There is a tinfoil narrative that suggest that entire formats are in bed with intelligence services. It sounds pretty wild, but other zero-click attack vectors have been possible through sabotaging the parsing of file formats. ie. send a message -> hacked. How? the message wasnt even opened. How is, an app like Messenger receives a photo attachment binary, tries to unpack it and in doing so receives an instruction that stops the parser and executes arbitrary instructions.
Yeah, but you need to know where to look for it, the average person is never going to be able to afford the amount of tokens that will take to find a bug like this, especially if it was implanted on purpose.
Shrink the surface to scan. Not foolproof but can be an improvement. After watching many conference videos on mobile OS hacking, the strategy should really be to focus on components that were touched recently in new updates (and the most popular components like messaging). Once software is mature, they don't go and change everything with every release. It's been a few years, but an interesting insight I learned at CCC was that the most touched components in new OS releases are the ones most likely to have contributions by junior developers trying to push some commit to satisfy their boss and thus have security flaws. Testing can only catch so much.
well yes, that is the surface. it's the surface being created with no recourse from the user side, that is intentional... the tinfoil hat theory is that it is, anyway.
Wait what, so there is no content disarm between companies making ads, and the publishers? They can literally push whatever they want? Wild.
Edit:
the TFA answers: "Advertisers or DSPs may run HTML and JavaScript code when an ad is shown to the user." Its wild! I thought the ads are sanitized, go through a CDR of sorts, and whatever javascript is permitted is authored by ad networks, not the buyers. Sheesh. Thats just RCE.
> Wait what, so there is no content disarm between companies making ads, and the publishers? They can literally push whatever they want? Wild.
RTB (real-time bidding) does not incentivise publishers to care about what ads are actually being shown to individual users, so long as CPM is maximised.
I was looking for this comment. I'm wondering the same. Are ads just iframes that could have js? Therefore this is basically a zero click js (is this the first?) that just happens to be distributed via ads?
They use ad network to try to target individual user visiting a page (eg you know your target is a male, 60 years old, living in that area, with a few other checks you can almost uniquely identify your target)
Then the ad network delivers a targeted ad that exploits a vulnerability (eg a broken JPEG decoder that, when sent a bad image, allows to run arbitrary code on your machine), and from there you have access to the computer
> Reuters has reported that billions of dollars’ worth of Meta’s ad revenue comes from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content. In the US, ICE and other government agencies have bought software that uses ad tech data to track people’s movements.
I don't know if an ad blocker protects against Discover-Tech’s Controlium but in general you'd be a fool to allow ads in your browser in at this point. The ad industry is pretty shady all round.
For years there was a strong segment of HN commenters who would come on and declare a moral imperative for not using ad blockers and looking at every ad you could in order to support a website.
One must wonder how many were genuine vs an influence op.
Or genuine people who ate an influence op before posting here.
The whole point of an influence op is to find a bunch of useful idiots to provide a large multiplicative factor.
And that's the problem with arguing that something is an influence op, because it is going to be mostly genuine people by the time it gets to you, even though you're not wrong.
Turns out Google killing Android privacy was completely useless as a way to prevent people from being hacked, but they might use this type of stuff to justify even more closing of supposedly "free" paltforms.
Likewise, using privacy messengers like Signal is also useless if they can just take control of your entire device anytime they want.
I'm sure Google's latest push to make it inconvenient to install apps from outside Google's Playstore, where Google charges a 30% commission, is going to solve that.
> useless as a way to prevent people from being hacked
From being hacked by others. Google was just trying to protect their property, which is the ability to spy on their users' every move. Google themselves really don't need to "hack" their users for that, they already have all the access and all the data they could ever want. And they also have the ability to brick their users' devices at a moment's notice the same as Apple does.
>Likewise, using privacy messengers like Signal is also useless if they can just take control of your entire device anytime they want.
Totally not useless. It costs a lot more to pay a spyware firm then to have an employee send an email / ask a judge (like that's even necessary).
I feel quite confident of my messages privacy on my Pixel with GrapheneOS given they most people I message are on iPhones which are second in security to Pixels running GrapheneOS.
>Turns out Google killing Android privacy was completely useless as a way to prevent people from being hacked, but they might use this type of stuff to justify even more closing of supposedly "free" paltforms.
If you're talking about the sideloading restrictions those were intended to stop social engineering and scams, not from getting hacked via 0days.
>Likewise, using privacy messengers like Signal is also useless if they can just take control of your entire device anytime they want.
Source? play services is privileged but not that privileged.
However, this hack could have happened whether sideloading was allowed or not.
In fact, following the OP's link to https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targ..., "the company’s ads were shown on almost 200,000 unique websites and Android/iOS apps in dozens of countries" so it's not just apps but ordinary websites you visit in your android chrome browser.
My understanding is that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of high impact vulnerabilities on Chrome/Safari. We don't get to hear about most of them because it would become tedious quickly.
Yes, Google's move to block people from installing software on their own devices is orthogonal to this. I was merely saying that some measures have massive negative effects and basically irrelevant positive effects in the grand scheme of things.
People have disliked ads since ads existed. Carl Sagan's 1985 book Contact includes a brazillionaire S.R. Hadden who made his fortune by inventing an adblocker for television. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
The FBI has previously recommended running adblockers as a method to prevent malware and especially scamming. Nobody cares much.
It’s a low-hanging fruit that has high value, particularly for less savvy internet users. Scams have always been the biggest threat. I’d say the majority of internet ads are scams, and the platforms often don’t make it clear what is or is not an ad.
But, we always knew the risk of malware was there. In the modern age, ads are basically never delivered as static assets. They’re delivered as small applications, with code. So, we’re relying on our sandboxing mechanics to work perfectly, and predictably they don’t. The solution is to block the code altogether; to block ads.
OK, I read the report, but I'm still not clear on what the browser vulnerability is. This clearly seems like something browser vendors should be able to patch, correct?
The article does say "Both samples use a COM hijack for persistence, though make use of different DLLs." So does this only affect Windows machines? I didn't have time to read the linked 2021 report on Candiru, so maybe more details are there, but for such a detailed write up it would be helpful if the article was more explicit about which browser vulnerability was exploited.
It was a Windows exploit that ran. An adBlocker (funnily enough) would've been an excellent defense against this, given that the exploit ran in JavaScript served in targeted ads.
Though, there is a browser patch for this, don't advertise so much identifiable information that an advertiser can identify a user or their employer. That's the defense, but it'll never happen.
The os exploit is, within this context, after the fact and therefore a non sequitur. You should look up the Project Zero watering hole analysis where they revealed something like 17 0-days being delivered to visitors of one particular site. It's likely that citizen labs only had windows exemplars.
(This comment must have been posted in one of the other threads before we merged them hither. I don't recall which one, but the other links are in the toptext.)
I doubt it's that easy to click on a link and install malware without the user knowing. Most browsers are highly secure and finding a zero day isn't that easy these days because both sides use A.I. to find vulnerabilities and to secure against them.
