Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 450 posts

Re: US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

#391

Post by Yeul »

jplrssn wrote: post #20

> Ciro Pellegrino, who heads the Naples newsroom of an investigative news outlet called Fanpage.it, received a notice on April 29 that his iPhone had been targeted. Last year, Fanpage secretly infiltrated the youth wing of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and filmed some of them making fascist and racist remarks. It's never a good look going after journalists, but this seems especially petty.

People talk about Japan but if there is one country that has never distanced itself from their role in WW2 it's Italy.

Ofcourse they get away with it because literally nobody has ever taken Italy seriously in centuries.

Re: US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

#392

Post by 7402 »

tptacek wrote: post #291
slim wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how come each time researchers find a new spyware, it's always an Israeli shop behind it ? maybe because Israel has developed an ecosystem and an industry around spying. I think it's evil to try to deflect the blame from israel given the fact it's currently committing genocide in Palestine

Based on what you're saying, I think I know more about this market than you do. I'm comfortable with who does and does not take me seriously. For those people who do: this "Israel" stuff is not useful for understanding what's happening in the world with respect to CNE tools.

A long time ago, I went to my first (and only) Defcon conference. There was a speaker who had worked in the US government talking about state use of hacking tools.

After the talk I went up to him and asked, "What are the countries that are using these tools?" He looked at me with a certain amount of scorn and said, "All of them."

Re: US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

#393

Post by wesselbindt »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #243
wesselbindt wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the folks who were tortured in Abu Ghraib were very happy that their toruturers bore no swastika. And I'm sure the Iraqi children who lost their entire families felt very blessed that the people who killed them were in fact the good guys. And the 130000 Mayans killed in the silent Holocaust? Well, imagine the added humiliation of knowing your killers were armed by Nazis. Phew, dodged that (metaphorical) bull…

This debate could continue forever since there's no single measure by which one can quantify how evil a nation is. I will leave our audience to consider the 20th Century and decide for themselves how America compared to Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, the USSR, Maoist China, Spain under Franco, Imperial Japan... etc.

"In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil."

Crazy how well this Hannah Arendt quote applies to both you and mid 20th century Germans.

Re: US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

#395

Post by kennywinker »

davidf18 wrote: post #266
kennywinker wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unwittingly, you are arguing the foundation of Israel is Nazi ideology. You don’t say?? A state that can only exist as the result of ethnic cleansing? A state that is currently committing numerous acts of genocide? Huhhh.

Not true. Please don't tell falsehoods in HN. The US, EU, UK, and individual countries have all determined no genocide. Moreover, civilian deaths stop in Gaza the moment Hamas surrenders and returns the remaining hostages. Remember, the tech revolution started in the US so have some respect for my country's opinion on the issue. Israel is a large supplier of tech including computer chip design. The unfortunate truth…

> The US, EU, UK, and individual countries have all determined no genocide

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976

“Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent: causing seriously serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group,”

That the political allies of israel defend it by denying an ongoing genocide is hardly evidence it’s not happening.

> Moreover, civilian deaths stop in Gaza the moment Hamas surrenders and returns the remaining hostages.

Patently false: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-netanyahu-...

Israel turned down a deal back in january 2024 that would have released all the hostages.

If hostage taking is wrong - Israel held thousands of palestinians without charges prior to oct 7th.

If hostages are the reason for the war, why has israeli bombing killed so many of the hostages?

> The unfortunate truth is that the Palestinians in a fair election elected Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.

That, and oct 7th, are all events that happened long after the ethnic cleansing of palestine started. The policy of “Trimming the weeds” lead to an intensification of anti-israeli sentiment in gaza.

But the election of which you speak was in 2006 - and hamas was elected. It’s been 19 years since an election in gaza. So anyone under 37 killed since oct 7th could not have voted for hamas. That’s most of them btw.

Also, you do see that the tread you’re responding to is someone explicitly saying the only path to peace is complete genocide of either gazans or israelis? Pick your friends better maybe?

Re: US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

#396

Post by kennywinker »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #271
kennywinker wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they prevented nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War on many occasions Spying created the conditions where we were on the brink of nuclear armageddon. That they also saved us from going over the brink isn’t really to their credit. Also, fyi - as best as we can ever know there was no lab leak. If you want a good summary of why not - have a listen to the most recent “If Books Could Kill” podcast episode.

