl. He will infantilize you, act as if you're incompetent and need his help 24/7, that you're too clumsy to manage on your own. You're not allowed to speak unless spoken to, unless it's an immediate emergency. You cannot act human-like, only act like a pet. You must always obey his command, regardless of how cruel or violating it is.

And because you're unable to speak, that means he'll put words in your mouth to satisfy himself, or to tease you, desperate for a reaction that he can mock. Oh, you're cold? Do you want König to warm you up? Do you want to sit on his big lap and allow him to envelop you in his welcoming arms? Don't hiss at him, Liebling. Know your place.

You don't like the food on the dining table? Well, that's too bad. König will restrain you with rope and spoon-feed you if he must, wiping away your tears and humiliate you for being pathetic. You're tired and don't feel well? Well, König doesn't. Keep going for him, even if your limbs feel numb and weak, and your head is spinning.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Apple's encryption capitulation

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC on TOMORROW (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE THURSDAY (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

The UK government has just ordered Apple to secretly compromise its security for every iOS user in the world. Instead, Apple announced it will disable a vital security feature for every UK user. This is a terrible outcome, but it just might be the best one, given the circumstances:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo

So let's talk about those circumstances. In 2016, Theresa May's Conservative government passed a law called the "Investigative Powers Act," better known as the "Snooper's Charter":

https://www.snooperscharter.co.uk/

This was a hugely controversial law for many reasons, but most prominent was that it allowed British spy agencies to order tech companies to secretly modify their software to facilitate surveillance. This is alarming in several ways. First, it's hard enough to implement an encryption system without making subtle errors that adversaries can exploit.

Tiny mistakes in encryption systems are leveraged by criminals, foreign spies, griefers, and other bad actors to steal money, lock up our businesses and governments with ransomware, take our data, our intimate images, our health records and worse. The world is already awash in cyberweapons that terrible governments and corporations use to target their adversaries, such as the NSO Group malware that the Saudis used to hack Whatsapp, which let them lure Jamal Khashoggi to his death. The stakes couldn't be higher:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/04/citizen-lab/#nso-group

Encryption protects everything from the software updates for pacemakers and anti-lock braking to population-scale financial transactions and patient records. Deliberately introducing bugs into these systems to allow spies and cops to "break" encryption when they need to is impossible, which doesn't stop governments from demanding it. Notoriously, when former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull was told that the laws of mathematics decreed that there is no way to make encryption that only stops bad guys but lets in good guys, he replied "The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/australian-pm-calls-end-end-encryption-ban-says-laws-mathematics-dont-apply-down

The risks don't stop with bad actors leveraging new bugs introduced when the "lawful interception" back-doors are inserted. The keys that open these back-doors inevitably circulate widely within spy and police agencies, and eventually – inevitably – they leak. This is called the "keys under doormats" problem: if the police order tech companies to hide the keys to access billions of peoples' data under their doormats, eventually, bad guys will find them there:

https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/1/1/69/2367066

Again, this isn't a theoretical risk. In 1994, Bill Clinton signed a US law called CALEA that required FBI back-doors for data switches. Most network switches in use today have CALEA back-doors and they have been widely exploited by various bad guys. Most recently, the Chinese military used CALEA backdoors to hack Verizon, AT&T and Lumen:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

This is the backdrop against which the Snooper's Charter was passed. Parliament stuck its fingers in its ears, covered its eyes, and voted for the damned thing, swearing that it would never result in any of the eminently foreseeable harms they'd been warned of.

Which brings us to today. Two weeks ago, the Washington Post's Joseph Menn broke the story that Apple had received a secret order from the British government, demanding that they install a back-door in the encryption system that protects cloud backups of iOS devices:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/07/apple-encryption-backdoor-uk/

Virtually every iOS device in the world regularly backs itself up to Apple's cloud backup service. This is very useful: if your phone or tablet is lost, stolen or damaged, you can recover your backup to a new device in a matter of minutes and get on with your day. It's also very lucrative for Apple, which charges every iOS user a few dollars every month for backup services. The dollar amount here is small, but that sum is multiplied by the very large number of Apple devices, and it rolls in every single month.

Since 2022, Apple has offered its users a feature called "Advanced Data Protection" that employs "end-to-end" encryption (E2EE) for these backups. End-to-end encryption keeps data encrypted between the sender and the receiver, so that the service provider can't see what they're saying to each other. In the case of iCloud backups, this means that while an Apple customer can decrypt their backup data when they access it in the cloud, Apple itself cannot. All Apple can see is that there is an impenetrable blob of user data on one of its servers.

