Just curious which city is the best city for computer system programming?

Yep, but Edison is long gone, while Hollywood kept compounding over time. There's zero other reasons Hollywood is _currently_ better than any other place for filmmaking.

Yep, exactly my point "small change in initial parameters".

> That unit is a symptom of their prodigious skill not the cause

"Unit 8200 was established in 1952," and apparently the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology was founded in 1912 [2]. I don't think Israel became a tech centre until the 1980s or 90s.

I'm not an expert on this. But similar to how military spending created Silicon Valley, I think Israeli military structure created its tech industry.

[1] Wikipedia

[2] https://ats.org/explore/videos/1912-today-the-institution-th...

Two things can be true at the same, although I agree with your assessment of future prospects - and the recent OECD report on school performance could be read that way too (or blamed on the war as the government has).

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-plummets-to-worst-ever-...

Israel is not just one homogeneous people, there are some orthodox jews who study biblical texts, treat women as birthing machines, and (personal opinion) contribute little to our society.

Yes, orthodox jews are a significant part of the population (~1.4 million in 2025 [1]), and I wouldn't go there looking for modern ideas like women's rights, but go a couple km in any direction and you'd find completely different people, living modern lives just like in the rest of the western world. Schools, research universities (Tel Aviv University, Waitzmann Institue of Science, Technion), tech companies, startups, makerspaces, and many more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism

That is only one part of Israeli society.

> Traditional Judaism has this really weird (to me, a goy) emphasis on finding loopholes in rules.

As an atheist Jew, it's weird to me as well...

> stay "indoors" on, I think it was, the Shabbat

Can't say I'm familiar with that one. What I'm generally familiar with is that you're not allowed to "work" on Shabbat, and the definition of work is extremely broad. For example, lighting a fire is considered work, turning a light switch on creates a tiny spark between the contacts, that counts as fire, so it's work.

This extends to pretty much every electrical device, so for those who observe Shabbat, using a computer or phone, turning the AC on or off, is all disallowed.

As a result there are many workarounds as you've described, timers, non-Jews (though you can't ask directly! You can say "it's hot in here", but not "Please turn the AC on"), fridges without a light bulb inside, and more.

> they do this with all things, from a young age.

Religious families do, to varying degrees. But I've met plenty of extremely talented programmers and hackers who do not follow any of the Jewish law.

Edit: Just noticed your username, I also want to say I really like your projects on YouTube!

'It's due to the shiftiness of jews'. Nice discussion Dang.

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Perhaps you don’t know the history or simply choose to ignore it. Initiating bombing, ethnic cleansing, stealing land, property and occupation of people for eight decades, while publicly declaring a desire to invade all the regional nations to create a greater Israel apartheid regime does generate pushback. Imagine that.

See professor john mearsheimer on the history & future of israel

https://www.youtube.com/live/z8wooQEYyzc?si=_STtJSdEjDUwIl72

The idea of Israel being under threat has been inculcated into every Israeli and Zionist. Significant casualties of historical facts had to occur such as The first arab israel war is described as arab world fighting Israel, Even though Israel conquered significant parts of UN partitioned Palestine. The arab govts were too new to be a threat. And they were too disunited then and now. Since inception, Israel has been behind every attack and disruption to peace.

I partially agree: Israel is a little bully who should be extremely worried about the track record of their big bully brother.

That's been the status quo for decades, but between Trump convincing folks that the US won't protect them and Iran convincing folks that the US can't protect them, and Hegseth focusing more on culture war stuff rather than policy objectives it's a guarantee that's looking a bit thin.

Dude, the cover we give Saudi Arabia is also shameful. And when you look at "businesses" like NSO Group, those things are even directly related.

But good on you for recognizing that we have a pattern of this kind of thing, even if you've stopped just short of noticing that it's a problem.

But that's mostly true because those countries are rich and fly half the world away to attack poorer countries and usually by bombing them from far away. Eg syrians can't realistically gather enough money and weapons and planes and bombs to bomb paris. Or iraqis london. Etc. On the other hand, they can gather a few fanatics, give them guns and have them shoot a bunch of people, or bomb something, or worse. But then we get the "why did those people get radicalized? was it GTA?" articles.