5 minutes in, “Look how far away the breakout was from the lab!” Really? 6 minutes in “look at the viruses they were working on…” Can’t, it’s been scrubbed, thankfully some people saved some of the data before it was deleted. 7 minutes in: “never been a confirmed case of a lab worker getting covid” The documented black market of animals out of biolabs in China and the fact that it’s an aerosol virus might be importan…

> 5 minutes in, “Look how far away the breakout was from the lab!”

> Really?

https://maps.app.goo.gl/t6RUAjksL7caBQvZA?g_st=ic

A 30min drive. So, a relevant point, especially since that’s basically the key piece of “evidence” for the lab leak.

> 6 minutes in “look at the viruses they were working on…”

> Can’t, it’s been scrubbed

They published papers about what they were working on. That has not been scrubbed.

> 7 minutes in: “never been a confirmed case of a lab worker getting covid”

> The documented black market of animals out of biolabs in China and the fact that it’s an aerosol virus might be important here…

Sure. That might be relevant. But it’s not evidence, it’s just an idea of how it might have happened. A wuhan lab worker getting covid early on would be evidence.

Nobody can say definitively it wasn’t a lab leak, but what we can say is that we don’t have credible evidence that suggests it was - just a couple coincidences that aren’t actually super coincidental when you look closer. Like, say, a lab and a market 19km away in a city of 11 million people. For comparison - that’s a city with more people than NYC, and the lab is in Manhattan while the market is in Coney Island.

Re: US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

#397

Post by snickerbockers »

>“We’ve seen first-hand how commercial spyware can be weaponized to target journalists and civil society, and these companies must be held accountable,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp told AP in an email.

Is it just me or is this statement written in a way that implies they think spying on people is acceptable just not in this specific circumstance?

Re: US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

#398

Post by kennywinker »

ty6853 wrote: post #261
kennywinker wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unwittingly, you are arguing the foundation of Israel is Nazi ideology. You don’t say?? A state that can only exist as the result of ethnic cleansing? A state that is currently committing numerous acts of genocide? Huhhh.

Lol so all that just to decide we agree with each other.

We agree that the ideology you are spouting is similar to the ideas that underpin nazism, and justifies genocide in the name of peace.

After that, we have nothing else we agree on, because your ideology is based on a false description of reality.

Re: US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

#399

Post by Aloisius »

hollerith wrote: post #385
Aloisius wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were still millions of Japanese troops outside of Japanese home islands all across Asia and the Pacific. The blockade would have had to be expanded and neither Japanese nor American leadership thought it was sustainable. While there was a very optimistic view within the Navy that the Japanese would soon face starvation and surrender, it doesn't appear to match reality. The food situation wasn't so dire that Jap…

I was guessing about the risk of mass starvation, which I hope my previous comment made clear. I continue to tend to believe that letting a weakened Japan fight indefinitely would have been preferable to what actually happened (i.e., the nuclear strikes). The US lost a lot of prestige, esteem and trust that day that it has not fully recovered yet. Most of the troops outside the home islands were in Manchuria, which S…

> letting a weakened Japan fight indefinitely

Again, that simply wasn't an option. The US did not believe it could sustain the blockade indefinitely. The American public was growing war weary and Japan was far from neutered - Japanese aircraft, submarines, suicide torpedoes and mines continued to inflict casualties.

The US would have been slowly bled without any end in sight for potentially years. Had the Japanese then sued for peace with extremely favorable terms that allowed them to keep the bulk of their expanded empire, the fear was that the American public demand the US accept it.

> Most of the troops outside the home islands were in Manchuria, which Stalin was willing to sort out for us

Japan had about 3.5 million military personnel outside the home islands in 1945. Only 665K of them were in Manchuria. They had 1.1 million in China, 190K in Taiwan, 127K in the Philippines, 107K in Thailand, 134K in Malaysia/Singapore, etc.

The Soviet Army couldn't fight them all.

Re: US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

#400

Post by ty6853 »

kennywinker wrote: post #398
ty6853 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol so all that just to decide we agree with each other.

We agree that the ideology you are spouting is similar to the ideas that underpin nazism, and justifies genocide in the name of peace. After that, we have nothing else we agree on, because your ideology is based on a false description of reality.

[dead]
Post reply on HN