This same spyware is mostly used on activist. You can read more on pegasus via https://larrybohboh.com/pegasus-spyware-what-is-it-and-how-d...
U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
581–590 of 651 posts
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a sovereign nation with its own national assemblies fully recognized isn't required. Israel recognizes the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian Liberation Organization as the political body responsible for certain agreed upon things including Palestinian elections. They also recognize Hamas as the ruling political entity in Gaza (though I am not sure how formal that is). My point is about non-citizens. Stat…
> You have to tacitly admit Israel and the US are democracies, to argue they are not perfect democracies (in your words "flawed"). This is a common logical fallacy. “You have to admit the existence God in order to not believe in him.” You could read my post as saying that: If Israel is a democracy, then it has a serious flaw . This is a value judgement on the state of democracy in Israel, not a simple binary: If Isra…
The context of this thread is fruitful. Someone claimed Israel isn’t a democracy - that “Israel may be considered a democracy, but only for the so-called "chosen people"" (they almost certainly mean for Jews / Jewish people).
They make other spurious claims as well.
I do not believe I am committing the logical fallacy you refer to. I don’t know if that commenter is either.
I am not claiming democracy = good, and I am not claiming not democracy = bad.
I believe talking about non-citizens voting is perfectly useful and fruitful for understanding Israel as a democracy. I do not hear people complain, generally, about other countries not allowing non-citizens to vote in elections. That is the state of affairs for Palestinians that aren’t Israeli citizens. Non-citizens not voting. It may just be a double standard applied to Israel for various reasons. This happens.
As I mentioned previously, full sovereignty does not seem relevant to this point, nor does full control of territory. You keep bringing up Palestinian sovereignty and sovereignty in general, but I have yet to understand why you think it’s relevant to this discussion.
Is Spain not a democracy because of Catalonia? Ireland and the UK because of North Ireland, or Scotland? No, these aren't identical situations, and there are obvious differences - note the similarities instead of the differences.
If it relates to ethnic nationalism and citizenship - is Estonia a democracy? Is Hungary? Lithuania? Others in this list generally considered democracies?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this convincingly show AIPAC is "the most powerful political organization in the US"? More than the Democratic party? More than the Republican party? More than these groups? https://largest.org/people/lobbying-groups/
I probably would rephrase parent’s comment as “one of the Most powerful political organization” As a congressman/woman while considering a policy position against Israel AIPAC is probably the most powerful. Any case comparison of strength between corporate funded lobbyists and an organization with singular ideological is pointless.
What's the super charitable reading of "can tip the scales in almost any election"?
The parent commenter talked about political organizations generally. They didn't specify non-corporate funded lobbying.
Also, it's reductive and I would argue misleading to say AIPAC has a "singular ideology" (as opposed to some sort of umbrella of overlapping ideologies, somewhat akin to groups like the Democratic the Republican parties in the US).
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The US spies on its European allies all the time, and I'm sure they spy on Israel too, so that's not super surprising. As for the USS Liberty, some do argue that it was intentional, but both the Israelis and Americans ended up agreeing that it was a mistake. The US is no stranger to such mistakes either, even more egregious ones like when they killed close to 300 civilians aboard a regular passenger flight following…
Actually, both Israel and the US have a long history of fighting terrorism.
Just this past May, terrorists from adjoining Gaza shot 4,300 missiles towards Israeli cities over a 10 day period. Thankfully they were almost all shot down by the Israeli anti-missile defense system, Iron Dome (which the US is now evaluating for use in our Guam base). But still 13 died and 300 injuries occurred during that 10 day period at the hands of terrorists.
Israel has been dealing with terrorists hijacking planes for decades. In fact, 2 former Israeli Prime Ministers, Netanyahu and Barak were members of a 16 man special forces team that rescued hostages from Sabena Flight 571. Barak was the leader, Netanyahu was injured.
Of course, with 9/11 and other incidents the US has, like Israel, been the target of terrorists.
Both the US and Israel have had to deal with terrorists much more than any other developed OECD countries.
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if some combination of Fuchsia, Titan, and Tensor would be sufficient to mitigate a baseband processor vulnerability.
Probably not. Processor vulnerabilities have the perpensity to affect most OSes because they're often pretty fundamental flaws in the basic CPU security mechanisms when discovered.
If I wasn't clear, I'm asking about vulnerabilities in the baseband processor (BBP), not the CPU.
The BBP is what makes a smartphone a phone, rather than a small tablet:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor
The thing about the BBP is that it is a second computer running its own proprietary OS (typically an RTOS) to handle the RF modem. The phone's main OS typically has no visibility into that second computer, even as root, but the reverse may not be true.
So I was wondering if any of Google's efforts to increase security can mitigate attacks that might come through this particular channel that lurks, Kuato like, just out of sight.
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if some combination of Fuchsia, Titan, and Tensor would be sufficient to mitigate a baseband processor vulnerability.
Apple mitigates baseband processor vulnerabilities by putting it behind what's essentially an IOMMU.
I must be missing something. I don't understand how that's supposed to help.
