Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

ccc.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 106 posts

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#91

Post by account42 »

someotherperson wrote: post #35
pelasaco wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well looks like it play a role in the defense strategy from the Ukraine https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/us/politics/pegasus-israe... So maybe until now we didn't see a country with cyber in their strategy being invaded by another?

Ukraine hasn't acquired NSO Group's software (based on your article) and ultimately it's a seriously corrupt country -- the most corrupt in Europe -- and globally ranks below El Salvador, Brazil, Turkey and even Cuba. Just because it's currently facing an invasion doesn't mean the malware won't be used for nefarious purposes: i.e Ukrainian elites targeting other Ukrainians or the sitting Ukrainian government targetin…

> the most corrupt in Europe

As ranked by countries and institutions in countries that rank themselves lower no doubt.

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#92

Post by zeepzeep »

freeflight wrote: post #45
zeepzeep wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> governments around the world almost exclusively use it for nefarious reasons Oh sure, I agree. But that's bad governments not bad lines of code.

So we need good governments, with their own malware, to fight the bad ones? Is that where this logic is going?

Nope? If the reason stated is terror, that seems like a legit reason to me.

Look I see that there is more evil than good done with this stuff, but it's not the stuffs fault.

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#93

Post by bombcar »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #76

Probably a simple "flip". Companies in Germany do that often when they want to move overseas. The reason is that the Finanzamt (IRS) will tax any assets you move abroad. That can be a large problem for companies that e.g. get US funding. I know of a case where a financially successful German startup got funded by YC and needed to reincorporate in the US. If they had done it via the official route the Finanzamt would…

Exactly. People assume bankruptcy of a company is like a human dying but it’s not at all - the exact company and people involved can continue to exist through a bankruptcy just with new owners.

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#94

Post by mhh__ »

bombcar wrote: post #93
ThePhysicist wrote: post #76

Probably a simple "flip". Companies in Germany do that often when they want to move overseas. The reason is that the Finanzamt (IRS) will tax any assets you move abroad. That can be a large problem for companies that e.g. get US funding. I know of a case where a financially successful German startup got funded by YC and needed to reincorporate in the US. If they had done it via the official route the Finanzamt would…

Exactly. People assume bankruptcy of a company is like a human dying but it’s not at all - the exact company and people involved can continue to exist through a bankruptcy just with new owners.

But corporations are people?

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#95

Post by zwirbl »

mhh__ wrote: post #94
bombcar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People assume bankruptcy of a company is like a human dying but it’s not at all - the exact company and people involved can continue to exist through a bankruptcy just with new owners.

But corporations are people?

The may be a "legal person" depending on the circumstances

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#96

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mhh__ wrote: post #94
bombcar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People assume bankruptcy of a company is like a human dying but it’s not at all - the exact company and people involved can continue to exist through a bankruptcy just with new owners.

But corporations are people?

> But corporations are people?

People don't die when they go bankrupt.

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#97

Post by sdoering »

planb wrote: post #81
sdoering wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> What a mess of naive and BS rambling. And that is the top comment on this HN posting right now. (...) > the Greens (who are happily trading with Qatar instead of Russia because Qatar is such a great place for human rights). Very OT, but this is naive rambling, too. They are not "happily" trading with Qatar and even stated that this is the lesser evil right now.

I agree.

That's why I prefaced with:

> You might read, that I am cynical regarding politics in my country

Anyone who trades with slavers lost his credibility. Everyone trading with warlords as well.

Either the Greens are a party of values (I don't have to share those) or they are a party of opportunists.

There are shades of grey. I attest to that. But being a pacifist and a humanist I can't accept dealing with either one (Putin as a war mongering statesman or the Qatar government embracing slavery as a Form of doing business).

When the Greens agreed for Germany to take part in an unconstitutional war in former Yugoslavia I was aghast. Nowadays I see it more differentiated. There was no way to ensure an UN peace mission. And we could either stand by an watch genocide or act.

There are other options now than to throw money at slavers imho. That's why I am being cynical.

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#98

Post by hnbad »

robertlagrant wrote: post #87
hnbad wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like a state owned enterprise? That would go against decades of free market ideology. Even if we had somehow ended up with a state owned malware development organization it would probably have been privatized by now.

Are you joking? Many states do this. E.g. in the UK they had a massive hiring binge for cyber a few years ago. They will also buy from third parties. That's not ideology (the free market can't really be deemed an ideology), that's just not succumbing to an (actual) ideology that says the state must own everything.

> the free market can't really be deemed an ideology

The free market isn't an ideology much like money isn't an ideology. Putting the free market in charge of certain aspects of society however is very much an ideological decision, though. Ideology doesn't stop being ideology just because you agree with it (although there are certainly plenty of political candidates throughout history who claim to not adhere to any ideologies). For example anarchists are somewhat open to market economies while state communists usually advocate for central planning and libertarians are strongly in favor of free market maximalism, believing that for a free market to work at its best it needs to be free of all regulations (tho usually still maintaing some rule of law to prevent a real world equivalent of EVE Online's corporate warfare).

I'm not saying privatization is good or bad, I'm just saying that the underlying ideology of the past decades in Germany has been that we should privatize as much as possible and where privatization is not possible we should at least reproduce a free market system as closely as possible (e.g. we have multiple competing public healthcare providers despite having strict regulations that mean they all provide very similar levels of care).

> Many states do this.

We do have people in government agencies "doing cyber". We just don't have a government owned software development department developing malware for government agencies to use, just like we don't have a government owned weapons manufacturing department developing weapons for the police and military.

We do have the government owning shares (even majority shares) in private (or rather publicly traded) companies though. But often these are in privatized branches of the government (e.g. Deutsche Bahn) or companies that are naturally monopolistic. Buying out a private software development company would go against the spirit of the free market as it would eliminate competition.

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#99

Post by hnbad »

freeflight wrote: post #44
hnbad wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this company was the developer of the "Staatstrojaner" malware government agencies used to hack into computer systems to investigate crimes. I think the original use case was just terrorism but I'm pretty sure it's been used against other crimes as well. As to why the German public tolerate it: because there wasn't sufficient pushback and the government doesn't care about a few protests as most people will ev…

> I think the original use case was just terrorism but I'm pretty sure it's been used against other crimes as well. This kind of stuff is always justified with "terrorism, pedophilia and organized crime" , but once its in place it's usually overwhelmingly applied to much pettier crimes.

It's usually CSAM or child sexual abuse in general, not pedophilia, but yes.

For example Internet censorship (I believe in the form of IP bans but I'm not sure how they're meant to be implemented exactly) was originally justified with the necessity of blocking CSAM in jurisdictions that are out of reach of Germany and the EU but recently there were moves to ban the pornsite XHamster because it provided an insufficient age check to visitors (although with similar sites it's usually nothing more than a popup to the effect of "Are you old enough to view porn? Y/N"), which while still boiling down to "think of the children" isn't exactly the kind of thing von der Leyen originally described when shooting down criticism of the proposed law.

Re: Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

#100

Post by spacemanmatt »

pelasaco wrote: post #26
spacemanmatt wrote: post #4

why do we even tolerate malware companies

to avoid to have to ask for support in that area when your country is being invaded by another country maybe? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/23/israel-ukraine...

seems like we have a whole international alliance for mutual defense assurance
Post reply on HN