Meduza co-founder's phone infected with Pegasus
meduza.io
meduza.io
Surely whatever money these guys spend buying these zero-days, Apple is rich enough to increase their bounties large enough to attract them to right side instead?
It’s not clear in the article if the author had to take any action to get this program installed. If that’s not required, what should anyone who even vaguely suspects state sponsored spying do? Sounds like it’s safer to just not use a phone or try and circle through a series of them you buy second hand or something.
I feel it's the safe money, certainly. One exploit dev in a given year can churn out multiple weaponized 0 days, surely they have more than one dev working on such things, so you're talking about a stockpile of likely dozens of vulns. Some might collide with public vulns so they lose a few, but you knock one down and I have to assume they have others staged.
> Apple is rich enough to increase their bounties large enough to attract them to right side instead?
That's a good question. I think at NSO's price point the answer is probably "no", but I don't know. At best Apple could be competitive, but bug bounty work is far riskier - you might spend a long time without getting a payout, either due to some bad luck, collisions with already reported vulns, or a vendor just being a dick (pretty sure Apple have been dicks).
> what should anyone who even vaguely suspects state sponsored spying do?
Probably have more than one phone, for starters. Use authenticated protocols, not SMS/MMS. It's insane that anyone can just send data to your phone unprompted. I'd probably disable cell service altogether unless I'm actively making an outbound call to a known contact.
In such a case, Apple "only" needs to make the bounty high enough to significantly exceed the sale price of the vuln, or the salary of aforementioned employees.
At which point it becomes cheaper to buy a law to force disclosure of those 0 days to vendor?
Maybe the government should care about the Obamaphone, but not anything beyond that.
Regarding Obamaphone, in the US there is a government agency responsible for such things. The NSA. It's tasked with securing US information infrastructure on top of its more known role of signals intelligence. It just happens to favour the latter over the former so its not about to share its stockpile of iPhone zero days with Apple.
In a nutshell, whether they will increase or subvert your security depends on factors outside of your control. But unless they have found ways of surveilling foreigners without compromising the security of any Apple device, it's almost certain that they won't disclose their own 0-day exploits to Apple.
“Apple makes the most secure mobile devices on the market. Lockdown Mode is a groundbreaking capability that reflects our unwavering commitment to protecting users from even the rarest, most sophisticated attacks,” said Ivan Krstić, Apple’s head of Security Engineering and Architecture.
I mean, we know nobody on their team actually believes Lockdown mode can protect against state funded actors with even a tiny $10M budget since their Lockdown mode total bypass bug bounty is only $2M.
But they did say it in their marketing, so they should be held to it even if we know for a fact that they are totally incapable of doing so. This is not a question of money, it is a question of ability, and we know they do not have that.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/07/apple-expands-commitm...
Well, they're not wrong on that one point. As it turns out, "most secure" is a pretty low bar. We'll see how Purism's Freedom Phone fares once it reaches genuine daily-driver status and it too becomes a target for this class of attacks.
Niche software often fares very poorly in terms of security because few people are trying to exploit it.
The Linux kernel itself is a very weak foundation security-wise, the only way Android and ChromeOS get away with it is by using a very small feature set and restricting everything else as much as possible with seccomp, SELinux and heavy sandboxing.
The Linux desktop userland doesn't have meaningful hardening features compared to other platforms (even Windows is ahead, sadly). For example, practically all distros use glibc's memory allocator which has both poor performance and security [1] and their toolchain is based on gcc, with no support for modern compiler security features such as CFI (with the sole exception of Chimera Linux). Not to mention the permission model is completely outdated, like in that xkcd comic. Flatpak only mitigates this partially, because the Flatpak sandbox is very weak. The people working on Flatpak are doing their best, but from reading some GitHub issues, it's clear they are badly overworked and not security experts. The person responsible for Flatpak's seccomp sandbox has said it isn't even his main responsibility and he doesn't have much knowledge about seccomp and is learning along the way [2]. The Flatpak seccomp filter is based on a denylist rather than an allowlist, and many dangerous syscalls can't be blocked because applications rely on them (e.g. Firefox needs ptrace for the crash reporter). You also have to be very careful and use Flatseal (which is not officially supported) to deny permissions such as /home filesystem access, because it lets Flatpak apps override their own permissions by design [3]. And dangerous kernel components like io_uring are exposed [4], while Google disables them on their systems because of their exploitation potential.
