What’s striking is how often these ‘small’ surveillance tech stories trace back to the same state-aligned ecosystem. When Israel does it, it’s treated as a complex security issue. When another ‘bad’ country does the same thing, we immediately call it espionage. And almost on cue, the discussion drifts anywhere except the uncomfortable fact that it’s the same ecosystem from the same country showing up again.
it’s a tough infosec situation because the tel aviv-haifa corridor in israel has an enormous amount of computer science R&D going on that gives US companies a competitive advantage.
for example, annapurna labs in haifa develops the technology behind AWS’s nitro cards, which run the hypervisor, block storage, and networking in every EC2 server.
Is it though? US and EU telecom companies pulled the plug on Huawei products, which were deeply integrated in all of their setup, as soon as someone said they may be spying or remote disabled by China. It was expensive, sure, but they pulled the plug. I don't recall any concrete evidence of backdoors etc to be found, but trust was gone.
And that's the difference I think; US and Israel have high trust, they are aligned in ideals and strategy and the like.
Fair enough. I guess it's fine to be spied on to make sure US companies have that competitive advantage you mention. As its all in a good cause, I'll take the Samsung phone!
To be fair, us over in Europe have been uncomfortable for a while due to the US surveillance apparatus having total dominion over the underlying systems that run our countries.
So, its a little bit tone deaf to hear these complaints from Americans honestly.
We’re told that we’re uncompetitive (yet when rising startups happen they’re bought out before being too large)- we’re told that we shouldn’t run on anything except US SaaS and US cloud providers.
I’m not saying that you specifically make these arguments, but the zeitgeist on HN definitely centres on this notion.
So, please forgive me for not taking this as seriously as you’d like me to.
I think USA tech hegemony is perfectly analogous to this Israeli tech dilemma. As a dual American and EU (Irish) citizen, should my company strive to categorically avoid Intel and Nvidia technologies for national security reasons? I think there is a strong argument for tech nationalism but there is still a hegemonic dilemma.
The main problem, even if you would avoid Intel and NVidia, is that during the last decades we confortably let OS and programing languages driven by US companies take over.
So you might go with ARM, RISC V, but still have to make use of an OS and programming stack with strong ties to US based companies, even if open source.
I mean, it's literally the same thing that happens when past genocides are bad, but when they happen today from an ally of the west... "it's complicated". Except this time happens on the technological side rather than the humanitarian one
Everything on your list involved the sale of a product, by this logic China would be our closest ally (actually I wish our leaders were that sane, but the inconsistency stands...).
I wish people could just state the transparently documented historical truth, Israel is a US ally because Truman and enough other backers wanted to create a state for Holocaust survivors. The leadership and majority of voters in the US have been true believers in Zionism (in one of its many versions) for generations, and supports Israel by essentially the same logic that Israelis support Israel by. This existed as a state of affairs with almost no opposition at any level until a couple years ago when it came into conflict with another basic belief (about being close enough to just in the cause and method of war that most people could somewhat believe it).
That certainly seems to be their attitude. If israel had listened to all of the advice from Britain and France it may well have been 60k Israelis dead. Imagine how many palestinians would have died. Nobody here is arguing against israel in good faith. If anyone had genuinely cared about the palestinians they would have put massive pressure on Hamas and put their full support behind a quick and brutal campaign. What would have happened? A 2 month long war and 20k dead max.
If only Israel wasn't committing a genocide itself, and hadn't treated the Palestinian people like lesser beings for decades, maybe things would be different.
This narrative about the founding of Israel is false.
Israel was founded in the middle of an offensive when it was "descended upon by the Arab world". That was a defensive reaction to Israel's brutal Plan Dalet, an invasion and occupation of Palestine, which extended far beyond what the UN had drawn up.
And then they destroyed 500 villages, ethnically cleansed Palestine of three quarters of a million of Palestinians and never let them return.
They went around with detailed lists of people identified as Arabs in each village, rounded them up, set fire to the villages, and then blew up the rubble. How can you believe that is the act of a legitimate state? It is quite simply evil. Nazi-level shit.
This was not an operation that was sanctioned by the UN's partition plan (which was ridiculous and at odds with the UNs founding principles of self-determination to begin with) it was just retconned into being a legitimate action.
I appreciate you sharing these links and pushing back. It’s clear you’re coming from a place of deep conviction about the historical injustices here, and I respect that.
The Nakba is undeniably a catastrophe for Palestinians, involving mass expulsions, village destructions, and profound human suffering that shapes their identity to this day.
Plan Dalet, as outlined in the Wikipedia article you linked, was indeed a Haganah blueprint that shifted to offensive operations, leading to the depopulation of hundreds of villages and the flight or expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians.
Historians like Ilan Pappé (in “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”) argue it was a systematic plan for ethnic cleansing, with tactics like sieges, bombings, and forced removals. That’s not something to downplay or excuse: it’s a dark chapter, and comparing elements to other atrocities (while avoiding direct equivalences) highlights the moral weight.
That said, I think the full picture is even more layered, and understanding both sides means grappling with the context without absolving anyone. The Arab states’ intervention in May 1948 wasn’t purely defensive; it was also driven by their own territorial ambitions and opposition to the UN Partition Plan (which, as you note, was flawed and rejected by Palestinians and Arabs for giving 55% of the land to a Jewish minority that owned ~7%). But Plan Dalet was finalized in March 1948 amid escalating civil war violence; after the UN vote in November 1947 sparked attacks from both sides, including Arab irregulars blockading Jewish areas and the Haganah responding in kind. Benny Morris (a “New Historian” who revised much of the traditional Israeli narrative) describes it as a response to anticipated Arab invasions, though he acknowledges the expulsions were often brutal and opportunistic. The plan’s text emphasizes securing Jewish areas and borders “in anticipation of” invasion, but in practice, it went beyond that, capturing territory outside the UN-allotted Jewish state.
You’re right that this wasn’t explicitly sanctioned by the UN, and the partition itself violated self-determination principles (as the Arab Higher Committee argued). But the “retconning” happened post-facto through armistice lines and international recognition of Israel. It’s tragic that Palestinians paid the price for European colonialism, the Holocaust’s aftermath, and Zionist aspirations; all while Arab leaders failed to unify or protect them effectively.
My original point wasn’t to defend Israel as “legitimate” in every action (far from it: they’ve committed wrongs that demand accountability). It was to urge empathy for how each side’s trauma fuels the cycle: Israelis seeing 1948 as survival against existential threats (five Arab armies invading a nascent state), Palestinians as the theft of their homeland. Both narratives have truths, and dismissing one entirely risks perpetuating the divide. If we’re serious about peace, we need to hold space for that complexity; maybe starting with works like Morris’s “1948” or Rashid Khalidi’s “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” for balanced views.
Thanks for engaging thoughtfully; these conversations are hard but necessary.
I still don't understand how you can view the Israeli foundation myth, and the "fear of an existential threat" as legitimate, when the Israeli state's founding was an unjust, immoral, wrong undertaking, the foundation of a colony on someone's homeland.
If a perpetrator breaks into a house and kicks out the homeowners, then declares the attempts to take back said house as an existential threat to their new house ownership, a reasonable person would not view that as a legitimate concern.
It's just not a logically consistent way to look at the situation. I agree that the current day situation is different, considering Israel has existed for two generations. It still does not change the fact that they are forcing an apartheid on the Palestinians, and are engaged in genocide, and have sabotaged any attempt to solve the situation by means other than ethnic cleansing.
I refuse to consider a balanced view when the crimes that have been committed are so unbalanced. Israel has established a society, and that society has clearly established itself as the bad guy, Palestine has not even had a chance to create a society for themselves, so they cannot even be judged to the same standard. But even if we do, it's hard to see them as anything but victims of Zionist oppression.
I try my best when trying to understand things, to think about how people have it today, and not to tie everything to what peoples ancestors did.
The only thing people can really do today is to acknowledge the past, and to do something about it, and if we’re taking the Israeli perspective now, then what we’re essentially telling them to do is not exist.
Many are fine with that being the case (why should they exist when its founded on evil) but there’s a few points there that make it harder to swallow I think.
1) I think if someone told me that I had no right to live in my home country because of its past I would get quite bent out of shape, especially if blood was shed.
(again, not arguing that this makes it entirely valid, just arguing a perspective).
2) It sort of justifies actual genocide. As mentioned in my other examples; any invading force in future will probably slaughter everyone. Because the international conversation surrounding genocides of the last 30 years is a lot more tame than how we talk about the suffering of palestinians.
This disproportionate discussion probably feels unfair, since the average Israeli probably feels like they would want to live peacefully today, if only they were not constantly attacked by Iranian proxies every time attempts at normalisation looked like they were succeeding. Unfortunately this would then include terrorism from Palestine.
I have to really caveat again, that I don’t think Israel is peachy, just that today the Palestinian narrative is a bit more empathised with internationally- but I wouldn’t like myself being in either countries shoes honestly.
I have not said that Israel should not exist, that is your extrapolation.
Israel should be held accountable for what it has done, and if it does not further a two state solution, it should be sanctioned by the international community. Current and previous political leaders should be prosecuted for war crimes, and the country should be reformed into a secular democracy.
That's it, that's my stance.
Now, I don't see any of this happening, and I see a genocide being committed.
You're then characterising any military response as genocidal. This no longer feels like an honest response. First, it's Israel that has decided it wants to be an ethnostate, the only reason it would seem genocidal is because Zionists have conflated a religion with a nationality with citizenship. The bad actor of Israel should still be a valid target of military actions just like others are. Would you say that the allies committed a genocide when they attacked Nazi Germany in the second world war?
And where are you getting these ideas of "invading forces slaughtering everybody"? This is starting to sound like Zionist propaganda. I'm sorry but hypothetical threats do not matter when compared with actual apartheid and genocide.
The Palestinians have always been the less violent party. Israel is also a much more violent and offensively postured military actor than Iran, they developed nukes in secret for chrissakes, and they seem to have immunity from international sanctions.
Israel could choose to live in peace by changing it's military posture, by not constantly attacking its neigbours and destabilizing the region. They currently illegally occupy territory in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. They could simply stop doing that to begin with.
Thanks for clarifying. Your point on Israel choosing peace by de-escalating, halting attacks on neighbors, and ending illegal occupations in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon hits hard. It is a straightforward path to de-escalation that demands action.
But as of today, November 18, 2025, the US-brokered ceasefire in Gaza holds broadly, with Israeli forces withdrawn to the “yellow line” and a UN Security Council vote underway for a new Gaza security force that could lead to full Israeli pullout. Trump calls it historic, though Hamas rejects it as insufficient.
This moment tests your idea: if Israel follows through on withdrawal and curbs West Bank settler violence (which has surged, with over 200 attacks reported this month alone), it could prove goodwill. Yet ongoing tunnel operations and regional strikes (like recent hits in Lebanon) show the military posture persists, fuelling distrust.
Pushing Israelis to empathise means seeing Palestinians not as perpetual threats but as equals deserving sovereignty. Many modern Israelis; weary from two years of war, economic hits, and global isolation… privately crave normalcy. They fear that unilateral retreats invite repeats of October 7 or Hezbollah barrages, especially with Iran arming proxies. Ending occupations could shatter that fear cycle, but it requires mutual security guarantees, not just Israeli concessions.
Your WWII analogy still fits: Defeat the aggressors’ system, not the people. Target occupation and apartheid policies surgically. Dismiss their fears, though, and hardliners win. Shared trauma acknowledgment, without equivalence, could spark real dialogue. What gap do you see?
I appreciate the response, but I see the same pattern repeating. You admit to Israel's actual wrongdoing, but equate the hypothetical wrongdoing of Israel's opponents. There is no equivalence here.
Also, Israel has nuclear weapons and the backing of the US, the EU, and Russia. That is enough to deter attacks. Further security guarantees are redundant, but sure, add them.
I agree that the system should be defeated, but I don't think purely diplomatic solutions will work. At least not ones that assumes Israel acts in good faith. Israel has shown that it will not respect international law, and Israeli opinion on Arabs is not just extreme in a small group of hardliners, it's widespread. In order to make a real change.
I believe Israel has to be brought to heel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. That is what tipped the scale with apartheid South Africa, that is most likely the best course of action here as well. Israel does what it wants, it is a self-interested bad faith actor. We need a powerful coalition of international actors to associate a cost with Israel's crimes. That's BDS.
The issue is that Israel has lobbied for anti-BDS laws in the US, making this more difficult. It's an uphill battle, which is also why a balanced discussion about Israeli concerns will not improve the situation. Israel is fighting a propaganda war. If we start debating things other than how to reform Israel, Israel wins. It can delay, confuse, and run interference against any actual discussion about the real problem: the ethnonationalist founding principles of Israel, the apartheid, the genocide, the imperial ambitions of Israel, the blatant disregard for international law and treaties.
I appreciate the discussion so far, but I think I've said everything I want to say. If you have any final thoughts, I'd be glad to hear them.
I get your frustration with patterns in these debates, and you’re right that Israel’s documented crimes: apartheid policies, genocidal violence in Gaza, and blatant violations of international law… stand alone in scale and impunity.
No hypotheticals from opponents come close, and that’s not up for debate. The power asymmetry is massive: nukes, US and EU support (Russia’s more pro-Palestinian, actually, with recent UN pushes for Palestinian statehood), and anti-BDS lobbying make good-faith diplomacy a tough sell without real pressure.
But let’s cut to the core: wrongdoing isn’t one-sided. You have to acknowledge that on the Palestinian side too: rocket attacks on civilians, suicide bombings, and October 7’s civilian massacres are wrongs that can’t be waved away as pure resistance. Both sides have blood on their hands, and denying that keeps the cycle spinning. In the end, it’s all just people: ordinary Palestinians crushed under occupation, and ordinary Israelis living in fear, both wanting safety for their families.
Put yourself in those Israeli shoes; surrounded by states and groups that have historically vowed your destruction, with no other viable homeland to flee to after centuries of global expulsions. You’d feel threatened too, right? That doesn’t excuse Israel’s aggressions, but it explains why zero empathy guarantees endless war.
BDS is a sharp tool; it broke South Africa’s back through isolation, and it could here: boycotts draining the economy, divestment from occupation profiteers, sanctions on war criminals. Ramp it up, build the coalition, associate real costs with the ethnonationalism and imperialism. But to make it stick, humanise the people enough to split internal hardliners from the weary majority open to secular change. Otherwise, you’re just fueling the propaganda you call out. Good talk.. it’s pushed me to think harder.
Only someone trying to silence any dissent to their position would use platitudes like this rather than addressing why the OP mentioned antisemitism out of nowhere.