TBH, considering the number of dead in palestine and the number of people in europe/us who literally lost everyone who ever mattered to them, the number of "terrorist" attacks seems relatively low.

> Over the last 50 years, the probability of anyone invading france

Wat.

Sure, maybe if NATO stopped the USSR in the Fulda Gap. But you know that the USSR's war plans definitely involved invading France, right?

And don't make the mistake of judging probability with the benefit of hindsight, that'd be a terrible intellectual tarpit to fall into.

> the probability of anyone invading france, canada, australia, etc has been next to 0.

Good for them. They learned to cooperate with their neighbors, created alliances and friends, and restrained to kill other people.

If you have one enemy, the enemy is the problem

If everybody else is your enemy, YOU are the problem.

Check your behavior and see if you can improve as human being.

You just listed some of the most sanctioned countries in the world #1 and #3.

China doesn't have large sanctions because it plays a key role in the economy, but the US had massive regime change intelligence operations against them in the 90s, but they failed and were dismantled.

And also injure and kill our sailors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

In that one incident, they killed and injured more than double the number killed and injured by Al Qaeda in the attack on the USS Cole.

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Everyone knows Snowden so I guess it was quite big scandal

And Gitmo, lies leading to invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, all of the times we whoopsies a JDAM into a school or wedding…

But yeah the country under an eternal international microscope is the one “getting away with it.”

1. For all normal countries, if they get caught, there's consequences. For Israel there's no consequences even if they get caught.

2. Israel is embedded in US politics. So US government is allowed to purchase this from Israeli contractors but I doubt they would be allowed to purchase sensitive stuff like from a neutral country like UAE.

So, the US is the customer and also protects Israel so Israel has built an entire industry around it.

Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Irans regime.

In the past Jordan, Egypt, Syria.

Look at the map. Then read about the Yom Kippur war, Six-Day war, conflicts with Lebanon, and so on.

Israel now is the biggest power in the region, but it was not the case not long ago.

Or if we are to be historically correct, Israel is a result of nation building as a result of breaking a British empire, just like 35 other countries across Asia, the Carribean and the Middle east.

That includes India, Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, UAE, Yemen and others.

Its nation building chud, shoots child in the head you just dont get it slams palestinian grandma into concrete

No it's science: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial... . Unless you believe God forced the Europeans to persecute the Ashkenazi Jews in order to create selection pressure for intelligence.

No, why? Apart from the not very plausible explanation with selection pressures in the middle ages, Jewish intelligence is pretty obvious if you look at the data- just as obvious as it's Jewish economic and media power, Jewish influence in Western politics, Jewish contributions to arts and literature, and so on. It really couldn't be more obvious. I think we need to recognise it and find ways to deal with it, from both sides.

The grand parent is not wrong -- 22 to 25% of individual nobel prize winners in 20th and 21st century were of Jewish descent.

Although laureats of Asian descent have been on the sharpest upward trajector in the recent decades

Sources:

https://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Asian_Nobel_laureates

Here's a study backing it up: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial... (the lead author is from Tel Aviv University so hardly some antisemitic crackpot).

I just don’t find business model arguments particularly convincing. If your business model can’t support itself, I don’t think that’s justification to go out and do whatever.

So? Your business relying on serving malware is not a valid excuse for serving malware.

Not in Australia at least. There were ads for flash in the pan fitness and weight loss devices and various other wastes of money, but outright scams and illegal devices would have their ads pulled real quick.

I think your answer gives us a clue about what went wrong and where.

The fact that internet advertising is run by the big US tech behemoths, makes them difficult to go after by countries that have previously had sane advertising standards. The lack of US regulation is the winning car in the race to the bottom.

Good. Advertising is already incredibly expensive for society. It's time to stop externalizing the costs.

No, it just means it costs more and you have to care a lot more about targeting.

It was allowed to grow to its current "sheer scale" due to lack of regulation, be that internal or legislated.

