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

Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 260 posts

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#121

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Dah00n wrote: post #113
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't the line due process of law, though? For state actions, yes. For private actors, if I suspect someone is using my services to break the law or engage in terrorism, "but your honor, I didn't have a court order confirming they were terrorists" won't cut my liability. Parler was a free speech question because it was almost purely speech. NSO Group isn't just speaking. It's doing, and it's doing things that will…

So then the question becomes Did Amazon let police gather evidence before touching anything?

> So then the question becomes Did Amazon let police gather evidence before touching anything?

Why does that become the question? If I fire a customer, must I ask the police for permission first?

America isn't a police state. And we don't have general data retention laws. The First Amendment contains both the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly; there is a balance between Parler's freedom to spew rubbish and Amazon's freedom to not assemble with them. With NSO Group, the free speech question is sharply constrained; Amazon's rights are thus stronger.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#122

Post by [deleted] »

csharptwdec19 wrote: post #60
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never assume malice where ignorance and incompetence would suffice instead. Those two things are actually not the same thing at all, depending on how you define “willful.”

It's malice but from a different aspect; willful malice in the name of 'cost cutting'.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#123

Post by TechBro8615 »

sloshnmosh wrote: post #20

I contacted Amazon to report an advertiser out of Tel Aviv that was using JavaScript hosted on CloudFront to fingerprint user's devices and if an Android device was detected a fake media player or fake CAPTCHA would trick user's into accepting push notifications for fake virus warnings to install questionable apps from the Play Store. This script also pushed ads for a fake AdBlock app that was a dropper for banking t…

I wouldn’t be so quick to rush into a future where Amazon takedowns are as easy as YouTube DMCA requests.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#124

Post by nova22033 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #65
xoa wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shouldn’t there be an outcry against the suppression of free speech? Only if someone was one of the many people who don't understand what Free Speech is or incorrectly think of rights only in terms of themselves and people they like, not for those who they don't. In this case, Amazon is exercising their own Free Speech rights. Free speech necessarily (and as a matter of law) means the freedom to not speak and to no…

> " In this case, Amazon is exercising their own Free Speech rights. " Corporations aren't humans; they don't have free speech rights.

they absolutely do have free speech rights in the United States. Also, if NSO was hosting malware on AWS resources, it's almost certainly against their terms of service..

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#125

Post by seanmcdirmid »

toss1 wrote: post #75
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never assume malice where ignorance and incompetence would suffice instead. Those two things are actually not the same thing at all, depending on how you define “willful.”

Yes, that is a good summary of Hanlon's Razor, a sort of corollary to Occam's Razor about mot creating unnecessary entities in your conceptual models. Hanlon's Razor is a good first approximation or initial approach to a situation, not the end of the discussion. There are many situations where incompetence may appear to be an explanation, but is in fact not the root cause, and may even be being actively used as a cov…

> That they have so persistently failed to do so for so long indicates a cause beyond mere incompetence.

So you are claiming that they have had so many opportunities to do the right thing, that they aren't merely incompetent, but are in bed with the evil doers? That would be a huge claim, to say the least.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#126

Post by lupire »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #105
bakuninsbart wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Israeli government classified Pegasus, the software by NSO currently in the news, as a weapon, thus restricting its exports. If you look at the list of customers, it quickly becomes clear that they are the same organizations that make the laws.

> If you look at the list of customers, it quickly becomes clear that they are the same organizations that make the laws Israel's unicameral, sovereign, supreme state body, the Knesset [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knesset

no, its customers are foreign governments. its world governments against world people, not nation vs nation.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#127

Post by lokedhs »

cinntaile wrote: post #100
lokedhs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another point if view, and that is that corporate marketing should not take precedence over correct use of language. Some languages tend to be more strict about this. I think it's particularly common to see English play fast and loose with the language compared to other languages. In Sweden, for example you will see media write Iphone, because it's a name, and names are capitalised. The same goes for Digital…

The media in Sweden use both by the looks of it. They do that for IKEA as well but it doesn't really make sense imo since it's an abbreviation of names. Both are made up language constraints anyway so I don't really see why the typographic rules of a language are more important than the equally artificial typographic rules of a company name.

You will definitely see both. You'll see things like Iphone being written by media sources that pride themselves on good writing, such as Dagens Nyheter.

If you go to https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikea the first sentence can be translated to English as: "Ikea Group, written by the company as IKEA Group, is a multi-national furniture company founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad"

Words such as TV started out in upper case because it's an acronym, but once it becomes a normal word, it's written in lower case.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#128

Post by xyzzy123 »

csharptwdec19 wrote: post #60
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never assume malice where ignorance and incompetence would suffice instead. Those two things are actually not the same thing at all, depending on how you define “willful.”

It's malice but from a different aspect; willful malice in the name of 'cost cutting'.

How many FTEs should they have dedicated to triaging security complaints from (relatively speaking) randos on the Internet about their customers?

Also, would you take that job?

Some poor support person probably got this and punted because they couldn't pattern match to something in their handbook.

For every thoughtful, detailed security report there are about 500 others that involve voices from appliances, self-xss, csrf on logout and 5G coronavirus. It is extremely difficult for L1 support to make sense of these. Having a support contract or attracting attention on the forums are decent ways to pop out from the background noise.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#129

Post by [deleted] »

aritmo wrote: post #54
esens wrote: post #28

Anyone notice that this statement from NSO in the article doesn't make sense: "NSO does not operate its technology, does not collect, nor possesses, nor has any access to any kind of data of its customers." If this is true, how do we have a singular list of all phone numbers penetrated? If there was this type of "segmentation" or firewall between NSO and its clients, why was there this huge central data leak? NSO is…

They are trying to claim that the service is so fully automated that it is the client that does the selection of the target. They claim that their system does not require any fine-tuning from their side, etc. And that's totally bullshit.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#130

Post by lupire »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #83
esens wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do they have access to the phone numbers that their customers are targeting? That seems by itself to contradict their statement ("nor has any access to any kind of data of its customers") right there. Something isn't adding up.

> Something isn't adding up It's bullshit at best. If we assume they aren't lying, which is generous given their track record, it could be that they provide the tools and infrastructure to collect the data, but don't instruct the software to collect the data. Sort of like if I had a loaded gun and told you I would point and shoot it where you told me to, and then argued that I didn't technically make the decision. It…

But then where did the list of numbers come from, if there is no "access"?
Post reply on HN