Yes, seemingly so. I guess we'd have to wait for full investigations to conclude before saying for sure, but sure looks like it.

> “To the extent that international humanitarian law applies, at the time of the attacks there was no way of knowing who possessed each device and who was nearby,” the experts said. “Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities."

> “Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pa...

They only discriminated to the extent to which the specific product they went after correlated with the people they actually wanted to kill.

The locations of the detonations were indiscriminate, the intended targets were not.

> phone with no sim card is sufficient enough

It's most certainly not. Phones connect to a cell tower even without a SIM to make emergency calls. The phone can still be tracked and it's not a difficult leap from there to identify the owner of the phone.

That may be true for this specific use case, but the protection on bigger services could be easily rolled back. E.g., law enforcement was able to ask Google for "tell me everyone who was in this specific area during this time" [0] and is still able to ask "give me everyone who searched for a specific term" [1].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/08/google-to... [1] https://reason.com/volokh/2025/12/16/are-there-fourth-amendm...

Nevertheless, it's eerie that we are even having this discussion today. I didn't say "scary" because I'm far away from these events, but definitely uncomfortable - I know, the "events" may approach sooner or later my location too...

This shows how flawed the idea is that individual gun ownership protects people from a rogue government. Acting alone with a firearm does not stop tyranny. It only leads to prison or worse.

Real resistance to authoritarianism has never come from isolated individuals using violence. It requires organized collective action where people stand together and refuse to comply. History shows that meaningful resistance often begins with simple nonviolent acts like refusing unjust rules or asserting basic dignity rather than a lone person reaching for a gun.

Owning a gun by itself does not meaningfully protect anyone from government overreach. Organization solidarity and collective action do.

> SIM-free phone

Is the modem completely disabled? Does it still show the "SOS" option that allows you to call 911 without a SIM? If so, and if it's ever been turned on in your residence, there's a decent chance the IMEI could be traced back to your house just based on pattern-of-life movement.

Analog recording and viewing may need to become the state of the art given how low the bar has become to manipulate digital media

I doubt that would do anything…

A phone with its SIM out is still registering with the network.

I wouldn't assume pulling a SIM is enough to hide the phone's location. The modem will still be powered, the IMEI isn't part of the SIM card and is a unique identifier. Plus last I checked you can still contact 911 without being a subscriber.

I'm no expert on cell networks but my impression is the baseband will still ping towers and participate in the cell network on some level. If the phone gets confiscated or its IMEI otherwise associated with you, it can probably be abused to try place you in an area at a given time even without the SIM card.

Just use cameras without any RF hardware. (they tend to have better optics / zoom capabilities anyways)

FRS: family radio service, a broadcast communications technology, TIL:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Radio_Service>

yeah it's kind of amazing, just leave your phone at home and the tracking problem is solved (if one even really exists to begin with). If you want to document something bring a simple digital camera. They pretty much all have video and audio capability too. Like how is this not obvious to everyone?

edit: just want to point out there are still cameras everywhere so if you're worried about being found just leaving your phone at home isn't going to do much

id just bring my phone. if the secret police are going to arrest or kill me, theyre going to do it either way, probably while im there.

if i bring a phone, i can at least document the secret police's actions, and make friends and get contact info for other people that are there.

security by obfuscation isnt particularly good, and its a state level threat.

there's a different absurdity with your child torture example - that youd be ok with children being tortured over phone usage. the bulletin and the people doing the kidnapping at torture are the problem, not the phone. there's a third option of stopping said torturers, and youll likely want your phone as one of the tools in doing so

True, cameras can be taken away or smashed after the fact destroying evidence.

With my phone I can stream video to a cloud so that it can't be deleted. The ACLU used to have an app specifically for this but it seems to have been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_Mobile_Justice

It's not flattering to the US that the mother who was murdered needed specifically to be white for people to care.

Video analysis is depressing: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010631041/minneapolis...

Trump watched the video in front of a bunch of reporters and said "meh". Nothing will change for 3.5 years minimum. 40% of the country thinks he's doing great, and a greater percentage of those 40% vote vs the people who vote from the other group.

You have it backwards. Police shooting a white person will get less attention than if they were not white.

Odd. I thought she was a legal observer. It is funny how quickly the narratives changed given how little traction was gained on 'observer' status.

He did say 10 years ago so...

Yes, but this feels like the modern equivalent of wearing a tin foil hat :/

> Why do you need 100 apps?

You don't. But a high percentage of the population will install apps for the sake they've been offered to install it.

I use eBay, I get bombarded by eBay telling me to install their app for 10% off. I use Gmail for work, if I don't use their app, I have the search engine to tell me to use their app. Facebook is an app, WhatsApp is an app too. Bejeweled Deluxe is an another app and $Reality_TV_show wants you to install their app. Your local supermarket has an app to give you % off your shopping list and probably not to far off in the future oxygen will be an app.