It was so successful that IronSource, one of those companies, ended up merging with Unity and I think they got like 25% of the company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IronSource
Specifically Unit 8200, which really has no counterpart elsewhere in the world given Israel's mandatory universal conscription. Imagine if you could systematically screen every young adult in a country, identify those with the strongest math/quantitative skills or promising deep tech skills and divert them into one single security special ops org for several years. You'd get the concentration of skill that Unit 8200 has been producing.
North Korea does this too, actually (and like Israel, for both genders). It's probably one of the significant reasons why NK has such a comparatively effective offensive cybersecurity group, despite how unlikely that would seem given their overall industrial capacity.
Russia has historically not had mandatory universal conscription.
Which is surprising that these organizations have trust; like our employers probably wouldn't be comfortable shipping all their code to / embedding agents from cybersecurity firms in Russia
That explains a lot. You're basically just fishing for downloads in your target networks. You don't actually care if anyone clicks the ads in the installers, the sole purpose of the adware is to get arbitrary software running alongside the installer, so that you can compromise their machine.
Why do some of the most evil tech companies, especially ones that use exploits and zero-days as part of their business model, disproportionately originate from the same small (population-wise) country? The company from the article, all the other examples everyone here lists, Candiru, NSO... All Israeli.
The same reason why many great tech companies originate from Israel. That's why Nvidia is the largest private employer in Israel. Why Apple's CTO is from Israel.
But something tells me that the way you framed your question, is not about the companies and more about you and how you view Israel.
Because they are the best at spying in the world by far, and are willing to splash the cash. They're what Silicon Valley would have been if it kept doing government contracts instead of just selling ads.
If Mossad is willing to give you a hundred million to make your startup a spyware company, you're obviously going to agree.
Their military is very good at cyber-warfare. The gap has narrowed in the last decade, but before that there wasn't even a distant second, maybe Russia. People serve in those units, acquire very useful and specific skills, then start companies that offer commercial variants of cyber-warfare, or become subcontractors for other governments.
They're even better at sextortion. Jeffrey Epstein is the posterchild for their efforts, along with his Mossad agent father-in-law Robert Maxwell, and handler Ehud Barak. It's likely that many of Israel's "triumphs" over the last few decades were less a result of hacking and more a result of blackmail, similar to the FSB/KGB.
Mandatory military service, too. You have to imagine that the US would have a similarly disproportionately-scaled cyber-warfare industry if it also had mandatory military service and good sorting of capable people into those units.
> a haven for American pedophiles/criminals who end up fleeing the country
Only Jewish pedophiles & criminals.
Israel will not let in random non-Jewish criminals to flee prosecution, only those who are provably Jewish are granted citizenship and non-extradition.
This is where the wall broke down for me. Criticizing Israel is okay, but criticizing Jews is not. However this is one example of being "above the law" which affects all jews, not only israeli citizens.
Guess where the company big AI labs are using for security sandbox is from? The one that was involved in both big hacking scandals from "rogue agents" by OpenAI and Anthropic?
It is standard that companies within a country act in the interests of its security services. Israel has a lot of ad-tech companies and thus it makes sense that they are roped into serving Israel's security services.
This is the same issue that the US government has with Chinese networking companies, it is too easy for the Chinese government to pressure these Chinese networking companies to put in back doors in the interests of national security. The US likely knows this because it pressures its own companies in similar ways.
Israel was created by ethnically cleansing Palestinians during the Nakba. That's not a democracy, ethnically cleansed Palestinians aren't even allowed to live on their land, let alone vote. That's not including all of the Palestinians that have been straight up murdered.
In addition Israel is an apartheid state with many undemocratic features:
> ethnically cleansed Palestinians aren't even allowed to live on their land, let alone vote
America was a democracy while we were exterminating our native population. Democracy is a system of government. Voters can democratically vote for terrible things.
Israeli Arabs are allowed to vote.
> Israel is an apartheid state
This is a valid argument, though still stretched–America didn't cease to be a democracy while we occupied Germany and Japan.
Murdered people can't vote. People forced off their land and over an artificially created border can't vote. Israel is no democracy.
> America was a democracy while we were exterminating our native population.
I would argue that it was not for the very same reasons (and of course there were many other classes not allowed to vote at the time). Killing someone robs them of their right to vote.
> Murdered people can't vote. People forced off their land and over an artificially created border can't vote
Sure. But this also describes a lot of well-accepted democracies' histories.
Perhaps you're thinking of a liberal democracy?
> would argue that it was not
Sure, according to a personal definition that countries cease to be democracies any time they go to war (or more narrowly, commit war crimes), Israel is not a democracy...
> there were many other classes not allowed to vote at the time
Most democracies also prohibit non-citizens from voting. The term you may be looking for is full democracy. And I think most people and experts agree Israel is not a full democracy [1].
> Most democracies also prohibit non-citizens from voting.
I mean we're talking about all Black people, Indigenous people and women! I think arguing semantics isn't helpful.
Israel is an illegitimate state practicing crimes against humanity. That some of the colonizers can vote isn't really relevant. I actually think this can help us reflect on the true nature of the US as well and push for things like land back to Indigenous people and reparations for Black people.
> we're talking about all Black people, Indigenous people and women
Yes. Athens was similar–a minority of the population could vote. It was a deeply flawed democracy, but a democracy nonetheless.
> That some of the colonizers can vote isn't really relevant
Literally America! Also all of Europe depending on when you draw the line. Also all of the Middle East for the same reason. (Also most extant Native American tribes.) Hell, even in Palestine we can only say more than 50% of the population traces from Bronze-Age heritage.
By your definition, democracy does not exist and cannot exist in most parts of the world.
> this can help us reflect on the true nature of the US
It really can't if we're redefining precedented terms. America, like Israel, is a flawed democracy.
> Most democracies also prohibit children and non-citizens from voting
In the case of Israel these 'non-citizens' are under brutal military occupation where each day Israel steals more and more of their land. There's no 'home country' they could return to because Israel is occupying it. They're not illegal immigrants. They ARE home and yet being treated by Israel like invaders.
> They ARE home and yet being treated by Israel like invaders
Which is illiberal and flawed. It doesn't mean Israeli citizens don't democratically choose their leaders.
Note that this cuts both ways. If Israel isn't a democracy, the Israeli people have no moral culpability in their state's actions because we have no way of knowing if they actually support it.
> There's no 'home country' they could return to because Israel is occupying it
Agree this is tragic. But again, historically not unique. Displaced people have existed across the history of democracy.
Something being wrong doesn't automatically make it all kinds of wrong. Israel illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza and having unresolved reparations around the Nakba doesn't have much relevance to whether it's a democracy. Just whether it's a liberal or full one. (Among all of the other issues.)
Sure, you can always slice it in a way to make it look like a democracy. There's elections within the Politburo too, or Iran, which is a Republic after all. It was true of South Africa too.