Continued lack of regulation, throwing up ones hands and saying "well, it's too big now" will not allow it to be solved.

What has been 'normalised' in the online advertising industry sets my teeth on edge as someone with some amount of security and privacy awareness. Hence I go out of my way to block as much of it as possible, for myself and family and friends.

Even the FBI and NSA make public their recommendation to run ad blockers as a safety requirement for internet browsing. I would have thought this may be some kind of red flag to say that maybe you're doing something not quite as well as would be satisfactory.

If it is indeed impossible to vet all the traffic passing through your networks, then perhaps your networks' existence is itself the issue. Maybe it is indeed not possible to vet 30 billion ads, just like it's difficult for Facebook to moderate all 3 billion users.

Perhaps the actual problem then are these monolith platforms that have done such a good job "eating the world" that they can no longer properly function.

it has to be the website to start with; if the website is hosting malware, then it's the website's problem. Soon after that's implemented, the adtech companies will begin competing to solve the website's problem by promising clean, malware free ads, and will begin aggressively vetting ads. The monetization model will be preserved and the incentives will be properly aligned.

There is no universe in which 'gosh it's just too hard' is the correct answer.

That's a problem for adtech to figure out. Consumers shouldn't suffer.

I find myself a bit astonished whenever people have trouble with this idea.

We can just decide that if you can't afford a person to vet the ad, it's not allowed to run.

Yes. That will destroy the current online advertising industry. As tempting as it is to say "that's the point", that is in fact not the point. The point is, we are completely in our rights as a society to say through regulation that if you can't vet an ad with a human, you can't run it, and the capital structure can damned well do what it does best and accommodate that whether they like it or not. We absolutely can write laws that say that Google is to some extent directly liable for the ads they run. Nothing is stopping us, at least in principle.

Does that mean it will be a lot harder for the advertising industry? Yes. So be it. That is not a reason this can't happen. Is it expensive for them? Yes. I don't care that this means that they won't be able to run anywhere near as many ads.

It is not a stopper that it would be really hard for them. It should be harder than it is. It should not be profitable to build a vast surveillance apparatus to squeeze literal fractions of a penny at a time out of us. It should not be profitable to have this massive machine that can push such targeted malware at as.

We're not talking about some minor tweaks that they can toss a few AI tokens at. We're talking about regulation that would rewrite the entire social contract of advertising. A social contract that we have not really signed, either individually or collectively. We can do that. We can rewrite the contract. It's a permissible thing.

We don't have to have a massive surveillance state just to serve us ads. We don't have to have sports gambling advertising on television. We don't have to have billboards on our highways. We don't have to have extra-cheap mailing rates for ads. We don't have to have Roblox and other video game systems exploiting our children's psychologies with deceptive game currency practices and gambling mechanics. We don't have to have state-sponsored gambling running what everyone knows is a backdoor tax on the poor. None of these things are physically inevitable. None of these things are socially inevitable. There are reasons why these things do exist, which economists and game theorists and political theorists have various words for, but none of the reasons are because they are mandatory and we're just stuck with them forever because there are no other possible worlds.

> 30B daily ads just served by Google

I'm assuming that means ad impressions and not unique ads.

While I respect that you are posting constructively here you might also be the physical embodiment of the old joke that it is difficult for someone to accept a truth when their continued employment depends upon its falsehood.

The Web used to be a great place before surveillance capitalism and adtech took over. Some of us remember it. People participated because they wanted to. People contributed content because they enjoyed it. The incentive was a sense of community and contribution and shared knowledge - and usually there was no expectation of direct financial gain. Basic hosting was included in everyone's normal ISP plan. SEO wasn't a thing. Blogspam just to generate pages to host ads wasn't a thing. AI slop just to generate even more pages to host ads wasn't a thing. And there was still more genuine and worthwhile content out there than anyone could read in a lifetime.

If 95% of the modern Web disappeared tomorrow and all that was left was what people or organisations were still willing to contribute because they enjoyed it and/or it provided some direct benefit then the Web would probably be a much better place. I cite as exhibit A the fact that we're all here posting our thoughts on HN - itself a site that has always run without any of the intrusive advertising we're talking about - without any compensation or reward other than the enjoyment of the discussion and perhaps the chance to learn something new.