I recently bought a cheap android device because I needed to test something on Android. The setup was about 3 hours of the device starting up, asking me questions, installing apps I explicitly told it not to, and then all sorts of other apps and OS updates trying to do their thing seemingly at once. I wasn't even transferring data, just a brand new phone, new google account.
What a horrible experience you get with some providers and phones.
It's to the point that I think there should be some sort of regulation that involves you getting a baseline experience on the OS rather than a bunch of malware out of the box.
I remember back when the iPhone came out, this was perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of it, at least to me. We were so used to phones coming with crap on them and tightly coupled to the carrier. If the carrier didn't want something on the phone, it never got there. So Apple comes along and says "Hey, AT&T, we will make you the exclusive carrier for the iPhone iff you leave the entire experience under our control."
There were lots of downsides to that deal, of course, but I appreciate that it broke the carriers' exclusive control over mobile phones.
I remember when Verizon got deliberately hobbled phones on top of that. Some of the Windows Mobile phones came with up to half the RAM if you dared buy it on Verizon, and they locked the GPS out to use VZ Navigator instead of being able to just throw TomTom on 'em.
When you think of old phones, think of the touch interface on a printer.
I don't like Apple either, they are DEFINITELY rent seeking and violating their users' privacy at the same time. There is no excuse for that. I think what the parent post was talking about is something historical. An iPhone at that time was a large step above a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson in terms of flexibility.
Hold on a sec. Nokia and Ericsson made lots and lots of phone modeles. If you're comparing with cheap ordinary models everyone had, then sure, first iphone was great, but that's not a fair comparison. This is:
Spinning up a competing carrier has a much higher barrier of entry, though, than creating a new mobile phone. If my only choices are carrier-controlled or manufacturer-controlled, I will choose the latter. Gives me way more options.
Rather refurbished, because those are longer on market thus development of custom ROM (like LineageOS) is more likely. And of course you save a lot of money.
Sounds like the average carrier locked Samsung device experience in the US. Oh you didn't want Clash of Clans installed? We'll reinstall that for you next OS update. Running updates through carriers was a serious mistake.
Running remote updates in general was a serious mistake. Other manufacturers are no better and give you all kinds of crap for their income streams at the expense of your convenience whilst claiming the opposite.
The last time I saw an update that just fixed security bugs and improved performance was... never.
I took this seriously and thought back to the most recent actually-useful-bugfixes-and-security-improvements release that I can remember. OSX Snow Leopard perhaps?
I was wondering why this thankfully hasn't been my experience until you said "carrier locked"... I always buy unlocked. Does that really make a difference?
I haven't bought an android device for a few years, but the last time I did, it was also a very cheap one for testing. I chose an "Android One" to avoid all these issues. Is something like that still an option?
Your best bet might be one of the Pixel "a" series, which are Google's budget-oriented models. Stock vanilla Android with as little bloat as you can hope for.
Those Pixels have options to open bootloader and after flashing custom ROM that is much cleaner (GrapheneOS) to lock it again. Which is currently most secure way to have clean and secure android device.
Sounds like a Samsung phone... no end of dark patterns and pushing Bixby AI and whatever else. And then once you have the phone set up you get to spend the next 10 minutes uninstalling a load of pre-loadded apps that you didn't want.
Fortunately Android is a pretty diverse range and Samsung is just one player. I had much more user-friendly experiences with Fairphone and Motorola.
Cheap devices get subsidized by shitty adware. The cheaper the device, the more likely that it's full of terrible adware.
Consumers often have a choice, at least between "filled to the brim with crap" and "a modicum of crap", by choosing between buying their phone from a store or from a carrier. Carriers have better deals but shovel their phones full of the worst apps you can imagine. Still, people will buy the crap-filled experience that makes you want to tear your hair out because they like the idea of scoring a better deal.
Nothing like unadulterated greed combined with short-sighed consumer behaviour at scale to drive a market segment into an awful race to the bottom.
What's a better word here? Adverts cost the consumer, however I'm sure the consumer doesn't get equal recompense. Theoretically a SmartTV with adverts costs less money ("subsidised" due to price competition), but is the consumer actually ($,time) better off?
The costs are invisible and the consumer cannot actually measure the costs (the vendors do measure profitability but this is not legible).
I reckon most people are terrible at judging the value of their own time (especially children and retirees).
I kind of like Motorola in the cheap android phone space. I have a moto-g stylus in my pocket now, and it's big (which I like), has a heaphone jack, and has an sd-card port. I thought I'd like the stylus, but I rarely use it.
It pre-installs some games, but you can uninstall them. The only thing it forces on you is a weather app which you can deactivate but not uninstall.
My guess is, those auto installs is exactly how they keep the costs down, by subsidizing the cost with getting paid by companies to auto-install garbage.
It's the same with Smart TVs, they've gotten so cheap because of all the other slimy stuff the manufacturers do, like sell your watch data, or pre-install apps.
I suppose the "paying off the subsidy" is to buy a more expensive phone. Or getting a Google Pixel. I've heard those are as much stock android as possible.
I agree, and that's the exact point I would make. The problem though, is I want a small phone with a headphone jack (and a physical keyboard, but that's orthogonal to the point).
Many OEMs sell their flagship as a shiny glass slab with only BT or USB-C for audio, and ship 3.5mm jacks and other "antiquated niceties" like a uSD card reader, on their lower-end models.
It's difficult to square the circle of "I want these specific features, but on a phone that's not working against me (any more than modern phones already do)"
The "Sony Xperia 5 V" (I have the previous "Sony Xperia 5 IV") has a headphone jack, takes a uSD card, and is somewhat compact. (And no silly camera cutout in the screen, it's in a reasonably small bezel.)
EDIT: also see the Xperia 10 VII for a phone that isn't 2 years old (I haven't been keeping up, I buy phones to use for 4+ years)
According to the specs it's 154 x 68 x 8.6 mm and 182 grams, so it's more compact than most phones of 2025 but not really compact. My Samsung A40 is smaller and lighter but it's 4 years older.
And easily internally shorted, leading to the dreadful 'wiggle around in your pocket until the headphones are detected again, and then press play again'...
I must admit, I don’t get the wish for 3.5mm headphone jacks in 2025. Already six years ago, with a phone that actually still had a headphone jack, I bought myself for just a few euro a Bluetooth DAC (a FiiO) that had superior sound quality to any phone’s audio-out that I had ever used. With a Bluetooth DAC (or with any USB-C to 3.5mm converter that costs pennies) you can still use whatever wired headphones you want to use.
Physical keyboards were nice back in an era when the web welcomed longform text, and I miss my Nokia N900. Nowadays, though, the web ecosystem that one typically uses from a phone is a cesspool, and for serious things I’ll just use my real computer.
I have a similar FiiO gadget and it makes less sense for me than a direct wired connection to the phone. It's a relatively bulky device that needs to be charged way too often, also it reduces voice call quality (like any other BT Classic device).
I'm conflicted about this matter. I use a Bluetooth earpiece on my phone because it's more convenient: you can move around a room with the phone on a table, no pockets, and you can wear and unwear t-shirts and sweaters. When I can't find the x with the earpieces I plug in in a wired one.
On the other hand a wired headphone always work, had maybe better quality and almost surely a better latency. I use one of them when doing calls from my laptop.
> I bought myself for just a few euro a Bluetooth DAC (a FiiO) that had superior sound quality to any phone’s audio-out that I had ever used.
I hate the 3.5'' jack myself (see below), but I can already tell you that mentioning some unscientific definition of "superior sound quality" that likely no one amongst us is humanly able to distinguish is not going to win any minds over. Proponents of 3.5'' like it because it is ridiculously simple to use, intuitive, cheap, doesn't have a lot of things that can go wrong (e.g. no batteries) and despite that is overall effective.
The reason I dislike 3.5'' is because the _socket_ part (i.e. the part on the expensive device) wears out very quickly, becoming fragile and generating distracting artifacts even with slight cable pulls/movements, as the springs in the connector start to fail. This annoys me to no end, much more than any issues with other interfaces.
Talking about “superior sound quality” in the context of mobile phones isn’t controversial, it’s not like a home-stereo audiophile snake oil debate. It is well known that DACs are an area where mid-range and low-end phone makers have cut corners, choosing chips that are quite flawed for anyone who uses their phone to listen to music where pristine sound quality is valued.
The elephant in the room for me is "microphonics" or the noise piped to your head via the wire any time anything touches it.
You demand higher quality, yet don't care about the loud noise created with every small movement of your body? I have heard this dismissed before as "doesn't bother me" and it's hardly ever mentioned in discussions about good audio vs Bluetooth.
I'm bewildered why wireless audio isn't praised for completely eliminating this source of noise that plagues every wired headphone, earbud, and IEM.
pretty much why I switched to iphone. I used pixels before for the same reason but good luck getting your pixel warranty honored outside the united states
This is not a valid cause. They spend insane amounts of money on advertising and also make insane amounts of revenue. Don’t think “them keeping the cost down” is relevant in this context.
This is true, it’s not an individual datapoint. When smartphones, like the iPhone, originally debuted carriers had a conniption fit because they couldn’t preload a ton of garbage apps to help subsidize the cost. Apple has been able to avoid this, but for your average smartphone this is absolutely how both the manufacturer and carrier are able to sell them so cheaply.
Every experience may not be as bad as the one the OP had, but it’s surely well within reality. Both carriers and handset manufacturers are glad to sell anything and everything about someone to make a quick buck. They’ve literally been doing it for 25+ years.
You need to think about the aggregate data. Whole trends can be seen in almost real-time.
Here’s a made up example, and it’s probably not even the best one. - Show Teckno-Detectives shows a “Cameo” of Grapple’s newest mixed-reality glasses. The data shows that 3.9 million additional people watched the episode. Investment firms who pay for the data notice and buy extra Grapple shares to cash in on the expected sales bump.
Nah its the corporate greed and disregard for avoiding amoral behavior at the first place, since clearly its punished much less than rewards are (just look at all the slaps on the wrist of FAANGs and similar), then followed by race to the bottom with the price.
Economies of scale do bring costs of everything much further than stealing user's data can, but good luck explaining some long term vision to C-suites who only care about short term bonuses.
I suspect the apparent reduction in price on these devices is a lot less than what they earn from the slimy stuff.
But the premium devices (especially TVs) are starting to do this too now via software updates. I had to turn off a bunch of crap in the settings on my LG CX TVs some time ago. Now they are just off the internet and can only connect to my NAS.
Hopefully one day we not only have open software, open hardware but also reproducibly guaranteed secure systems. Now I don't have any idea how this could be verified (and no, Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" is not what I have in mind), but I hope we'll see to this eventually.
we've alreaaaay seen that decentralization is an abstract, butnot a reality.
There will always be a move towards centralization when a project gains enough converts because the bulk of concerns are exactly the same but we don't have n+1 people willing to do the necessary legwork to secure.
As such, just like REST apis and their N+1 query problem, forcing everyone to have a security conscious posture is never going to happen.
You absolutely need centralized authorities; what the real argume is about is how that authority is selected, changed and intermediated. The same way we argue about how a stable RAFT algorithm operates.
Move on from this "decentralization is all we need" argument. It's failed and failing.
"Decentralized governance" is just feudalism. What you need is a re-envigoration of democracy. Democracy works, but we have to engage with it positively, both as citizens and as politicians.
It will be excluded from any popular OS and will end up a niche thing that no one will use. The issue is the hegemony of big tech companies over the regulations to shape it however they like, and in return they provide the surveillance to legislators.
Has no-one bothered to reverse engineer the app and see what it's actually doing before launching into hundreds of words of breathless conjecture?
If not, this article and almost every comment on this submission is a colossal waste of time.
This is supposed to be a technical website full of inquisitive hackers, right? Then perhaps try to examine the facts instead of guessing and bullshitting.
> jesus, you must be seriously fucked in the head to
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.
You have, of course, familiarized yourself with this material:
Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
I don't take anything Leon Panetta says as gospel, but the fact that someone like him says this shows how the position is not ludicrous in the way you and other similar replies are painting it.
It wasn't a targeted attack since they had no way of knowing where the pagers would end up in the second-hand market, as they were only activated years later.
> You’re telling me pagers used by a terrorist organization ending up in the second-hand market.
Four children were killed and dozens of _innocent_ bystanders were injured.
> What do you know about Lebanon and Hezbollah?
It's a conflict that's been going on for 30 years that I can remember and I don't think that more kinetic operations are going to accomplish anything other than fomenting an actual genocide.
Did you think gatekeeping was going to work? This conflict has spilled out into the broader world. If it were strictly contained to Lebanon and only implicated Hezbollah then you might have a point. We're well past that.
> How do people end up making such unfounded, unbiased claims so confidently??
>Four children were killed and dozens of _innocent_ bystanders were injured.
Compared to thousands of Hezbollah members. Literally one of the most targeted large-scale attacks of all time. There are effectively zero other military means that would have been even close to as selective and discriminant. Would you prefer they drop a 500lb bomb on each of their houses instead?
The pager detonations were weak enough to be effectively nonlethal unless you're especially vulnerable. That's how you end up with such a low death to injury ratio in the first place.
So per the KPI metric you've chosen, making it more lethal and more dangerous to bystanders would have been better.
Even among the injuries, you're still looking at an awful ratio, since Hezbollah had mostly migrated these devices out of their combatants in favor of newer models, and they were mainly in the hands of civilians.
And all of this is ignoring the blatant international law violation against booby trapping. This was very clearly a war crime.
Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
The point is that such preposterously stupid military means are not preventing the continuation of blood-shed, and if you are saying that exploding pagers are a perfectly acceptable means of executing military goals, then .. whats next .. are Israeli citizens expected to live under the continuous threat of exploding vibrators and vaporizers, now, too?
The “War on Terror” has addled peoples minds so harshly that the notion that there is actually a legal way to wage war seems preposterous - however, there is a “legal means by which to wage war” which does in fact protect you, citizen, and you should learn about it - because when your representatives (and by proxy: you) violate those laws, you become personally liable for the repercussions that other victims will prosecute on you, and your nation state:
If ‘no bomb/missile ever is a war crime’, then .. there is no such thing as “terrorism”, either. (Although the argument could be made that there is no such thing as ‘terrorism’ at all, and that indeed, the word terrorism is merely a propaganda crutch used to justify atrocities against so-called ‘lesser cultures’ deemed inferior by the same institutions which used to use the ‘n-word’ to justify their atrocities in decades past, too, before that became difficult to do ..)
You can indeed commit war crimes with sticks too, though, incidentally.
