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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

I've interviewed IronSource employees who showed me their work. I was pretty shocked at how purely evil the products intent was (malware wrapped installers for popular Windows applications). And this is in Israel, so you regularly interview people from NSO and similar companies, but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror".

IronSource doesn't even have that as an excuse

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> but at least they can claim to be part of "The War On Terror".

Can't decide if that makes it better or worse x)

"Not only is this work evil, it also involves wasting 8 trillion dollars and killing civilians"

Terror might not be the main issue in Israel these days as it was for example around 2000 but it still happens and the reason it doesn't happen as much is partly due to those efforts. The main issue is that there are still entities in the region openly claiming that they want to destroy the country and turn it into another Arab country, most of the military efforts are against this threat. There is no need to judge it cynically as if we are talking now about the US or some European country going half way across the world to destroy some countries as part of the "war on terror".

There are still entities in the region oppressed by the Israel regime too, human beings whose land has been taken, journalists, children, civilians in general murdered by their army, a belligerent stance on their neighbors, known nuclear weapons... The list could go on and on, but there's no way to put Israel on some noble pedestal, it's a powerful first world nuclear power oppressing people on their doorsteps.

Let's also not forget that the Mossad murdered an innocent civilian by shooting him 13 times in front of his pregnant wife in Norway: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair

Because they were told wrongly by an informant that he was a planner of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre

Who are the angels in the region? Which other countries in the region tolerate women, LGBT, and Jews?

I'm not sure what you're trying to imply with your question. It's not like Israel's oppressiveness there is an attempt to improve those types of tolerance.

I'm implying that it's hard to take criticism of Israel seriously when it gets far more criticism than its much worse neighbors (indeed, the UN has passed more resolutions against Israel than ~all other countries combined, and whatever Israel has done it's not worse than Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc much less all of them put together).

Okay but Israel came up because that's where the company is, in a comparison of different kinds of bad actor. Your complaint, in this specific context, is not helping.

That would be the YPJ

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Protection_Units

Yep. We the West care so much about democracy in the middle east that we throw under the bus a project of radical democracy which puts most liberal democracies to shame.

Greece, Jordan, and Turkey (though the latter have other human rights issues just as Israel does).

Well, at least it opens the possibility that the employee _thinks_ they're fighting the good fight, even if they're misguided. You can imagine the kind of person who thinks they're making the world a better place by working on technology to "fight terrorism". I don't think there exists a single person who genuinely thinks they're making the world a better place by installing malware onto innocent users' computers to earn money; you know for a fact that the employees who work on that stuff are morally bankrupt.

> I don't think there exists a single person who genuinely thinks they're making the world a better place by installing malware onto innocent users' computers to earn money

Suppose someone thinks that if they hold a job there and perform their duties less effectively than their replacement would, they are reducing the company's effectiveness at accomplishing their harmful goal. If I can come up with that on the spot without even having any cognitive dissonance to self-justify, I imagine that at least some employees can come up with something at good or better.

You're downvoted, but I don't think you're wrong. I'm probably underestimating people's capacity for deluding themselves into thinking what they're doing isn't harmful.

It's easy to label alternative morals as bankrupt. If my kids were starving and I could feed them by scamming some American with more money than I'll ever see if I added up every dime I make for my entire life, I'd feel pretty morally bankrupt if I let them starve instead.

The people who write the code aren't the problem, they're a symptom

Any relation to IronDome?

Depending on who you ask, it's actually "war for terror"

Turns out its more analogous to think of terror as the toast and war as the jam

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