Here is a more detailed article examining the lack of security of Linux phones in case you're interested: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux-phones.html
If you want a FOSS-based secure phone, GrapheneOS is the best option.
[1] Check this comment by GrapheneOS founder for some technical details and how it compares to hardened allocators such as Android's Scudo or Graphene's hardened_malloc: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/90147#issuecomment-6...
[2] https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4466#issuecomment-...
Thats not a honest proposition by its very definition, just look at the assymetry of those numbers. Serious offer would add at least 2 zeroes to that.
The real question is why is Apple allowed to lie about providing meaningful protection against state actors when they only think it only costs 2M $ to break it. In no universe is 1/5 the cost of a tank even a road bump for a state actor.
The other question is why is their security so terrible. The short answer is that they demonstrably know nothing about security since this is the most they have been able to do after decades of work, billions of dollars, and repeated promises of meaningful security. When somebody spends billions of dollars and decades failing to achieve even 1/10th of what they promised, you should take any new statements as extraordinary claims and demand extraordinary evidence.
It's not like anyone has been doing any better. Mobile phones are embedded devices targeted to everyday consumers, basically toys. They've never been engineered for anything like meaningful security against even mildly sophisticated attacks. The industry simply doesn't care about this, e.g. most phone SoC's are still not protected against misbehavior by any of the included devices, each of which is running some unknown proprietary firmware. That's just par for the course in the embedded ecosystem.
Apple marketing claims it provides meaningful protection against state actors. Apple engineering says it does not. Even if nobody can do it, even if Apple is closer than anybody else, that does not excuse lying to people who are betting their lives on Apple’s representations that it works.
Apple can not protect against state actors. Apple knows that. If you are at risk, the only safe thing to do is avoid Apple (and all other smartphones). Apple knows that. They lie and insinuate that a iPhone is fit for this task so they can sell a few more iPhones caring not a single bit for the lives at risk. That is grossly unethical. Yet, it is par for the course in “cybersecurity”. That does not make it acceptable, that just means everything is rotten.
I was just listening to Darknet Diaries episode 100 this past weekend and they mentioned an NSO-crafted zero-click vulnerability in Whatsapp that Citizen Lab had detected being exploited.
Though I suppose Whatsapp (anyone with my phone number can message me) wouldn’t qualify as an authenticated protocol.
TL;DR, Apple probably doesn't care enough
You're in a very exclusive club if you're targeted by NSO (ie. very few people are victims) and most of the general public probably doesn't understand or care enough to get their pitch forks out.
Personally if I was anywhere near being a possible NSO target I'd dump all my devices or at least have them fully airgapped, the only way you'll win that fight.
You still wouldn't win that fight without applying those rules to everyone you come in contact with. And even then, the absence of such data could create a pattern enough to identify parts of your life if they have enough data from people that are not around you.
Escaping surveillance from bad actors is essentially no longer a winnable fight. you can only do your best to mitigate it.
That's a dangerous assumption. We only know about the victims who are clueful enough about OPSEC to even be informed about the issue, let alone find out about an attack.
And yet:
(a) Lockdown Mode cost money to develop and will cost support time from casuals turning it when they shouldn't but Apple did it anyway, and
(b) the journalists only know this happened because Apple told them proactively.
Sounds like they care at least a little.
Apple does not buy out the zero-days for two reasons: First, you can not buy your way to security. Second, the benefits do not outweigh the costs.