You have to lose the war in order to be so prosecuted. So, the important thing about war crimes is not to lose once you've determined that you've committed them.
I'll start to believe this sort of fantasy when the people who win wars begin investigating and prosecuting themselves for the crimes that they committed or suborned.
The "legal way to wage war" is only relevant when you are waging war against an army. Hezbollah is not an army, it's a terrorist group. It attacks civilians. It doesn't wear uniforms. It ignores the laws of war.
“The IDF attacks civilians. It uses perfidy to indiscriminately attack the civilian population of its enemies. It, too, ignores the laws of war.”
There is no way to continue justifying acts of terror being committed by your in-group, without also become equivalent to the terrorist of your out-group.
27 out of 190 countries is far from “international consensus” and does not legitimize attacks on the group in sovereign territory. don’t justify the security hack as legitimate. If Israel penetrated a security perimeter of a group that breach becomes a threat to all people everywhere
I mean the world takes the view Israel is occupying and slowly invading more regions of Palestine.
I didn't make it up, the Balfour declaration makes it pretty clear, so if you're upset natives are attacking you what's your point exactly.
Anyway, point is Israel has almost always lied throughout it's genocide against Palestinians. The IOF has lied or distorted the truth in almost every statement, one which always comes to mind is the attack on the Christian hospital.
The Israeli government are liars, they have a whole online army dedicated to misinformation and the 5 D's. For them lying is just another effective weapon of war which must be utilised.
Who are these “Israel haters” on HN you’re referring to?
There are plenty of us on HN who believe in the Israeli peoples’ human rights just as seriously as we support those of the children of Gaza, too.
Those of us who actually care about civilized society, human rights, and international law also consider that there are plenty of Israeli citizens who are, themselves, victims of their own states acts of terrorism as well.
You are responsible for the crimes of your state, citizen. No amount of chicken-waving is going to absolve you of that fact.
The point of discussing the heinous nature of the pager attack is to prevent the precedent set by that attack from taking further victims.
It is not in the interests of Israeli citizens to have their war-crime committing state subjugate their societies’ commercial institutions to commit further atrocities.
When you increasingly lose the court of public opinion, you resort to this sort of gaslighting.
Because the Israeli Hasbara is now failing at this gaslighting strategy, you're leveling ad hominems towards people who see this as what it is - decades of war crimes and a humanitarian crisis.
So either come up with a proper argument, or stay quiet. Gaslighting us into thinking we're being biased, or that we're ill informed, just isn't going to work anymore.
...and destroying or damaging >2/3rds of all structures in Gaza and killing tens of thousands of civilians with airstrikes isn't?
Obviously yes, Hamas and Hezbollah indiscriminately firing rockets at Israel consistute war crimes. I assume you must agree that Israel's systematic targeting of schools, hospitals, mosques, and refugee camps would also qualify?
It is pretty trivial to look up recent sattellite imagery and find undestroyed buildings, but that takes more interest in facts than finding youtube videos
I'm claiming there is a reason that Israel destroys buildings you neglect to mention. Recognizing that reason strongly undermines your assertion of systematic targetting. There is a fog of war, and war is messy, so a charitable outlook should exclude blase confidence about the matter.
You're mixing two different things with the civilians in buildings. The mass building destruction we see is done on buildings after evacuation to dismantle booby trapped buildings. Israel does frequently do strikes on buildings or infrastructure that contain civilians, but that is a different kind of action with different reasons and circumstances (e.g. collateral damage of strikes on military targets, etc.)
I love how confidently you reply in a way that makes you think Israel just has a right to do it. Like they have a right to just level buildings because they think it's booby trapped.
You're someone that has deepthroated the Israeli narrative, with no critical thinking whatsoever. I hope, for your own sake, you start to see more of the reality, as defending a violent regime like this can have an impact on ones soul, which will affect - if not already - other areas of your life.
Did I say Israel has a right to do all these things? No, I did not. I described the situation and their reasoning. Now Israel does have a right to defend itself. Hamas, the government of Gaza, forfeited their relatively peaceful situation when they openly attacked Israel. That doesn't mean everything Israel does is unquestionable. There is plenty open to criticism. There is also a fog of war, and much is unknown now that will be revealed as time goes on. But that also doesn't mean that we should dismiss everythjng Israel says just because they say it. A little more nuamce and curiosity is the most ethical approach to this inherently morally bankrupt conflict.
The mere existence of a state per se is violent, and given that both Israel and Palestine insists on having mutually incompatible states over the same territory, there is no other option but endless bloodshed until both sides commit to a conciliatory settlement. Until that day, a day which may never come, since everyone is hellbent on egging their respective favored side on, things will simply continue as is until one or both sides are destroyed. Since Israel unquestionably has more power, it will likely survive. There is no morally unquestionable option, but I think anyone who has a stake in the livelihood of Palestinians would be interested in stopping the conflict as soon as possible and making a settlement, even an imperfect one. In such a quandry, the only ethical option is to remain open and curious, be willing to look at facts and evaluate claims instead of jumping to conclusions, and refrain from asserting an uncertain narrative as fact when there are competing narratives and counterexamples.
If you assert this, it is a open attack against the rule of law. Society requires peace, and peace requires deterrence and enforcement. Feel free to feel morally righteous, but recognize that your opinion on moral righteousness condemns all people to live the rule of the jungle.
It is also a war crime to carry out what is known as the Nakba - ethnically cleansing and displacing hundreds and thousands of Palestinians.
It is a crime illegally occupy land that does not belong to you.
It is a crime to maintain an apartheid state.
It is a crime to hold 'prisoners' without any charges
It is a crime to rape said prisoners. It is also disgusting to have a society that riots when said rapists are called out for their actions.
It is a crime to continually bomb and kill Palestinians for just existing.
It is a crime to continually kill Palestinians for no reason via 'mowing the grass' exercises
It is a crime to crime to kill Palestinians when they peacefully protest
It is a crime to indiscriminately bomb Gaza because some Palestinians have had enough of being subjected to sub-human conditions.
So if you say 'any and all means are justified to prevent that', then any and all means should be justified to prevent the above, right?
After WW2 Germans were literally removed from certain territories and the land given to Poland. It's honestly not much different from the Nakba. I find an immediate refusal to address points of history like this and hide behind accusations of bias to weaken your credibility.
War is a horrible and inherently immoral thing. We do no favors to our humanity or othercs by pretending it's a simple black and white matter when it is really not.
Nobody is going to argue that the USA is a force for good in the world when it comes to starting one stupid, evil war, after the other. If the USA is good at one thing, its dropping bombs on innocent human beings every twenty minutes for the past twenty odd years. The question is, though, in which interest is it committing those crimes?
Oh, and .. who are you referring to as “people living in the US”, and by what means are you certain of this fact? HN is an international community.
Some of us don’t see national identity and just want the mass murder of children to stop, whatever it takes.
Literally a violation of Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
Common Article 3 was breached by carrying out lethal attacks against persons taking no active part in hostilities (including off-duty medics and civilians) without individual assessment; GC I Articles 12 and 18 were violated when medical personnel and facilities were hit by exploding devices carried by wounded or off-duty health workers; GC III Article 13 was infringed because many victims instantly became hors de combat through injury yet were subjected to further maiming by shrapnel designed to cause maximum harm; GC IV Articles 27, 32 and 51 were contravened by the indiscriminate killing and mutilation of civilians (including children and bystanders) and by imposing collective punishment through mass, simultaneous detonation regardless of individual status; Additional Protocol I Articles 48, 51(2–5), 57 and 54 were violated through the failure to distinguish combatants from civilians, the inherently indiscriminate and disproportionate nature of detonating thousands of devices in populated areas, and the use of treachery/perfidious means to kill; finally, Amended Protocol II to the CCW Article 7(2) was directly breached by transforming ordinary civilian pagers into prohibited booby-traps specifically designed and constructed to contain concealed explosives.
The use of treachery/perfidious means to kill is particularly disturbing, since it sets the precedent for similar means to be used in retaliation, very likely to result in yet more unjustifiable acts of terror.
You're really playing up the false narrative that the spicy pagers were indiscriminate, which just isn't factually accurate, they were sold exclusively to terrorists and used exclusively by terrorist organizations for communications, there weren't any non-terrorist affiliated medics that got caught up in the attack from my understanding. Even in cases where they were detonated in populated areas bystanders were essentially unaffected due to the design of the explosive payload.
The claims made in the interview align with various other sources, including videos of the explosions showing that bystanders were unaffected. Likewise none of the spicy pagers were found to have been sold to the general public.
You claim:
> “sold exclusively to terrorists” - false.
> “used exclusively by terrorist organizations for communications” - false.
> “weren't any non-terrorist affiliated medics ” - false.
From the interview
> Lesley Stahl: Did people other than Hezbollah want to buy this based on what was being said about it online?
> Gabriel: Yes. We received several request from regular potential customer. Obviously we didn't send to anyone. We just quote them with expensive price.
You claim:
> “bystanders were essentially unaffected due to the design of the explosive payload” - false.
From the article:
> In order to put explosives inside. But not too much. Using dummies, Mossad conducted tests with the pager in a padded glove to calibrate the grams of explosive needed to be just enough to hurt the fighter -- but not the person next to him.
>Extra-judicial murder through out of control deployment of weapons via subterfuge is terrorism, also.
No? The slave workers in Nazi germany who purposely fucked up equipment to get german soldiers killed were not committing a war crime. Sabotage is legitimate warfare. The french people getting the trust of german soldiers and then slitting their throats were not committing war crimes.
>Civilians died in those indiscriminate attacks - which were terrorist in nature and deed.
Civilians die in every war because war is messy and the geneva conventions, which only considered prisoners of war until the 4th, do not prevent civilian causalities. They are not intended to. The Geneva conventions were updated after world war 2 and were STILL not made to prevent things like the London Blitz or infrastructure attacks, and indeed things like Russia trying to freeze Ukraine to death by blowing up it's electrical infrastructure is not a war crime.
If hezbollah are legitimate combatants, then they have to wear a uniform during hostilities to be protected by the conventions/protocols/hague. If they do not wear a uniform, they are considered defectors to lawful war and have less protections than actual combatants.
If China puts backdoors in all the chips we buy from them, and we build weapons with those chips, and China pressed a button that self destructs all things made with those chips, that is also not a warcrime.
War crimes are pretty much only treating POWs incorrectly by doing medical "experiments" on them or genociding them. If you are not a POW yet, the Geneva conventions don't say much about you.
Do you people think anyone would have signed a treaty that says "You can't kill more than 1 innocent person per bad guy"?
>Tell me you don't care about the Geneva convention without telling me you've probably never read the Geneva convention.
Big words from someone who doesn't seem to recognize that they geneva convention they've "totally read" doesn't say what they seem to think it says. Please quote the part where blowing up a civilian with your target is called a war crime
Show me the Article in the CCW which supports this claim. And do you mean sabotage against civilian infrastructure, or military materials? Again, show the Article, either way.
>If hezbollah are legitimate combatants, then they have to wear a uniform
Yes, true. Just as those responsible for the pager attacks had to identify themselves as combatants, also.
> If China puts backdoors in all the chips we buy from them, and we build weapons with those chips, and China pressed a button that self destructs all things made with those chips, that is also not a warcrime.
If this were to occur, it would be considered a war crime under one or more of the following articles:
You might want to familiarize yourself with this material before commenting further on this thread:
Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
From Stuxnet to Pegasus to the 2024 pager attack, Israel has a history of leveraging its tech sector to advance its national security aims through clandestine means (this is not unusual: so does the US, and so does China). If you're a country with not-so-friendly relations with Israel, the company being founded in Israel is absolutely pertinent.
Which _Israeli_ companies were used for Stuxnet or the 2024 pager attack? NSO is not the same as the company from the article since it's explicitly a cyber company.
The more relevant question is, which Israeli companies are currently not involved in covert military operations?
The difficulty in comprehending an answer to this question is precisely why allowing ones military to perform such actions using covert means is so dangerous for a civilian population to support.
War is supposed to be fought in the open in order to protect the civilians.
I suppose when the distinction between soldier and civilian is not so easy to make, the profligate mindset which allows covert, indiscriminate mass murder at scale becomes a norm.
The question is a straw man fallacy in an attempt to distract from the fact that Shin Bet/Mossad, both Israeli organizations, used multiple company cutouts to weaponize the supply chain of civilian infrastructure in order to commit acts of perfidy in violation of the Geneva Convention.. of course they’re not going to set up “SababaTech”, headquartered in Tel Aviv, to do this dirty work. The perfidious nature of this act required them to involve Hungary, among other nations.
Where the question “which Israeli companies are involved in committing Israels war crimes?” needs to be answered, is at the ICC - not here on HN.
(Unless the question is being answered by a whistleblower, of course..)
> Which _Israeli_ companies were used for Stuxnet or the 2024 pager attack?
I'll tell you as soon as you tell me exactly why ZTE devices were banned in the United States. The thing about clandestine operations is that they aren't done in the open.
> The presence of an Israeli-origin technology component on Samsung phones in WANA countries poses additional problems. Several nations in this region legally bar Israeli companies from operating, and in light of the ongoing Israel–Palestine conflict, the preload of an app tied to such a company becomes even more contentious.
So yes, the presence of Israeli software is a problem in many countries, and may even be illegal.
> the program was found to be quietly invasive as it allows the installer to install programs on the user’s device without permission. It circumvents the user validation process and successfully bypasses multiple security checks, including antivirus programs
I agree that the headline “controversy” is manufactured.
That's not the controversy based on the article - it's arguing that because the app is Israeli in origin, it may run afoul of local BDS laws thus another reason for AppCloud to be removed from local device, which is notable because the AppCloud app only appears to be installed on African, Asian, and MENA Samsung phones, where the bulk of countries with BDS laws exist.
The article doesn't appear to take a side one way or the other in the conflict, it's just listing a potential compliance issue.
There is no such thing as BDS laws, only anti-BDS laws.
Some muslim countries boycott Israeli-made products,
But since Israel is a tech powerhouse only behind the US, almost every tech is Israeli-made at least partially, so again, trying to enforce any boycott is stupid.
What does any of that have to do with GP not wanting israeli spyware on his smartphone? Maybe your mention of Waze is tangentially related but that's about it?
Considering the political context around Israel it is clear that cherry tomatoes being an Israeli development (apparently) is completely irrelevant here.
Let me guess, you think shawarma and hummus are also Israeli inventions. It's insane you are trying to pass off firewall as an IDF invention on hackernews. How wildly inaccurate and tone deaf.
you probably need to throw away your phone. or something. because never mind of it apple/qualcomm/android/etc - one of R&D centers that all companies have in Israel developed part of it.
