I notice issues relating to these groups (israeli cyber groups) are very quick to be denied or delegitimised on HN
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EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
121–130 of 192 posts
Re: EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
#122I notice issues relating to these groups (israeli cyber groups) are very quick to be denied or delegitimised on HN
No they're not. You're the top comment on this post, despite contributing very little to this discussion. Israel and the geopolitics around mercenary spyware coming out of that country is a very regular occurrence on this site. Despite a few instances of people trying to downplay the connection or redirect the conversation, there is ample discussion of this topic. I know this because I follow this topic closely and r…
It obviously wasn't the top comment when I posted it. When I came into the discussion most were about not attributing it to the state in question despite no evidence either way, and downplaying it. And, the fact that my comment has come to the top means that it has seemingly resonated with a lot of users with similar experiences (~+70pts).
If you do actually follow the topic very closely, or read one or two comments further down in this thread you would have come across this link to pro-israeli astro turfing zoom call tutorials by the idf https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information and many other examples
Re: EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever Iran, China, and Russia have done is also a minor effort compared to the billions spent by the US on influence operations.
Doubtful.
Depends how broadly you define it.
America literally produces movies about "Captain America", a heroic do-gooder who has superhuman strength, speed and endurance and who wears a flag as an outfit. In these movies he saves the entire planet. America spends like a hundred million dollars every year on that alone.
Re: EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is Israel's problem either way. Either Israel is involved themselves, which is quite plausible given their history of this shit. Or Israel is not involved, and they massively fucked up by letting their malware be used against their supposed allies. In both cases, we are left with the question: Why are we letting this country develop malware with our approval and funding?
> In both cases, we are left with the question: Why are we letting this country develop malware with our approval and funding? Because Western governments are the biggest customers of these companies. Using Israeli companies makes it much more difficult for criminal defense lawyers to challenge the findings of investigations, additionally Israeli companies aren't bound by ethics codes and whatnot. Our governments can…
Indeed. Its the same reasoning behind the utterly repugnant 5-eyes apparatus, which allows Western governments to violate the human rights of their own citizens with impunity.
Re: EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
This applies to any Western government interest group, at least for small submissions or individual comments that relate to those organizations. Large ones like the Assange release cannot be suppressed, but are full of pro-government comments that would not have been made by any software engineer before 2015. So either the engineers have changed fundamentally, or ...
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As we speak the US is in breach of international law per the ICJ's legal conclusion that enabling and / or supporting "the transfer by Israel of settlers to the West Bank and Jerusalem as well as Israel’s maintenance of their presence, is contrary to article 49 of the 4th Geneva convention”.
Prior to which the US very publicly issued threats and sanctions on the ICJ and Judges in hopes of avoiding the judgement being published.
Re: EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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A piece of advice: Avoid using general and indirect terms like "Them" when referring to the state of Israel and/or it's government. Antisemites deliberately use such language to conflate the Israeli government with the global Jewish population, in order to blame & slander the latter for the actions of the former. If you use similar language, you'll sound like an antisemite.
I've taken to using it because i feel uncomfortable even naming them a lot of the time
Re: EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they're not. You're the top comment on this post, despite contributing very little to this discussion. Israel and the geopolitics around mercenary spyware coming out of that country is a very regular occurrence on this site. Despite a few instances of people trying to downplay the connection or redirect the conversation, there is ample discussion of this topic. I know this because I follow this topic closely and r…
might I suggest that 'allowed discussion' isn't at all a metric by which to judge whether or not there are efforts to delegitimize a topic. might I also suggest that sufficiently skilled efforts to direct a conversation will not be detected by most conversation participants.
>might I also suggest that sufficiently skilled efforts to direct a conversation will not be detected by most conversation participants.
.. and, even more importantly, the censorship cannot be considered successful on the part of the agency doing the censorship unless a) the victim audience do not know the censored information, and b) never know that things were censored.
It would appear that attempted obfuscation over this very issue can be observed in a multitude of forms ...
Re: EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
might I suggest that 'allowed discussion' isn't at all a metric by which to judge whether or not there are efforts to delegitimize a topic. might I also suggest that sufficiently skilled efforts to direct a conversation will not be detected by most conversation participants.
In that case I would suggest that 't0lo provide us with receipts considering that most of us are not skilled enough to detect these efforts
To adequately address this claim, we (the general HN public) would need to be able to access all of the metrics regarding censored/downvoted-into-oblivion articles on HN related to Israel/Mossad/Gaza/War Crimes/etc., and we all know that there is only one individual with such power, and its not exactly in their job description to reveal to this audience just how far and wide the obfuscation/censorship goes ..
Re: EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
#129[flagged]
More to the point, there actually is evidence of a connection to the Israeli government, inasmuch as "Candiru" was financed by the same people behind NSO, "Founders Group", and both of these entities have very clear ties to Mossad: https://www.dimse.info/candiru/ " TheMarker Claims that NSO is also a customer of Candiru as it is often seen contacting the surreptitious firm for some espionage-related projects. Two ind…
Almost all startups in Israel are cybersecurity oriented.
There is almost no dealflow for a non-Security startup in the Israeli market because Israeli VCs demand a short exit window, Cybersecurity startups are very M&A friendly, and Israeli VCs don't have as much experience with GTMing B2C and B2B2C compared to Enterprise.
Cybersecurity is the right mix of easy but niche (only Israel, CEE, India have a thriving low level development scene because American universities increasingly moved OS and Kernel classes into "Computer Engineering" instead of "Computer Science"), easy exits (there are enough F1000 cybersecurity and enterprise companies to sell a startup to), large dealsize (cybersecurity/infra ACV tends to be mid-to-high 5 figures), and pre-existing network (the Israeli and Indian scenes started thanks to Palo Alto Network's successful IPO, and the founding team at PANW became VCs funding similar startups across Israel and India since the mid-2000s).
Also, Israel is TINY (both in area and population). Everyone is at most 3 degrees of separation from Netanyahu or any other dignitary in the country - it's barely 9 million people.
Re: EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware
#130[flagged]
I am sure that next time something nefarious comes from Russia, you will afford Russia the same, very large, benefit of doubt.