2022 was very late for Apple to have added E2EE to its cloud backups. After all, in 2014, Apple customers suffered a massive iCloud breach when hackers broke into the iCloud backups of hundreds of celebrities, leaking nude photos and other private data, in a breach colloquially called "Celebgate" or "The Fappening":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak

Apple almost rolled out E2EE for iCloud in 2018, but scrapped the plans after Donald Trump's FBI leaned on them:

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sour-idUSKBN1ZK1CO/

Better late than never. For three years, Apple customers' backups have been encrypted, at rest, on Apple's servers, their contents fully opaque to everyone except the devices' owners. Enter His Majesty's Government, clutching the Snooper's Charter. As the eminent cryptographer Matthew Green writes, a secret order to compromise the cloud backups of British users is necessarily a secret order to compromise all users' encrypted backups:

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/02/23/three-questions-about-apple-encryption-and-the-u-k/

There's no way to roll out a compromised system in the UK that differs from non-British backups without the legion of reverse-engineers and security analysts noticing that something new is happening in Britain and correctly inferring that Apple has been served with a secret "Technical Capability Notice" under the Snooper's Charter:

Even if you imagine that Apple is only being asked only to target users in the U.K., the company would either need to build this capability globally, or it would need to deploy a new version or “zone”1 for U.K. users that would work differently from the version for, say, U.S. users. From a technical perspective, this would be tantamount to admitting that the U.K.’s version is somehow operationally distinct from the U.S. version. That would invite reverse-engineers to ask very pointed questions and the secret would almost certainly be out.

For Apple, the only winning move was not to play. Rather than breaking the security for its iCloud backups worldwide, it simply promised to turn off all security for backups in the UK. If they go through with it, every British iOS user – doctors, lawyers, small and large business, and individuals – will be exposed to incalculable risk from spies and criminals, both organized and petty.

For Green, this is Apple making the best of an impossible conundrum. Apple does have a long and proud history of standing up to governmental demands to compromise its users. Most notably, the FBI ordered Apple to push an encryption-removing update to its phones in 2016, to help it gain access to a device recovered from the bodies of the San Bernardino shooters:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/eff-support-apple-encryption-battle

But it's worth zooming out here for a moment and considering all the things that led up to Apple facing this demand. By design, Apple's iOS platform blocks users from installing software unless Apple approves it and lists it in the App Store. Apple uses legal protections (such as Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Article 6 of the EUCD, which the UK adopted in 2003 through the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations) to make it a jailable offense to reverse-engineer and bypass these blocks. They also devote substantial technical effort to preventing third parties from reverse-engineering its software and hardware locks. Installing software forbidden by Apple on your own iPhone is thus both illegal and very, very hard.

This means that if Apple removes an app from its App Store, its customers can no longer get that app. When Apple launched this system, they were warned – by the same cohort of experts who warned the UK government about the risks of the Snooper's Charter – that it would turn into an attractive nuisance. If a corporation has the power to compromise billions of users' devices, governments will inevitably order that corporation to do so.

Which is exactly what happened. Apple has already removed all working privacy tools for its Chinese users, purging the Chinese App Store of secure VPN apps, compromising its Chinese cloud backups, and downgrading its Airdrop file-transfer software to help the Chinese state crack down on protesters:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

These are the absolutely foreseeable – and foreseen – outcomes of Apple arrogating total remote control over its customers' devices to itself. If we're going to fault Theresa May's Conservatives for refusing to heed the warnings of the risks introduced by the Snooper's Charter, we should be every bit as critical of Apple for chasing profits at the expense of billions of its customers in the face of warnings that its "curated computing" model would inevitably give rise to the Snooper's Charter and laws like it.

As Pavel Chekov famously wrote: "a phaser on the bridge in act one will always go off by act three." Apple set itself up with the power to override its customers' decisions about the devices it sells them, and then that power was abused in a hundred ways, large and small:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

Of course, there are plenty of third-party apps in the App Store that allow you to make an end-to-end encrypted backup to non-Apple cloud servers, and Apple's onerous App Store payment policies mean that they get to cream off 30% of every dollar you spend with its rivals:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1iv072y/endtoend_encrypted_alternative_to_icloud_drive/

It's entirely possible to find an end-to-end encrypted backup provider that has no presence in the UK and can tell the UK government to fuck off with its ridiculous back-door demands. For example, Signal has repeatedly promised to pull its personnel and assets out of the UK before it would compromise its encryption:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

But even if the company that provides your backup is impervious to pressure from HMG, Apple isn't. Apple has the absolute, unchallenged power to decide which apps are in its App Store. Apple has a long history of nuking privacy-preserving and privacy-enhancing apps from its App Store in response to complaints, even petty ones from rival companies like Meta:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

If they're going to cave into Zuck's demand to facilitate spying on Instagram users, do we really think they'll resist Kier Starmer's demands to remove Signal – and any other app that stands up to the Snooper's Charter – from the App Store?