What an insane argument. iPhones are assembled in China, does that mean the iPhone belongs to China? Some companies are bound to have offices in Isn'treal, do pray tell their contributions that are publicly verifiable.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Or there is a history of shady companies doing shady things, and the one that this app is related to, has done shady things in the past, so people are nervous about this app doing shady things.
As a Jew, the soon as I hear "Israel" and "App" I think of Pegasus. In this genocide, the Israeli government has shown it will cross any line. Remember the pager attack? So I would like there to be zero Israeli controlled products anywhere near me. That plus everyone should be engaged in boycotts divestment and sanctions against the regime.
And as someone who worked for multiple cyber firms out of Israel… it’s entirely reasonable to double-check that apps from Israeli firms don’t have a dual purpose to feed data to Western intelligence agencies.
Why are you obfuscating the concern? The issue is not that it is an app that is popularly found on devices!
The issue is that it is an app which is forcibly installed without consent or disclosure, which has privileged access to the system and beyond the scope of the device vendor. To have no care for that reeks suspiciously of nationalistic bias.
edit: Please answer: Which country has backdoor control of the phones via this app?
I agree that the issue is what you described -- an bloatware installed on a common handset manufactured by South Korean tech company. That should be the controversy.
Focusing on the factthe software is made by an Israeli company is manufacturing a controversy which is in fact extremely biased. We should be focusing on the decisions made by the South Korean manufacturer.
I read through the linked article and an article on smex.org and there was nothing about "remote control backdoor access".
It complains about inability to uninstall from the manufacturers handset which is a manufacturers decision.
Again both articles manufacture controversy simply by nature that the Appcloud is associated with an Israeli company, not by what the app actually does or not by the fact that nobody forced Samsung to install this app on their handsets.
If you have information showing that Samsung is selling phones that are remote controlled by another government or corporate actor, that would be extremely newsworthy. Please share these news when you find them
Ethnic cleansing involves forcible expulsion of a population -- not just mass killing -- with the goal of achieving cultural or racial homogeneity in a given territory.
Israel is guilty of both the forcible expulsion and mass killing of Palestinians, so the definition certainly applies.
The resistance and the resilience of the Palestinian people have prevented their ethnic cleansing. This is not because Israel isn't trying as hard as it can within the bounds the international community is allowing.
Seems reasonable. Same way "Russian" companies are shady. Doesn't matter if they do something inane . This is really basic geopolitics that only had a short respite... Like less than 30 year period as cold war slowed. This is very normal.
Why do android phone companies load up the bloatware on their phones? Why can't they provide a plain vanilla version of android and let users to choose the stuff?
The same reason this happens/happened on Windows laptops. The hardware provider gets money to pre-install this software. They can then offer the phone at a lower price with a higher margin.
low quality website "sammobile" wanted to recycle news from 2011 which is essentially "samsung packs their phone full of bloatware" so they sprayed some israel over it. Now they got all those angry clicks and they have made their honest pay.
Samsung seems to have all sorts of security issues.
I haven't spent any time investigating, because I believe that privacy is nonexistent, but my Samsung phones have always enabled by default, a backup of everything I have (including the removable uSD cards) to a server in South Korea.
Even when I've disabled this behavior, it seems to persist at some level.
AppCloud is not only in India. It is on some OEM version of the phone in the US as well.
How did I know? My phone had random notifications promoting apps that I had never heard of, and I couldn't find a way to disable them. Eventually I found and removed it via adb.
Any chance you can remember the package name? It's not mentioned in the article or ones it linked to, and I can't quickly find it on my phone. There is the vaguely named "application recommendations" that going by a quick search should be com.samsung.android.mapsagent
Actually AppCloud is a software that can install apps remotely. Not bloatware. It is spyware. And the location of the developers (example, being in China) would make it a security concern. And Israel is a security concern for countries that don't recognize Israel.
TL;DR Article claims AppCloud (software in question) has ties to ironSource, an Israeli-founded company now owned by US-based Unity, but never clarifies what those ties are. The author only states that an ironSource tech called "Aura" appears to do something similar to AppCloud. However, the author also points out that AppCloud isn't listed anywhere on ironSource's website. They also acknowledge that there's no evidence currently that AppCloud is doing anything weird. This looks an awful lot like an "Israel bad" article.
I bought an Ipad yesterday. The setup was almost the same, except all the bloat was from Apple itself. Numbers, GarageBand, iMovie, Keynote, Pages, Clips… even the Tips app felt like bloatware.
Wild how every ecosystem has its own "preloaded surprise pack."
They are deletable, and frankly, I wouldn't call them bloatware, they are all pretty much decent applications, they don't shove you ads down your throat and a lot of people are happy to use them.
Most people don't care what stuff is being installed elsewhere, just their region as it affects them directly. I don't know how I'd get through the day if I had to keep up on news from every region of the world, other than the highlights.
Redis and Elasticsearch were both built by Israelis, and there is also Israeli code in important projects like the Linux kernel. And of course, also Israeli contributions in closed-source tech like CUDA. Avoiding all of that is a pretty tall order. But if you want to impair your systems by purifying them based on national origin of the contributors, have at it.
In fact Elasticsearch was specifically mentioned as a partner of the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation", a fake aid org who caused many Palestinians to be killed under their watch. (Elasticsearch denied involvement when I contacted them)
But to be more specific I would narrow it down to avoiding using any tech which Israel could use for surveillance, narrative control, or harm.
To the best of your ability. If you can avoid Israeli tech then do so, if you can't at least you try. Also opensource technology is different because you can verify and audit the tech
Are you suggesting this software will somehow be able to make a phone explode? The pagers weren't just normal pagers with malware, I'm pretty sure they were loaded with actual explosives.
I added more context above to clarify the point I was making (which I thought would be self-evident, but I guess it was a bit more obscure than I thought)
> 2. The vast majority of casualties were not mythical "terrorists", they were ordinary pedestrians.
This is simply false, virtually every single spicy pager casualty was part of a terrorist organization.
> 3. Regardless this is still considered a war crime, and is by definition a terrorist act because it was not targeted. When they launched the attack they had no knowledge of where each pager was.
It was highly targeted in reality, spicy pagers were sold exclusively to the terrorist organizations for use on the terrorists communication network. It's arguably one of the most highly targeted attacks in history in terms of enemy to civilian casualty ratios.
he cited a single Israeli private citizen. not Israeli leaders.
The fact that a data-harvesting bloatware is installed on common handsets should be controversial enough.
Both the title of this post and the link try to add
"Israel is baaaad" angle as just because a company was founded in Israel.
Israel is a middle-eastern tech hub that produces a lot of tech companies and innovations. Its just a numbers game that some of them will be working on things of questionable value to humanity.
What GP suggesting is discriminating against all technologies developed by Israel because of his political views, nothing more.
Your claim has nothing to do with the parent claim. Truthful or not, you can't write an article, have it debunked or disputed and then move onto another argument.
Yes, software was involved in the pager attacks, and software can be used to overheat and cause malfunction(which in the case of lithium ion can cause explosions, hazardous gases, and fire). Another example of a software-based attack that damages hardware is Stuxnet(there were no explosives either as part of this attack).
FUD and rationalising. We do understand the real reason they don't like it.
By the way, in the Arab world (my reading of "some West Asian and North African markets". Nice euphemism, btw) there isn't the same stigma as in the West so they usually don't feel the need to be cautious and say exactly what they mean, i.e. "the Jews".
99.9% of jews from north africa had to leave their homes after 1948 or after 1967. so saying that those countries "host jewish comminutes of their own" is far fetched
Nothing about this is antisemitic in my book. In fact I would go as far as conflating criticism of Israeli state actions with antisemitism is a sort of antisemitism since it puts both things in the same category equating both with each other (leaving no room for legitimate criticism according to the person equating them).
What is antisemitism is people shouting sieg heil outside my house when they read my name on the door thinking I am Jewish (I am not, though our family fled from German forces during WW2, not all survived).
Though I am not fully subscribed to the internet school of ”just ignore the trolls”, I think they should all be countered once or twice before being added to a blocklist. That way other people see that those trolls are not welcome and that voices are being raised against them.
Israel wouldn't last a year without Western support. It would be nice if they remembered that.
The Chinese sure as hell couldn't care less about Moses.
Even worse is that Samsung phones, at least in my region, come with a "Samsung Global Goals" app installed by default; an app that serves to push a certain political agenda that many find unpalatable. Imagine if your new Xiaomi phone came with an app telling you how good the CCP is.
What’s striking is how often these ‘small’ surveillance tech stories trace back to the same state-aligned ecosystem. When Israel does it, it’s treated as a complex security issue. When another ‘bad’ country does the same thing, we immediately call it espionage. And almost on cue, the discussion drifts anywhere except the uncomfortable fact that it’s the same ecosystem from the same country showing up again.
it’s a tough infosec situation because the tel aviv-haifa corridor in israel has an enormous amount of computer science R&D going on that gives US companies a competitive advantage.
for example, annapurna labs in haifa develops the technology behind AWS’s nitro cards, which run the hypervisor, block storage, and networking in every EC2 server.
Is it though? US and EU telecom companies pulled the plug on Huawei products, which were deeply integrated in all of their setup, as soon as someone said they may be spying or remote disabled by China. It was expensive, sure, but they pulled the plug. I don't recall any concrete evidence of backdoors etc to be found, but trust was gone.
And that's the difference I think; US and Israel have high trust, they are aligned in ideals and strategy and the like.
I don't think it's wise for us to trust a country that has a whole Wikipedia article dedicated to the ways they spy on us.
I hate that I have to say this, but I'm a Jew and I'm not anti-Semitic in any way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...
And surely no way to monitor what's going on in those VMs
Also Microsoft's BlueHat security conference always takes place in Israel, and probably that is where Azure security R&D offices happen to be located.
Fair enough. I guess it's fine to be spied on to make sure US companies have that competitive advantage you mention. As its all in a good cause, I'll take the Samsung phone!
To be fair, us over in Europe have been uncomfortable for a while due to the US surveillance apparatus having total dominion over the underlying systems that run our countries.
So, its a little bit tone deaf to hear these complaints from Americans honestly.
We’re told that we’re uncompetitive (yet when rising startups happen they’re bought out before being too large)- we’re told that we shouldn’t run on anything except US SaaS and US cloud providers.
I’m not saying that you specifically make these arguments, but the zeitgeist on HN definitely centres on this notion.
So, please forgive me for not taking this as seriously as you’d like me to.
I think USA tech hegemony is perfectly analogous to this Israeli tech dilemma. As a dual American and EU (Irish) citizen, should my company strive to categorically avoid Intel and Nvidia technologies for national security reasons? I think there is a strong argument for tech nationalism but there is still a hegemonic dilemma.
The main problem, even if you would avoid Intel and NVidia, is that during the last decades we confortably let OS and programing languages driven by US companies take over.
So you might go with ARM, RISC V, but still have to make use of an OS and programming stack with strong ties to US based companies, even if open source.
You are asking the “wrong” question!! If you are Gabriele Nunziati you will be fired immediately!!
For context: https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/11/05/italian-journalist-fired...
I mean, it's literally the same thing that happens when past genocides are bad, but when they happen today from an ally of the west... "it's complicated". Except this time happens on the technological side rather than the humanitarian one
> an ally of the west
Remind me again of all the help Israel has provided the USA/the West that they are considered such a great (the greatest, in fact) ally?
Heaps of military and intelligence technology, base of operations / bastion in the middle east, etc.
[dead]
[flagged]
Everything on your list involved the sale of a product, by this logic China would be our closest ally (actually I wish our leaders were that sane, but the inconsistency stands...).
I wish people could just state the transparently documented historical truth, Israel is a US ally because Truman and enough other backers wanted to create a state for Holocaust survivors. The leadership and majority of voters in the US have been true believers in Zionism (in one of its many versions) for generations, and supports Israel by essentially the same logic that Israelis support Israel by. This existed as a state of affairs with almost no opposition at any level until a couple years ago when it came into conflict with another basic belief (about being close enough to just in the cause and method of war that most people could somewhat believe it).
Well, that same ally has also been doing a bit of genocide on the humanitarian side lately, just so we’re clear on the facts
Oh yes
[flagged]
[flagged]
> Israel as a country is aligned with Western values
Western values include, among other things, a commitment to equality and human rights, not apartheid[1] and genocide[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_apartheid
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
[flagged]
> a wikipedia page on Western values
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_values
Since the wikipedia page also mentions individual liberty and rule of law, let me also link to this topic:
Arrest and detention of Palestinian minors by Israel — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_detention_of_Palest...
You're right - Palestinians don't deserve to be murdered by people who don't like them.
They murdered primarily by Hamas, either directly or indirectly by their war tactics that prioritize civilian casualties.
As opposed to the rest of the world who believe you must let yourself be murdered /s
That certainly seems to be their attitude. If israel had listened to all of the advice from Britain and France it may well have been 60k Israelis dead. Imagine how many palestinians would have died. Nobody here is arguing against israel in good faith. If anyone had genuinely cared about the palestinians they would have put massive pressure on Hamas and put their full support behind a quick and brutal campaign. What would have happened? A 2 month long war and 20k dead max.
[flagged]
[flagged]
If only Israel wasn't committing a genocide itself, and hadn't treated the Palestinian people like lesser beings for decades, maybe things would be different.
[flagged]
This narrative about the founding of Israel is false.
Israel was founded in the middle of an offensive when it was "descended upon by the Arab world". That was a defensive reaction to Israel's brutal Plan Dalet, an invasion and occupation of Palestine, which extended far beyond what the UN had drawn up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Dalet
And then they destroyed 500 villages, ethnically cleansed Palestine of three quarters of a million of Palestinians and never let them return.
They went around with detailed lists of people identified as Arabs in each village, rounded them up, set fire to the villages, and then blew up the rubble. How can you believe that is the act of a legitimate state? It is quite simply evil. Nazi-level shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
This was not an operation that was sanctioned by the UN's partition plan (which was ridiculous and at odds with the UNs founding principles of self-determination to begin with) it was just retconned into being a legitimate action.
I appreciate you sharing these links and pushing back. It’s clear you’re coming from a place of deep conviction about the historical injustices here, and I respect that.
The Nakba is undeniably a catastrophe for Palestinians, involving mass expulsions, village destructions, and profound human suffering that shapes their identity to this day.
Plan Dalet, as outlined in the Wikipedia article you linked, was indeed a Haganah blueprint that shifted to offensive operations, leading to the depopulation of hundreds of villages and the flight or expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians.