I am happy to call Israel an ethno-supremacist, apartheid democracy if you want.
> Agree this is tragic. But again, historically not unique.
Sure, the Holocaust was 'historically not unique' too. Aren't we meant to be moving forward as humanity? Slavery was legal for most of history too.
> If Israel isn't a democracy, the Israeli people have no moral culpability in their state's actions because we have no way of knowing if they actually support it.
The Palestinians don't have any moral culpability in their own genocide and ethnic cleansing. That's the point, they can't vote on their own land.
By the way, the word "Nakba" is linguistically related to the Holocaust. If they admitted the Nakba happened they'd be admitting they did a Holocaust, so they don't admit that.
> Related work by the research group Confiant also suggests that Discover-Tech’s ads have been shown to users of the networks of government entities in Europe and the US, as well as the UN, Nato, the international criminal court and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Yet we don't sanction Israel nor hold them accountable in any way. Of course they're spying on members of the UN and ICC, of course. Israel is at war with the entire world right now, and my politicians continue to support them. Thankfully many people have woken up, but the situation is dire.
Based on responses from roughly 46,700 people assessing 129 countries, Israel ranked as the most negatively perceived country worldwide, ahead of North Korea, Afghanistan, and Iran. The most positively viewed were Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Sweden, and Italy.
That conflates the state with a business headquartered in it. It begs the question of what the sanctions would be for: is the argument that this firm is an arm of Israel, that Israel turns a blind eye to abusive businesses, or something else?
Yes, obviously the state and this company are the same thing. Why would a private company spy on the ICC and the UN? I’m sure there are plenty of 8200 people involved.
In case my point was unclear: Discover-Tech served ads to many clients. As far as I could tell, it's the paper's authors who singled the ICC and UN out.
That might be why the authors, in that disclaimer:
• used "in and of itself" without a footnote
• downplayed "confirm targeting" by sticking "or infection with spyware" into the same sentence.
My Democratic Rep (who is a Zionist) voted with the Republican Party to financially sanction and impose visa restrictions on members of the International Criminal Court for issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, so the ICC could hold Netanyahu for trial.
I will never vote for this particular (D) candidate again. Fortunately, the (L) candidate seems reasonable.
If indeed your representatives support Israel or the genocide in Gaza, I urge you to consider voting 3rd party. In two-party elections, candidates mostly just try to be a little better than their opponent. What forces them to do more isn’t a third party actually winning. It’s a real risk that enough fed-up voters will go third-party and cost them the election. This is basic game theory optimization.
Eh? My point was that the journalists are antisemetic and report very skewed. For example I learned just last week that there's illegal settlements in West Bank Area C... by Palestinians. From the media I've never even heard of such a thing, but that there's illegal Israeli settlements, I've been hearing about that for decades over and over.
Probably happens with Russia, US, etc as well, but the "hasbara" campaigns through the years have the effect of making people assume the mossad is all powerful etc etc. You inspire fear on your enemies, but also your friends.
>During our analysis of the Controlium platform, we observed that the source code mentioned an endpoint called “/csv-download”, which accepted start and end date parameters. When we sent normal HTTP GET requests to this endpoint without any password, special headers, or authentication token, we received logs showing which users had logged in to Controlium, and from which IP addresses.
Obviously not the first time an Israeli tech firm is responsible for these types of exploits, and at this point I'd go so far as saying that any Israeli-based tech company (especially cyber security ones, of which they have a strong industry) should be considered beholden to the government of Israel and hence, probably not trustworthy. How could you be sure whether they will act like a trustworthy independent entity, or compromise your data for the benefit of the state?
Define "hostile to users" a bit more. Chinese devices recklessly place rando back-doors into things, opening up them up to everyone and their mother. Average consumer router firmware? Compromised. They swallow up any and all information they can get their hands on and operate scam centers where they can utilize the info to blackmail people. Israel seems to have a more targeted approach, albeit there is definitely a blast radius. I'm not sure I can say any one country is worse than the other when it comes to cybersecurity. That includes: USA, Iran, North Korea, China, Israel, Russia etc. They all put consumers at risk; whether it's immediate or down the line when the exploits are revealed and other bad actors (scammers) are able to leverage them. It's a lose-lose for us either way.
I would also love this clarification, because not trusting an Israeli company is one thing, but with China, you're choosing to trust a government that is decades-old at being untrustworthy, not just a company. And whether or not the Israeli government can persuade a company to work with them notwithstanding, it's a known out truth that the Chinese government is in the business of its businesses.
We live in a world where NSO Group is protected from legal repercussions. If you're a US citizen, you live under the auspices of Israeli surveillance whether you like it or not. If you're a journalist, Israel will sell your opposition the Pegasus spyware to track you down and endanger your life. I wouldn't put it past Israel to blow up my phone, if they had the option. Yitzhak Rabin was killed for less.
The pager attack is a single stone in a mosaic of misanthropic Likud tactics. The damage Likud has done to Israel's reputation was intentional, designed from the ground-up to draw ire and protect criminals.
Yes, it is clear talking point (which I have seen and refuted before) to convince people not to buy from Israeli companies but as I already explained that doesn't apply and in the scenario with NSO - you aren't their costumer anyway.
> I wouldn't put it past the Mossad to blow up my phone, if they had the option. Yitzhak Rabin was killed for less.
Unless you are a member of Hezballah I doubt it. Yitzhak Rabin wasn't killed by Mossad and you have delusion of grandeur if you think your actions matter more than those of Yitzhak Rabin.
> The pager attack is a single stone in a mosaic of misanthropic Likud tactic
The pager attack was designed by Mossad, no reason to believe any particular relation to Likud.
The scenario absolutely applies with NSO Group. They are not the only business in Israel that engages in extrajudicial conduct abroad. They are not the only company being protected by the state. Just an extremely egregious, inhumane one that personally offends the sizable class of self-conscious smartphone users. It's bad PR.
In March 1994, for example, [Netanyahu] participated in a protest near Ra’anana that was organized by the extremist Kahane Chai movement. Photographs show Bibi walking in front of a coffin beside which was a man carrying a pole with a hangman’s noose attached.
On October 5, 1995, exactly one month before the assassination, Bibi organized and addressed an anti-Rabin rally in Jerusalem’s Zion Square where protesters chanted “Death to Rabin.” Bibi did nothing to quiet those chants. Itamar Rabinovich, Rabin’s former ambassador to Washington and later biographer, said of that event, “Netanyahu’s incitement at the time crossed the line.”
When Shin Bet chief Carmi Gillon warned Netanyahu that there was a plot on Rabin’s life and urged him to help tone down the hateful rhetoric he and others were using, Bibi refused to do so.
So yes, perhaps the Mossad had nothing to do with it. It doesn't change the violent rhetoric of Likud, or how they enable Mossad to perpetuate their violent objectives though. This corrupt, lethal and oppressive mentality is baked-in to Likud political strategy and deliberately suppresses voices that encourage peace or nonviolence.
