Eelongate

You think the iceberg is coincidentally only as deep as what we've presently heard? That we didn't have the full story yesterday, but today we definitely do?

Well I hope you're right, but I don't think you are.

The public's elected representatives being easily blackmailable is obviously of great concern to the public, I don't know why you're downplaying this.

The very left-wing Americans I know hated Trump a lot more than they love Biden. They have no particular love for Biden because Biden is not very left-wing at all. Biden comes from the old neoliberal contingent of the DNC, not the new lefty progressive camp. Biden is no Bernie or AOC and only has lukewarm support from very-left people, in my experience.

In principle, America could drop Hellfire R9X sword missiles through the cars of every NSO employee. In practice, would American politicians have the nerve to go to war with NSO, when NSO probably infected all their phones years ago? How much dirt do they have on American politicians?

Yep. Weak, incompetent or absent governments, with corporations governing most affairs in practice.

I think that remains to be seen.

> Then there's the time they stole nuclear material from us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apollo_Affair

On a related note, JFK was trying to shut down Israel's nuclear weapons program in the months before his murder.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kennedy-letter-to-ben-g...

At the time the cost to launch it would have been insane since it called for ten thousand or more satellites in LEO. However with Starlink, SpaceX has been promising to demonstrate the ability to economically launch such massive satellite constellations. If they succeed, I expect Brilliant Pebbles to return, although probably under a new name.

The term tabloid has a literal meaning besides the pejorative meaning. The format of Yedioth is tabloid, not broadsheet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_(newspaper_format)

> "[...] instead of the current ones ascribing all agency and blame to just NSO."

The article does not claim that NSO has sole responsibility for any of the crimes it was an accomplice to.

In past HN conversations about this topic, there have always been some who deny or downplay the relationship between NSO and the Israeli government. This article paints a convincing story to the contrary: NSO and the rest of Israel's cyberoffense industry were/are used as a negotiating chip by Israeli diplomats. NSO only exported their technology/services with the approval of the Israeli government, and Israeli courts have cleared the Israeli government of any negligence in that approval process.

There's at least one exception to this; rabies. Wild animals can be vaccinated using baits containing an oral rabies vaccine.

The USAF have a love affair with fast jets (who can blame them?) but I have a feeling that using manned aircraft as the first stage of missiles is an anachronism that won't survive the next major war.

Yes, 'fair shake' is the term. Wiktionary defines it as "Reasonable, unbiased treatment; a fair deal." and provides examples from both American and British newspapers, so it seems to be used on both sides of the Atlantic.

ICBMs by definition go to space, the B stands for Ballistic. FOB systems aren't ballistic either (that B stands for Bombardment), but still go to space and Brilliant Pebbles is designed to intercept missiles during the initial boost phase, so it would work against FOB systems too. Brilliant Pebbles, once in place, can stop any satellite launch, including those intended to trigger the Kessler syndrome. Of course, Russia might have such satellites in orbit already...

What Brilliant Pebbles wouldn't be any good against is cruise missiles that remain in the atmosphere, and ultra long range nuclear torpedoes. Russia is working on both, doubtlessly for this very reason.

The US Navy could block all Chinese exports and imports by sea around the world, not only those between China and America. This is why China's "Belt and Road Initiative" (aka the 'New Silk Road') is so important to China. It's meant to decrease China's reliance on shipping for international trade, by opening up land routes across Eurasia.

Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are all considered latent nuclear powers; they each operate numerous nuclear reactors and likely have the material and expertise on hand to create nuclear weapons in a matter of months (if they ever chose to.)

Apple supposedly has a indefinite 'architectural' license to design and manufacture ARM chips. Presumably that cannot be revoked.

It's not the job of any military to be fair.

Getting a close look at it, and seeing what it can do. For instance, seeing if it's capable of precisely the evasive behavior that it apparently demonstrated.

The objective of the game is making the other guy feel certain he can't win. The only winning condition is when both sides believe they can't win.

> What counts as a drone? Satellites can be steered, are those drones?

Traditionally, any remote controlled aircraft is a drone, it seems fair to say any remote controlled spacecraft is also a drone.

The first drone, from which the term 'drone' came, was a radio controlled de Havilland Tiger Moth created in 1935, named "Queen Bee". It was a gunnery target drone, built for the purpose of being shot down, intended to fly only once. 'Drone' is a pun on that single-flight use and the name 'Queen bee'; male bees, which fly only once before dying, are called drones.

These days it's trendy for people to put forth their own definitions of 'drone' that have qualifiers like "it must have autonomy" or "it must be able to land". But the first drone had neither capability and the term itself is at odds with the latter.

If SpaceX can get Starship flying at the price they predict, it would be a game-changer. Presently that seems like a big 'if'.

It would pay to be the first nation with a Brilliant Pebbles installation, since such an installation could be used to deny any other nation the ability to create the same. Brilliant Pebbles isn't merely an anti-missile system; it could also be used to intercept rockets launching satellites, including the launch other BP systems. It's a winner-takes-all game.

If the strategic interests of America are not your own interests, all of this obviously seems very grim. If you think strategic defense is just a waste of money, then all of this is more of the same. But if you're the sort of person who thinks that billions of dollars spent on nuclear submarines is money well spent, then using Starship to launch a Brilliant Pebbles constellation is a no-brainer.

> In my mind, if someone has already gained access to my user on the server, which has sudo privileges, they are only a couple of steps away from be able to take control over the server anyways.

This seems like sound logic to me. If you have write permission to their bashrc, it's trivial to change their path to include a keylogging wrapper for sudo. The next time they use sudo, you have their password. If an attacker has gotten that far, a password on sudo seems like closing the barn doors after the horses already ran off.

> EDIT: I just want to see how many people died per capita in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth, why is that not shown anywhere?

Because that statistic makes the whole thing seem very mellow. Same thing as average life expectancy by year; the change from 2019 to 2020/21 is very slight.

Thankfully so, since "shouting fire in a theater" was an incredibly lame euphemism for telling people to dodge the draft.

> We should remember that the freedom of the press exists because a well informed population is necessary for a functioning democracy.

The text of the First Amendment does not contain this or any other justification for itself. And rightfully so I think; such a right does not require utilitarian justification.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

You can thank the CIA for justifying their suspicion of vaccination drives.

You can't send everybody home for two months, even if you give everybody two months of shelf stable food. Somebody needs to keep the utilities running. People still need fresh water to bath with, to wash their shit away. You might expect people to buy enough bottled water to drink for two months, but not enough to stay sanitary. And it's not just water; the power companies still need manpower to stay on, garbage still needs to be collected, plumbers still need to clear clogs and fix broken pipes. You clearly haven't given this idea of yours much serious consideration, so why should anybody else take it seriously?

When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place. And anecdotally, every last person I personally know that claims long covid is a person I already knew to be a hypochondriac.

I do believe some people will have lingering respiratory problems, as is the case for all viral respiratory illnesses. But I don't think there is much more to it than that, and I think most of the complaints come from the sort of people who always think they have the latest trendy affliction.