For the first point, it is impossible to buy your way to serious security. Apple currently pays a $1M bounty for a zero-click RCE with persistence [1] and $2M to do the same to Lockdown Mode, around the cost of a single Tomahawk cruise missile. They set this price because it takes around 1-3 engineer-years to find such a security defect, so the bounty is approximately the cost of labor. If they paid $10M, around the cost of a single M1 Abrams tank, they would get a absolute flood of new reports since suddenly the ROI is 10x and the number of security defects detectable at the $10M level is vastly more than at the $1M level. However, to deter countries, you need to get to at least the $100M level, the cost of a single F-16. At the few million dollar level there are already tens to hundreds of known security defects, so at the $100M level there are almost certainly thousands to tens of thousands of vulnerabilities. So, to buy their way to protection against state-funded attackers would cost them trillions to tens of trillions of dollars, if it is even possible at all. Note that literally nobody has ever gotten past the few million dollar range using this strategy, or frankly using any strategy when attempting to retrofit a system not designed for security like iOS or Windows.
For the second point, what does Apple gain by buying the zero-days? People keep buying iPhones no matter how many thousands of security defects get reported. All they have to do is make up new bullshit like Lockdown mode and everybody feels warm and fuzzy inside. The company, that has never once made a product within a factor of 100x of what is needed to protect against state-funded attackers, just makes up a marketing spiel about how they are "totally going to do it this time for sure, pay no attention to our record exclusively consisting of hundreds of failures" and everybody eats it up. We know they do not believe their own marketing fluff because they set the bounty for lockdown mode at $2M, only double the $1M for regular iOS, which is still only 1/5 of a single tank. Do you think a single state-funded attackers will be dissuaded by the price of a fractional tank? It costs more money to start a new McDonalds store. All the companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Cisco, Crowdstrike, etc. need to do is lie and for some reason everybody keeps believing them for the thousandth time and their sales are protected.
Commercial IT systems are completely and utterly insecure against attacks by moderately funded attackers. If you have operations worth more than $1M or are at the risk of targeted attacks, you are completely, 100%, vulnerable no matter what or how many of these systems you use. If that is not acceptable, then you must not use standard commercial IT systems with connectivity. That is, unfortunately, the only solution that currently works. It is up to you if you think the tradeoff is worth it.
Androids havent had anywhere near as many 0 clicks.
I have a secret on my backup/mostly offline phone, I cannot imagine using an iphone with a secret on it.
"Pegasus" is not one hacking entity like most articles make it out to be. Its
1) A bunch of services that download data, given root access to a phone
2) a bank of 0-days, we don't know how deep.
For all we know, there are times when "Pegasus" doesn't work for hours, days, weeks, until the 0-day is rotated. We do know from some leaks that they have a mix of non-click and click exploits, and also support all different kinds of phone OS.
Their hacking abilities are definitely overstated, for all we know, for smooth continuous customer support, they could be buying 100% of their 0-days, and not finding any themselves. A 0-click 0-day for iPhones is worth about $2,000,000[1], a company with contracts like NSO can afford a lot of those. IMO the media portraying them as super-hackers is pure hype. Its a bunch of crooked business people who figured out how to extract money out of countries
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/zerod...
It's fairly probable that iPhone exploits are just less valuable to a shady intel operation that sells mostly to small authoritarian regimes.
Are you sure that's true? In my experience governments often choose Android because they prefer the platform's organization-wide device management options over iOS. Many dissidents/journalists choose Android because it's easily rootable, giving them more privacy and control (I have a very small sample of the latter, however)
Google and Samsung warn you about enabling root.
Samsung:
Is rooting your smartphone a security risk?
Rooting disables some of the built-in security features of the operating system, and those security features are part of what keeps the operating system safe and your data secure from exposure or corruption. Since today’s smartphones operate in an environment filled with threats from attackers, buggy or malicious applications, as well as occasional accidental missteps by trusted users, anything that reduces the internal controls in the Android operating system represents a higher risk.
https://insights.samsung.com/2022/07/28/what-are-the-securit...
Google:
Security risks with modified (rooted) Android versions Google provides device security protections to people around the world using the Android operating system. If you installed a modified (rooted) version of Android on your device, you lose some of the security protection provided by Google.
Important: If your account is enrolled in the Advanced Protection Program, don’t use that account on a device with a modified version of Android. Modified versions of Android can undermine Advanced Protection’s increased security features.
I have great respect for the iOS security model. Seriously a marvel and best-in-class accomplishment.
