321–330 of 477 posts
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Terrorist? Really? I think one can argue that they've likely saved many, many lives.
Whose?
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Nerds always want to interpret the law in some strict pedantic fashion, but in practice this is almost never how it works. Law is not applied stupidly or mechanically, you can't fashion yourself some ad hoc workaround unless you're extremely certain about what you're doing, preferably with a mountain of precedent behind you.
Speaking as someone who’s been on the unfortunate wrong end of it, the law is applied stupidly and mechanically. All the time. That’s the default. The judge will go to great pains to super pedantically apply the rule of the law, regardless of common sense and believe it or not in most cases also regardless of common sense. As it should be. It doesn’t always work well for all circumstances, but we don’t have a better…
However, "common sense" is also not how it works, so sure, when people rely on what they expect "common sense" to mean, then they too get screwed (the meaning of "common sense" after all varying dramatically from person to person).
Law has its own principles, philosophy, and practices, that's all. And judges, especially senior judges, do not like it one iota when folks try to circumvent the meaning, substance, and purpose of these elements.
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Extradition has next to nothing to do with a civil EULA suit.
> Extradition has next to nothing to do with a civil EULA suit The following has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. If NSO blows off the EULA suit, they'll be held in contempt of court. That tends to escalate into the type of thing for which one can be extradited.
We need to target the pos engineers and management at NSO, Finfisher, Hacking Group etc. who sell their souls for a fast buck. These pricks are likely already setting up the next corporate front for when this one collapses. Let's make the mercenary business a cripplingly expensive line of work.
"target them"? What are you proposing?
Blog about their names and the work they do and their employer, so anyone searching for them on Google knows that they are military-industrial complex scumbags.
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"NSO can be sued under California law because they accepted the EULA" seems like a mechanical, strict, pedantic application of law though.
How does that seem pedantic? It's incredibly straightforward. On the other hand, creating some kind of convoluted, contrived paper trail to claim that mysterious third parties were the ones to have physically pressed the "Accept" button on your 100 fake accounts and so you didn't even know there was a EULA seems kind of like it might actually be fraud.
A full paper trail would also necessarily disclose the entity that provided those devices, which they may well be loathe to do (since it either drags in a related company, who Apple can then also target, or embarrasses a third party who would rather remain nameless).
However, in practice, a technology engineering firm claiming to have no knowledge of the licensing that applies to the devices in which they also claim expertise, is such a far-fetched statement that it's almost trivially set aside, and earns a rebuke from the bench to boot.
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Beyond merely selling their products to Israel, the NSO Group itself is an Israeli firm, founded by ex-Israeli intelligence, and whose products are subject to Israeli national export controls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSO_Group That's a level of sponsorship way beyond simply being a customer... that's state espionage served with a side of profit. It's evil when the USA does it, it's evil when the Russians do it,…
Every Israeli citizen, except religious extremists, serves in the IDF or equivalent; if you look useful to the intelligence apparatus, that's where you'll end up. You literally cannot find an Israeli company that isn't founded, run, and staffed by people with military or intelligence links, unless you're only dealing with religious extremists.
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Beyond merely selling their products to Israel, the NSO Group itself is an Israeli firm, founded by ex-Israeli intelligence, and whose products are subject to Israeli national export controls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSO_Group That's a level of sponsorship way beyond simply being a customer... that's state espionage served with a side of profit. It's evil when the USA does it, it's evil when the Russians do it,…
> Israeli national export controls A crash course in Israeli national export control: 1. You can sell everything except for nuclear tech (and maybe even that, I don't know). 2. If the client is not officially an enemy of Israel then do whatever you want, we don't give an f'ing f'. 3. If the client _is_ officially an enemy of Israel, then all sales must be conducted through official (secret) state channels. Independen…
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I was responding to a specific comment about prices. You're right that the price doesn't fully correlate with security. It will reflect supply (security and interest of researchers) and demand (how much there is to be gained by breaking into each platform). Android is more widely used, but I gather more money is spent in the app store than the play store. I don't know the market share of "interesting" users. My analy…
Agreed! Thank you for posting that Zerodium link. It's always great to bring substantive data into a security discussion.
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> "I get bothered by the use of the term "nation-state" in this context. And I thought I was pedantic. " I don't think I'm being pedantic, it seems like people use the word 'sponsor' in these contexts to exaggerate and vilify. Nobody seems to have used the word 'nation-state' in this post; what made you think of it?
It's used throughout the comments and the topic generally. I don't call it out (for meaning a state with borders aligned with an ethnicity) because I get the point being made. As for sponsorship, states sponsor their industries by providing labor trained at public expense, promoting them abroad through trade agreements, access to trade representation etc. so there is the technical definition of sponsorship met. The r…
Not necessarily. I assume you mean it fortifies despot regimes in the Middle East right? I no longer think at this time there is any sane alternative.