This week’s Surveillance Report was a bit of a “welcome back, everything is on fire” episode. I covered two major iOS exploit frameworks that were found in the wild—Coruna (five full exploit chains impacting iOS 13 through 17.2.1) and DarkSword (a separate zero-click style attack that could take over iOS 18 devices, especially in the Russia–Ukraine context). The takeaway is boring but true: update your iPhone. If you can’t update, enable Lockdown Mode, because both reports (and Apple themselves) point to it as a meaningful mitigation. And if you want peace of mind, I recommend scanning with iVerify (or tools like iMazing) to check for signs of compromise. From there I pivoted to Android, because of course we have bad news there too. Google finally detailed its new “advanced flow” for sideloading, and it’s exactly the kind of friction that turns Android into a gatekept ecosystem: developer options, extra warnings, a reboot, and a 24-hour waiting period just to install an APK. I also talked about Instagram quietly killing end-to-end encryption in DMs, and why that should worry anyone who believed Meta’s pro-encryption PR. Finally, I hit the broader policy push toward OS-level age verification (yes, including Linux), and why building that infrastructure is indistinguishable from building censorship infrastructure—because the same lever can be repurposed the moment someone else grabs it.