But this is flatly not true. If you really care, you have Graphene et al, and even without that stock Android has plenty of well-tested features that enable you to lock down the device further than at stock. And rooting as a pathway to undermine security is a well understood aspect of the threat model
To get the top payout, you'd need to come up with something that works across all manufacturers versions of Android and probably across 4 or 5 major versions. You might be able to find an exploit for all Androids running version x, but if that version only has 10% of the android market, you wouldn't get a full payout.
iOS users tend to heavily be on the latest version, or one version behind at most. As an example, most recent iOS exploits in the wild seem to be using iMessages. On iOS, you can focus your efforts at one thing. On Android? Your surface area is much smaller because each manufacturer is going to be shipping their own messenger app, for example.
Consider that in a just world you'd be in jail. Does the money still look that good?
Unfortunately, it forgets how to do this if the country is Israel instead of the Philippines.
Is there some solution in that to making sure 100% of possible red team members are more aligned with the profit interests of the US' strategic private companies than the US strategic partners in running illegal conspiracies?
I'm baffled as to what utopia of a profession has global tool collaboration and consequences, but somehow manages to deal with 230 groups of nationalists, thousands of sects, and embargo's on any one group paying people across all of these to provide a regulatory framework for safe and human benefiting tools in their category with no edge cases. If such a regulatory framework existed maybe it would shut down these mobile phone companies over behavioral harm?
Would Apple being totally incompetent at security and fighting exploits from NK prison labor, eventually with about the same fail rate, be a better world?
Export control on thoughts didn't work, so total disarmament on thoughts won't work. Prioritize security, cut out some of the entertainment and useless features through regulation because brain candy always wins in an unregulated market.
So personal responsibility is where it starts and there isn't a fig leaf large enough that would allow you to pretend otherwise.
Let's be clear though, I'm not saying tech is bad. We'd all be doing manual labor on a a farm without it. I do think our demographic (including myself) has completely set aside any consideration for our impact in the name of optimization or a fat paycheck.
Evolution playing before our eyes.
Each exploited phone raises the chance of the exploit being found and burned, so they really have to incentivize their customers to use them sparingly.
I think Apple should randomize data structure ordering, change flags and logic in the the memory allocator, and choose a different set of compiler optimizations with every release.
At least that way, most exploits and bugs will at least require an expert to put in substantial effort to update them to work on a new OS release, and many exploits won't be possible at all on a new release - if for example the exploit allows a stack buffer to overrun by 1 byte, then it depends what data follows the buffer - and if the compiler randomizes that, then in the next release it might become non-exploitable.
Whether there's "Pegasus" attribution or not, the reality of the contemporary internet is: if you're targeted hard enough, you're probably screwed. (....but you're probably not actually targeted that hard, so practice good practices)
That being said, I agree with others that it's probably a good technical, PR, and long-term "marketability to regimes" approach for Apple to just double down and spend millions instead of thousands on competing with the black market to buy 0-days.
This is a distinction without a difference. The major Great Powers are all cyber powers. The only difference is that NSO services the non-Great Powers too, with the implicit backing of the Israeli state apparatus. The media has created NSO a cyber power broker for the powers that be, but all of the UN Security Council permanent members have their own defence contractors and cybersecurity staff. Talented engineers are everywhere.
And I would argue most trade is not based on trust, except for maybe trust in the legal system and repercussions if someone tries to screw you over.
First you provide a description of the exploit, then you get an estimate, then you have provide the exploit for vetting and the payout has multiple cliffs similar to equity vesting in a company.
This way you can't sell them a an exploit for $2MM and go play robinhood by reporting it to the vendor once the check clears.
The business is not hacking and wiretapping the phones of the victims. They are selling tools to governments, who either have the legal right to do the hacking under their own laws, or can safely flaunt their laws.
Just because you have a right to do something to your own device doesn't mean you have a right to sell it. It is not a huge stretch of the imagination to see 0-days being classified as munitions and encumbered by ITAR. I've seen open source drone guidance software taken down for similar reservations, and that was far from a weaponized instance.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_...