I see no reason to tolerate any sort of online advertising that conflicts with the above ideals. We should simply set rules that decide what is acceptable and drop legal nukes on any company - or indeed any entire business model or industry - that fails to comply. Low key advertising for YC's next round? I doubt a single contributor here minds the little banner that pops up at certain times of year. In-your-face auto-play videos that accidentally (or not - it doesn't matter) advertise something dangerous before your kid's favourite show plays? Sue everyone and punish the offending businesses without mercy. It's really not that complicated.

If you can't do something responsibly at scale then you don't do it at scale at all.

Yes, exactly, if programmatic deals aren’t possible to do safely then dont. There’s tons of stuff you can’t do safely programmatically, so we get people involved. Many such domains exist. The idea that advertising can’t be one of them is just the status-quo, not the only option.

> It completely upsets the economics of content management

Exactly. It moves the economic incentives from "serve the ads from the highest bidder and turn a blind eye to the fact that that's a scammer/malware" to "drop an ad platform that can't or won't keep the scammers/malware out".

Or even better, refusing to use ad platforms that let the ads serve arbitrary code. There is no strict reason why an ad can't be an image (re-rendered by the platform) and a link. Slapping scripts all over the place just makes it easier to collect data (among other things to verify that all the companies involved in serving your ad aren't cheating you, because the ecosystem is full of scammers in all directions).

The deterrent here would be prosecuting the accomplices involved in, and directly getting paid for, the crime.

But it doesn't relieve you, the citizen, of responsibility to be mindful and exercise situational awareness.

How can you exercise situational awareness against a zero-day attack?

There are several parties who have an opportunity to detect that problem before it causes serious damage to people visiting a website. The visitors themselves are not among them. Trying to make those visitors responsible for the consequences is nonsensical.

> completely upsets the economics of content management and makes it absolutely impractical for content owners to monetize through ads

Why? An insurance product wouldn't wipe out ad revenues.

> this is not much different from "regular" crime. It happens

Why do you think parking lots have signs that say they aren't responsible for goods stolen out of cars parked there? Because that liability, by default, exists. And if a parking lot is a robbery hotspot, and the owners don't bother putting up cameras or whatnot, they'll absolutely start facing lawsuits and investigations.

> it doesn't relieve you, the citizen, of responsibility to be mindful and exercise situational awareness

Nobody argued as much. That doesn't mean we give negligent actors monetizing malware a free pass.

What, your ad provider would just need to indemnify you for the consequences of their own fuckups. This is pretty basic stuff.

As for the ad provider, it is trivial to not deliver criminal payloads if your business starts from the assumption that doing so is costly instead of something you can foist on society for your own benefit.

> No ad revenue would be worth such liability

And this would motivate fundamental change in the industry to be able to track down the bad actors.

KYC exists for various industries in order to track down the person responsible for bad actions. Implement KYC for the advertising chain, or something equivalent, to ensure there's a validly registered sue-able entity at the end of it.

> be mindful and exercise situational awareness

I'm not going to say victim blaming, but a good percentage of the population just aren't capable of this, especially with "the sheer scale" of advertising they're exposed to. It's exhausting to be on guard for the entirety of your life.

Might as well say: don't use the internet. That might actually be the best advice to come from all this.

So you're saying we're all fucked and there's nothing we can do?

Not seing your conflict of interest or not admitting to it doesn't meant you don't have one.

Clearly not, but I'm surprised it's so common to write someone off for their industry, just because said industry is evil.

Former Adtech dev here - yeah, that justification worked for me for a while but when I was ordered to "just go look at this porn site and figure out what they're doing to open popunders despite the latest browser updates and then apply it to our adverts" too many times, I jumped ship.

But sure, "free content cos adverts", you keep believing that for as long as you can, I jumped ship after 13 years of it, which ironically appears to be how long you've been in the industry.

