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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, is this service service equally available/relevant to civilians on both sides of the conflict, or only one? I don't ask to be judgmental, I recognize that politically/legally it may not even be possible to serve both sides. I just wondered if the automated nature of the service allows for it to be apolitical.

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Unfortunately, it caters mostly to the Israeli side, as it is in Hebrew and relies on Hebrew sources of information.

I would very much be interested in helping build a similar system for Palestinians in Gaza, but from past attempts to organize similar cooperations, help is not necessarily wanted.

That being said, I am aware of several Palestinian users in Gaza who do follow this account for various purposes.

Respect the intent to make a tool for peace, not a weapon. Want to point out that "Various purposes" might include the people shooting the missiles seeing if/where they land? These communications might better be conducted via bulk PM?

Possibly, but most reports never mention specific coordinates.

Israelis already have complete drone coverage of Gaza Strip, they don't need reports on hits. Palestinians cannot possibly use coordinates to aim homebrew rockets being used. Hit radius is e.g. around 1km for far range rockets.

During the last flare up with Hezbollah, my friends in the Haifa suburbs told me that there were some gag orders on some rockets that landed near them to prevent Hezbollah from knowing that they had successful hits. But I suppose the rockets of Hamas vs Hezbollah would be different.

EDIT: Seems like their rockets are reaching Tel Aviv so I guess they aren't as crude as they used to be...

Those rockets have long range, not precision.

Thanks, I don't ask to be partisan, just to gain a better understanding of the situation. I hope the conflict dies down quickly and that there is less death and destruction for everyone to worry about.

This article is relevant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/world/middleeast/by-phone-...

I imagine there is a lot of data available on the Israeli side but not as much on the Palestinian side.

Such a service could well be apolitical, but @rotternews is an extreme right wing news organization by Israeli standards.

sources ?

Well, the website itself is the best of sources. I would translate some of the posts if I weren't too ashamed.

That is true, most of the participants on Rotter hold views that are despicable and couldn't be further away from my beliefs.

However, Rotter has time and again proven to be the best news community on the Israeli internet, bringing breaking news and alerts as they happen.

Also, note that all the hate speech on Rotter always takes place in the thread comments, never in the headlines, which is what we use for @rotternews.

> Also, note that all the hate speech on Rotter always takes place in the thread comments, never in the headlines, which is what we use for @rotternews.

Is it now? What about these, just in the past few hours:

* https://twitter.com/RotterNews/status/486621279823200256

* https://twitter.com/RotterNews/status/486621270738366464

* https://twitter.com/RotterNews/status/486631085724286976

* https://twitter.com/RotterNews/status/486625806932664320

Again, I will not translate because the views expressed in this Twitter feed are abhorrent to most Israelis, and are, quite frankly, idiotic and juvenile, but the Twitter feed itself is most certainly ultra right wing (and represents a small minority of Israelis).

I would appreciate if you (or someone) would, since if they're already posted here, those of us who don't speak Hebrew are left wondering about the context of the discussion.

Just follow the links in the tweets and paste them into Bing/Google translate.

The translation is not perfect but the general gist seems to be anger, hatred and calls for revenge towards Palestinians.

Nah, that will just piss me off terribly. Instead, let me translate a recent tweet by some (other) clever Israeli:

I will never forgive the Middle East for making me hate nationalists, while people like me in the rest of the enlightened world have long since moved on to hating capitalists

Thanks, that is clever! Though I guess they shouldn't feel so bad; capitalism intersects with other oppressive systems like patriarchy, race and the state...

I was surprised to find that google translate did a good enough job at conveying the idiocy:

Let the state of #Israel to win and take your gloves without spare any Gazan!

Talk about putting the war home: Gazan Commander and his family immigrated to storm heaven.

Well the conflict itself is not apolitical.

True, but not wanting to get hit by explosive projectiles seems to be universal. If you could make a tool that addressed that need without regard to which side of a dispute users were on it might have a de-escalatory effect. Then again maybe I'm wrong and it would just cause technological escalation instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad#Stories_involving_...

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