41–50 of 103 posts
"Tens of millions" for controlling stake in NSO is like an order of magnitude less than what I'd imagine in todays environment. Comes off as cheap. Have their capabilities been overplayed? Is selling done under pressure? Are they not actually sitting on big bank and procurement network of valuable 0days?
I always wondered how the software people who work in places like this live with themselves. Is it some sort of “enough money can make me forget and look myself in the mirror” situation?
The company exists to fight illegal activities. Maybe there are governments that abuse this service, but it's not NSO's job to fight this. They're a company and they want to make money. How are they different from Google or other companies? When Google wants to keep you on your phone it becomes OK? When food industries make sugar-full beverages it's OK? There are also many governments that use this tool to combat ter…
"In October 2018, Citizen Lab reported on the use of NSO software to spy on the inner circle of Jamal Khashoggi just before his murder."
If your work indirectly kills people you can't say that it's not your job not to fight this. You are if that is the case among the causes, so you are responsible.
Investors: you must care of the planet, not emit any CO2 and not launder any money Also investors: let's invest in hacker business and break into all phones in the world
I always wondered how the software people who work in places like this live with themselves. Is it some sort of “enough money can make me forget and look myself in the mirror” situation?
The pay for this kind of work usually isn’t very good. People do it for the mission.
Investors: you must care of the planet, not emit any CO2 and not launder any money Also investors: let's invest in hacker business and break into all phones in the world
The first statement doesn’t sound like anything a professional investor would ever say
I feel like ESG has been rammed in to every company i've worked at for a couple of decades now.
I always wondered how the software people who work in places like this live with themselves. Is it some sort of “enough money can make me forget and look myself in the mirror” situation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like a failure on TechCrunch. There is an implied agreement and violating it will result in a flat refusal to talk outside of prepared press releases. This isn't good journalism and should not be celebrated.
That's not how that works. You don't get to decide statements are off the record after you realize you said something that would look bad. Every interview would be a puff piece if that was how things worked.
Now, the "victim" here is NSO, so not expecting any sympathy, but journos do this to everyone, even normal people.
> Puff pieces
But with the aforementioned rhetoric in vogue these days, every piece of journo is a forced "scoop", leading to most of modern media(social and mainstream, the incentives are the same) being misconstrued non-factual brain damage. Even press conferences, most questions are just loaded and very bad-faith, basically trying to get you to say something they can quote out of context, or use for a misconstrued "non-truth", or a false equivalence. Or sometimes they just make things up! Retarded scoop-bait headlines as well.
The root cause for all this is that adversarial rhetoric.
Before you say "but the press is an adversary against the government", they do this to sportspersons, and a variety of other normal people too. If they only did this to the designated government spokesperson, it would be OK.
Now, this rhetoric itself is a result of "news"[1] companies competing for audiences. A fairly obvious incentive there. On socials too. Engagement is rewarded, leading to the same thing.
Furthermore, LLMs if used for content generation, will compete for audience, and even inference-time feedback driven optimisation leads to it giving the same reality-bending outputs. It's been simulated and shown in this stanford paper already: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06105
[1] they really deserve the quotes these days
I always wondered how the software people who work in places like this live with themselves. Is it some sort of “enough money can make me forget and look myself in the mirror” situation?
There are lots of justifications. It's the same as why people can be soldiers or build missiles and still sleep at night: you believe (or at least tell yourself) that you're stopping bad people. There are good applications of these tools. If you can hack the phones of a terrorist organization, you can find out about attacks before they happen and stop them. If you can extract data off of locked computers, you can hel…
But, but, but.
> "[...] it's not completely disingenuous of the people who work there to believe they're doing good."
Given how well and widely NSO and their merchandise were reported on, including the dissection of various associated scandals in the mainstream media, I beg to differ. These people are not dumb, they know exactly what they do, and who their clients are. Your good-faith assumptions with regards to these players come across as extremely naive, to put it mildly.
I always wondered how the software people who work in places like this live with themselves. Is it some sort of “enough money can make me forget and look myself in the mirror” situation?
You can say this about most of tech. Sure, we agree spying is bad. But, is it worse than ad tech at large? Is it worse than companies addicting people to their phones via psychological tricks at alarming rates? Or siphoning money from kids via freemium models? Or working on a chatbot that helps kids kill themselves? Or the gazillion payday loan apps? Or the gazillion prediction market/sports betting avenues? I'm sure…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me it looks very much like a scale... Anyone that works at FAANG or "big"/mobile game studios, anything to do with advertising, banking, natural resources extraction/processing, non-sustansible farming, etc, etc. In my opinion there are not many constructive things you can work with that really improve society or peoples lives. But then again I'm in a quite dark place this year.
Public sector? In my country working for the energy grid operator feels like a constructive and positive contribution. Sorry about your dark place. Keep looking for the light!