Let me just say though - adverts can still support free content without all the absolutely scummy things the adtech industry does. You don't have to track users across everything you can possibly track them across to still make money - my former company at one point was going to partner with Shazam to track people via transponders in bus-stop / train station billboards.

That's not "supporting the free Internet", that's "making some amoral shareholders richer".

Hopefully you'll figure out the difference with a few more years under your belt.

I want to pay a real and honest price for everything.

I send them a dollar or two in Monero, anonymously. That has me for a year, no?

https://www.therage.co

Most free works on the web is produced by users who receive absolutely zero ad money or any direct compensation whatsoever.

If anything, the ad industry helps kill honest contributions because they financially reward dishonest ones who are better at playing the SEO game or other such tactics than they are at giving visitors what they are actually looking for.

And at the end of the day, ad-supported content isn't free at all because we all pay for it in the end - and much more than what the website receives because there are entire industries inbetween that take their cut.

Honestly, if a bunch of adverts going away got rid of "free" content, would that be all that bad? Most of the quality free content does not have ads on it. Ad supported content, or at least those using traditional ad networks, tends to be bottom of the barrel.

After all, this website doesn't have (traditional) ads

My understanding is that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of high impact vulnerabilities on Chrome/Safari. We don't get to hear about most of them because it would become tedious quickly.

Israel was created by ethnically cleansing Palestinians during the Nakba. That's not a democracy, ethnically cleansed Palestinians aren't even allowed to live on their land, let alone vote. That's not including all of the Palestinians that have been straight up murdered.

In addition Israel is an apartheid state with many undemocratic features:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/66a134337e960f229da81...

In the interest of balance, how many times did the FBI snoop into innocent people’s private lives with no warrant or worse, goaded some weak-minded individuals into planning crimes together in sting operations (i.e. people who needed convincing to commit the crime, so not quite clean but not the masterminds either)?

If you put out a fire how many are you allowed to set while people applaud selectively?

I don’t think they’re striking a good balance between how invasive they are compared to the real results they deliver.

Banning encryption. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia!

You were expecting Leviticus?

> as for trust, avoid it

We all end up running closed source code somewhere

If you do you'll be much better off avoiding Israeli tech

As a rule if you boycott everything Israeli it'll be smarter, more ethical, and safer

Zcash was created as an alternative to Monero. In Monero, every transaction is completely anonymous. In Zcash, transactions can be chosen as anonymous or not, so users can be pressured to avoid anonymous transactions, and to avoid associating or transacting with users who use anonymous transactions. This is apparently the main advantage and selling point of Zcash.

> You wouldn’t put personal data and trust in a Chinese app.

At this point, I don’t agree. I’m an immigrant living in the US currently. From an infosec and real-world consequences perspective, I have much less reason to fear what the Chinese government or corporations could do with my information than what either the current US government or its major tech corporations might do.

> Israel still have the reputation of being part of the ‘free world’ in the collective mind.

That collective mind is cognitively challenged and extremely ignorant, but it doesn’t mean I have to be.

It comes down to trust them about what.

If I were engaged in anything hostile to Israel I utterly would not trust Israeli stuff. But Israel is normally quite careful about target selection, if I was not engaged in anything hostile to Israel I would expect anything they slip in to be secure and to not do any harm beyond it's existence. A scene from Lebanon not too long ago makes it very clear: A whole bunch of people milling about, setting up for selfies and the like--then we see the building behind destroyed by an airstrike. Clearly all those people around knew the building was going to be destroyed and they trusted Israeli accuracy enough to be standing not too far from where the bomb would land.

China, though, I would utterly not trust target selection or security against misuse.

wonder how long they'll be able to uphold this reputation, it's a bit puzzling to me that they still have one after three years of genocide in Palestine/Gaza and attacks on Lebanon, Iran, Qatar, Yemen and Syria. with the president having a warrant for war crimes and being investigated in his own country. and far-right government officials proudly saying that they want to eradicate their arab neighbors, and other heinous shit.

seems to me like lots of people are wary of ever criticizing or changing their mind about Israel, because their population once was the target of arguably the most heinous genocide in history, so far, which i'm of course very sorry for. must've caused some heavy, multi-generational trauma, other than that i can't explain why they're acting the way they do. don't make the mistake of translating official government statements or looking at population surveys, truly horrific, barbaric stuff. but of course the only terrorists in all of this are their neighbors which they keep in open-air prisons they at this point have bombed to rubble.