> The pager attack was designed by Mossad, no reason to believe any particular relation to Likud.
Mossad reports directly to the prime minister of Israel, who was a Likud politician. Do you think that the Mossad carried out the complete attack without Likud involvement? I won't have my intelligence insulted so readily. It wouldn't surprise me if it was Likud's urging that pushed the Mossad to research and develop the attack.
You continue to fail to substantiate the claim Israeli companies are dangerous to their costumers which is what I dispute and talked about irrelevant stuff with whiff of conspiracy of Shin Bet's implicit cooperation.
Israeli companies are inherently dangerous to everyone, including customers. They are not subject to the rule of law, and there is no limit to their victims or how they can be jeopardized. It's not a conspiracy that the Israeli government protects criminals from investigation, extradition or prosecution, even entire criminal companies oftentimes. No liability system exists for these organizations, most of them cannot be punished for attacking customers indiscriminately since they aren't credibly investigated.
I would not trust them, even if I was an Israeli citizen myself.
They killed combatants in a war started by the same. Assuming you grant Israel the right to defend itself against those who attack them they could also have chosen to use less precisely targeted means to disable these combatants, leading to more 'collateral damage'. How would you have reacted had they done so?
Don't bother answering, I had a quick look at your submissions which show you to be an anti-Israel troll. Get you back to your cave, troll. Maybe 'tunnel' would be a better destination?
1.
Israel's "New" National Security Concept (inss.org.il)
5 points by newspaper1 2 days ago | flag | past | discuss
2.
US charity plans to use AI to monitor its Gaza classrooms for 'hateful' speech (apnews.com)
24 points by newspaper1 6 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment
3.
Green party votes to adopt policy that equates Zionism with racism (theguardian.com)
20 points by newspaper1 10 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment
4.
Israel water authority dumped toxins into Mediterranean to kill algae bloom (twitter.com/matanhodorov)
7 points by newspaper1 41 days ago | past | 1 comment
5.
Netanyahu says being on US television for 1k hours got the US to attack Iran (twitter.com/clashreport)
4 points by newspaper1 45 days ago | past | 3 comments
6.
House Dems' pro-Israel wing gains power on key panel (axios.com)
5 points by newspaper1 50 days ago | past
7.
Liquid Death runs ad campaign focused on mailing urine to data centers (twitter.com/drinkgaragebeer)
2 points by newspaper1 57 days ago | past
8.
Israel's Rave Music Drowns Out the Sound of Its Victims (currentaffairs.org)
8 points by newspaper1 63 days ago | past | 2 comments
9.
Invisible Invaders: How Israeli Surveillance Penetrated American Networks (libertarianinstitute.org)
4 points by newspaper1 66 days ago | past
10.
Anti-Zionism gains protection by UK law (twitter.com/tracking_power)
5 points by newspaper1 72 days ago | past
11.
Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Sold Bugged Israeli Software to Two Nuclear Weapons Labs (alisav.substack.com)
20 points by newspaper1 3 months ago | past | 5 comments
12.
[flagged] Apple removes Lebanese village names from Apple Maps as Israel attacks (twitter.com/ethanlevins2)
101 points by newspaper1 6 months ago | past | 16 comments
13.
Sequoia's Shaun Maguire accused an innocent Palestinian of being Brown shooter (fastcompany.com)
18 points by newspaper1 9 months ago | past | 1 comment
Israel has clear, expansionist ambitions. It makes it nigh-impossible to fully accept any of the borders the government has drawn.
I can conceive of a world where Israeli statehood is fully justified, but certainly not under the "biblical" borders suggested, or including the occupied territories. Syria and Lebanon are pretty justified in refusing to recognize Israel, and the rest of the world is also justified in mistrusting their "temporary" occupations.
I don't generally engage in arguments with people who seek justification for a genocide.
The numbers are available for you through numerous independent sources, Israel has murdered a disproportional order of magnitude more civilians than Hamas ever has, and even with these pager attacks it was reported each device had numerous collateral damages.
So please, if you want to be a disgusting human being, do it towards someone else.
They went out of their way to exterminate all members of the institutions who collect and publish these numbers, so we can assume the numbers are stacked really hard against them.
> Photographs and videos filmed by victims and witnesses to the incident and reviewed by Human Rights Watch showed pagers exploding in various locales, such as grocery stores. Other videos that appear to be linked to the incident show adults and children in emergency rooms with severe penetrating traumatic injuries to their heads, torsos. and limbs, and other injuries consistent with the detonation of high explosives.
The videos show Hezbollah members explode in public, but nearby civilians were unharmed. The explosive material was only a few grams. It didn’t even kill most people that were holding on to it, just maimed them with groin, hand, and eye damages
What do you think that proves? Thousands of pagers exploded. 50 unlucky bystanders explains your article.
I looked harder and found that Hezbollah has admitted that most of the victims were the intended targets, Hezbollah members.
>Hezbollah, also a major Shiite political party with a wide network of social institutions, has acknowledged that most of those wounded and killed were its fighters or personnel.
Is is quite amazing to see how effective the propaganda has been in pushing the anti-Israel standpoint. The KGB never succeeded here even though they tried quite hard - they even made up a nation state out of thin air to rally around - which shows the power of modern media and communications channels.
No, these specific attacks did not 'kill and maim far more bystanders than the targets themselves', where did you get that from? The beepers contained a few grams of explosives, enough to blow off a hand but not nearly enough to cause the imagined effect you describe. There is plenty of video material available which shows these things going off in pockets, hands and other locations. None of these show any collateral damage.
> Given that all nation states are more or less "made up out of thin air"
Not really, they tend to be created through conquest and/or colonisation followed by stabilisation around a common culture. Britannica has an article on the subject worth reading:
Here's the key components of what make a nation state as listed in the article:
A nation-state is a sovereign political entity where a state governs in the name of a community identifying as a nation. Its legitimacy arises from the right to self-determination of a core national group, who view the state as their own and its territory as their homeland.
Key features include:
* Defined Territory A nation-state has a specific territory, over which it has exclusive jurisdiction.
* Sovereignty It possesses the power to govern its territory without external interference, recognized since the Peace of Westphalia (1648).
* National Identity A shared history, culture, and language often create a sense of national identity, though this isn't always the case.
* Compulsory Membership Citizenship within the state is compulsory.
* Monopoly of Force The state claims the sole right to use armed force within its borders.
In the case of "the Palestinian people" and "the Palestinian state" these were created in 1964 by the KGB which drafted the 'Palestinian National Charter' and staffed the 'Palestinian National Council' with 422 selected members. They provided training, intelligence, financing and directed operations all in a clearly successful attempt to portray the PLO as a legitimate national liberation movement. By manufacturing Palestinian nationalism and backing the PLO the KGB successfully promoted it on the international stage which helped the PLO gain observer status at the UN in 1974 and recognition from various states.
