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.
> 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.
Israel used its tech sector to commit those war crimes.
It’s only a controversial story, anyway, to those who think that the pager attack was ‘a perfectly acceptable way to wage war’, and the counter to that argument is: are you sure you would be willing to have this same technique, or similar uses of at-scale consumer devices being subverted by a nation state, applied to you?
For those of us who see the war crime nature of that pager attack, Israeli companies can no longer be trusted with supply-side delivery of mobile devices. Or, indeed, with components to be used in such devices, hardware or software.
This has significant relevance to us here on HN, who have to deal with the potential subversion of devices some of us deploy, at massive scale.
Or would you be okay if some state that was hostile to your own decided to just pack malfeasant activities into devices that almost everyone in your neighborhood/company are using?
The willingness to just roll over and let rogue states commit heinous acts is one thing; staying alert of potential threat vectors, at massive scale, is another.. and after all, isn’t this “hacker” news?
Yeah, totally a war crime against innocent civilians.
Extra-judicial murder through out of control deployment of weapons via subterfuge is terrorism, also. The idea that it was a 'targeted attack' is risible. Civilians died in those indiscriminate attacks - which were terrorist in nature and deed.
Except yes, indeed, we label it a war crime, in civilised society - and we seek justice for the war criminals in terms of prison sentences. Not dismemberment and maiming.
You can justify atrocities all you want. Getting called out for war crimes is the price to be paid for such 'cleverness', however.
Or else, you know, everyone will start doing it, not just those who have deemed themselves uniquely worthy of the act .. and we can't have that now, can we...
Literally the most discriminate attack against an enemy embedded within a civilian population in history.
The method was a war crime. You appear to be defending war crimes as justifiable.
And it is absolutely not the case that 4000 civilians were injured. 4000 people, perhaps, but the exceedingly vast majority were actual targets and not bystanders.
4000 civilians were injured
There were two waves of attacks. You're ignoring the second one.
I want to see good evidence that the "4000" were indeed civilians, and were indeed injured. Because so many of the examples of "this innocent doctor" etc. etc. ended up with Hezbollah themselves eventually announcing their name and rank within the organization and giving them an official funeral.
What do you know about Lebanon and Hezbollah?
How do people end up making such unfounded, unbiased claims so confidently??
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...
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?
That's a pretty awful ratio.
So per the KPI metric you've chosen, making it more lethal and more dangerous to bystanders would have been better.
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.
Not on HN, not other places.
They all know best while living a world away from the region.
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.
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.
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.
which ones?
are you confusing "war crimes" with "nonzero collateral damage"?
> are you sure you would be willing to have this same technique, or similar uses of at-scale consumer devices being subverted by a nation state, applied to you?
no, but it would not be motivated by nonexisting war crimes
it would be motivated by "I prefer my enemy to not succeed at attacking me"
> would you be okay if some state that was hostile to your own decided to just pack malfeasant activities into devices that almost everyone in your neighborhood/company are using?
no, but it would not be motivated by nonexisting war crimes
it would be motivated by "I prefer my enemy to not succeed at attacking me"
> 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 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.
Edit: I know what they wrote
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.
Source: me who uninstalled AppCloud via adb on a phone purchased from Best Buy.
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.
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.
Wild how every ecosystem has its own "preloaded surprise pack."
It's one thing to want to avoid government-spyware. It's another thing to be racist.
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).
With this title I'm of course asking "why is this app controversial" and it's because its yet another addition to the long list of annoying preloaded software on Samsung devices.
Of course it's fine to mention that this is an Israeli-founded company, the article even goes into more detail about it's ownership. Its just like not that relevant to the headline, in the same way that it being currently owned by a US company was worth including, but only in the article itself.
duxup•4h ago
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.
atonse•4h ago
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.
esafak•4h ago
atonse•3h ago
xethos•2h ago
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)"
HeinzStuckeIt•1h ago
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.
ipaddr•1h ago
blep-arsh•1h ago
AshamedCaptain•1h ago
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.
HeinzStuckeIt•1h ago
pmontra•47m ago
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.
Plasmoid•1h ago
mc32•1h ago
sodality2•1h ago
ploxiln•1h ago
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)
pmontra•57m ago
pmontra•29m ago
cultofmetatron•1h ago
elsjaako•4h ago
takipsizad•4h ago
rubyn00bie•4h ago
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.
montjoy•3h ago
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.
kakacik•4h ago
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.
tyfon•1h ago
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.
ghurtado•1h ago
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.
brookst•1h ago
ozgrakkurt•1h ago
ravenstine•1h ago
jajuuka•1h ago
jacquesm•42m ago
The last time I saw an update that just fixed security bugs and improved performance was... never.
avn2109•39m ago
summermusic•59m ago
jeroenhd•38m ago
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.
oceansky•20m ago
jay_kyburz•27m ago
I'm looking at HMD or Motorola.
rootusrootus•4m ago