Historians like Ilan Pappé (in “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”) argue it was a systematic plan for ethnic cleansing, with tactics like sieges, bombings, and forced removals. That’s not something to downplay or excuse: it’s a dark chapter, and comparing elements to other atrocities (while avoiding direct equivalences) highlights the moral weight.
That said, I think the full picture is even more layered, and understanding both sides means grappling with the context without absolving anyone. The Arab states’ intervention in May 1948 wasn’t purely defensive; it was also driven by their own territorial ambitions and opposition to the UN Partition Plan (which, as you note, was flawed and rejected by Palestinians and Arabs for giving 55% of the land to a Jewish minority that owned ~7%). But Plan Dalet was finalized in March 1948 amid escalating civil war violence; after the UN vote in November 1947 sparked attacks from both sides, including Arab irregulars blockading Jewish areas and the Haganah responding in kind. Benny Morris (a “New Historian” who revised much of the traditional Israeli narrative) describes it as a response to anticipated Arab invasions, though he acknowledges the expulsions were often brutal and opportunistic. The plan’s text emphasizes securing Jewish areas and borders “in anticipation of” invasion, but in practice, it went beyond that, capturing territory outside the UN-allotted Jewish state.
You’re right that this wasn’t explicitly sanctioned by the UN, and the partition itself violated self-determination principles (as the Arab Higher Committee argued). But the “retconning” happened post-facto through armistice lines and international recognition of Israel. It’s tragic that Palestinians paid the price for European colonialism, the Holocaust’s aftermath, and Zionist aspirations; all while Arab leaders failed to unify or protect them effectively. My original point wasn’t to defend Israel as “legitimate” in every action (far from it: they’ve committed wrongs that demand accountability). It was to urge empathy for how each side’s trauma fuels the cycle: Israelis seeing 1948 as survival against existential threats (five Arab armies invading a nascent state), Palestinians as the theft of their homeland. Both narratives have truths, and dismissing one entirely risks perpetuating the divide. If we’re serious about peace, we need to hold space for that complexity; maybe starting with works like Morris’s “1948” or Rashid Khalidi’s “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” for balanced views.
Thanks for engaging thoughtfully; these conversations are hard but necessary.
Thank you also for engaging in a civil manner.
I still don't understand how you can view the Israeli foundation myth, and the "fear of an existential threat" as legitimate, when the Israeli state's founding was an unjust, immoral, wrong undertaking, the foundation of a colony on someone's homeland.
If a perpetrator breaks into a house and kicks out the homeowners, then declares the attempts to take back said house as an existential threat to their new house ownership, a reasonable person would not view that as a legitimate concern.
It's just not a logically consistent way to look at the situation. I agree that the current day situation is different, considering Israel has existed for two generations. It still does not change the fact that they are forcing an apartheid on the Palestinians, and are engaged in genocide, and have sabotaged any attempt to solve the situation by means other than ethnic cleansing.
I refuse to consider a balanced view when the crimes that have been committed are so unbalanced. Israel has established a society, and that society has clearly established itself as the bad guy, Palestine has not even had a chance to create a society for themselves, so they cannot even be judged to the same standard. But even if we do, it's hard to see them as anything but victims of Zionist oppression.
I try my best when trying to understand things, to think about how people have it today, and not to tie everything to what peoples ancestors did.
The only thing people can really do today is to acknowledge the past, and to do something about it, and if we’re taking the Israeli perspective now, then what we’re essentially telling them to do is not exist.
Many are fine with that being the case (why should they exist when its founded on evil) but there’s a few points there that make it harder to swallow I think.
1) I think if someone told me that I had no right to live in my home country because of its past I would get quite bent out of shape, especially if blood was shed.
(again, not arguing that this makes it entirely valid, just arguing a perspective).
2) It sort of justifies actual genocide. As mentioned in my other examples; any invading force in future will probably slaughter everyone. Because the international conversation surrounding genocides of the last 30 years is a lot more tame than how we talk about the suffering of palestinians.
This disproportionate discussion probably feels unfair, since the average Israeli probably feels like they would want to live peacefully today, if only they were not constantly attacked by Iranian proxies every time attempts at normalisation looked like they were succeeding. Unfortunately this would then include terrorism from Palestine.
I have to really caveat again, that I don’t think Israel is peachy, just that today the Palestinian narrative is a bit more empathised with internationally- but I wouldn’t like myself being in either countries shoes honestly.
I have not said that Israel should not exist, that is your extrapolation.
Israel should be held accountable for what it has done, and if it does not further a two state solution, it should be sanctioned by the international community. Current and previous political leaders should be prosecuted for war crimes, and the country should be reformed into a secular democracy.
That's it, that's my stance.
Now, I don't see any of this happening, and I see a genocide being committed.
You're then characterising any military response as genocidal. This no longer feels like an honest response. First, it's Israel that has decided it wants to be an ethnostate, the only reason it would seem genocidal is because Zionists have conflated a religion with a nationality with citizenship. The bad actor of Israel should still be a valid target of military actions just like others are. Would you say that the allies committed a genocide when they attacked Nazi Germany in the second world war?
And where are you getting these ideas of "invading forces slaughtering everybody"? This is starting to sound like Zionist propaganda. I'm sorry but hypothetical threats do not matter when compared with actual apartheid and genocide.
The Palestinians have always been the less violent party. Israel is also a much more violent and offensively postured military actor than Iran, they developed nukes in secret for chrissakes, and they seem to have immunity from international sanctions.
Israel could choose to live in peace by changing it's military posture, by not constantly attacking its neigbours and destabilizing the region. They currently illegally occupy territory in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. They could simply stop doing that to begin with.
Thanks for clarifying. Your point on Israel choosing peace by de-escalating, halting attacks on neighbors, and ending illegal occupations in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon hits hard. It is a straightforward path to de-escalation that demands action. But as of today, November 18, 2025, the US-brokered ceasefire in Gaza holds broadly, with Israeli forces withdrawn to the “yellow line” and a UN Security Council vote underway for a new Gaza security force that could lead to full Israeli pullout. Trump calls it historic, though Hamas rejects it as insufficient.
This moment tests your idea: if Israel follows through on withdrawal and curbs West Bank settler violence (which has surged, with over 200 attacks reported this month alone), it could prove goodwill. Yet ongoing tunnel operations and regional strikes (like recent hits in Lebanon) show the military posture persists, fuelling distrust.
Pushing Israelis to empathise means seeing Palestinians not as perpetual threats but as equals deserving sovereignty. Many modern Israelis; weary from two years of war, economic hits, and global isolation… privately crave normalcy. They fear that unilateral retreats invite repeats of October 7 or Hezbollah barrages, especially with Iran arming proxies. Ending occupations could shatter that fear cycle, but it requires mutual security guarantees, not just Israeli concessions.
Your WWII analogy still fits: Defeat the aggressors’ system, not the people. Target occupation and apartheid policies surgically. Dismiss their fears, though, and hardliners win. Shared trauma acknowledgment, without equivalence, could spark real dialogue. What gap do you see?
I appreciate the response, but I see the same pattern repeating. You admit to Israel's actual wrongdoing, but equate the hypothetical wrongdoing of Israel's opponents. There is no equivalence here.
Also, Israel has nuclear weapons and the backing of the US, the EU, and Russia. That is enough to deter attacks. Further security guarantees are redundant, but sure, add them.
I agree that the system should be defeated, but I don't think purely diplomatic solutions will work. At least not ones that assumes Israel acts in good faith. Israel has shown that it will not respect international law, and Israeli opinion on Arabs is not just extreme in a small group of hardliners, it's widespread. In order to make a real change.
I believe Israel has to be brought to heel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. That is what tipped the scale with apartheid South Africa, that is most likely the best course of action here as well. Israel does what it wants, it is a self-interested bad faith actor. We need a powerful coalition of international actors to associate a cost with Israel's crimes. That's BDS.
The issue is that Israel has lobbied for anti-BDS laws in the US, making this more difficult. It's an uphill battle, which is also why a balanced discussion about Israeli concerns will not improve the situation. Israel is fighting a propaganda war. If we start debating things other than how to reform Israel, Israel wins. It can delay, confuse, and run interference against any actual discussion about the real problem: the ethnonationalist founding principles of Israel, the apartheid, the genocide, the imperial ambitions of Israel, the blatant disregard for international law and treaties.
I appreciate the discussion so far, but I think I've said everything I want to say. If you have any final thoughts, I'd be glad to hear them.
I get your frustration with patterns in these debates, and you’re right that Israel’s documented crimes: apartheid policies, genocidal violence in Gaza, and blatant violations of international law… stand alone in scale and impunity.
No hypotheticals from opponents come close, and that’s not up for debate. The power asymmetry is massive: nukes, US and EU support (Russia’s more pro-Palestinian, actually, with recent UN pushes for Palestinian statehood), and anti-BDS lobbying make good-faith diplomacy a tough sell without real pressure.
But let’s cut to the core: wrongdoing isn’t one-sided. You have to acknowledge that on the Palestinian side too: rocket attacks on civilians, suicide bombings, and October 7’s civilian massacres are wrongs that can’t be waved away as pure resistance. Both sides have blood on their hands, and denying that keeps the cycle spinning. In the end, it’s all just people: ordinary Palestinians crushed under occupation, and ordinary Israelis living in fear, both wanting safety for their families.
Put yourself in those Israeli shoes; surrounded by states and groups that have historically vowed your destruction, with no other viable homeland to flee to after centuries of global expulsions. You’d feel threatened too, right? That doesn’t excuse Israel’s aggressions, but it explains why zero empathy guarantees endless war.
BDS is a sharp tool; it broke South Africa’s back through isolation, and it could here: boycotts draining the economy, divestment from occupation profiteers, sanctions on war criminals. Ramp it up, build the coalition, associate real costs with the ethnonationalism and imperialism. But to make it stick, humanise the people enough to split internal hardliners from the weary majority open to secular change. Otherwise, you’re just fueling the propaganda you call out. Good talk.. it’s pushed me to think harder.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
The phrase "dog whistle" is also itself a dog whistle that signals where you stand on discussing particular issues in the open.
Only someone trying to silence any dissent to their position would use platitudes like this rather than addressing why the OP mentioned antisemitism out of nowhere.
When Israel does what, in this case? Write software?
Spyware*
I recently bought a cheap android device because I needed to test something on Android. The setup was about 3 hours of the device starting up, asking me questions, installing apps I explicitly told it not to, and then all sorts of other apps and OS updates trying to do their thing seemingly at once. I wasn't even transferring data, just a brand new phone, new google account.
What a horrible experience you get with some providers and phones.
It's to the point that I think there should be some sort of regulation that involves you getting a baseline experience on the OS rather than a bunch of malware out of the box.
I remember back when the iPhone came out, this was perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of it, at least to me. We were so used to phones coming with crap on them and tightly coupled to the carrier. If the carrier didn't want something on the phone, it never got there. So Apple comes along and says "Hey, AT&T, we will make you the exclusive carrier for the iPhone iff you leave the entire experience under our control."
There were lots of downsides to that deal, of course, but I appreciate that it broke the carriers' exclusive control over mobile phones.
"I was so happy to get locked into a different eco system" is all I hear.
You wouldn't get a phone in 2007 that didn't lock you in to something; the question is whose ecosystem you'd prefer to deal with.
I remember the Verizon crapware phone experience well.
I remember when Verizon got deliberately hobbled phones on top of that. Some of the Windows Mobile phones came with up to half the RAM if you dared buy it on Verizon, and they locked the GPS out to use VZ Navigator instead of being able to just throw TomTom on 'em.
I would say their comment had a lot more nuance and thought put in to it than yours did.
I mean sure, but Androids been following Apple's lead, not tother way tround.
When you think of old phones, think of the touch interface on a printer.
I don't like Apple either, they are DEFINITELY rent seeking and violating their users' privacy at the same time. There is no excuse for that. I think what the parent post was talking about is something historical. An iPhone at that time was a large step above a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson in terms of flexibility.
Hold on a sec. Nokia and Ericsson made lots and lots of phone modeles. If you're comparing with cheap ordinary models everyone had, then sure, first iphone was great, but that's not a fair comparison. This is:
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
Spinning up a competing carrier has a much higher barrier of entry, though, than creating a new mobile phone. If my only choices are carrier-controlled or manufacturer-controlled, I will choose the latter. Gives me way more options.
This is why custom ROM support is the first question I ask when buying a new Android phone
Rather refurbished, because those are longer on market thus development of custom ROM (like LineageOS) is more likely. And of course you save a lot of money.
Totally, by "new" I mean refurbished or used, but new to me :)
Sounds like the average carrier locked Samsung device experience in the US. Oh you didn't want Clash of Clans installed? We'll reinstall that for you next OS update. Running updates through carriers was a serious mistake.
Running remote updates in general was a serious mistake. Other manufacturers are no better and give you all kinds of crap for their income streams at the expense of your convenience whilst claiming the opposite.
The last time I saw an update that just fixed security bugs and improved performance was... never.
I took this seriously and thought back to the most recent actually-useful-bugfixes-and-security-improvements release that I can remember. OSX Snow Leopard perhaps?
Wasn’t that also Apple’s last paid OS?
I was wondering why this thankfully hasn't been my experience until you said "carrier locked"... I always buy unlocked. Does that really make a difference?
Yes, the carriers load up the phones with apps that you cannot remove (at least not without rooting the phone).
You can usually disable them, but they are still there.
Well dang, that's another good reason to buy unlocked :P
That would make Samsung's business model not viable. :D
I haven't bought an android device for a few years, but the last time I did, it was also a very cheap one for testing. I chose an "Android One" to avoid all these issues. Is something like that still an option?
Your best bet might be one of the Pixel "a" series, which are Google's budget-oriented models. Stock vanilla Android with as little bloat as you can hope for.
Those Pixels have options to open bootloader and after flashing custom ROM that is much cleaner (GrapheneOS) to lock it again. Which is currently most secure way to have clean and secure android device.
This regulation should've happened 25 years ago, because the same thing was done with laptops.
Sounds like a Samsung phone... no end of dark patterns and pushing Bixby AI and whatever else. And then once you have the phone set up you get to spend the next 10 minutes uninstalling a load of pre-loadded apps that you didn't want.
Fortunately Android is a pretty diverse range and Samsung is just one player. I had much more user-friendly experiences with Fairphone and Motorola.
Cheap devices get subsidized by shitty adware. The cheaper the device, the more likely that it's full of terrible adware.
Consumers often have a choice, at least between "filled to the brim with crap" and "a modicum of crap", by choosing between buying their phone from a store or from a carrier. Carriers have better deals but shovel their phones full of the worst apps you can imagine. Still, people will buy the crap-filled experience that makes you want to tear your hair out because they like the idea of scoring a better deal.