China being a dictatorship means bad things for Chinese citizens but not necessary for the rest of the world.

Israel being a (disfunctional and rather illiberal at this point) democracy, means it's much better for it's own citizens (excluding Arabs ofc), but says nothing about the people outside. Same for the US BTW.

It's an ethnic supremacist theodicy, is that better or worse than a dictatorship?

Also, meta discussion about down votes is against him policy, yet magically you're exempt, typical of **

> Define "hostile to users" a bit more.

They use this software to find and kill people. Which they then publicly brag about. How much more hostile do you want to be?

> Define "hostile to users" a bit more

Exploding pagers. Israel literally killed people with consumer tech.

I would also love this clarification, because not trusting an Israeli company is one thing, but with China, you're choosing to trust a government that is decades-old at being untrustworthy, not just a company. And whether or not the Israeli government can persuade a company to work with them notwithstanding, it's a known out truth that the Chinese government is in the business of its businesses.

> openly hostile to the West unlike Israel

Israel has openly and publicly threatened western politicians and citizens that don't aid their agenda however, many times. Like Russia, they have also shot down commercial airliners.

Unlike Russia, they have killed American sailors whilst directly attacking American naval assets.

Exactly. There's plenty of public-private partnerships in Israel and there is zero chance that a spyware firm would go unnoticed. Israeli academia, defense industry, and government is tightly interconnected. See Unit 8200, for example, which basically works as an incubator for Israeli cyberspace fraudsters. Denying Israeli government involvement here is just as dumb as denying Russian government involvement in Fancy Bear.

which is profoundly stupid from a digital sovereignty and security standpoint.

Tons of SV companies really... it's quite disturbing how obvious the compromise vectors are but big companies and startups alike seem to just allow it with no consideration for the security implications.

I think lots of it has to do with how well the hasbara covers up the scandals from the wider publics perception, combined with the cultural bandwagon of considering them an ally even when their repeated actions say otherwise.

edit: also the idea that they have such good tech and its a pragmatic decision ignores the history of how and who they got it from and the intentions for it. I say this as someone who worked directly with Mellanox for example, before aquisition by Nvidia... I always thought kernel level shims for networking stacks from an Israeli company was dangerous... but the speeds!!!

well yes, that is the surface. it's the surface being created with no recourse from the user side, that is intentional... the tinfoil hat theory is that it is, anyway.

Yeah, but you need to know where to look for it, the average person is never going to be able to afford the amount of tokens that will take to find a bug like this, especially if it was implanted on purpose.

I found it to be an excellent, easy-to-read summary.

I was looking for this comment. I'm wondering the same. Are ads just iframes that could have js? Therefore this is basically a zero click js (is this the first?) that just happens to be distributed via ads?

> Wait what, so there is no content disarm between companies making ads, and the publishers? They can literally push whatever they want? Wild.

RTB (real-time bidding) does not incentivise publishers to care about what ads are actually being shown to individual users, so long as CPM is maximised.

> ads in the stars

I'm reminded of the ending of the 2008 film Hancock in which Hancock defaced the moon with a corporate logo. But it was okay because it was "for a good cause".

Showing an advert is fine. A poster on a billboard is not deploying mass surveillance.

The moon as a giant Pepsi logo.

I don't see how anything in this exploit requires ads. It could just as well be done by enticing the target to view a malicious web page, such as a post in a subreddit or facebook group the target is known to read, or even by just sending him a link in an email or chat which will often trigger an automatic "preview" of the link in the email or chat client. Or by other social engineering techniques.

The ad-tech network probably does make it easier, because any page that includes their ad network could deliver the malicious ad.