[1]: https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2022/etappensieg-finfisher-ist... (it appears they actually went bancrupt due to this in the long run)
They should keep their phone in Lockdown mode [1]. It's less useful as a computer in that case but the restrictions reduce the attack surface.
Almost zero, if China with 1.5 billion people, unlimited money and lots of motivation couldn't hack into iOS then there is no way Israel can do it Multiple times... Just think about it...
It would be a lot easier to just believe Apple gave backdoor access to the Israeli intelligence, it would explain why Europe is at their throat recently after Israel sold Pegasus to Morocco who used it to spy on French journalists and politicians which led to Morocco recognizing Israel and the US recognizing the western sahara and putting an embassy there, now those waters (between the canary islands and morocco) aren't the EU's but are shared with Morocco aka the US, and it all happened after discovering that mineral rich mountain (mount Tropic) that has lots of minerals used in battery manufactoring. That's just my tinfoily theory for the day... I don't believe all of it but I don't disregard that possibility...
You assume it's just money and not poltical idealogy or "because I can, when I can."
the book Pegasus by laurent richard chronicles the challenges the journalists who brought us the pegasus leaked list with 50k + targets had to go through. Anyone who has grown cynical to journalism over time will be humbled by the death and terror that journalists endure to challenge regimes like SA or morocco. Pegasus was on jamal Kashoggi and his mistress(? iirc) phones.
Apple is a commercial organisation with a sole purpose of generating profit. And the bounties are at their equilibrium points already (or at least supposed to be). Apple is rich enough sure, but they will only spend money if this makes Apple even richer.
What’s a Tesla 0-day worth I wonder?
And most modern cars have a Secure Gateway[1] that are mostly not connected to internet, that only allow limited NW access for the connected systems to rest of the vehicle (Engine, powertrain, brakes...) so the possibility of a remote scaled attack is low IMO.
[1] https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/ultimate-guides/software-defin...
> Question - why Meduza in particular? That's a slippery, unpleasant creature
> Journalists are generally unpleasant and slippery and there are few who love them - such is the job. Also "Medusa" turns its subject to stone with a glance, which is true of journalists, too. But to be completely honest, we ended up with "Meduza" by chance. We thought the paper should be named after the ancient Greek monster that had its head cut off but came alive anyway. We chose "Meduza" and then remembered that it was a hydra, but it was too late.
https://ukdataexplorer.com/european-translator/?word=jellyfi...
However, what if this person was much lower profile? Let's say a person that lives in a democratic country. Does Apple even know who targeted them? If they do, let's say "if its China or Russia" we inform. Then what if China or Russia does the exact same thing but using a paid agent in a democratic country?
This raises so many questions. And finally, if Apple can detect such malware why isn't there an immediate notification from some local app? Like an anti virus for your phone. They must already have something like this, otherwise how would they know?
- A different device for each app (Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, etc)
- Use web front ends and keep the phone turned off - not sure if it works for all apps
- Regularly ditch devices, sell them second hand and get new/used phones.
- Use the devices to setup meetings in more secure environments, never say/text anything into the phone, assume its compromised at all times.
And there should be some sanction against NGO, they are scumbags.
Something akin to Graphene OS where there’s a constant drive to narrow the attack surfaces, but also removing any concessions related to installing apps or Google services entirely.
Basically, a phone that has access to encrypted messaging and the camera/mics under very controlled circumstances and that’s about it.
The restrictions would also limit the popularity enough that it would likely never be worth the cost of targeting, but also provide greater protection to the few people that really need that protection enough to make those sacrifices.
Assembly is a pain to understand even with the latest disassemblers. Cut that out and you’re cutting out 90% of the work.
Now sure in theory having it open source means good people will find the exploit. But have you ever found an exploit and reported it? Of course not. Only attackers are motivated to put thousands of hours of work into looking for vulnerabilities. Unless you pay someone to actually put the same work in, it being open source is meaningless.
> But have you ever found an exploit and reported it? Yes, actually. It was for a project I had already contributed to, so I was just reading source code and stumbled upon a somewhat critical bug. The main problem there was figuring out how to fix it without breaking API, really.
