Live data from Hacker News

Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

sammobile.com

191–200 of 346 posts

Re: Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

#191
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

>Extra-judicial murder through out of control deployment of weapons via subterfuge is terrorism, also.

No? The slave workers in Nazi germany who purposely fucked up equipment to get german soldiers killed were not committing a war crime. Sabotage is legitimate warfare. The french people getting the trust of german soldiers and then slitting their throats were not committing war crimes.

>Civilians died in those indiscriminate attacks - which were terrorist in nature and deed.

Civilians die in every war because war is messy and the geneva conventions, which only considered prisoners of war until the 4th, do not prevent civilian causalities. They are not intended to. The Geneva conventions were updated after world war 2 and were STILL not made to prevent things like the London Blitz or infrastructure attacks, and indeed things like Russia trying to freeze Ukraine to death by blowing up it's electrical infrastructure is not a war crime.

If hezbollah are legitimate combatants, then they have to wear a uniform during hostilities to be protected by the conventions/protocols/hague. If they do not wear a uniform, they are considered defectors to lawful war and have less protections than actual combatants.

If China puts backdoors in all the chips we buy from them, and we build weapons with those chips, and China pressed a button that self destructs all things made with those chips, that is also not a warcrime.

War crimes are pretty much only treating POWs incorrectly by doing medical "experiments" on them or genociding them. If you are not a POW yet, the Geneva conventions don't say much about you.

Do you people think anyone would have signed a treaty that says "You can't kill more than 1 innocent person per bad guy"?

>Tell me you don't care about the Geneva convention without telling me you've probably never read the Geneva convention.

Big words from someone who doesn't seem to recognize that they geneva convention they've "totally read" doesn't say what they seem to think it says. Please quote the part where blowing up a civilian with your target is called a war crime

Re: Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

#192
post #2

I recently bought a cheap android device because I needed to test something on Android. The setup was about 3 hours of the device starting up, asking me questions, installing apps I explicitly told it not to, and then all sorts of other apps and OS updates trying to do their thing seemingly at once. I wasn't even transferring data, just a brand new phone, new google account. What a horrible experience you get with so…

Name and shame please. I'm shopping for a cheap first phone for my 13 year old. I'm looking at HMD or Motorola.

I kind of like Motorola in the cheap android phone space. I have a moto-g stylus in my pocket now, and it's big (which I like), has a heaphone jack, and has an sd-card port. I thought I'd like the stylus, but I rarely use it.

It pre-installs some games, but you can uninstall them. The only thing it forces on you is a weather app which you can deactivate but not uninstall.

Re: Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

#193
post #162
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Ethnic cleansing involves forcible expulsion of a population -- not just mass killing -- with the goal of achieving cultural or racial homogeneity in a given territory.

Israel is guilty of both the forcible expulsion and mass killing of Palestinians, so the definition certainly applies.

Re: Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

#196
post #2

I recently bought a cheap android device because I needed to test something on Android. The setup was about 3 hours of the device starting up, asking me questions, installing apps I explicitly told it not to, and then all sorts of other apps and OS updates trying to do their thing seemingly at once. I wasn't even transferring data, just a brand new phone, new google account. What a horrible experience you get with so…

Sounds like a Samsung phone... no end of dark patterns and pushing Bixby AI and whatever else. And then once you have the phone set up you get to spend the next 10 minutes uninstalling a load of pre-loadded apps that you didn't want.

Fortunately Android is a pretty diverse range and Samsung is just one player. I had much more user-friendly experiences with Fairphone and Motorola.

Re: Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

#197
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Literally a violation of Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions. Common Article 3 was breached by carrying out lethal attacks against persons taking no active part in hostilities (including off-duty medics and civilians) without individual assessment; GC I Articles 12 and 18 were violate…

You're really playing up the false narrative that the spicy pagers were indiscriminate, which just isn't factually accurate, they were sold exclusively to terrorists and used exclusively by terrorist organizations for communications, there weren't any non-terrorist affiliated medics that got caught up in the attack from my understanding. Even in cases where they were detonated in populated areas bystanders were essentially unaffected due to the design of the explosive payload.

Re: Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says you, and that is too easy: “The IDF attacks civilians. It uses perfidy to indiscriminately attack the civilian population of its enemies. It, too, ignores the laws of war.” There is no way to continue justifying acts of terror being committed by your in-group, without also become equivalent to the terrorist of your out-group.

[flagged]

False. The truth is that the IDF does indeed do such things at massive scales.

Re: Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

#199

What’s striking is how often these ‘small’ surveillance tech stories trace back to the same state-aligned ecosystem. When Israel does it, it’s treated as a complex security issue. When another ‘bad’ country does the same thing, we immediately call it espionage. And almost on cue, the discussion drifts anywhere except the uncomfortable fact that it’s the same ecosystem from the same country showing up again.

You are asking the “wrong” question!! If you are Gabriele Nunziati you will be fired immediately!!

For context: https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/11/05/italian-journalist-fired...

Re: Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember back when the iPhone came out, this was perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of it, at least to me. We were so used to phones coming with crap on them and tightly coupled to the carrier. If the carrier didn't want something on the phone, it never got there. So Apple comes along and says "Hey, AT&T, we will make you the exclusive carrier for the iPhone iff you leave the entire experience under our control." T…

"I was so happy to get locked into a different eco system" is all I hear.

You wouldn't get a phone in 2007 that didn't lock you in to something; the question is whose ecosystem you'd prefer to deal with.

I remember the Verizon crapware phone experience well.

Post reply on HN