I know what a nation state is, just wondering what makes Palestine stand out as an especially artificial one in your view. Is foreign involvement the key factor here?
The fact that is was created by an outside actor to be used as a tool is the major factor. It is still used for that same purpose and only for that purpose, there is no real nation state as such other than in the imagination of those who use it as a tool. This "state" has not benefited its inhabitants in any way since their "rulers" have only used them as tools and human shields in their power plays.
Sounds rather hyperbolic to me. By similar logic, one could argue that Israel's only purpose is to serve as a Western outpost in the Middle East. There's some truth in that but hardly tells the whole story.
There is no limit. The request is not coming from genuine curiosity — they are asking for a stricter definition so that they can attack any one that you provide, no matter how sensible. The befuddlement is deliberate.
Incorrect. I was genuinely curious and the person you responded to even proves my point in needing clarification because they're referring to an intentional "enemy" (which is relative here), but my understanding of OP's "users" is the average consumer like you or I. That's why I asked what the definition of "hostile to users" is here because hostile to a specific military or organizational target (like Israeli compromised devices do) is not the same as hostile to Frank sitting in a cubicle in Wisconsin (like Chinese compromised devices do).
This is a weird question and comment because a country doesn't generally make the software. But I suppose they seem to have a lot of influence on the companies. Like surveillance cameras in China.
If I was to say what companies have done the most to take the most privacy from the most people, it would be American big tech like Google and Meta.
There's some okayish software from Israel I can think of, like Zcash.
These Israeli ones are literal criminal companies. What Meta does should be illegal. Both are immoral.
A single spyware against a journalist is much worse than a single Facebook user, but for the total impact on society, they both destroy democracy and human rights significantly.
>I would sooner trust a Chinese company than an Israeli company
As for trust, with privacy I'm a big proponent of avoiding it. Use E2EE or self host if you have to. The country does not matter so much.
Zcash was created as an alternative to Monero. In Monero, every transaction is completely anonymous. In Zcash, transactions can be chosen as anonymous or not, so users can be pressured to avoid anonymous transactions, and to avoid associating or transacting with users who use anonymous transactions. This is apparently the main advantage and selling point of Zcash.
Some multinationals have their R&D offices in Israel, there's a lot of pretty good research coming out. Russia would probably be worse in terms of trust and they are openly hostile to the West unlike Israel.
Israel has openly and publicly threatened western politicians and citizens that don't aid their agenda however, many times. Like Russia, they have also shot down commercial airliners.
Unlike Russia, they have killed American sailors whilst directly attacking American naval assets.
That doesn't make any sense. China is a full dictatorship, Israel is not.
Vote me down all you want for saying something about Israel that's not super negative, but it's not a "which country do I dislike most" competition when it comes to facts.
China being a dictatorship means bad things for Chinese citizens but not necessary for the rest of the world.
Israel being a (disfunctional and rather illiberal at this point) democracy, means it's much better for it's own citizens (excluding Arabs ofc), but says nothing about the people outside. Same for the US BTW.
> You wouldn’t put personal data and trust in a Chinese app.
At this point, I don’t agree. I’m an immigrant living in the US currently. From an infosec and real-world consequences perspective, I have much less reason to fear what the Chinese government or corporations could do with my information than what either the current US government or its major tech corporations might do.
> Israel still have the reputation of being part of the ‘free world’ in the collective mind.
That collective mind is cognitively challenged and extremely ignorant, but it doesn’t mean I have to be.
wonder how long they'll be able to uphold this reputation, it's a bit puzzling to me that they still have one after three years of genocide in Palestine/Gaza and attacks on Lebanon, Iran, Qatar, Yemen and Syria. with the president having a warrant for war crimes and being investigated in his own country. and far-right government officials proudly saying that they want to eradicate their arab neighbors, and other heinous shit.
seems to me like lots of people are wary of ever criticizing or changing their mind about Israel, because their population once was the target of arguably the most heinous genocide in history, so far, which i'm of course very sorry for. must've caused some heavy, multi-generational trauma, other than that i can't explain why they're acting the way they do. don't make the mistake of translating official government statements or looking at population surveys, truly horrific, barbaric stuff. but of course the only terrorists in all of this are their neighbors which they keep in open-air prisons they at this point have bombed to rubble.
I'd say the image of public acceptance is somewhat manufactured by media, as it is coming from the US where people, especially in power, still actually believe in religious stuff and also, sadly, control or at least largely influence the world's media
us, the general public, is more or less atomized and the whole idea of it existing, but having an opinion outside "those who know" is precisely the way they manufacture it, thus people may believe all they want, but think that it is common knowledge that Israel can commit crimes due to victimhood in the past etc - nobody needs to believe this, only to think that others do
If I were engaged in anything hostile to Israel I utterly would not trust Israeli stuff. But Israel is normally quite careful about target selection, if I was not engaged in anything hostile to Israel I would expect anything they slip in to be secure and to not do any harm beyond it's existence. A scene from Lebanon not too long ago makes it very clear: A whole bunch of people milling about, setting up for selfies and the like--then we see the building behind destroyed by an airstrike. Clearly all those people around knew the building was going to be destroyed and they trusted Israeli accuracy enough to be standing not too far from where the bomb would land.
China, though, I would utterly not trust target selection or security against misuse.
I'm saying they shouldn't do that, because there is a decent chance those Israeli companies may do thinks at odds with their customers' best interests (because they cannot or would not say no to a government request).
* The state of Israel does authorize spyware sales (eg NSO Group has to get a license from the Ministry of Defense, and Israel's Defense Export Control Agency states that its decisions take national security / foreign policy into account).
* In the case of Pegasus, NYT had reported that Netanyahu intervened to make an exception allowing sale of Pegasus to Saudi Arabia (as political leverage). NSO group execs used Israeli diplomatic passports when they traveled and stayed at the Israeli embassy.
* The government doesn't crack down on these industries, which it would do if it really considered them criminal.
* In this particular case, one of the main targets was Al Jazeera, which seems unlikely that a criminal company would want to target vs. a state actor.
So yea, the government seems to allow these companies to engage in what other countries would consider criminal activity. You can then kind of choose your spot on the spectrum of: "I think this is some broad conspiracy the government purposefully designed for large-scale espionage" or just "The Israeli government thinks it would be good to have great cybersecurity skills in the country so they bend the rules a little".
A good well-researched read is The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein.
Exactly. There's plenty of public-private partnerships in Israel and there is zero chance that a spyware firm would go unnoticed. Israeli academia, defense industry, and government is tightly interconnected. See Unit 8200, for example, which basically works as an incubator for Israeli cyberspace fraudsters. Denying Israeli government involvement here is just as dumb as denying Russian government involvement in Fancy Bear.
Jewish and Israeli are not identical. It's possible for someone to have negative views of the country without that being a stance on people who are Jewish.