Even easier if you have your phone stripped down and locked up in the first place, less apps to ever cause outgoing traffic.
Disable iMessage and don't use iCloud at all, for a belt and suspenders approach.
Rather then naive, I think his main problem is that he hasn't investigated before the discussed event what the European states actually do in that context. Then he would be just worried, not shocked.
Another possibility is that the "shocked" is the "Casablanca shocked":
> Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
> Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
> [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
> Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
> Captain Renault: Oh, thank you very much.
It is a race though, so past info may no longer be valid. However, I doubt it will ever be able to spread by itself, since it uses very expensive zero days to infect and they will be quickly fixed after detection.
So at least for now we'd expect all Pegasus installations to be a result of targeted attacks. On the other hand, if the tool leaks and becomes readily available to multiple actors, then the incentives change and one of them might decide to make a worm that infects everyone in the world who's not patched.
I see that someone flagged my comment.
I suspect that it was not because it was hurtful or destructive, but because I chose to use the national currency of Israel as the denomination (instead of dollars, which would actually be disrespectful), and someone that skipped Social Studies, thought it was being "anti-semitic."
Sort of like the paediatrician in UK, that was attacked, because some idiot thought the sign outside her office meant she was a paedophile.
It would be relatively trivial to write such - simply have it send the exploit via iMessage to all of a targets contacts, rinse and repeat.
This would be counterproductive though - the whole selling point of Pegasus is targeted surveillance, and such exploits are very costly - uncontrolled spreading would make it detected much faster, burning a valuable resource.
If such exploits were cheap, it’s plausible you could justify writing a variant that automatically attacks a targets entire address book to mine their social graph, but then you have the problem of analysing a shitload of probably worthless data…
They presumably also configure their command and control to only persist if it is one of the designated targets and wipe all traces if it is not, so even forwarding the attack payload would probably not do anything. You would need to determine you have been compromised and then reverse engineer the exploit so you could replace the command payload with a irreversible bricking operation to do what you suggest.
At that point you might as well spend the $5M-$10M to develop the entire attack yourself. If you are a competitor to Apple spending $10M to completely destroy the $2.7T Apple is literal pocket change; too small to even show up on your financials.
You're comparing two near completely unrelated numbers here. That's not what enterprise value means; it doesn't mean much of anything really.
How does that even work?
I mean if the bug in the browser, you have to visit the page to have the payload get to you, but it's a phone. A device for other people to contact you.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/05/29/apple-e...
International weapons dealing doesn't work that way. Point to any manufacturer of weapons and there's a bunch of people that don't like them. But the countries that benefit from those weapons don't agree.
https://citizenlab.ca/2023/09/blastpass-nso-group-iphone-zer...
> We believe, and Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture team has confirmed to us, that Lockdown Mode blocks this particular attack.
https://citizenlab.ca/2023/04/nso-groups-pegasus-spyware-ret...
> For a brief period, targets that had enabled iOS 16’s Lockdown Mode feature received real-time warnings when PWNYOURHOME exploitation was attempted against their devices. Although NSO Group may have later devised a workaround for this real-time warning, we have not seen PWNYOURHOME successfully used against any devices on which Lockdown Mode is enabled.
> Researchers believe Timchenko’s hackers used the so-called “PWNYOURHOME” vulnerability
https://citizenlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Annotated-B...
If many people had such alerts, it would draw attention to the action.
If more money is thrown at the people finding the vulnerabilities so they responsively disclose would it make NSO’s business model unprofitable?
Sounds to me like the best approach to shutdown the NSO group is to make the economics not work out.
2. Tricking Mossad is not easy. I am fairly certain they are better at counterintelligence than Apple, even if Apple is getting coached.
3. Trick Mossad at your own risk.
should not be even remotely possible
While the Wikipedia article claims Pegasus "jailbreaks" the iPhone to maintain persistence. Every technical article I've read says that a reboot clears Pegasus (albeit, it is easy to re-infect with a no-click exploit without the user's knowledge).
Hopefully, someone more knowledgeable can chime in with citations.