Nothing like unadulterated greed combined with short-sighed consumer behaviour at scale to drive a market segment into an awful race to the bottom.
The premium devices still have the bloatware.
Yeah, even the iPhone bundles/bakes in google junk
> subsidized
What's a better word here? Adverts cost the consumer, however I'm sure the consumer doesn't get equal recompense. Theoretically a SmartTV with adverts costs less money ("subsidised" due to price competition), but is the consumer actually ($,time) better off?
The costs are invisible and the consumer cannot actually measure the costs (the vendors do measure profitability but this is not legible).
I reckon most people are terrible at judging the value of their own time (especially children and retirees).
Name and shame please. I'm shopping for a cheap first phone for my 13 year old.
I'm looking at HMD or Motorola.
I kind of like Motorola in the cheap android phone space. I have a moto-g stylus in my pocket now, and it's big (which I like), has a heaphone jack, and has an sd-card port. I thought I'd like the stylus, but I rarely use it.
It pre-installs some games, but you can uninstall them. The only thing it forces on you is a weather app which you can deactivate but not uninstall.
My guess is, those auto installs is exactly how they keep the costs down, by subsidizing the cost with getting paid by companies to auto-install garbage.
It's the same with Smart TVs, they've gotten so cheap because of all the other slimy stuff the manufacturers do, like sell your watch data, or pre-install apps.
The problem is that you do not get the option to pay off the subsidy to get a clean install.
I suppose the "paying off the subsidy" is to buy a more expensive phone. Or getting a Google Pixel. I've heard those are as much stock android as possible.
I agree, and that's the exact point I would make. The problem though, is I want a small phone with a headphone jack (and a physical keyboard, but that's orthogonal to the point).
Many OEMs sell their flagship as a shiny glass slab with only BT or USB-C for audio, and ship 3.5mm jacks and other "antiquated niceties" like a uSD card reader, on their lower-end models.
It's difficult to square the circle of "I want these specific features, but on a phone that's not working against me (any more than modern phones already do)"
The "Sony Xperia 5 V" (I have the previous "Sony Xperia 5 IV") has a headphone jack, takes a uSD card, and is somewhat compact. (And no silly camera cutout in the screen, it's in a reasonably small bezel.)
EDIT: also see the Xperia 10 VII for a phone that isn't 2 years old (I haven't been keeping up, I buy phones to use for 4+ years)
According to the specs it's 154 x 68 x 8.6 mm and 182 grams, so it's more compact than most phones of 2025 but not really compact. My Samsung A40 is smaller and lighter but it's 4 years older.
Serendipity happens. Maybe you almost want this https://liliputing.com/zinwa-q27-prototype-brings-classic-bl... Keyboard but it seems no 3.5" jack.
I actually ordered the Q20 revival by the same team back in May or so! Very excited, should ship this week
I bought a USB-C to 3.5mm jack for around $20. It works well but does tend to get caught on things more easily than a pure jack.
As well as easily getting misplaced…
And easily internally shorted, leading to the dreadful 'wiggle around in your pocket until the headphones are detected again, and then press play again'...
I must admit, I don’t get the wish for 3.5mm headphone jacks in 2025. Already six years ago, with a phone that actually still had a headphone jack, I bought myself for just a few euro a Bluetooth DAC (a FiiO) that had superior sound quality to any phone’s audio-out that I had ever used. With a Bluetooth DAC (or with any USB-C to 3.5mm converter that costs pennies) you can still use whatever wired headphones you want to use.
Physical keyboards were nice back in an era when the web welcomed longform text, and I miss my Nokia N900. Nowadays, though, the web ecosystem that one typically uses from a phone is a cesspool, and for serious things I’ll just use my real computer.
I have a similar FiiO gadget and it makes less sense for me than a direct wired connection to the phone. It's a relatively bulky device that needs to be charged way too often, also it reduces voice call quality (like any other BT Classic device).
I'm conflicted about this matter. I use a Bluetooth earpiece on my phone because it's more convenient: you can move around a room with the phone on a table, no pockets, and you can wear and unwear t-shirts and sweaters. When I can't find the x with the earpieces I plug in in a wired one.
On the other hand a wired headphone always work, had maybe better quality and almost surely a better latency. I use one of them when doing calls from my laptop.
Bluetooth wastes batteries / alter soubd.
> I bought myself for just a few euro a Bluetooth DAC (a FiiO) that had superior sound quality to any phone’s audio-out that I had ever used.
I hate the 3.5'' jack myself (see below), but I can already tell you that mentioning some unscientific definition of "superior sound quality" that likely no one amongst us is humanly able to distinguish is not going to win any minds over. Proponents of 3.5'' like it because it is ridiculously simple to use, intuitive, cheap, doesn't have a lot of things that can go wrong (e.g. no batteries) and despite that is overall effective.
The reason I dislike 3.5'' is because the _socket_ part (i.e. the part on the expensive device) wears out very quickly, becoming fragile and generating distracting artifacts even with slight cable pulls/movements, as the springs in the connector start to fail. This annoys me to no end, much more than any issues with other interfaces.
Talking about “superior sound quality” in the context of mobile phones isn’t controversial, it’s not like a home-stereo audiophile snake oil debate. It is well known that DACs are an area where mid-range and low-end phone makers have cut corners, choosing chips that are quite flawed for anyone who uses their phone to listen to music where pristine sound quality is valued.
The elephant in the room for me is "microphonics" or the noise piped to your head via the wire any time anything touches it.
You demand higher quality, yet don't care about the loud noise created with every small movement of your body? I have heard this dismissed before as "doesn't bother me" and it's hardly ever mentioned in discussions about good audio vs Bluetooth.
I'm bewildered why wireless audio isn't praised for completely eliminating this source of noise that plagues every wired headphone, earbud, and IEM.
pretty much why I switched to iphone. I used pixels before for the same reason but good luck getting your pixel warranty honored outside the united states
This is not a valid cause. They spend insane amounts of money on advertising and also make insane amounts of revenue. Don’t think “them keeping the cost down” is relevant in this context.
I've heard this theory before, but is an individual data point really worth enough to make this argument?
This is true, it’s not an individual datapoint. When smartphones, like the iPhone, originally debuted carriers had a conniption fit because they couldn’t preload a ton of garbage apps to help subsidize the cost. Apple has been able to avoid this, but for your average smartphone this is absolutely how both the manufacturer and carrier are able to sell them so cheaply.
Every experience may not be as bad as the one the OP had, but it’s surely well within reality. Both carriers and handset manufacturers are glad to sell anything and everything about someone to make a quick buck. They’ve literally been doing it for 25+ years.
You need to think about the aggregate data. Whole trends can be seen in almost real-time.
Here’s a made up example, and it’s probably not even the best one. - Show Teckno-Detectives shows a “Cameo” of Grapple’s newest mixed-reality glasses. The data shows that 3.9 million additional people watched the episode. Investment firms who pay for the data notice and buy extra Grapple shares to cash in on the expected sales bump.
its not just your data point its everyones data point
> they've gotten so cheap because of all the other slimy stuff
Not really, they've gotten so cheap because the individual components they are made of have become much cheaper due to economies of scale.
The same thing happened with computer monitors, and those don't ship with the bloatware.
Compare monitors to TVs of similar spec, in price and bloatware.
Nah its the corporate greed and disregard for avoiding amoral behavior at the first place, since clearly its punished much less than rewards are (just look at all the slaps on the wrist of FAANGs and similar), then followed by race to the bottom with the price.
Economies of scale do bring costs of everything much further than stealing user's data can, but good luck explaining some long term vision to C-suites who only care about short term bonuses.
I suspect the apparent reduction in price on these devices is a lot less than what they earn from the slimy stuff.
But the premium devices (especially TVs) are starting to do this too now via software updates. I had to turn off a bunch of crap in the settings on my LG CX TVs some time ago. Now they are just off the internet and can only connect to my NAS.
SpyApps everywhere.
Hopefully one day we not only have open software, open hardware but also reproducibly guaranteed secure systems. Now I don't have any idea how this could be verified (and no, Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" is not what I have in mind), but I hope we'll see to this eventually.
If you don’t trust a centralized authority you need decentralized governance…
we've alreaaaay seen that decentralization is an abstract, butnot a reality.
There will always be a move towards centralization when a project gains enough converts because the bulk of concerns are exactly the same but we don't have n+1 people willing to do the necessary legwork to secure.
As such, just like REST apis and their N+1 query problem, forcing everyone to have a security conscious posture is never going to happen.
You absolutely need centralized authorities; what the real argume is about is how that authority is selected, changed and intermediated. The same way we argue about how a stable RAFT algorithm operates.
Move on from this "decentralization is all we need" argument. It's failed and failing.
"Decentralized governance" is just feudalism. What you need is a re-envigoration of democracy. Democracy works, but we have to engage with it positively, both as citizens and as politicians.
It will be excluded from any popular OS and will end up a niche thing that no one will use. The issue is the hegemony of big tech companies over the regulations to shape it however they like, and in return they provide the surveillance to legislators.
Has no-one bothered to reverse engineer the app and see what it's actually doing before launching into hundreds of words of breathless conjecture?
If not, this article and almost every comment on this submission is a colossal waste of time.
This is supposed to be a technical website full of inquisitive hackers, right? Then perhaps try to examine the facts instead of guessing and bullshitting.
So a Unity owned bloatware company being used by Samsung is now somehow controversial because it was founded in Israel? Am i reading this right?
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
> jesus, you must be seriously fucked in the head to
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You have, of course, familiarized yourself with this material:
Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
Why do you keep copy pasting this, it means absolutely nothing to me. When was the last time you were in a war, buddy?
[flagged]
> Former CIA director Leon Panetta labeled last week’s deadly pager explosions in Lebanon a form of “terrorism.”
> “I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism,” Panetta said on “CBS News Sunday morning.”
https://thehill.com/policy/international/4893900-leon-panett...
I don't take anything Leon Panetta says as gospel, but the fact that someone like him says this shows how the position is not ludicrous in the way you and other similar replies are painting it.
It wasn't a targeted attack since they had no way of knowing where the pagers would end up in the second-hand market, as they were only activated years later.
[flagged]
[flagged]
> You’re telling me pagers used by a terrorist organization ending up in the second-hand market.
Four children were killed and dozens of _innocent_ bystanders were injured.
> What do you know about Lebanon and Hezbollah?
It's a conflict that's been going on for 30 years that I can remember and I don't think that more kinetic operations are going to accomplish anything other than fomenting an actual genocide.
Did you think gatekeeping was going to work? This conflict has spilled out into the broader world. If it were strictly contained to Lebanon and only implicated Hezbollah then you might have a point. We're well past that.
> How do people end up making such unfounded, unbiased claims so confidently??
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-e...
>Four children were killed and dozens of _innocent_ bystanders were injured.
Compared to thousands of Hezbollah members. Literally one of the most targeted large-scale attacks of all time. There are effectively zero other military means that would have been even close to as selective and discriminant. Would you prefer they drop a 500lb bomb on each of their houses instead?
The pagers killed a total of twelve people; which included four children.
That's a pretty awful ratio.
The pager detonations were weak enough to be effectively nonlethal unless you're especially vulnerable. That's how you end up with such a low death to injury ratio in the first place.
So per the KPI metric you've chosen, making it more lethal and more dangerous to bystanders would have been better.
Even among the injuries, you're still looking at an awful ratio, since Hezbollah had mostly migrated these devices out of their combatants in favor of newer models, and they were mainly in the hands of civilians.
And all of this is ignoring the blatant international law violation against booby trapping. This was very clearly a war crime.
For future reference, the specific articles:
Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
The point is that such preposterously stupid military means are not preventing the continuation of blood-shed, and if you are saying that exploding pagers are a perfectly acceptable means of executing military goals, then .. whats next .. are Israeli citizens expected to live under the continuous threat of exploding vibrators and vaporizers, now, too?
Does the IDF issue vibrators to their soldiers?
[flagged]
[flagged]
The “War on Terror” has addled peoples minds so harshly that the notion that there is actually a legal way to wage war seems preposterous - however, there is a “legal means by which to wage war” which does in fact protect you, citizen, and you should learn about it - because when your representatives (and by proxy: you) violate those laws, you become personally liable for the repercussions that other victims will prosecute on you, and your nation state:
https://www.icrc.org/en/law-and-policy/geneva-conventions-an...
If ‘no bomb/missile ever is a war crime’, then .. there is no such thing as “terrorism”, either. (Although the argument could be made that there is no such thing as ‘terrorism’ at all, and that indeed, the word terrorism is merely a propaganda crutch used to justify atrocities against so-called ‘lesser cultures’ deemed inferior by the same institutions which used to use the ‘n-word’ to justify their atrocities in decades past, too, before that became difficult to do ..)
You can indeed commit war crimes with sticks too, though, incidentally.
You have to lose the war in order to be so prosecuted. So, the important thing about war crimes is not to lose once you've determined that you've committed them.
I'll start to believe this sort of fantasy when the people who win wars begin investigating and prosecuting themselves for the crimes that they committed or suborned.
The "legal way to wage war" is only relevant when you are waging war against an army. Hezbollah is not an army, it's a terrorist group. It attacks civilians. It doesn't wear uniforms. It ignores the laws of war.
Says you, and that is too easy:
“The IDF attacks civilians. It uses perfidy to indiscriminately attack the civilian population of its enemies. It, too, ignores the laws of war.”
There is no way to continue justifying acts of terror being committed by your in-group, without also become equivalent to the terrorist of your out-group.
[flagged]
False. The truth is that the IDF does indeed do such things at massive scales.
[dead]
27 out of 190 countries is far from “international consensus” and does not legitimize attacks on the group in sovereign territory. don’t justify the security hack as legitimate. If Israel penetrated a security perimeter of a group that breach becomes a threat to all people everywhere
Hezoballah group itself defies the Lebanese government and the Lebanese sovereignty
Hezbollah is part of the political system in Lebanon
The pager operation was definitely the most impressive one I know in modern day.
I mean the world takes the view Israel is occupying and slowly invading more regions of Palestine.
I didn't make it up, the Balfour declaration makes it pretty clear, so if you're upset natives are attacking you what's your point exactly.
Anyway, point is Israel has almost always lied throughout it's genocide against Palestinians. The IOF has lied or distorted the truth in almost every statement, one which always comes to mind is the attack on the Christian hospital.
The Israeli government are liars, they have a whole online army dedicated to misinformation and the 5 D's. For them lying is just another effective weapon of war which must be utilised.
