NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

My experience with Israeli companies suggests that a culture which values intellectual achievement and competition is more widespread there.

Similar cultural enclaves exist elsewhere in the world and are presumably similarly effective, but they just aren't as large a portion of the population.

Even small cultural differences can have outsized effects because of pollination-- e.g. it's easier to learn from an expert in a domain if there are more experts around you.

I think your question isn't really that much different to asking why the bay area has "punched above its weight" in terms of producing successful tech companies compared to other regions around the US... or why other regions have had a lot more success in other domains.

Signal's software is timebombed to force you into taking automatic updates. These updates could be used to force targeted users into backdoored builds.

Additionally, the signal has had a long history of being feature hostile to strongly secure use, through things like making it very difficult to cryptographically verify the identity of the party you're talking to... or automatically resending the last message you sent when the far end merely claims its key has changed.

I recommend people treat signal as unencrypted communications-- _actually_ unencrypted private communications are too absurdly insecure to use. But in practice signal does not provide the kind of strong security that we would associate with 'encrypted communication', and maybe UI considerations make that an unrealistic goal. Instead signal provides the kind of security we should expect from _ANY_ communication, but which isn't actually provided due to pervasive surveillance.

The article says: "The Facebook-owned software giant alleges that NSO Group built and sold a hacking platform that exploited a flaw in WhatsApp-owned servers to help clients hack into the cellphones of at least 1,400 users."

The actual complaint reads: "Between in and around April 2019 and May 2019, Defendants used WhatsApp servers, located in the United States and elsewhere, to send malware to approximately 1,400 mobile phones and devices (“Target Devices”). Defendants’ malware was designed to infect the Target Devices for the purpose of conducting surveillance of specific WhatsApp users (“Target Users”). Unable to break WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, Defendants developed their malware in order to access messages and other communications after they were decrypted on Target Devices. Defendants’ actions were not authorized by Plaintiffs and were in violation of WhatsApp’s Terms of Service. In May 2019, Plaintiffs detected and stopped Defendants’ unauthorized access and abuse of the WhatsApp Service and computers."

https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do...

In other words: WhatsApp does not allege a server breach. It alleges that phones were hacked via carefully crafted messages to trigger an exploit[1] on the phones, but to do that, hackers sent the messages via WhatsApp servers. They mention that, because otherwise they would have less of an argument to sue over. As far as I can tell, they're alleging that NSO Group was part of a scheme to interfere with the WhatsApp relay servers and to break the TOS, stated several different ways under different theories and laws.

[1] this one https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-3568

Jews are extremely overrepresented amongst scientific, business, cultural, and political elites compared to how many of them are in the world. Just look at the list of 500 richest people, or Nobel Prize winners.

I took a class on it back in the day in the uni. There are long and complicated historical factors contributing to this, including centuries of Catholic-church mandated Jewish monopoly on law & banking (i.e. Catholic church didn't allow anybody else to do it because it was considered impure), which resulted in intense focus on education through generations while everybody else was farming and fighting. On top of that, everybody has been trying to murder Jews during the entire history, so there's a lot of natural selection.

The article is garbling the WhatsApp allegations: WhatsApp says the hackers abused WhatsApp servers to hack phones, not that the servers had a flaw. To send the malicious payloads to the victims, the hackers sent messages that flowed over WhatsApp's networks, which largely what they're hanging the lawsuit on.

https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do...

The actual flaw was this one: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-3568