Leaked documents expose deep ties between Israeli army and Microsoft
972mag.com
972mag.com
> The leaked documents show that the Israeli military’s average monthly use of Azure’s cloud storage facilities in the first six months of the war was 60 percent higher than in the four months leading up to it.
This is the actual data in the article, the rest is a bunch of speculation around these pieces of data. They note that GPT-4 may have been used in air gapped systems which would make it impossible to know how it was used, but it would be interesting to have more detail here.
I also find it interesting that the largest usage of services is actually in translation more than anything else.
This is both concerning and quite unsurprising to me...
This is an easy "excuse" for an outside observer, because the scales are just not obvious enough; On one hand, you have a desperate/futile lashing out from palestinian terrorists (killing about a thousand civilians), on the other hand, a coldblooded strategic bombing campaign (with >20000 victims and basically no building left behind).
I would be really hesitant with assigning blame on either side here.
What do you think would have happened without that "mass mind control"? How could specifically western/external states have helped the situation in hindsight?
I'll absolutely concede that as outsider its more important to keep the Israelis in check, but this is simply because of how the power balance looks: Israel is a modern industrialized state with a highly effective military-- the palestinians, on the other hand, have some smuggled RPGs and a bunch of guns at best.
But when assigning blame for all the bloodshed, also consider the following: If you swapped the roles over night, took all the military capabilities from Israel and gave it to the Palestinians: Do you think the situation would actually improve, or stabilize? Honestly?
My external view of the whole conflict is that Israel is a state that does not want to care for or govern its palestinian minority (which is unethical and very problematic); a lot of palestinians, on the other hand, simply want the Jewish population dead or banished, and finding a solution from this position is immensely difficult.
But my point is-- this is completely unhelpful and almost irrelevant for conflict resolution now. Because what are you gonna do? Throw all the Israelis back to Europe or wherever their ancestors used to live at some point? Give all the military power to Palestinians and just... find out what happens?
It's also important to note that pretty much every modern nation has figurative ethical skeletons ins its closet, and frequently in the rather recent past-- would you sanction/break up the US for segregation (or, worse, their past with native americans)? White South Africans for apartheid? France for colonialism/Vietnam? I'm just saying that it is very difficult to deal with historical injustice consistently...
If you got to call the shots, what would you do with todays Israel?
PS: thank you for the discussion-- i really appreciate getting feedback from a different PoV in a civil manner!
This is a very principled move, but I think it overestimates the short-term political effect that sanctions can achieve by a lot-- consider Cuba, North Korea or Russia: even heavy, comprehensive sanctions were completely unable to steer those in a different political direction (what sanctions do guarantee is that the affected countries growth is stunted-- fifty years down the line Israel would be pretty much guaranteed to be economically weaker than unaffected neighbors-- but that is a double-edged sword, and unhelpful for peace efforts).
On the other hand, you have significant costs for establishing such a drastic policy: Israeli public opinion would consider you a backstabbing traitor after October 7th, and probably proceed to enact the exact opposite of your demands for the next decade or so out of spite. But an even bigger problem would be that you back the Israeli government into a corner, denying them the ability to weather Palestinian (rocket) attacks passively-- instead, the next clash would probably escalate completely. And that's extremely bad-- Israel absolutely has the military capabilities to enact genocide the conventional way, and by reducing their other options you incentivice exactly that (think current Gaza offensive but with tanks and infantry instead of airstrikes, half a million dead at the end instead of ten thousands plus a large mixed bag of warcrimes).
> I wouldn’t deny Palestinians a military option if that was all they had.
If you give Palestinians workable military options, a lot of them (most certainly the majority in Gaza, maybe a minority for Westbank residents) are going to try and exterminate every jew in Israel, which is just not an improvement. That is one of the biggest difficulties-- even if you managed to wrangle territory from the jews, a right to return for expatriates and their descendants, monetary reparations and legal representation-- that is still quite likely to simply not be good enough for a significant number of fanatics on the palestinian side (and there is no way to get concessions like that from the jews except at gunpoint anyway).