All ads should have to appear in an <advertisement> node, and users should have the option of disabling javascript within an advertisement. Make it the fucking law.
250 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 20.3 ms ] threadArticle on the CitizenLab website: https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targ...
Edit:
the TFA answers: "Advertisers or DSPs may run HTML and JavaScript code when an ad is shown to the user." Its wild! I thought the ads are sanitized, go through a CDR of sorts, and whatever javascript is permitted is authored by ad networks, not the buyers. Sheesh. Thats just RCE.
RTB (real-time bidding) does not incentivise publishers to care about what ads are actually being shown to individual users, so long as CPM is maximised.
Then the ad network delivers a targeted ad that exploits a vulnerability (eg a broken JPEG decoder that, when sent a bad image, allows to run arbitrary code on your machine), and from there you have access to the computer
I don't know if an ad blocker protects against Discover-Tech’s Controlium but in general you'd be a fool to allow ads in your browser in at this point. The ad industry is pretty shady all round.
One must wonder how many were genuine vs an influence op.
The whole point of an influence op is to find a bunch of useful idiots to provide a large multiplicative factor.
And that's the problem with arguing that something is an influence op, because it is going to be mostly genuine people by the time it gets to you, even though you're not wrong.
Likewise, using privacy messengers like Signal is also useless if they can just take control of your entire device anytime they want.
From being hacked by others. Google was just trying to protect their property, which is the ability to spy on their users' every move. Google themselves really don't need to "hack" their users for that, they already have all the access and all the data they could ever want. And they also have the ability to brick their users' devices at a moment's notice the same as Apple does.
Totally not useless. It costs a lot more to pay a spyware firm then to have an employee send an email / ask a judge (like that's even necessary).
I feel quite confident of my messages privacy on my Pixel with GrapheneOS given they most people I message are on iPhones which are second in security to Pixels running GrapheneOS.
If you're talking about the sideloading restrictions those were intended to stop social engineering and scams, not from getting hacked via 0days.
>Likewise, using privacy messengers like Signal is also useless if they can just take control of your entire device anytime they want.
Source? play services is privileged but not that privileged.
No, those restrictions were intended to keep Android users in the playstore ghetto (which is suffed to the gills with scams.)
In fact, following the OP's link to https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targ..., "the company’s ads were shown on almost 200,000 unique websites and Android/iOS apps in dozens of countries" so it's not just apps but ordinary websites you visit in your android chrome browser.
No info on if a recent version patches this?
It also mentions a "Windows DLL" - so they're somehow infecting Windows desktop too?
It’s a low-hanging fruit that has high value, particularly for less savvy internet users. Scams have always been the biggest threat. I’d say the majority of internet ads are scams, and the platforms often don’t make it clear what is or is not an ad.
But, we always knew the risk of malware was there. In the modern age, ads are basically never delivered as static assets. They’re delivered as small applications, with code. So, we’re relying on our sandboxing mechanics to work perfectly, and predictably they don’t. The solution is to block the code altogether; to block ads.
* https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targ...
The article does say "Both samples use a COM hijack for persistence, though make use of different DLLs." So does this only affect Windows machines? I didn't have time to read the linked 2021 report on Candiru, so maybe more details are there, but for such a detailed write up it would be helpful if the article was more explicit about which browser vulnerability was exploited.
Though, there is a browser patch for this, don't advertise so much identifiable information that an advertiser can identify a user or their employer. That's the defense, but it'll never happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley
Russia has historically not had mandatory universal conscription.
But something tells me that the way you framed your question, is not about the companies and more about you and how you view Israel.
If Mossad is willing to give you a hundred million to make your startup a spyware company, you're obviously going to agree.
what a sad take.
Only Jewish pedophiles & criminals. Israel will not let in random non-Jewish criminals to flee prosecution, only those who are provably Jewish are granted citizenship and non-extradition.
It's fairly common in Europe[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis#Leges_sanguinis_...
It is no different that Israel's location tracking of StarLink terminals worldwide: https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-tech-firms-can-locate-an...
This is the same issue that the US government has with Chinese networking companies, it is too easy for the Chinese government to pressure these Chinese networking companies to put in back doors in the interests of national security. The US likely knows this because it pressures its own companies in similar ways.
In addition Israel is an apartheid state with many undemocratic features:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/66a134337e960f229da81...
America was a democracy while we were exterminating our native population. Democracy is a system of government. Voters can democratically vote for terrible things.
Israeli Arabs are allowed to vote.
> Israel is an apartheid state
This is a valid argument, though still stretched–America didn't cease to be a democracy while we occupied Germany and Japan.
> America was a democracy while we were exterminating our native population.
I would argue that it was not for the very same reasons (and of course there were many other classes not allowed to vote at the time). Killing someone robs them of their right to vote.
Sure. But this also describes a lot of well-accepted democracies' histories.
Perhaps you're thinking of a liberal democracy?
> would argue that it was not
Sure, according to a personal definition that countries cease to be democracies any time they go to war (or more narrowly, commit war crimes), Israel is not a democracy...
> there were many other classes not allowed to vote at the time
Most democracies also prohibit non-citizens from voting. The term you may be looking for is full democracy. And I think most people and experts agree Israel is not a full democracy [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
I mean we're talking about all Black people, Indigenous people and women! I think arguing semantics isn't helpful.
Israel is an illegitimate state practicing crimes against humanity. That some of the colonizers can vote isn't really relevant. I actually think this can help us reflect on the true nature of the US as well and push for things like land back to Indigenous people and reparations for Black people.
Yes. Athens was similar–a minority of the population could vote. It was a deeply flawed democracy, but a democracy nonetheless.
> That some of the colonizers can vote isn't really relevant
Literally America! Also all of Europe depending on when you draw the line. Also all of the Middle East for the same reason. (Also most extant Native American tribes.) Hell, even in Palestine we can only say more than 50% of the population traces from Bronze-Age heritage.
By your definition, democracy does not exist and cannot exist in most parts of the world.
> this can help us reflect on the true nature of the US
It really can't if we're redefining precedented terms. America, like Israel, is a flawed democracy.
In the case of Israel these 'non-citizens' are under brutal military occupation where each day Israel steals more and more of their land. There's no 'home country' they could return to because Israel is occupying it. They're not illegal immigrants. They ARE home and yet being treated by Israel like invaders.
Which is illiberal and flawed. It doesn't mean Israeli citizens don't democratically choose their leaders.
Note that this cuts both ways. If Israel isn't a democracy, the Israeli people have no moral culpability in their state's actions because we have no way of knowing if they actually support it.
> There's no 'home country' they could return to because Israel is occupying it
Agree this is tragic. But again, historically not unique. Displaced people have existed across the history of democracy.
Something being wrong doesn't automatically make it all kinds of wrong. Israel illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza and having unresolved reparations around the Nakba doesn't have much relevance to whether it's a democracy. Just whether it's a liberal or full one. (Among all of the other issues.)