[flagged]
[flagged]
42 people were killed
4000 civilians were injured
There were two waves of attacks. You're ignoring the second one.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Which deranged logic are you referring to?
Also America is behind all sufferings in the world?
That’s some amazing interpretation of reality
[flagged]
Who are these “Israel haters” on HN you’re referring to?
There are plenty of us on HN who believe in the Israeli peoples’ human rights just as seriously as we support those of the children of Gaza, too.
Those of us who actually care about civilized society, human rights, and international law also consider that there are plenty of Israeli citizens who are, themselves, victims of their own states acts of terrorism as well.
You are responsible for the crimes of your state, citizen. No amount of chicken-waving is going to absolve you of that fact.
The point of discussing the heinous nature of the pager attack is to prevent the precedent set by that attack from taking further victims.
It is not in the interests of Israeli citizens to have their war-crime committing state subjugate their societies’ commercial institutions to commit further atrocities.
When you increasingly lose the court of public opinion, you resort to this sort of gaslighting.
Because the Israeli Hasbara is now failing at this gaslighting strategy, you're leveling ad hominems towards people who see this as what it is - decades of war crimes and a humanitarian crisis.
So either come up with a proper argument, or stay quiet. Gaslighting us into thinking we're being biased, or that we're ill informed, just isn't going to work anymore.
The war crime is when Hamas and Hezbollah fire rockets indiscriminately into Israel to kill innocent civilians.
Any and all means are and will always be justified to prevent that.
Prosecute All The War Criminals, But Start With YOUR OWN FIRST.
Only then will you have the moral altitude required to gain the support of the rest of the world in prosecuting “their” war criminals.
...and destroying or damaging >2/3rds of all structures in Gaza and killing tens of thousands of civilians with airstrikes isn't?
Obviously yes, Hamas and Hezbollah indiscriminately firing rockets at Israel consistute war crimes. I assume you must agree that Israel's systematic targeting of schools, hospitals, mosques, and refugee camps would also qualify?
Destroying buildings due to being booby trapped by Hamas; booby trapping I seem to recall was mentioned earlier in this thread as a war crime.
See if you can identify in any of these clips, a single non-damaged building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcqIDKf1uYU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yvJiW-Ndj0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFUkfmnCR7U
It is pretty trivial to look up recent sattellite imagery and find undestroyed buildings, but that takes more interest in facts than finding youtube videos
You're claiming that every building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike was booby trapped by Hamas...?
Even if that were the case, destroying those buildings with civilians inside is still a war crime
I'm claiming there is a reason that Israel destroys buildings you neglect to mention. Recognizing that reason strongly undermines your assertion of systematic targetting. There is a fog of war, and war is messy, so a charitable outlook should exclude blase confidence about the matter.
You're mixing two different things with the civilians in buildings. The mass building destruction we see is done on buildings after evacuation to dismantle booby trapped buildings. Israel does frequently do strikes on buildings or infrastructure that contain civilians, but that is a different kind of action with different reasons and circumstances (e.g. collateral damage of strikes on military targets, etc.)
I love how confidently you reply in a way that makes you think Israel just has a right to do it. Like they have a right to just level buildings because they think it's booby trapped.
You're someone that has deepthroated the Israeli narrative, with no critical thinking whatsoever. I hope, for your own sake, you start to see more of the reality, as defending a violent regime like this can have an impact on ones soul, which will affect - if not already - other areas of your life.
Did I say Israel has a right to do all these things? No, I did not. I described the situation and their reasoning. Now Israel does have a right to defend itself. Hamas, the government of Gaza, forfeited their relatively peaceful situation when they openly attacked Israel. That doesn't mean everything Israel does is unquestionable. There is plenty open to criticism. There is also a fog of war, and much is unknown now that will be revealed as time goes on. But that also doesn't mean that we should dismiss everythjng Israel says just because they say it. A little more nuamce and curiosity is the most ethical approach to this inherently morally bankrupt conflict.
The mere existence of a state per se is violent, and given that both Israel and Palestine insists on having mutually incompatible states over the same territory, there is no other option but endless bloodshed until both sides commit to a conciliatory settlement. Until that day, a day which may never come, since everyone is hellbent on egging their respective favored side on, things will simply continue as is until one or both sides are destroyed. Since Israel unquestionably has more power, it will likely survive. There is no morally unquestionable option, but I think anyone who has a stake in the livelihood of Palestinians would be interested in stopping the conflict as soon as possible and making a settlement, even an imperfect one. In such a quandry, the only ethical option is to remain open and curious, be willing to look at facts and evaluate claims instead of jumping to conclusions, and refrain from asserting an uncertain narrative as fact when there are competing narratives and counterexamples.
> forfeited their relatively peaceful situation
There you go. Even when you want to hide it, you can't.
If you assert this, it is a open attack against the rule of law. Society requires peace, and peace requires deterrence and enforcement. Feel free to feel morally righteous, but recognize that your opinion on moral righteousness condemns all people to live the rule of the jungle.
Any evidence of that, that is not Israeli 'evidence'?
People from Hamas say they do it. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/international/ham...
So one article about a tunnel shaft is what you have come up with?
Nice work.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect Hamas would do the same with buildings as tunnels.
Agree that is a war crime.
It is also a war crime to carry out what is known as the Nakba - ethnically cleansing and displacing hundreds and thousands of Palestinians. It is a crime illegally occupy land that does not belong to you. It is a crime to maintain an apartheid state. It is a crime to hold 'prisoners' without any charges It is a crime to rape said prisoners. It is also disgusting to have a society that riots when said rapists are called out for their actions. It is a crime to continually bomb and kill Palestinians for just existing. It is a crime to continually kill Palestinians for no reason via 'mowing the grass' exercises It is a crime to crime to kill Palestinians when they peacefully protest It is a crime to indiscriminately bomb Gaza because some Palestinians have had enough of being subjected to sub-human conditions.
So if you say 'any and all means are justified to prevent that', then any and all means should be justified to prevent the above, right?
[flagged]
Thanks for exposing your clear bias. Nothing productive will come of this discussion.
After WW2 Germans were literally removed from certain territories and the land given to Poland. It's honestly not much different from the Nakba. I find an immediate refusal to address points of history like this and hide behind accusations of bias to weaken your credibility.
War is a horrible and inherently immoral thing. We do no favors to our humanity or othercs by pretending it's a simple black and white matter when it is really not.
Which of those historical facts you find biased?
Ps humans are biased. Humans need to be able to have respectful discussions
actually i think those that have the most beef with israel are very much in the region.
[flagged]
Nobody is going to argue that the USA is a force for good in the world when it comes to starting one stupid, evil war, after the other. If the USA is good at one thing, its dropping bombs on innocent human beings every twenty minutes for the past twenty odd years. The question is, though, in which interest is it committing those crimes?
Oh, and .. who are you referring to as “people living in the US”, and by what means are you certain of this fact? HN is an international community.
Some of us don’t see national identity and just want the mass murder of children to stop, whatever it takes.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Literally a violation of Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
Common Article 3 was breached by carrying out lethal attacks against persons taking no active part in hostilities (including off-duty medics and civilians) without individual assessment; GC I Articles 12 and 18 were violated when medical personnel and facilities were hit by exploding devices carried by wounded or off-duty health workers; GC III Article 13 was infringed because many victims instantly became hors de combat through injury yet were subjected to further maiming by shrapnel designed to cause maximum harm; GC IV Articles 27, 32 and 51 were contravened by the indiscriminate killing and mutilation of civilians (including children and bystanders) and by imposing collective punishment through mass, simultaneous detonation regardless of individual status; Additional Protocol I Articles 48, 51(2–5), 57 and 54 were violated through the failure to distinguish combatants from civilians, the inherently indiscriminate and disproportionate nature of detonating thousands of devices in populated areas, and the use of treachery/perfidious means to kill; finally, Amended Protocol II to the CCW Article 7(2) was directly breached by transforming ordinary civilian pagers into prohibited booby-traps specifically designed and constructed to contain concealed explosives.
The use of treachery/perfidious means to kill is particularly disturbing, since it sets the precedent for similar means to be used in retaliation, very likely to result in yet more unjustifiable acts of terror.
You're really playing up the false narrative that the spicy pagers were indiscriminate, which just isn't factually accurate, they were sold exclusively to terrorists and used exclusively by terrorist organizations for communications, there weren't any non-terrorist affiliated medics that got caught up in the attack from my understanding. Even in cases where they were detonated in populated areas bystanders were essentially unaffected due to the design of the explosive payload.
[flagged]
There are interviews with the Mossad agents that ran the operation that clarify how the operation was carried out: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-former-mossad-agents-det...
The claims made in the interview align with various other sources, including videos of the explosions showing that bystanders were unaffected. Likewise none of the spicy pagers were found to have been sold to the general public.
You claim:
> “sold exclusively to terrorists” - false.
> “used exclusively by terrorist organizations for communications” - false.
> “weren't any non-terrorist affiliated medics ” - false.
From the interview
> Lesley Stahl: Did people other than Hezbollah want to buy this based on what was being said about it online?
> Gabriel: Yes. We received several request from regular potential customer. Obviously we didn't send to anyone. We just quote them with expensive price.
You claim:
> “bystanders were essentially unaffected due to the design of the explosive payload” - false.
From the article:
> In order to put explosives inside. But not too much. Using dummies, Mossad conducted tests with the pager in a padded glove to calibrate the grams of explosive needed to be just enough to hurt the fighter -- but not the person next to him.
>Extra-judicial murder through out of control deployment of weapons via subterfuge is terrorism, also.
No? The slave workers in Nazi germany who purposely fucked up equipment to get german soldiers killed were not committing a war crime. Sabotage is legitimate warfare. The french people getting the trust of german soldiers and then slitting their throats were not committing war crimes.
>Civilians died in those indiscriminate attacks - which were terrorist in nature and deed.
Civilians die in every war because war is messy and the geneva conventions, which only considered prisoners of war until the 4th, do not prevent civilian causalities. They are not intended to. The Geneva conventions were updated after world war 2 and were STILL not made to prevent things like the London Blitz or infrastructure attacks, and indeed things like Russia trying to freeze Ukraine to death by blowing up it's electrical infrastructure is not a war crime.
If hezbollah are legitimate combatants, then they have to wear a uniform during hostilities to be protected by the conventions/protocols/hague. If they do not wear a uniform, they are considered defectors to lawful war and have less protections than actual combatants.
If China puts backdoors in all the chips we buy from them, and we build weapons with those chips, and China pressed a button that self destructs all things made with those chips, that is also not a warcrime.
War crimes are pretty much only treating POWs incorrectly by doing medical "experiments" on them or genociding them. If you are not a POW yet, the Geneva conventions don't say much about you.
Do you people think anyone would have signed a treaty that says "You can't kill more than 1 innocent person per bad guy"?
>Tell me you don't care about the Geneva convention without telling me you've probably never read the Geneva convention.
Big words from someone who doesn't seem to recognize that they geneva convention they've "totally read" doesn't say what they seem to think it says. Please quote the part where blowing up a civilian with your target is called a war crime
>sabotage is legitimate warfare
Show me the Article in the CCW which supports this claim. And do you mean sabotage against civilian infrastructure, or military materials? Again, show the Article, either way.
>If hezbollah are legitimate combatants, then they have to wear a uniform
Yes, true. Just as those responsible for the pager attacks had to identify themselves as combatants, also.
> If China puts backdoors in all the chips we buy from them, and we build weapons with those chips, and China pressed a button that self destructs all things made with those chips, that is also not a warcrime.
If this were to occur, it would be considered a war crime under one or more of the following articles:
- Perfidy (Art. 37 AP I)
- Indiscriminate attack (Art. 51(4) AP I)
- Excessive incidental civilian harm / disproportionality (Art. 51(5)(b) AP I)
- Treachery (broader Hague prohibition)
- Superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering (Art. 35(2) AP I)
- Failure to take feasible precautions (Art. 57 AP I)
Any of these 6 violations can constitute war crimes.
>“War crimes are pretty much only treating POWs incorrectly by doing medical "experiments" on them or genociding them.”
Okay, this is just plain, ignorant, crazy talk.
>”Please quote the part where blowing up a civilian with your target is called a war crime,”
Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and from the Rome Statute of the ICC.
[flagged]
You might want to familiarize yourself with this material before commenting further on this thread:
Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
Targeting civilians in a sovereign country is a war crime
From Stuxnet to Pegasus to the 2024 pager attack, Israel has a history of leveraging its tech sector to advance its national security aims through clandestine means (this is not unusual: so does the US, and so does China). If you're a country with not-so-friendly relations with Israel, the company being founded in Israel is absolutely pertinent.
Which _Israeli_ companies were used for Stuxnet or the 2024 pager attack? NSO is not the same as the company from the article since it's explicitly a cyber company.
The more relevant question is, which Israeli companies are currently not involved in covert military operations?
The difficulty in comprehending an answer to this question is precisely why allowing ones military to perform such actions using covert means is so dangerous for a civilian population to support.
War is supposed to be fought in the open in order to protect the civilians.
I suppose when the distinction between soldier and civilian is not so easy to make, the profligate mindset which allows covert, indiscriminate mass murder at scale becomes a norm.
[flagged]
The question is a straw man fallacy in an attempt to distract from the fact that Shin Bet/Mossad, both Israeli organizations, used multiple company cutouts to weaponize the supply chain of civilian infrastructure in order to commit acts of perfidy in violation of the Geneva Convention.. of course they’re not going to set up “SababaTech”, headquartered in Tel Aviv, to do this dirty work. The perfidious nature of this act required them to involve Hungary, among other nations.
Where the question “which Israeli companies are involved in committing Israels war crimes?” needs to be answered, is at the ICC - not here on HN.
(Unless the question is being answered by a whistleblower, of course..)
> Which _Israeli_ companies were used for Stuxnet or the 2024 pager attack?
I'll tell you as soon as you tell me exactly why ZTE devices were banned in the United States. The thing about clandestine operations is that they aren't done in the open.
RTFA
> The presence of an Israeli-origin technology component on Samsung phones in WANA countries poses additional problems. Several nations in this region legally bar Israeli companies from operating, and in light of the ongoing Israel–Palestine conflict, the preload of an app tied to such a company becomes even more contentious.
So yes, the presence of Israeli software is a problem in many countries, and may even be illegal.
I’ll wager there is a bit more Israeli tech in those phones than some adware.
Or a heck of a lot of non-phone tech as well.
Apple's A/M-series chips are designed in Israel. My guess is no one is banning iPhones.
