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Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

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Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#171

Post by midev »

wpietri wrote: post #45
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…

Exactly. Language is for all its users. I can insist that my name be rendered only in 14.5 pt Comic Sans colored with Pantone 19-3336 ("Sparkling Grape"). But people get to decide for themselves how they're going to speak and write. Corporate branding guidelines constrain only their employees and people who want to curry favor with them. Everybody else can do as they please.

> Corporate branding guidelines constrain only their employees and people who want to curry favor with them. Everybody else can do as they please

What a weird take on why you should spell a company name correctly.

Correct, nobody is going to put you in jail for misspelling Digital Ocean. You can do as you please. But everyone else is going to think you don't know what you're talking about if you can't even get their name correct.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#172

Post by ramraj07 »

adventured wrote: post #160
kilroy123 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then why not increase the bounty? What are they possibly going to loose? What’s a few million for a company that makes hundreds of billions a quarter?

If you’re gonna say there will be a flood of zero days that the cost will add up that also doesn’t support their security seriousness.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#173

Post by midev »

lokedhs wrote: post #155
cinntaile wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> which is about not letting corporate marketing departments decide how the written language should work

Why do you keep repeating this? You say you were raised among linguists, but you're getting the most basic tenant of linguistics wrong. There is no such thing as "correct" language.

But more to the point, language allows you to write proper names as though they are registered or defined. It is not incorrect to spell it DigitalOcean, because that's the registered name.

If my name was JoeBob, you don't get to split up my name just because you think English requires it.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#174

Post by detritus »

neom wrote: post #107
detritus wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you 'helped build' Digital Ocean, so I can understand your personal reasoning, but really - it's not at all important to anyone else. Also, wasn't that a bit of a fad back in the late 90s early 00s? I know my wee business followed the path of concatenating words for brand ...something... , but I honestly couldn't care less how other people deploy it in their own space, as long as they remember the name.

Of course, some people might choose to reply "Oh I see you worked on DigitalOcean! Funny people care about something like that, but given another human does, I'll respect that!" Some might chose to reply "I can do whatever I want, I don't really care what you think" - people can choose how they react. It's always very interesting to me who choses what, it's very telling regarding personality. I am well aware people a…

Reading my response back now, I didn't mean to sound cynical or abrasive when I quoted 'helped build' from your profile.

I could have as easily said "I see you were involved in.." or whatever and that would not have sounded snarky.

Honestly though, I didn't think it through that much, I just literally quoted what I saw. Just in case you thought that was where I was coming from!

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#176

Post by Spooky23 »

geofft wrote: post #51
xoa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, and it "seems like" the extremist propaganda that Big Tech shut down was violating all sorts of other laws like incitement. Most of it actually wasn't FWIW, hateful extremist content is generally perfectly legal free speech. "Incitement" gets used way, way too often on the internet, almost nothing that gets posted online is legal incitement. But neither "Big Tech" (such a dumb term) nor Hacker News nor a rand…

To be clear, I'm personally all in favor of Amazon choosing who they want or don't want to contract to. But the comment I was replying to was saying it's only okay (as in, good for society, I guess) for Amazon to kick off NSO because Amazon thought they were violating the law. I agree most extremist content is legal free speech, but not all of it is, which should be enough reason, by that rule, to kick off extremist…

Thank you… you made the point better than I.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#177

Post by ruggeri »

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…

Thank you. I was trying to understand this myself.

NSO seems to be trying to distance themselves from how its software is used by its "clients," but that seems undercut by the plausible supposition that NSO knows exactly who its clients' targets are.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#178

Post by ben_w »

DSingularity wrote: post #138
TechBro8615 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes! Let’s stay in a present where Israeli hackers-for-hire can help dictatorships capture and murder dissidents. At a minimum we should demand transparency and accountability from all of these scale-enabling organizations.

Obviously I am not in favour of that either.

Making takedowns automatic on any user report means the dictators take down the apps of the dissidents.

In the absence of AI that would necessarily have to be good enough to also radically change society and the economy, the only solution I can even think of is a big increase in funding for the policing of apps. Who exactly would fund that? Governments would want to use such powers to pursue their own agendas, while Big Tech taking a proportion of App Store income is already being called “[Apple|Google] tax”.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#179

Post by jjice »

DSingularity wrote: post #138
TechBro8615 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes! Let’s stay in a present where Israeli hackers-for-hire can help dictatorships capture and murder dissidents. At a minimum we should demand transparency and accountability from all of these scale-enabling organizations.

Given two sides of a spectrum, one will take that one that aids their argument most. We need a healthy middle, like most cases.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#180

Post by vmception »

sorokod wrote: post #158
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.

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

Is that more of a notification form or an actual collaborator process with a tribunal?
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