I am happy to call Israel an ethno-supremacist, apartheid democracy if you want.
> Agree this is tragic. But again, historically not unique.
Sure, the Holocaust was 'historically not unique' too. Aren't we meant to be moving forward as humanity? Slavery was legal for most of history too.
The Palestinians don't have any moral culpability in their own genocide and ethnic cleansing. That's the point, they can't vote on their own land.
What it has to do with Israel?
Seriously, are you older than 5?
You really don't know history, the Germans lived there hundreds of years.
You are really 5 years old. Aren't you?
Can we get an alien invasion already please, god
Yet we don't sanction Israel nor hold them accountable in any way. Of course they're spying on members of the UN and ICC, of course. Israel is at war with the entire world right now, and my politicians continue to support them. Thankfully many people have woken up, but the situation is dire.
Based on responses from roughly 46,700 people assessing 129 countries, Israel ranked as the most negatively perceived country worldwide, ahead of North Korea, Afghanistan, and Iran. The most positively viewed were Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Sweden, and Italy.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260513-israel-becomes-wo...
That might be why the authors, in that disclaimer:
• used "in and of itself" without a footnote
• downplayed "confirm targeting" by sticking "or infection with spyware" into the same sentence.
Israel is at war with Hamas, Iran and its proxies and allies.
I will never vote for this particular (D) candidate again. Fortunately, the (L) candidate seems reasonable.
If indeed your representatives support Israel or the genocide in Gaza, I urge you to consider voting 3rd party. In two-party elections, candidates mostly just try to be a little better than their opponent. What forces them to do more isn’t a third party actually winning. It’s a real risk that enough fed-up voters will go third-party and cost them the election. This is basic game theory optimization.
Absolute morons.
* Any company from any country in the world does something bad --> 'Company did something bad'
* Israeli company does something bad --> 'Israeli company did something bad'
Exploding pagers. Israel literally killed people with consumer tech.
We live in a world where NSO Group is protected from legal repercussions. If you're a US citizen, you live under the auspices of Israeli surveillance whether you like it or not. If you're a journalist, Israel will sell your opposition the Pegasus spyware to track you down and endanger your life. I wouldn't put it past Israel to blow up my phone, if they had the option. Yitzhak Rabin was killed for less.
The pager attack is a single stone in a mosaic of misanthropic Likud tactics. The damage Likud has done to Israel's reputation was intentional, designed from the ground-up to draw ire and protect criminals.
> I wouldn't put it past the Mossad to blow up my phone, if they had the option. Yitzhak Rabin was killed for less.
Unless you are a member of Hezballah I doubt it. Yitzhak Rabin wasn't killed by Mossad and you have delusion of grandeur if you think your actions matter more than those of Yitzhak Rabin.
> The pager attack is a single stone in a mosaic of misanthropic Likud tactic
The pager attack was designed by Mossad, no reason to believe any particular relation to Likud.
I know you know this, but Yitzhak Rabin was killed with Netanyahu's support, Likud's full awareness of the threat on his life, and Shin Bet's implicit cooperation: https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/rabins-murder-and-a...
So yes, perhaps the Mossad had nothing to do with it. It doesn't change the violent rhetoric of Likud, or how they enable Mossad to perpetuate their violent objectives though. This corrupt, lethal and oppressive mentality is baked-in to Likud political strategy and deliberately suppresses voices that encourage peace or nonviolence.> The pager attack was designed by Mossad, no reason to believe any particular relation to Likud.
Mossad reports directly to the prime minister of Israel, who was a Likud politician. Do you think that the Mossad carried out the complete attack without Likud involvement? I won't have my intelligence insulted so readily. It wouldn't surprise me if it was Likud's urging that pushed the Mossad to research and develop the attack.
I would not trust them, even if I was an Israeli citizen myself.
They killed combatants in a war started by the same. Assuming you grant Israel the right to defend itself against those who attack them they could also have chosen to use less precisely targeted means to disable these combatants, leading to more 'collateral damage'. How would you have reacted had they done so?
--edit--
Don't bother answering, I had a quick look at your submissions which show you to be an anti-Israel troll. Get you back to your cave, troll. Maybe 'tunnel' would be a better destination?
1. Israel's "New" National Security Concept (inss.org.il) 5 points by newspaper1 2 days ago | flag | past | discuss
2. US charity plans to use AI to monitor its Gaza classrooms for 'hateful' speech (apnews.com) 24 points by newspaper1 6 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment
3. Green party votes to adopt policy that equates Zionism with racism (theguardian.com) 20 points by newspaper1 10 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment
4. Israel water authority dumped toxins into Mediterranean to kill algae bloom (twitter.com/matanhodorov) 7 points by newspaper1 41 days ago | past | 1 comment
5. Netanyahu says being on US television for 1k hours got the US to attack Iran (twitter.com/clashreport) 4 points by newspaper1 45 days ago | past | 3 comments
6. House Dems' pro-Israel wing gains power on key panel (axios.com) 5 points by newspaper1 50 days ago | past
7. Liquid Death runs ad campaign focused on mailing urine to data centers (twitter.com/drinkgaragebeer) 2 points by newspaper1 57 days ago | past
8. Israel's Rave Music Drowns Out the Sound of Its Victims (currentaffairs.org) 8 points by newspaper1 63 days ago | past | 2 comments
9. Invisible Invaders: How Israeli Surveillance Penetrated American Networks (libertarianinstitute.org) 4 points by newspaper1 66 days ago | past
10. Anti-Zionism gains protection by UK law (twitter.com/tracking_power) 5 points by newspaper1 72 days ago | past
11. Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Sold Bugged Israeli Software to Two Nuclear Weapons Labs (alisav.substack.com) 20 points by newspaper1 3 months ago | past | 5 comments
12. [flagged] Apple removes Lebanese village names from Apple Maps as Israel attacks (twitter.com/ethanlevins2) 101 points by newspaper1 6 months ago | past | 16 comments
13. Sequoia's Shaun Maguire accused an innocent Palestinian of being Brown shooter (fastcompany.com) 18 points by newspaper1 9 months ago | past | 1 comment
I can conceive of a world where Israeli statehood is fully justified, but certainly not under the "biblical" borders suggested, or including the occupied territories. Syria and Lebanon are pretty justified in refusing to recognize Israel, and the rest of the world is also justified in mistrusting their "temporary" occupations.
I'm afraid to say there is zero justification for the atrocities Israel commits. None.
The numbers are available for you through numerous independent sources, Israel has murdered a disproportional order of magnitude more civilians than Hamas ever has, and even with these pager attacks it was reported each device had numerous collateral damages.
So please, if you want to be a disgusting human being, do it towards someone else.
Is that the case? That's not the impression I got from the reporting. Do you recommend anything in particular I should read to verify your view?