[dead]
To HN readers, the controversy is likely this:
> the program was found to be quietly invasive as it allows the installer to install programs on the user’s device without permission. It circumvents the user validation process and successfully bypasses multiple security checks, including antivirus programs
I agree that the headline “controversy” is manufactured.
That's not the controversy based on the article - it's arguing that because the app is Israeli in origin, it may run afoul of local BDS laws thus another reason for AppCloud to be removed from local device, which is notable because the AppCloud app only appears to be installed on African, Asian, and MENA Samsung phones, where the bulk of countries with BDS laws exist.
The article doesn't appear to take a side one way or the other in the conflict, it's just listing a potential compliance issue.
BDS is a western concept, legal laws banning business with Israel in the Middle East precede it.
There is no such thing as BDS laws, only anti-BDS laws. Some muslim countries boycott Israeli-made products, But since Israel is a tech powerhouse only behind the US, almost every tech is Israeli-made at least partially, so again, trying to enforce any boycott is stupid.
[dead]
Yep.
The First thing that popped into my head, was
- is this a problem because of bloatware in general? Or…
- because its Israeli bloatware?
If the latter, I would understand your discomfort because of past security intrusions by Israeli companies.
But not if it’s just „IsRa-HeLl bAd“
Uhhhh, not sure about you, but I wouldn't want anything Israeli within 10m of my phone.
If you want to _really_ bar anything of Israeli origin, you should:
- Not use Intel processors, as many are developed in Haifa
- Not use a firewall. It was invented in the IDF.
- Not use Waze. It's Israeli.
- Not use thumb drives. Invented in Israel.
- Not eat cherry tomatoes. Israeli development.
The list goes on and on, but I must add - if you ever suffer a serious head or stomach injury, tell the medics to not use the Israeli bandage.
What does any of that have to do with GP not wanting israeli spyware on his smartphone? Maybe your mention of Waze is tangentially related but that's about it?
Exactly, I unistalled Waze once I knew it was Israeli, as well as avoided about a dozen of VPN providers acquired by ex-Mossad led Kape Technologies
Considering the political context around Israel it is clear that cherry tomatoes being an Israeli development (apparently) is completely irrelevant here.
Let me guess, you think shawarma and hummus are also Israeli inventions. It's insane you are trying to pass off firewall as an IDF invention on hackernews. How wildly inaccurate and tone deaf.
[dead]
Best throw it away then
you probably need to throw away your phone. or something. because never mind of it apple/qualcomm/android/etc - one of R&D centers that all companies have in Israel developed part of it.
The controversy is Israeli remote control over all these phones. Not Israeli R&D contributing to a component.
Edit: I know what they wrote
parent said "anything israeli". phones are partially israeli. including baseband firmware and stuff.
Do you have a source?
For what? That all major companies have r&d center (or few) in Israel?
Nvidia for example tripples size of one of the offices now (out of seven i think) and builds new campus in different city
ROFL.
Best step up to your words and throw away your phone then.
All major tech companies and chip manufacturers have R&D and design centers in Israel.
What an insane argument. iPhones are assembled in China, does that mean the iPhone belongs to China? Some companies are bound to have offices in Isn'treal, do pray tell their contributions that are publicly verifiable.
Is it easy to bake vulns into chips during the design stage only?
Genuine question.
[flagged]
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
Or there is a history of shady companies doing shady things, and the one that this app is related to, has done shady things in the past, so people are nervous about this app doing shady things.
[flagged]
[flagged]
As a Jew, the soon as I hear "Israel" and "App" I think of Pegasus. In this genocide, the Israeli government has shown it will cross any line. Remember the pager attack? So I would like there to be zero Israeli controlled products anywhere near me. That plus everyone should be engaged in boycotts divestment and sanctions against the regime.
And as someone who worked for multiple cyber firms out of Israel… it’s entirely reasonable to double-check that apps from Israeli firms don’t have a dual purpose to feed data to Western intelligence agencies.
[flagged]
It's antisemetic to question whether someone is Jewish based on their disdain for genocide.
[flagged]
Why are you obfuscating the concern? The issue is not that it is an app that is popularly found on devices!
The issue is that it is an app which is forcibly installed without consent or disclosure, which has privileged access to the system and beyond the scope of the device vendor. To have no care for that reeks suspiciously of nationalistic bias.
edit: Please answer: Which country has backdoor control of the phones via this app?
I agree that the issue is what you described -- an bloatware installed on a common handset manufactured by South Korean tech company. That should be the controversy.
Focusing on the factthe software is made by an Israeli company is manufacturing a controversy which is in fact extremely biased. We should be focusing on the decisions made by the South Korean manufacturer.
Why are you obfuscating the concern? Bloatware does not accurately describe remote control backdoor access.
Which country has backdoor control of the phones via this app?
I read through the linked article and an article on smex.org and there was nothing about "remote control backdoor access".
It complains about inability to uninstall from the manufacturers handset which is a manufacturers decision.
Again both articles manufacture controversy simply by nature that the Appcloud is associated with an Israeli company, not by what the app actually does or not by the fact that nobody forced Samsung to install this app on their handsets.
If you have information showing that Samsung is selling phones that are remote controlled by another government or corporate actor, that would be extremely newsworthy. Please share these news when you find them
[flagged]
[flagged]
Ethnic cleansing involves forcible expulsion of a population -- not just mass killing -- with the goal of achieving cultural or racial homogeneity in a given territory.
Israel is guilty of both the forcible expulsion and mass killing of Palestinians, so the definition certainly applies.
The resistance and the resilience of the Palestinian people have prevented their ethnic cleansing. This is not because Israel isn't trying as hard as it can within the bounds the international community is allowing.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Seems reasonable. Same way "Russian" companies are shady. Doesn't matter if they do something inane . This is really basic geopolitics that only had a short respite... Like less than 30 year period as cold war slowed. This is very normal.
Why do android phone companies load up the bloatware on their phones? Why can't they provide a plain vanilla version of android and let users to choose the stuff?
The same reason this happens/happened on Windows laptops. The hardware provider gets money to pre-install this software. They can then offer the phone at a lower price with a higher margin.
Supposedly the Pixel line of phones are pretty clean.
I think a lot of this might come down to carrier deals though.
Best bet I would imagine is to buy an Android device not through a carrier and make sure it has the necessary wireless modem bands
low quality website "sammobile" wanted to recycle news from 2011 which is essentially "samsung packs their phone full of bloatware" so they sprayed some israel over it. Now they got all those angry clicks and they have made their honest pay.
but why is HN playing along?
Samsung seems to have all sorts of security issues.
I haven't spent any time investigating, because I believe that privacy is nonexistent, but my Samsung phones have always enabled by default, a backup of everything I have (including the removable uSD cards) to a server in South Korea.
Even when I've disabled this behavior, it seems to persist at some level.
I live in the US BTW.
AppCloud is not only in India. It is on some OEM version of the phone in the US as well.
How did I know? My phone had random notifications promoting apps that I had never heard of, and I couldn't find a way to disable them. Eventually I found and removed it via adb.
These scumbags.
Any chance you can remember the package name? It's not mentioned in the article or ones it linked to, and I can't quickly find it on my phone. There is the vaguely named "application recommendations" that going by a quick search should be com.samsung.android.mapsagent
com.aura.oobe.att
Apparently only for the at&t variant.
com.samsung.android.app.spage
for t-mobile
What a trash title, literally just covering bloatware...
Actually AppCloud is a software that can install apps remotely. Not bloatware. It is spyware. And the location of the developers (example, being in China) would make it a security concern. And Israel is a security concern for countries that don't recognize Israel.
Why are there so many people in this thread lying about this being bloatware? It's alarming
They are Isreali
For a bloatware that has been owned by a US company for years.
Just originally founded in Israel.
Almost like posting it has an alterior motive.
TL;DR Article claims AppCloud (software in question) has ties to ironSource, an Israeli-founded company now owned by US-based Unity, but never clarifies what those ties are. The author only states that an ironSource tech called "Aura" appears to do something similar to AppCloud. However, the author also points out that AppCloud isn't listed anywhere on ironSource's website. They also acknowledge that there's no evidence currently that AppCloud is doing anything weird. This looks an awful lot like an "Israel bad" article.
Stop buying Samsung products
Getting an Android phone from anyone but Google seems like a nightmare.
I bought an Ipad yesterday. The setup was almost the same, except all the bloat was from Apple itself. Numbers, GarageBand, iMovie, Keynote, Pages, Clips… even the Tips app felt like bloatware.
Wild how every ecosystem has its own "preloaded surprise pack."
Those are easily deleteable though, moreover they don't install third party "recommended" apps.
They are deletable, and frankly, I wouldn't call them bloatware, they are all pretty much decent applications, they don't shove you ads down your throat and a lot of people are happy to use them.
Well, apps probably won't explode.
Edited. This seems to be according worldwide despite the article saying it's in West Asia and Africa.
Why, is privacy less valuable there?
It tells readers whether they might or might not be affected.
The reporting is not accurate. The app is found in phones sold in the US as well.
Source: me who uninstalled AppCloud via adb on a phone purchased from Best Buy.
Thanks that's important data. I started looking into this and found a case in the EU as well.
Most people don't care what stuff is being installed elsewhere, just their region as it affects them directly. I don't know how I'd get through the day if I had to keep up on news from every region of the world, other than the highlights.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Redis and Elasticsearch were both built by Israelis, and there is also Israeli code in important projects like the Linux kernel. And of course, also Israeli contributions in closed-source tech like CUDA. Avoiding all of that is a pretty tall order. But if you want to impair your systems by purifying them based on national origin of the contributors, have at it.
In fact Elasticsearch was specifically mentioned as a partner of the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation", a fake aid org who caused many Palestinians to be killed under their watch. (Elasticsearch denied involvement when I contacted them)
But to be more specific I would narrow it down to avoiding using any tech which Israel could use for surveillance, narrative control, or harm.
Opposing a specific organization for engaging in specific acts is a lot less objectionable than discriminating based on national origin.
We're not basing on national origin, we're basing on specific participation in occupation, which is being done by the Israeli state and army.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
His grandson has said it's worse than Apartheid https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/mandelas-grandson-...
[flagged]
So, not Nelson Mandela. Not even his own children. Why do their voices matter to you?
And since you value their voices, why not his grandson's voice? Or do their voices only matter when they agree with yours? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45958241
To the best of your ability. If you can avoid Israeli tech then do so, if you can't at least you try. Also opensource technology is different because you can verify and audit the tech
One might wonder what computer you are using, I think ZX Spectrum is safe.
Are you suggesting this software will somehow be able to make a phone explode? The pagers weren't just normal pagers with malware, I'm pretty sure they were loaded with actual explosives.
I added more context above to clarify the point I was making (which I thought would be self-evident, but I guess it was a bit more obscure than I thought)
[flagged]
> spicy pagers
what a disturbing infantilization
> what a disturbing infantilization
Would you prefer it be called Operation Grim Beeper?
[flagged]
[flagged]
If you define "casualty" as suffering some ear pain or a minor scratch, then sure.
> 2. The vast majority of casualties were not mythical "terrorists", they were ordinary pedestrians.
This is simply false, virtually every single spicy pager casualty was part of a terrorist organization.
> 3. Regardless this is still considered a war crime, and is by definition a terrorist act because it was not targeted. When they launched the attack they had no knowledge of where each pager was.
It was highly targeted in reality, spicy pagers were sold exclusively to the terrorist organizations for use on the terrorists communication network. It's arguably one of the most highly targeted attacks in history in terms of enemy to civilian casualty ratios.
[flagged]
GP self-describes as "Cofounder of Tech for Palestine", so making that sort of mental association is not unexpected.
It's a pretty well established phenomenon and he cites israeli leaders. no need for ad-hominem attacks. What's your argument for allowing spyware?
he cited a single Israeli private citizen. not Israeli leaders.
The fact that a data-harvesting bloatware is installed on common handsets should be controversial enough.
Both the title of this post and the link try to add "Israel is baaaad" angle as just because a company was founded in Israel.
Israel is a middle-eastern tech hub that produces a lot of tech companies and innovations. Its just a numbers game that some of them will be working on things of questionable value to humanity.
What GP suggesting is discriminating against all technologies developed by Israel because of his political views, nothing more.
[dead]
[flagged]
Your claim has nothing to do with the parent claim. Truthful or not, you can't write an article, have it debunked or disputed and then move onto another argument.
Yes, software was involved in the pager attacks, and software can be used to overheat and cause malfunction(which in the case of lithium ion can cause explosions, hazardous gases, and fire). Another example of a software-based attack that damages hardware is Stuxnet(there were no explosives either as part of this attack).
Downvoting facts? You might not be thinking about this topic rationally.
well, your facts are wrong, because there were in fact explosives planted in there [1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
[dead]
FUD and rationalising. We do understand the real reason they don't like it.
By the way, in the Arab world (my reading of "some West Asian and North African markets". Nice euphemism, btw) there isn't the same stigma as in the West so they usually don't feel the need to be cautious and say exactly what they mean, i.e. "the Jews".
100%.
[flagged]
99.9% of jews from north africa had to leave their homes after 1948 or after 1967. so saying that those countries "host jewish comminutes of their own" is far fetched
morocco went from 250000 to 2000
algeria went from 130000 to 200
tunisia went from 105000 to 1000
libya went from 40000 to 0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maghrebi_Jews#Communities
[flagged]
Nothing about this is antisemitic in my book. In fact I would go as far as conflating criticism of Israeli state actions with antisemitism is a sort of antisemitism since it puts both things in the same category equating both with each other (leaving no room for legitimate criticism according to the person equating them).
What is antisemitism is people shouting sieg heil outside my house when they read my name on the door thinking I am Jewish (I am not, though our family fled from German forces during WW2, not all survived).
It’s very clear that comment is agent provocateurs trying to sow discord. They have a lot of comments about “the west”.
Very plausible.
Though I am not fully subscribed to the internet school of ”just ignore the trolls”, I think they should all be countered once or twice before being added to a blocklist. That way other people see that those trolls are not welcome and that voices are being raised against them.
Please be more specific about what you're seeing and where, as it's not apparent from this comment what you're referencing.
Which part of this was racist? Did you even bother to even skim the article?
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Israel wouldn't last a year without Western support. It would be nice if they remembered that. The Chinese sure as hell couldn't care less about Moses.
[flagged]
…and this, and similar stories, continues to be why I will never trust or own an Android phone.
Even worse is that Samsung phones, at least in my region, come with a "Samsung Global Goals" app installed by default; an app that serves to push a certain political agenda that many find unpalatable. Imagine if your new Xiaomi phone came with an app telling you how good the CCP is.