Companies that do these kinds of things are a menace to society, because those tools get used for evil purposes (not just spying on terrorists). Plenty of other governments benefit from using these spy tools themselves, but we all know they fall into the hands of despotic governments like Saudi Arabia and they are used to harass and attempt to control journalists, people advocating against their governments.
What I'd like to see is Apple uses their enormous influence and financial power to sue these companies and drive them out of business. They should financially attack the companies doing this and make it known they will work to destroy them.
Ah, but what about spying on "Nazis" and "foreign influence organizations"? What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
cmd-f "submarine"
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-lets-metas-wh...
See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61570971/apple-inc-v-ns...
- For desktop - Tails OS booted from USB + TOR for browser
- For mobile - GrapheneOS on latest pixel device
NSO Group probably uses an Indian intermediary (my first guess) and does the same thing.
By the way, Pegasus doesn't work against US phone numbers.
Nope.
There were enough articles with outright lies to never believe anything from them until proven by numerous other, independent sources.
I.e. US republicans most often won't believe CNN and US democrats most often won't believe Fox.
The point here is, there are plenty of topics on which CNN and Fox coverage is very very similar: off the top of my head events in Israel and Taiwan
And on those topics, plenty of people just "trust the consensus" (or what appears to be the consensus, in western media)
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/out-of-bounds-how-media...
They're politicking 101 made into 24/7 news media panic.
They're both charlatans and peddlers of lies and cheap tricks; they engage in propaganda and employ journalists who seem to believe that they're anything other than foot soldiers to stir up the masses against XYZ.
Everyone knows Fox News is trash, it's laughable when some continue to argue that CNN isn't.
Where XYZ can be anything, depending on which way the wind is blowing, sometimes it's each other, sometimes it's internal to the US, sometimes it's external
There's no need to be condescending.
The job of a news source it not to criticize, or not criticize, the annexation of Crimea. They're not a political party. Nobody but their mom really wants to know their private opinion.
The job of a news source is to provide news. All the news and articles Meduza produces follows the same pattern, where they would arrive at a predetermined conclusion regardless of the facts they are discussing, and the train of thought would go from A to B in a reasonably short route. If it's hard to derive the conclusion from some facts, they will be skipping reporting these where possible. If it's very convenient to derive the conclusion for unproven facts, they will be using these eagerly.
Propaganda is annoying to read, especially if you know you will disagree with their conclusion, which you obviously know in advance.
Yes, you will be living in a tiny bubble. But at least you do not get to read propaganda pieces trying to derive prefabricated conclusions out of irrelevant small events. If anything large happens, you are going to hear of it earlier or later.
If you really want balanced coverage, choose a source from the other side which is so blatantly propagandist that you can have good laughs instead of grinding your teeth. I am reading The Guardian for that purpose.
Perhaps there are better ways to consume your news, but I don't know these.
> Yes, you are living in a tiny bubble.
How is that a tiny bubble?
> It is the century XXI, and the mainstream way seems to be subscribing to Telegram channels whose vibe resonates with you. Yes, you will be living in a tiny bubble.
I believe they mean "the mainstream way" puts you into a tiny bubble, but they go on to say:
> But at least you do not get to read propaganda pieces trying to derive prefabricated conclusions out of irrelevant small events. If anything large happens, you are going to hear of it earlier or later.
Thus, I believe they were advocating for a tiny bubble -- not accusing the previous commenter of being in a tiny bubble.
-> restricting what journalists may write
-> claiming the public has no interest in editorial opinion
-> labeling dissent as propaganda
The remark above is all three.
Which is kind of hilarious as US news sources are far less neutral than most of those politically colored newspapers!
also they got completely outlawed by the Russian regime, so they can't possibly get any advertising from Russian firms.
Popular contradictions today: It's a human right to dress and act like any sex one chooses. It's evil and horrible to dress and act like a different race.
Global warming is the biggest threat to mankind. Coming into the office is more important.
Flying around the globe is to talk down to others who are doing more about global warming earns praise.
So basically you picked a side and trust only what news agree with your beliefs?
Israel: NSO does not pose a problem, because they work only for lawful purposes.