I don't understand the focus on NSO in these stories. If U.S State Department personnel in Uganda were shot from an M-16, would the headline mention "an American arms manufacturer"? No, because it's ridiculous. For better or worse, NSO's product is a weapon. How is it any different from an M-16? Where is the outrage towards the people who used this weapon against the State Department?
U.S. weapons manufacturers receive a lot of criticism too, both domestically in the U.S. and internationally. The comments here focus on NSO because the story is about what NSO did. This is computer tech kind of community so you’re going to see more computer weapon stories here than stories about improper use of rifles.
U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
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Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#212This is a typical "shadow government" symptom. You have forces working within the government that 1) have their own agendas; 2) have connection to international communities, usually military-intelligence ones; 3) have almost zero regulation; 4) even many high ranking government officials don't know about them because they are brotherhood-like closed circles. This reminds me of Operation Gladio or Propaganda Due but d…
Implying that Israeli spying on the US is some fringe "shadow government" sub-group of the Israeli government is strange given a long, long history of high profile Israeli spying incidents against the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Franklin_espionage_sc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Ami_Kadish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer…
Again I don't have concrete proofs so I could be 100% wrong. But reading world history especially cold war history makes me be sceptical to certain things.
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#213I don't understand the focus on NSO in these stories. If U.S State Department personnel in Uganda were shot from an M-16, would the headline mention "an American arms manufacturer"? No, because it's ridiculous. For better or worse, NSO's product is a weapon. How is it any different from an M-16? Where is the outrage towards the people who used this weapon against the State Department?
Unlike a firearm which has no intelligence or software, NSO retains significant control over their product.
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know you're joking but for anyone that's not in on the joke: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24690055
Wow! You found one instance of the US spying on a friendly government. That totally justifies NSO leasing spyware to authoritarian third world regimes! Carry on folks, nothing to see here.
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#215Is anyone working on a microkernel design for privacy-sensitive devices (like phones) that would prevent outright this class of kernel-level arbitrary code execution exploits? We're stuck with iOS and Android for the foreseeable future, but is there hope that we'll get this right some day? Actually, would a microkernel design even be sufficient? Given that hackers exploit deserialization, memory safety, and variable…
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#216I don't understand the focus on NSO in these stories. If U.S State Department personnel in Uganda were shot from an M-16, would the headline mention "an American arms manufacturer"? No, because it's ridiculous. For better or worse, NSO's product is a weapon. How is it any different from an M-16? Where is the outrage towards the people who used this weapon against the State Department?
Speak plainly. Are you suggesting this is a company being unfairly singled out just because it's Israeli?
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#217Is there a timetable when Apple plans to stop using memory-unsafe languages to avoid memory-bugs? If not, how can the amount of zero-days stop with constant development?
You do know that memory-safe languages are developed using memory-unsafe languages, and eventually execute the binary code on the actual CPU?
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just another incident in a long list that goes back decades of Israel getting carte blanche to do whatever they want to the US with little to no repercussion. The most famous probably being USS Liberty ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident )
Why would Israel be allowed to do whatever they want?
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't they get pretty close with Huawei when the previous president issued an executive order in response to state spying fears that: * banned the sale of any of their phones or networking products in the US * banned US companies selling product to Huawei * cut funding to wireless carriers using Huawei equipment ...and then pressured allied countries to do the same?
The investigation into Huawei was going on for many years prior to 2016. It's not exactly an initiative of the previous president. I sat in briefings about Huawei and ZTE in 2007. Regretfully can't say more.
I've grown up watching this unfold and I'm shocked that the power groups seem to be so ineffectual at times that it's laughable(but that may be by design...)
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#220Slapping down the NSO doesn't fix the problem. We should be glad we even know that their software exists, imagine if it was completely hidden from the public? The problem is that Apple needs to fix this. Security is an arms race, and the more visibility we have into where it is weak, the better for everyone. To paraphrase the motorcycle repair episode of Winter Steele, "You are stronger now for having been fixed." IM…