It goes without saying that the "bad guys" the UK government claims it wants to target will be able to communicate in secret no matter what Apple does here. They can just use an Android phone and sideload a secure messaging app, or register an iPhone in Ireland or any other country and bring it to the UK. The only people who will be harmed by the combination of the British government's reckless disregard for security, and Apple's designs that trade the security of its users for the security of its shareholders are millions of law-abiding Britons, whose most sensitive data will be up for grabs by anyone who hacks their accounts.

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/2025/02/25/sneak-and-peek/#pavel-chekov

Image: Mitch Barrie (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daytona_Skeleton_AR-15_completed_rifle_%2817551907724%29.jpg

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

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Kambanji https://www.flickr.com/photos/kambanji/4135216486/

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

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[ninja-knox-ur-sox-off]

For a guy with such a big ego who cares about his adoring fans he sure does wear the scarf they seem to hate on purpose huh

[lesliemeyers]

@ Butters in Worldwide Privacy Tour

[realmothchu]

i know that dinluke situationship is crazy

[oceanwithouthermoon]

maybe its just me but i cant stand when people are like "it just doesn't sit right with me how teruhashi thought about aiura 🥺" like yes... its not supposed to ??? because her thinking badly of other girls and prioritizing male validation over everything is one of her main flaws ??? can we talk about that WITHOUT making it seem like shes not allowed to have a single actual flaw without suddenly becoming an awful person? nobody can handle complex female characters at all and its so fucking annoying

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Mean Girl Montecito Magic by Meghan Markle

The silver lining of that 2024 Polo Fundraiser fiasco is that Meghan Markle showed the world her true mean girl colors on a non-BRF platform. No one on Tumblr was surprised because we have been watching and reacting to her true colors since the 2017 engagement interview.

In support of Dr Sophie Chandauka please share two (2) reaction videos created in 2024 by BROWN skinned women. One video is comedic (The Duchess of Sus) and the other a serious commentary via the Being Beautifuly Honest (politically left leaning) podcast where the comments section includes a number of brown skinned women who also call out Meghan Markle's mean girl behavior. The skin color of these women shouldn't matter, but Meghan Markle is playing the race card so please join me in amplifying the voices of WOMEN who refuse to be used as her tokens.

Get out the Way by The Duchess of Sus

She's not the victim, she's the villan.

It's 2025 and thanks to the Sussex Sentebale shenanigans, we know that Meghan was angry and behaved passive aggressively towards Dr. Sophie Chandauka.

Bullies are cowards and MM is no different. She ignored the accomplished Sophie while love bombing Delfina, and later surprised the organizers with a visit from Serena Williams.

MegaLiar would never EVER miss a media opportunity or a Netflix production, but as a stunt she lied to the Sentebale organization with regrets that she would NOT attend the event.

Anyone who tells Rachel no and/or refuses to indulge her bratty behavior will be retaliated against, so perhaps the Duchess wasn't getting her way with the Netflix production. Whatever the case, the entire world can see with their own eyes that Meghan Markle is a fraud and a mean girl.

Although in 2024 Delfina filmed megflop as a "friend," according to the February 2025 blinds (Delfina Blaquier) "the significant other of the foreign born A+ polo player has had enough of the alliterate one and refuses to be seen with her any longer."

Even after Megsy showed her insecurities about Delfina's height and therefore forced her to remove her shoes as a guest in a stranger's kitchen, Delfina still sat with Megsy and stroked her ego:

M: Omg you look so pretty. You're tall.

D: Do you want me barefoot?

M: Only if you want to be

DB: Yes I am tall. Do you want me barefoot.

MM: not unless you want to be"

M: Go barefoot with me

[windsweptinred]

You know when a part of a fanfic just sticks with you for life?

I remember reading a cherik fic, this must have been over a decade ago now after First Class came out. And there was a scene where Charles breaks down and tells Erik, him continually telling Charles to stay out of his head, was Eric making him hide his power, repress his mutant self. And Erik’s whole world crumbles. 

For the life of me I can't remember the fic, and I've never been able to find it again. But yeah, I still think about that amazing scene every time I watch First Class. 

[awakefor48hours]

Gotta love living in the future

[phneltwrites]

i think we should play with the fact that yr is set in alternate universe Sweden more. Sure, different monarchy, but what else is different? Why limit to those few changes we see? Maybe this is a Sweden without shrimp have we considered that.