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Taiwan analogy is pretty flawed here. > Israel is like the Taiwan of the Middle East, meaning it's a useful partner to us in terms of maintaining a separation between the West and some perceived enemy (Muslims in this case, the Chinese in the case of Taiwan). Is 'separation' a euphemism for 'preventing invasion'? Because threat of that is #1 thing keeping cross-strait relations tense. Mainland China could easily…
> Is 'separation' a euphemism for 'preventing invasion'? Because threat of that is #1 thing keeping cross-strait relations tense. Mainland China could easily offer Taiwan a better deal than they get by being closely aligned with the US. Their reluctance to do so keeps US influence in the region, and after a while one can't help if it's deliberate. I don't quite follow. Are you saying China purposely gives Taiwan a ra…
I don't quite follow. Are you saying China purposely gives Taiwan a raw deal just to deliberately spite the US? Why would they do that? I think I'm misunderstanding you.
I mean the whole situation is incredibly contrived. The 'sacred chinese territory' narrative feels completely hollow if you consider how long ago they stopped claiming other Qing dynasty possessions like Mongolia. My guess is that it serves a domestic narrative, and that they've backed themselves into a corner by staking their core legitimacy on annexing Taiwan for so long.
So yes, by offering Taiwan a better deal than they get from the US, they could remove a lot of influence from the region. But it never happens.
Yeah, for sure. But our support of both countries (and others like them) pisses other countries off. IMO we have no business being either world police or world arms market, especially in some of the most volatile quagmires in the world. We make our own enemies because of our supposed friends. These places only have strategic value to us so long as we desire to remain the global hegemon, with tentacles everywhere. Let go of that weird military-industrial-hentai complex, and there's no reason for us to artificially prop up these countries. Especially Israel. The IDF can more than take care of themselves. Taiwan is going to fall sooner or later anyway, but why is that our business? We force our enemies to go on eternal arms races against us because we've shown them we're incapable of minding our own business after WW2. It should not be our responsibility to provide world security using our people, our equipment, our money.
The US withdrawing from East Asia would be a global disaster. This wouldn't be a small land skirmish, it would be a massive amphibious invasion in Japans backyard - which knows it's southern territories would be next on the menu. It would also take place in one of the busiest shipping routes in the world, causing a massive disruption of global trade. Not to mention the semi conductor angle, now abandoned US allies pursuing their own nuclear weapons agendas.. etc etc.
You could argue the US should not have been interfering there in the first place. Which is very principled and all, but the USSR was going to be there either way. And now the US is very much the force in that region keeping war from breaking out. Arming South Korea, Taiwan and Japan does not make these places more volatile. It makes them much, much less.
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we ban that sort of account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
Every passionate ideologue thinks that both the community and the moderators are biased in favor of their opponents. Your counterparts are just as certain that it's all biased in favor of you:
Typical modern leftist ideology. Very disappointed with HN lately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25955953
Hacker News has a progressive Silicon Valley bias https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26402235
this site is heavily biased towards the left https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26610757
the status quo here is California liberalism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26719247
HN, where the SV/SJW group think prevail https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26731079
a mod who curates comments based on what's politically expedient according to leftist valley dweebs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866955
Ssshh.. You can't say that on HN. You might anger the WOKE mob! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27227591
HN is best thought of as a machine for deepening the delusions of the left https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27242324
pure commie propaganda https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27269114
Democrat cultists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27308327
HN is very, very authoritarian left https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27507112
90% of the HN audience supports communism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27816841
HN is populated by the very liberal types https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27939890
this website (like most of the internet), is controlled by the far left https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037354
This site is sadly run by militant commies https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=k33n
This site is ran by the most radical socialist lefties San Francisco has to offer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203889
all non-leftie viewpoints are banned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237072
HN moderation got outsourced to affiliates of the Democratic Party https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28291108
a total invasion of commies to HN over the past decade https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28065194
blue for how liberal it is [...] red for how commie it is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022117
insane how hard-left this forum has gotten https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29100962
HN doesn't like it when you criticize the US left https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176196
That's a small sample, and of course there is an equivalent list of complaints saying the opposite. They can't all be right, and I don't think the odds are very high that yours are right while theirs are wrong (or vice versa)—the comments are too isomporphic and the logic too identical. Rather, some deeper mechanism is generating them, one that you/they have in common. What might that be? Well, there's one variable that has complete predictive power here: the ideological passions of the observer. Since the entire phenomenon is predictable from that, I assume it's being generated by it.
Moderation is far from perfect - for one thing, there's far too much content for us to see it all, and for another we make mistakes. But that's a far cry from "breeding a community full of extreme opinions, generally $ideology" and all the rest of it. Note that the one thing such complaints never come with is specific examples of all these horrendous things that moderators do or don't do.
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In principle, America could drop Hellfire R9X sword missiles through the cars of every NSO employee. The next step isn't to blow them up, the next step is to sue them. I just assume the IDF and Shin Bet would like to be the only ones who blow up civilians in Israel, but I can't think of a single reason why the Israeli government would oppose an extradition request if they were presented with evidence of cyber-whate…
> I can't think of a single reason why the Israeli government would oppose an extradition request if they were presented with evidence of cyber-whatever. Except the really obvious detail that most normal countries won’t extradite their citizens? Israel loosened up their laws on this a bit after the Sheinbein affair, but extraditing resident-citizens remains a rather unlikely prospect.
> Except the really obvious detail that most normal countries won’t extradite their citizens?
I can’t even guess why you’d believe that. Participating in extradition treaties is the norm, not the exception.
Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple mitigates baseband processor vulnerabilities by putting it behind what's essentially an IOMMU.
I must be missing something. I don't understand how that's supposed to help.
On other phones the baseband has full control of the AP because it can read and write to all of its physical RAM. With an IOMMU a compromised baseband can only control things inside its small view, rather than completely compromise everything running on your phone.