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

231–240 of 260 posts

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#231

Post by DSingularity »

jjice wrote: post #179
DSingularity wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No dispute there. That’s why you should push for accountability and transparency. When we discover groups like NSO, we (the public) should be able to use FOIA like mechanisms to query these cloud providers and check if they are doing business with these criminals. We should be able to see who exactly approved their application and why they didn’t fail whatever standards we (the public) have decided that cloud providers should uphold. Maybe the standards had gaps or maybe there is corruption. Either way, the public has a method for feedback into key parts of society: cloud providers.

Voting with the dollar doesn’t work anymore.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#232

Post by DSingularity »

mrits wrote: post #201
DSingularity wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish we could just go back to the pre amazon days where we didn't have problems in the middle east

This is besides the point. Just because the Middle East has been in turmoil since it was neo-colonized after WW2 doesn’t mean it’s okay for massive corporations to exert this much influence.

Also, while we are on this subject, your language has some pretty orientalist vibes to it. I wonder who you think created these problems and who feeds them today?

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#233

Post by wpietri »

midev wrote: post #171
wpietri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dang. Everybody else! That's a lot of people. You must have done a great deal of work to check with them all, so clearly I have to yield. I had no idea the entire rest of humanity was so passionate about corporate branding guidelines.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#234

Post by toss1 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #125
toss1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are many options between incompetence and being actually 'in bed with', which I read to mean 'knowingly cooperating with', the criminals.

The first example is that it's simply more profitable for them to turn a blind eye unless one of the relationships becomes a public problem. They wouldn't be actively aiding and abetting the crime, but neither are they stepping up to ensure that it isn't happening on their systems. It's being complicit several steps beyond incompetence, but not the same level as active cooperation.

And, considering that Amazon has no shortage whatsoever of funds and skilled people to prioritize anything they want to prioritize, I'd say more than sufficient time has passed that they're at least at something resembling this sort of willfully ignorant stage.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#235

Post by Volt »

livinginfear wrote: post #223
stevenicr wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is this being downvoted? It's demonstrably true. https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

Is Cloudflare a "pipe"? I don't think so.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#236

Post by midev »

wpietri wrote: post #233
midev wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Dang. Everybody else! That's a lot of people. You must have done a great deal of work to check with them all, so clearly I have to yield. I had no idea the entire rest of humanity was so passionate about corporate branding guidelines.

What a cringe reply. I'd love to introduce you to a new word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hyperbole

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#237

Post by mrits »

DSingularity wrote: post #232
mrits wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we could just go back to the pre amazon days where we didn't have problems in the middle east

This is besides the point. Just because the Middle East has been in turmoil since it was neo-colonized after WW2 doesn’t mean it’s okay for massive corporations to exert this much influence. Also, while we are on this subject, your language has some pretty orientalist vibes to it. I wonder who you think created these problems and who feeds them today?

You should have closed with "How do you like them apples?"

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#238

Post by ehsankia »

zzleeper wrote: 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).

I mean Saudi Arabia literally murdered a American journalist and hacked the cellphone of an American businessman, yet they're still allies. So....

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#239

Post by ehsankia »

tedunangst wrote: post #163
s_dev wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.wired.com/story/bezos-phone-hack-mbs-saudi-arabi...

Why would you post an article from Jan 2020 as a rebuttal to an article from May 2021?

What concrete proof does your article have? Bezos literally has access to his phone and the text that MBS sent him, containing the exploit. You're going to take some conspiracy theory based on rumors over the analysis of the actual phone that was hacked?

The affair and all those things are probably true, but that doesn't really negate the fact that he was most likely also hacked by MBS.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#240

Post by paleite »

midev wrote: post #171
wpietri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

”But everyone else is going to” *Citation needed
Post reply on HN