Still, I can see at least the Westbank situation slowly improving over the years. I have talked with a few residents (pre-Covid): People are bitter, there is a lot of repressed anger and helplessness and opportunities are also often (ab-) used to radicalize (e.g. schools or educational autonomy in general), but I could see this slowly mending over a century or two-- Gaza on the other hand... :(
Kamala Harris and the whole democratic party lost because of a lot of things. I wouldn't put the Palestinians in the top 5.
How come?
Lol right, we never hear about it. You people are so meek and quiet about the perceived evilness of Israel. People only speak about Sudan, Syria, Yemen and countless other places with worse atrocities. No one ever mentions the Palestinians.
Side note, the pathological Israeli desire to have the last word is super obnoxious. You can just let a conversation end without adding one more reiteration of the same thing you’ve already said many times. I find this bad trait is omnipresent amongst Zionists.
We also could not have taken part in the atrocity propaganda around October 7 which has advanced numerous falsehoods like "mass rape," "40 beheaded babies," or even "1000 civilians killed."
Presumably, one avenue is to aid in target acquisition. I would imagine being to more accurate determine a target is more efficient and results in less innocent lives lost than blanket bombing.
Compare carpet bombing of German cities in WW2 to the laser guided munitions of today. Or those "sword" bombs that have been used to crush people in a car while not harming anyone on the sidewalk.
This does not necessarily hold, because less "probabilistic" target aquisition capabilities might also just mean that less bombing is done because it is no longer cost effective.
Consider WW2 Germany-- them having less access to "targetting data" (e.g. religion registers) was typically better for the population, because it made extermination campaigns less feasible: Contrast Netherlands vs France.
Air raids against population centers were very much intentional, targeted and optimized (by relying on fire as a damage multiplier).
What I said is that more targetting information does not necessarily lead to less bombing (or less collateral damage), and the fact that Dresden was firebombed is neither here nor there.
The AGM-114R-9X has also been effective at targeting individuals which meant less collateral damage (i.e. innocent civilians)
The evidence suggests that better targeting abilities have lead to less bombing and less civilians deaths because of it, though.
That is exactly my point. Dresden was just a juicy target-- dropping a bunch of incendiaries on a city to make it burn, then catching a good chunk of available firefighters with a second wave is just the better bang for the buck than dropping explosives on heavy industry (which can always be repaired). Which is exactly why the city was targeted instead of its industry.
Dresden had ~600000 inhabitants and over >20000 deaths during the firebombing. Gaza City has a similar number of inhabitants, and there's been >20000 deaths in Gaza as of early December 2024. Thats very weak evidence.
My personal view is that "our wars are less harmful because we do precision strikes" is a somewhat selfdelusional justification that Bush junior used to sell the second Gulf war; a lot of people didn't really buy it then and history mostly proves them right.
> For the most part, the collateral damage assessment process for the air war in Iraq worked well, especially with respect to preplanned targets. Human Rights Watch’s month-long investigation in Iraq found that, in most cases, aerial bombardment resulted in minimal adverse effects to the civilian population.
> Human Rights Watch recommends that if the United States bombs populated areas, it should:
Complete a collateral damage estimate in advance and balance this against the expected direct and concrete military advantage of the attack.
Use the smallest effective precision munitions to limit civilian harm.
Carry out a bomb damage assessment as soon as possible after the attack and apply immediate lessons learned.
Human Rights Watch also recommends that the United States abandon aerial attacks on leadership targets until the targeting and intelligence failures have been corrected. In particular,
Strikes should not be based solely on satellite phone intercepts.
There should be no strikes in densely populated areas unless the intelligence is considered highly reliable.
What's relevant is if more precise targeting of strikes equates to less collateral damage, or as I prefer being more directly descriptive, innocent civilian deaths, which is appears to be true.