Ideally, you'd sue the website because the website is responsible for everything that shows up on the website they control, and the website would turn around and sue their ad provider because they paid that ad provider for a service that wasn't malware delivery and as a result of that ad provider's crimes (or negligence) the website now has legal costs and harm to their reputation.

It shouldn't fall on the person just going to a website to track down the vendors and third parties the website contracts with.

I don't understand how you could arrive at this perspective. If you're doing business with ExampleCorp and one of their subcontractors malfeasantly mishandles things, would you say that ExampleCorp had nothing to do with it? If not, why does that change when the interaction happens via example.com?

Seems to me the website is negligent and the ad provider is an accessory (e.g. helping to select targets for fraud), at the very least.

> The website didn't server the ad.

Sure it did. The content coming from elsewhere doesn’t change their decision to include it when the user loads their page.

It just makes the decision wildly important.

This is no different than the “I’m too big, can’t tell what my subsidiaries are doing!” wink

Pay attention, do due diligence to do things correctly, or don’t do them.

I don't think we should try to split accountability at all here.

The ad platform that allows malware to be served to anyone is at fault.

As is the individual website that has selected to allow a 3rd party's code to be delivered to your machine without controlling that risk, often for very silly reasons.

Which candidates support the "put ads providers in jail" platform?

That's true, even what they know is happening is so abstract and hidden that they don't really understand it.

Vast majority of people will gladly sell their privacy.

It reads to me that the DLL is something they found later while trying to determine what the attacker was doing after they were already in.

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The user opens a WhatsApp link (or executes a file sent to them), Chrome WebRTC is exploited, shellcode invokes a Windows Kernel race condition, process escalates to Kernel/System privileges, Windows sandbox is bypassed, allowing the malware to drop the IME DLL and initialize the COM hijacking loop.

Memory safety, and a number of other glaring holes in common stacks, are ignored by the general public for the same psychological and effort-related reasons that people secure their whole lives with easily-picked Schlage locks, or windows/doors that can be defeated in under 5 seconds, often silently.

Most genuinely do not or can not believe tragedy can find them - until it has.

> they attribute to the ads based on the DLL hard-coding some domains related to the ad campaign

No, their attribution is much more robust than this. Neglecting those details to oversimplify your explanation is intellectually dishonest.

> there is nothing explaining how the DLL becomes zero-click compromised [...]

They do, just a little later in that same section: "Both samples use a COM hijack for persistence [...]" through a malicious DLL.

https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1546/015/

OK, then. Let's do the same with your profile, so in your About page I see this:

"About: Old programmer Tel Aviv, Israel"

Most of the information coming from Israel about Israel seems unreliable, too.

I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H. Kater. [0]

No, I will never fund TikTok. This article must have struck a nerve with yourself identity. Speaks volumes about your void of humanity.

[0] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300253375/culture-in-naz...

Or genuine people who ate an influence op before posting here.

The whole point of an influence op is to find a bunch of useful idiots to provide a large multiplicative factor.

And that's the problem with arguing that something is an influence op, because it is going to be mostly genuine people by the time it gets to you, even though you're not wrong.

That would be the most likely explanation if we knew the ICC and UN were targets, which we do not:

  A Discover-Tech ad impression does not in and of itself confirm targeting or infection with spyware.

Please explain the state of war between Israel and Mongolia.

It wouldn't work like that. Yes, there are some exceptions, but that wouldn't work for the vast majority of sites. The rest of them would end up being Facebook pages or Fandom wikis or similar.

It doesn't matter because simply having to pay any amount at all makes those sites inaccessible. Most of the world do not have credit cards.

But that aside, I think what we would see is a lot more Facebookification. A bunch of walled gardens that you pay a subscription for and then you get access to a whole slew of sites that FB buys up. Of course, they will make sure every site ends up toeing their line too.

I was only really aware of the many high profile cases of sex offenders exploiting this, I never thought of the cybercrime angle.

Yes, in general Israeli intelligence and hacking groups tend to enjoy far fewer consequences when they screw up than their Western counterparts, which then allow them to be far more aggressive.

