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Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

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Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#151
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "DigitalOcean" - sorry to be pedantic, it drives me absolutely nuts when people put a space between, especially publications.

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…

Another point of view: DigitalOcean.com works but Digital Ocean.com does not.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like this is more a result of Amazon not being able to connect you with the right escalation path to verify & act on these claims than a considered decision to ignore them. Does anyone here know what an individual reporter should do? Is there an escalation ramp that exists but was so poorly marked that neither sloshnmosh nor Amazon support was able to find it? Does the ramp go through other organizations (e.…

Doesn't cloudfront generally act like cloudflare? Ie. We don't inspect your content. Law enforcement are the only people who can stop us hosting a site.

clouflare stopped being like that long ago. they publicly posted that they will take down stuff they makes the ceo worry, and they will inspect what your users are reading/sharing - and notify agencies with powers and guns when they find stuff from now/then on.

- no longer a dumb pipe, no longer neutral, actually active in directing law enforcement to take you down and possibly take people out.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#153
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…

Another point of view: DigitalOcean.com works but Digital Ocean.com does not.

You can actually flip that argument on its head - that maybe Digital Ocean was intended,but because a URL cannot contain a space, we ended up with a space-less version.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#154
post #9

Perhaps NSO Group should be considered a terrorism-aiding organization. Freeze its assets, track all their employees, backers, etc. Wonder if they are even helping to hack US government employees through China, etc. (besides just helping to torture dissidents).

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.

"same organizations that make the laws"

More importantly, they are the ones that decide what laws are enforced.

What is sad is that in America, the law around surveillance and security is largely a nice marketing campaign. Sure, you have rights that protect you from the government.

But practically speaking the government won't enforce them, doesn't stop its employees from abusing them even for personal drama, undermines or stops dead any lawsuits by saying the discovery is impossible due to "national security", or will invent terms like "enemy combatant" and then apply them to its own citizens to bypass even the constitution. It will setup "oversight courts" that rubberstamp everything and have no real power or regulatory function/safeguard.

The result of this is that each presidential election is becoming truly dangerous to the opposition. If a McCarthyism movement takes over either party that's in power with the modern surveillance infrastructure, legal "precedents" established by Bush in the war on terror, the confirmation of those powers by the Obama administration holding onto them and continuing funding of infrastructure, undermining of judicial powers, rote acceptance by the people at large, and propaganda outlets available to push messaging, and huge amounts of institutional mores and standards thrown out in the Trump administration, the opposition has real motivation to feel an existential threat.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They still write Iphone X, why not Iphone x? or Iphone 10? or Iphone tio? Roman numerals aren't really a part of the Swedish language after all. They write IOS or iOS, why not Ios? Is this not a normal enough word? It's just artificial rules replaced by a different set of artificial rules. Why not just use what everyone else uses, haha. A bit of a meta discussion in a thread totally unrelated to this, sorry about tha…

I think we're drifting away from the original point, which is about not letting corporate marketing departments decide how the written language should work. I used Swedish as an example of a language where this is a more firm rule than English, but Swedish is certainly not alone. It just happens to be the language I know best.

But, I do find the topic of Swedish writing standard to be interesting, so I'll be happy to do my best in responding to your questions, even though I'm not formally a linguist (although I was raised among them)

With regards to your question, I'd write Ios, because it's not an acronym and I do believe that I'm not alone in this. About the version number, I find at least one case of the use of Ios 10 at Svenska Dagbladet: https://www.svd.se/apple-har-atgardat-problem-med-ios-10/om/...

However, it seems to be highly inconsistent, and this is probably caused by these organisations saving money on proof readers.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#156
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like this is more a result of Amazon not being able to connect you with the right escalation path to verify & act on these claims than a considered decision to ignore them. Does anyone here know what an individual reporter should do? Is there an escalation ramp that exists but was so poorly marked that neither sloshnmosh nor Amazon support was able to find it? Does the ramp go through other organizations (e.…

always a narrative/explanation...right on

It's always the other way around. A company can never do anything right. HN will always find an ulterior motive.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#157

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.

One would hope Amazon is capable of having a reasonable terms of service and enforcing it without the need for government intervention.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#158
post #9

Perhaps NSO Group should be considered a terrorism-aiding organization. Freeze its assets, track all their employees, backers, etc. Wonder if they are even helping to hack US government employees through China, etc. (besides just helping to torture dissidents).

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.

From an radio interview with NSO spokesman ( an ex spokesman for the IDF ), all sales require the Israeli MoD approval.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#159

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.

In the meantime, Google and Amazon simply ignore all complaints about spam originating from their networks.

In the olden days of the internet, ISPs that ignored abuse complaints would be blocked by their peers. Now that Gmail and AWS are too big to block, they act with impunity.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple might take this more seriously instead of having some PR flack write marketing copy What are they supposed to do?

Take security a lot more serious than they currently do. They've had some seriously embarrassing security holes in their software the last few years. Also, they could increase the payout for their bug bounty. Why report to apple for a 0-day when you can make $1 million from these guys? It's not like Apple doesn't have the cash.

> Take security a lot more serious than they currently do.

That statement doesn't mean much. How do you know they're not taking it seriously enough and still struggling with the enormity of the problem regardless? You could always claim any entity isn't taking security serious enough.

The alternative explanation makes a lot more sense: security is extremely difficult at Apple's scale, serving a billion consumers with complex and essentially always-connected electronic devices (not to mention their huge services business now). Devices that also happen to be one of the single most important attack points that there is.

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