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Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

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Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#461
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refuse to hire them, like I do for Facebook, Microsoft, and Raytheon/Booz/etc staff. Blog about their names and the work they do and their employer, so anyone searching for them on Google knows that they are military-industrial complex scumbags.

> Blog about their names and the work they do This is, uh, rather malicious, and definitely undemocratic. Let's not have any of that, please.

No, publishing and free expression (especially of factually accurate information) is extremely democratic.

It's really surprising to see people pushing back lately against free speech and a free press.

If you find the truth to be malicious, perhaps it's reality you have the issue with, not the speaker.

Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#462
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit (maybe moot): > 4) Apple incurred damages […] from expenses related to mitigating the hacking of their users. This sounds like no one should be a security researcher for they risk paying companies to implement the security the company should have implemented anyway. Put another way, that also sounds like the corporate open source push, "We love open source because we don't have to support it, the community will!"…

From Facts(C), "60. Defendants force Apple to engage in a continual arms race: Even as Apple develops solutions and enhances the security of its devices, Defendants are constantly updating their malware and exploits to overcome Apple’s own security upgrades. 61. These constant recovery and prevention efforts require significant resources and impose huge costs on Apple. Defendants’ unlawful malware activities have cau…

Is it C that imposes huge costs here? Do they have a list what CVEs have what cost?

Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's worked out so well until now. So may as well make a little cash on the side of it, eh? Do you think the path to end tyranny was so smooth in developed countries? Think back through Western revolutionary history and now immediately forget the name of every leader the moment you think of them - because that's what's happening, right now, in these countries at this exact stage of their political developme…

I don't care about NSO at all, they can shut down tomorrow for all I care. I'm just saying if the alternative is between something like the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood type movements - to something like the military regime Egypt has now or whatever the Saudis came up with, I take the latter. What you said about resistance being impossible - it won't get any better under a radical Islamic rul…

They don't just use sales to oppose the Muslim Brotherhood! They are bombing innocent Yemenis who have ZERO connection to Iran. They backed Salafis, like Al-Qaeda for decades (forgotten about those guys?) They use them to jail journalists for reporting on corruption, women rights activists for driving. People just trying to make their countries a bit better.

You say "if the alternative is between...", and then proceed to just accept the false choice that it's either tyranny or anarchy, using that reasoning to give a pass to the scum making a buck from some of the most disgusting regimes on the planet. Western countries took generations of incremental improvements to arrive here, all while tyrants always used that argument to try stay on top.

You're uncritically buying the line that Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood are the worst (which could be argued) but the other less so, because they are on "our side". If you prioritise human rights, that lives on both sides are equally valuable (and I suspect from this thread that you don't) then such a distinction is meaningless.

It's a fear-driven siege mentality and terribly short sighted to think that in the region that brought us Gadhafi, Saddam, Daesh and the Mujahaddin, somehow KSA, Egypt or the UAE will magically always align with however your interests evolve.

Thanks to NSO they ARE a step closer to North Korea and destabilising the region in the long term with repression and misery. But you're only interested in short term outcomes for Israel/Western countries, kicking the can down the road when the consequences of such sales will have unknown impacts for decades.

After seeing how it's played out, it's just exhausting to see this kind of mentality after all these years, lost lives and lessons apparently unlearned. Along with greed, this mentality is why the mercenary surveillance industry exists. For the sake of everyones kids both need to end.

Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#464
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blog about their names and the work they do This is, uh, rather malicious, and definitely undemocratic. Let's not have any of that, please.

No, publishing and free expression (especially of factually accurate information) is extremely democratic. It's really surprising to see people pushing back lately against free speech and a free press. If you find the truth to be malicious, perhaps it's reality you have the issue with, not the speaker.

> No, publishing and free expression (especially of factually accurate information) is extremely democratic.

If I publish someone's name, address, and personal routine to am online forum and ask someone to assassinate them, is that "democratic"? It's "factually accurate information", right?

No, obviously not. People's personal information is off-limits.

Unless, you think that it's not - in which case it's ok for large companies like Google and Facebook to gather it, as well, and I expect you to hand yours over to them (as well as the US government).

Regardless, it's quite clearly false that publishing someone's personal information with the intent to make them unemployable because of your partisan political opinions is "democratic" - you're doing your best to enforce your own values on someone else as an individual. That's the opposite of democracy - tyranny.

> It's really surprising to see people pushing back lately against free speech and a free press.

I'm calling this for what it is - feigned surprise and an appeal to emotion used for the purposes of emotional manipulation.

And if you think that doxxing people counts as a "free press" that explains a lot about the other things you've written.

> If you find the truth to be malicious, perhaps it's reality you have the issue with, not the speaker.

As we've seen, your claims have no relation to reality, and are additionally indicative of extremely malicious intent (truth and malice are not exclusive anyway - you can say "I'm going to mess you up" and that's both truthful and malicious). Please stop trying to justify doxxing people - it's both evil by itself and completely inconsistent with the other positions that you've stated on freedom and privacy.

Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#465
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that seem pedantic? It's incredibly straightforward. On the other hand, creating some kind of convoluted, contrived paper trail to claim that mysterious third parties were the ones to have physically pressed the "Accept" button on your 100 fake accounts and so you didn't even know there was a EULA seems kind of like it might actually be fraud.

Wouldn't there be an article in the EULA that states if you use an Apple device, regardless of clicking buttons, you automatically consent to the ToS? Or is that not how the law works ...?

EULA isn't ToS. If you accept EULA and EULA automatically joins you to ToS, then you also accept ToS, usually including all its future versions.

Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> They are just using the EULA as the basis for claiming jurisdiction. IANAL but it's always seemed to me that if I reject the terms of a EULA then the EULA doesn't apply to me. Pushing the "button" does not mean anything because only the EULA gives it meaning and I reject that. 50 years from now if someone is doing software archaeology and they go to install some software from a long gone company, who does clicking…

US contract law jurisprudence doesn't really seem to support you here. > The mental assent of the parties is not requisite for the formation of a contract. If the words or other acts of one of the parties have but one reasonable meaning, his undisclosed intention is immaterial except when an unreasonable meaning which he attaches to his manifestations is known to the other party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_v.…

That looks very different:

>Zehmer wrote on the back of the restaurant's receipt stating, "We hereby agree to sell to W. O. Lucy the Ferguson Farm complete for $50,000.00, title satisfactory to buyer". The note was signed by Zehmer and his wife.

Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure that makes it any better.

It makes it a nothingburger. Your Israeli barista has past involvement with the security forces. In and of itself it's basically a meaningless statement.

Yeah, an intelligence firm founded by ex intelligence is absolutely a coincidence. There's no chance they would use their skills or connections in their new firm.

Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#468
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly heads-up: if you try to say anything negative about Apple here on Hacker News, people will tend to downvote you out of cognitive dissonance alone. It doesn't matter if what you're saying is the truth, the people here just really like to roleplay as security experts and pretend like Apple is somehow different from the other PRISM-compliant corporations.

This isn't remotely true, as anyone can see for themselves using the search box at the bottom of every page. Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, such as spurious generalizations about the community. The people who feel the opposite way about $BigCo make exactly the opposite spurious generalizations—the dominant variable affecting this is the passions of the perceiver. In other words, it is in the eye of th…

I respectfully disagree. No matter how arbitrary or obliquely bad of a decision Apple makes (supporting mass-surveillance, adding a notch to a laptop, buying out the entire 5nm node from TSMC), there are people on this site that will defend it. These people represent the majority of interactions I've had on the subject over the past year, because anyone who criticizes the dominant culture of the site gets run out of town on a rail. Every attempt I make at good-faith discussion around Apple ends with accusations, dogpiled downvotes and completely off-topic flamewars. I'm not the sort of person who cares about those things, but denying that they happen? It's in every $BigCo thread, every day. Without healthy skepticism to balance blind support, meaningful conversations cannot happen. When we fail to hold companies accountable for their actions, innovation dies. As this is a site made for entrepreneurs and starry-eyed startup jockeys, I think fostering discussions around the shortcomings of bigger companies opens the dialogue around creative solutions and novel products. Some people treat this site as a place to do battle for their favorite companies though, which ultimately harms the quality of discourse and reduces us to nothing more than tribal warfare.

Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#469
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't remotely true, as anyone can see for themselves using the search box at the bottom of every page. Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, such as spurious generalizations about the community. The people who feel the opposite way about $BigCo make exactly the opposite spurious generalizations—the dominant variable affecting this is the passions of the perceiver. In other words, it is in the eye of th…

I respectfully disagree. No matter how arbitrary or obliquely bad of a decision Apple makes (supporting mass-surveillance, adding a notch to a laptop, buying out the entire 5nm node from TSMC), there are people on this site that will defend it. These people represent the majority of interactions I've had on the subject over the past year, because anyone who criticizes the dominant culture of the site gets run out of…

Of course you're going to get pushback when you post grand claims, provocations, and outright flamebait like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29344580. Your own posts are generating it. That's not evidence of bias in the community, it's a reflection of what you're doing on the site.

Please stop that. It's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that keep doing it.

Re: Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware

#470
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. No matter how arbitrary or obliquely bad of a decision Apple makes (supporting mass-surveillance, adding a notch to a laptop, buying out the entire 5nm node from TSMC), there are people on this site that will defend it. These people represent the majority of interactions I've had on the subject over the past year, because anyone who criticizes the dominant culture of the site gets run out of…

Of course you're going to get pushback when you post grand claims, provocations, and outright flamebait like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29344580 . Your own posts are generating it. That's not evidence of bias in the community, it's a reflection of what you're doing on the site. Please stop that. It's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that keep doing it.

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