Some venue for a ticket for that odd one-off gig requires an app and every single restaurant order at the table has different app. You're then forced to install the app to use your Dishwasher, Fridge, TV, WiFi Router. I bought a new heater as my old one broke this winter and if I desire to configure WiFi for it, you guessed it I have to install an app.

And that's how you you end up with 100 of apps that are never really used, leaking information, spying on you and never deleted because people don't. I bought Christmas presents and I was unable to track delivery information without installing an app, I had forgotten about that until now. Thanks for reminding me you, can watch me delete it. That again is how you end up with apps.

We use discord at work and when I walk past co-workers screens they are within multiple of dead discord servers. They never leave and it's not just discord I've seen people idling in dead channels on IRC. I just question why and walk away as if the server is dead, I leave.

Hanging on to things that are never needed again is what we are best at it seems. FOMO?

> 1 minute to check the location permissions list.

Most users are not you and I, they don't know about permissions. They just want to accomplish what they set out to do. And if you do remove that permission; that app refuses to co-operate frustrating the user, nagging them until they do re-enable that permission.

It's now rather than how it used to be. Smart humans using a dumb phones, the now is dumb humans being used by smart phones.

* With sympathy to those who are actually mute/non-verbal, that must suck.

> GrapheneOS isn't magically exempt from cell tracking, and both android and ios phones can go into airplane mode and have location disabled, which provides similar privacy.

You practically can't do anything on a Googled Android device or iOS without a Google or Apple account, so no, they don't provide "similar privacy." The point of a FOSS system is that the user fully controls it, and can install apps privately from any source.

Then you're going to take it home for >8 hours per day, and to your job several hours per day, and likely call at least one or two of your important contacts. At which point that's the ball game - the pool of people that live in the immediate vicinity of your building, and work in the immediate vicinity of your job site, and call your partner / parents / kid, is made up of pretty well exclusively you

>Without more information about how the system works, a casual "eh if I don't grant location data access to shady apps I'm probably safe" seems very risky.

I don't think anyone who actually is at risk, or cares about risk, is going to be overconfident about their security because some HN commenter said "you're probably fine".

>What apps are "shady"?

Depends on your paranoia level. I'd say first party apps (eg. apple/google maps/weather) are probably fine. Google has the additional caveat that they record location history and therefore might be subject to geofence warrants. If you think iOS/Android is backdoored then all phones are off limits.

>How does the real-time bidding system obtain and divulge location data?

They're whatever ad SDKs can get their hands on. If the app has location permissions, it's that. Otherwise it's something like geoip. At the end of the day it's just third party code running in some app's sandbox. If the app can't get it, the SDK can't get it either.

>I think that it is not a safe assumption that the only way corporations are obtaining people's location is via OS location APIs.

What other plausible mechanism are there then? wifi/bluetooth scanning requires location permissions since forever ago.

> Are there decent wifi communicators on the market? I looked into some Lora projects for this but they never seem to actually ship or get past prorotype

Yes, 100%. Meshtastic and Meshcore both do this, but I'd recommend Meshcore. Here in the Seattle area we have a network that fairly reliably delivers messages from Canada through the Seattle metro area all the way down to Portland. Fully encrypted with dual key cryptography. Meshcore uses a different strategy than Meshtastic, which enables Meshcore to work more reliably. To see what's happening in your area for Meshcore see https://analyzer.letsmesh.net/map

Is very fun to set up a repeater for under $50 and see a noticeable difference in the coverage area. Is a fun technical project that combines the best of hiking/walking/driving geocaching style, ham radio (but without a license requirement), antenna building, and more. I'm getting acquainted with people in my neighborhood too which is a bonus.

Figuring out what hardware to buy that'll actually work can be a challenge, to get started search amazon for "heltec v3" and make sure you get something that includes a battery, and you'll see 2-packs of radios for $60. There's a web flasher at the above link that'll put the software on the radios for you.

I was ultimately taking the piss, it'll be radical if someone actually did but I had no idea it caused wifi pollution from this.

You learn something new everyday.

It was power-lust dressed as ideology, the latter largely to make it attractive to a larger, and highly gullible, it turns out, cohort.

More to the point, it's the collapse of the carefully balanced entente around things like WMD and war crimes that will be our undoing.

Recent events have brought this into sharp focus.

This is really the glue that holds it all together -- that we and our allies haven't even had to think about these things for our entire lives up until now.

I hate to be hyperbolic, but I fear that fear of these things will soon become a looming presence in our lives. For the rest of our lives. And kids' lives. And grandkids' lives.

We live in different worlds, friend.

Please know there are people across the aisle that view it differently. When things calm down, talk with them and learn. Nobody wins when we insist the world is only as we alone view it.

Please don't use abusive terms like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html