> Photographs and videos filmed by victims and witnesses to the incident and reviewed by Human Rights Watch showed pagers exploding in various locales, such as grocery stores. Other videos that appear to be linked to the incident show adults and children in emergency rooms with severe penetrating traumatic injuries to their heads, torsos. and limbs, and other injuries consistent with the detonation of high explosives.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
>Hezbollah, also a major Shiite political party with a wide network of social institutions, has acknowledged that most of those wounded and killed were its fighters or personnel.
https://apnews.com/article/b63cb3639dd9da855ec6c704bc8424df
No, these specific attacks did not 'kill and maim far more bystanders than the targets themselves', where did you get that from? The beepers contained a few grams of explosives, enough to blow off a hand but not nearly enough to cause the imagined effect you describe. There is plenty of video material available which shows these things going off in pockets, hands and other locations. None of these show any collateral damage.
Given that all nation states are more or less "made up out of thin air", what makes one more artificial than another in your view?
Not really, they tend to be created through conquest and/or colonisation followed by stabilisation around a common culture. Britannica has an article on the subject worth reading:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/nation-state
Here's the key components of what make a nation state as listed in the article:
A nation-state is a sovereign political entity where a state governs in the name of a community identifying as a nation. Its legitimacy arises from the right to self-determination of a core national group, who view the state as their own and its territory as their homeland.
Key features include:
* Defined Territory A nation-state has a specific territory, over which it has exclusive jurisdiction.
* Sovereignty It possesses the power to govern its territory without external interference, recognized since the Peace of Westphalia (1648).
* National Identity A shared history, culture, and language often create a sense of national identity, though this isn't always the case.
* Compulsory Membership Citizenship within the state is compulsory.
* Monopoly of Force The state claims the sole right to use armed force within its borders.
In the case of "the Palestinian people" and "the Palestinian state" these were created in 1964 by the KGB which drafted the 'Palestinian National Charter' and staffed the 'Palestinian National Council' with 422 selected members. They provided training, intelligence, financing and directed operations all in a clearly successful attempt to portray the PLO as a legitimate national liberation movement. By manufacturing Palestinian nationalism and backing the PLO the KGB successfully promoted it on the international stage which helped the PLO gain observer status at the UN in 1974 and recognition from various states.
They use this software to find and kill people. Which they then publicly brag about. How much more hostile do you want to be?
There is no limit. The request is not coming from genuine curiosity — they are asking for a stricter definition so that they can attack any one that you provide, no matter how sensible. The befuddlement is deliberate.
If I was to say which countries do the most to restrict digital freedom, I'd say look at this table: https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm
If I was to say what companies have done the most to take the most privacy from the most people, it would be American big tech like Google and Meta.
There's some okayish software from Israel I can think of, like Zcash.
These Israeli ones are literal criminal companies. What Meta does should be illegal. Both are immoral.
A single spyware against a journalist is much worse than a single Facebook user, but for the total impact on society, they both destroy democracy and human rights significantly.
>I would sooner trust a Chinese company than an Israeli company
As for trust, with privacy I'm a big proponent of avoiding it. Use E2EE or self host if you have to. The country does not matter so much.
We all end up running closed source code somewhere
If you do you'll be much better off avoiding Israeli tech
As a rule if you boycott everything Israeli it'll be smarter, more ethical, and safer
Israel has openly and publicly threatened western politicians and citizens that don't aid their agenda however, many times. Like Russia, they have also shot down commercial airliners.
Unlike Russia, they have killed American sailors whilst directly attacking American naval assets.
Vote me down all you want for saying something about Israel that's not super negative, but it's not a "which country do I dislike most" competition when it comes to facts.
Also let's discussion about down votes is against him policy, yet magically you're exempt, typical of **
Israel being a (disfunctional and rather illiberal at this point) democracy, means it's much better for it's own citizens (excluding Arabs ofc), but says nothing about the people outside. Same for the US BTW.
Israel still have the reputation of being part of the ‘free world’ in the collective mind.
that is more dangerous.
At this point, I don’t agree. I’m an immigrant living in the US currently. From an infosec and real-world consequences perspective, I have much less reason to fear what the Chinese government or corporations could do with my information than what either the current US government or its major tech corporations might do.
> Israel still have the reputation of being part of the ‘free world’ in the collective mind.
That collective mind is cognitively challenged and extremely ignorant, but it doesn’t mean I have to be.
seems to me like lots of people are wary of ever criticizing or changing their mind about Israel, because their population once was the target of arguably the most heinous genocide in history, so far, which i'm of course very sorry for. must've caused some heavy, multi-generational trauma, other than that i can't explain why they're acting the way they do. don't make the mistake of translating official government statements or looking at population surveys, truly horrific, barbaric stuff. but of course the only terrorists in all of this are their neighbors which they keep in open-air prisons they at this point have bombed to rubble.
us, the general public, is more or less atomized and the whole idea of it existing, but having an opinion outside "those who know" is precisely the way they manufacture it, thus people may believe all they want, but think that it is common knowledge that Israel can commit crimes due to victimhood in the past etc - nobody needs to believe this, only to think that others do
Today, I saw an American news reporter got beaten up on the ground by 50 Israeli colonists.
That fact alone would get media, government most us citizens angry with pitch forks.
There is some very strong lobbying at multiple levels.
If I were engaged in anything hostile to Israel I utterly would not trust Israeli stuff. But Israel is normally quite careful about target selection, if I was not engaged in anything hostile to Israel I would expect anything they slip in to be secure and to not do any harm beyond it's existence. A scene from Lebanon not too long ago makes it very clear: A whole bunch of people milling about, setting up for selfies and the like--then we see the building behind destroyed by an airstrike. Clearly all those people around knew the building was going to be destroyed and they trusted Israeli accuracy enough to be standing not too far from where the bomb would land.
China, though, I would utterly not trust target selection or security against misuse.
I guess that your concerns are not aligned with reality, or the benefits far outweigh whatever it is you think may happen.
(Talking as an Israeli working in cybersecurity)
Do we have evidence this is a state operation versus a criminal group?
* The state of Israel does authorize spyware sales (eg NSO Group has to get a license from the Ministry of Defense, and Israel's Defense Export Control Agency states that its decisions take national security / foreign policy into account).
* In the case of Pegasus, NYT had reported that Netanyahu intervened to make an exception allowing sale of Pegasus to Saudi Arabia (as political leverage). NSO group execs used Israeli diplomatic passports when they traveled and stayed at the Israeli embassy.
* The government doesn't crack down on these industries, which it would do if it really considered them criminal.
* In this particular case, one of the main targets was Al Jazeera, which seems unlikely that a criminal company would want to target vs. a state actor.
So yea, the government seems to allow these companies to engage in what other countries would consider criminal activity. You can then kind of choose your spot on the spectrum of: "I think this is some broad conspiracy the government purposefully designed for large-scale espionage" or just "The Israeli government thinks it would be good to have great cybersecurity skills in the country so they bend the rules a little".
A good well-researched read is The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein.
https://www.taboola.com/
This crap is the worst of the worst.