If there is no punishment for shooting school kids with a sniper rifle, there isn't going to be punishment for any lesser evils.

hell and america will send israeli's that commit horrible crimes in us territory back to israel before anyone can actually consider prosecuting them.

But North Korea, Russia, and Iran isn't supported on our tax dollars. In this case we're literally paying another country to infiltrate ourselves.

This is true, but as far as I know, the other countries (except the US, which however is far larger than Israel) keep their cyberwarfare operations mostly internal. There's no public Russian company accessible to any Russian that does what the example companies above do, for instance. It's all government-led. So is the existence of these companies some outcome of the legal or financial system in that country?

> I'm going to stay out of the political issue of what any actor should do.

Thankfully, in many such cases, we can call the skyman to rescue:

  What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this—go and study it!

>Israel has a lot of enemies that going against them.

Why do you think that is?

lol downvotes

>North Korea, Russia, and Iran

...are also widely considered bad actors. Yet, it isn't "islamophobia" when you criticize Iran or "anti-Orthodox" when you call Russia to account.

Curiously, however, when you similarly criticize the actions of this specific Israeli government and its leaders, you are slandered with the term "antisemite" and there are orgs that exist to doxx you and get you fired from your job.

Isn't that weird?

They're even better at sextortion. Jeffrey Epstein is the posterchild for their efforts, along with his Mossad agent father-in-law Robert Maxwell, and handler Ehud Barak. It's likely that many of Israel's "triumphs" over the last few decades were less a result of hacking and more a result of blackmail, similar to the FSB/KGB.

Mandatory military service, too. You have to imagine that the US would have a similarly disproportionately-scaled cyber-warfare industry if it also had mandatory military service and good sorting of capable people into those units.

Its easy to be surrounded by enemies when you keep giving them reasons to hate you.

My point is that being at war with your neighbor(s) is not a unique situation, but only Israel has acquired such an extreme abuse-through-tech slant because of it. Why?

> If Mossad is willing to give you a hundred million to make your startup a spyware company, you're obviously going to agree.

what a sad take.

If that's your first instinct, then by your standards no country can be criticized for much of anything. After all, pointing out the negative outcomes of a purposefully designed system is the exact same as prejudice based on immutable birth characteristics.

Yes, and?

I in fact tried to word this as neutrally as possible, but people are already seeing ghosts just because it has a hint of negativity towards the country, which should be expected because most people agree that these technologies are not actually good for the world.

> The same reason why many great tech companies originate from Israel. That's why Nvidia is the largest private employer in Israel. Why Apple's CTO is from Israel.

You never said what the reason for that is. Their society doesn't seem more tech-oriented than comparable countries. Their universities are OK, but not the best in the world. So what in their society caused this?

> The same reason why many great tech companies originate from Israel.

wait - what's the reason, though? i don't understand what you're trying to say.

> That's why Nvidia is the largest private employer in Israel. Why Apple's CTO is from Israel.

you cite two american companies with presence in Israel to defend your claim that "many great tech companies originate from Israel".

> is not about the companies and more about you and how you view Israel

your entire response is predicated on your view of Israel but you haven't explained what your view actually is or what it's based on.

The founder was former checkpoint engineer and unit 8200 in Israel. It isn't HQed in there but there are ties.

the founder is !

Specifically Unit 8200, which really has no counterpart elsewhere in the world given Israel's mandatory universal conscription. Imagine if you could systematically screen every young adult in a country, identify those with the strongest math/quantitative skills or promising deep tech skills and divert them into one single security special ops org for several years. You'd get the concentration of skill that Unit 8200 has been producing.

Are you saying there's no work for both babes either? What a dry market!

This is where the wall broke down for me. Criticizing Israel is okay, but criticizing Jews is not. However this is one example of being "above the law" which affects all jews, not only israeli citizens.

I'm trying to be nice here, but yes, it's a racial nationalist policy. We don't have many of those countries left in the world.

"tel aviv impressed" - not a very good comment for HN, is it?

If you're so concerned about Israel's reputation, focus less on Ukraine or Russia and turn your attention to what Israel is doing to earn that reputation.

Name checks out