montblanc

Got it and we don't even mention Uganda in all of this. Makes sense.

no military danger aprart from Russia and China I agree. And perhaps Iran/Turkey etc. Other than that the EU is super secure.

> I believe the purpose of keeping Israel there

Here's part of the problem. Does it make sense to you Israel just disappears? Sounds like it from what you're saying. Isn't it weird though - how many nation states do you think should vanish?

> but because of the human rights/colonialism problems

If Western societies really wanted the conflict to dissolve they wouldn't keep encouraging the Palestinians to "return" to their home (75 years after). Western societies keep the conflict alive. So it makes me think human rights issues isn't really the thing here.

Ah sorry my bad

You do realize it was Ugandans who actually ordered the hack yes?

I don't know much about chess but Magnus throwing away his queen like that (traded his queen + rook for two rooks), was that a common thing to do? Looked outrageous to me but what do I know.

That still doesn't mean they knew about this. How would they even know it were American phones? Its very possible it were some IPhone with a Ugandan sim card. How do you know who's using it - do the Ugandans tell you? It's a very real possibility NSO servers simply show some Ugandan number. I have no more knowledge on this than anyone here but I don't find it realistic NSO would take this chance.

It being Israeli is definitely a big part of why this story is so huge. Why do you think it's making huge headlines then - what's your theory? The fact that 8 American diplomats got their phones hacked?

U.S drones and F-15s don't have software?

The U.S sells super sophisticated weapons such as attack drones, F-15s or nuclear submarines. The tech behind these things is probably super interesting and there's a lot of software involved. If you look at the comments here, around 90% of them don't care about the tech at all but focus on bashing Israel. This isn't a tech story.

Uganda is not an American enemy.

I'm not attacking NATO. I'm saying the U.S is subsidizing Europe's defense in the trillions (if we count since WW2 end). It could be beneficial to the U.S, or not. I'm only saying U.S aid to Israel is not unique and is peanuts compared to the NATO subsidy. People here like saying they are super focused on Israel because of the 3 billion annual subsidy the U.S gives to Israel. I call bullshit on that.

The intervention in Syria? That's a military operation done by the U.S for Israel? How did you come up with that? If there's no Israel tomorrow the entire region is still messed up with possibly tens of millions of new refugees flooding Europe. It's not all about Israel.

You are being a demagogue here. It's 8 phones that were hacked, by someone in Uganda - a friendly country to the U.S, with NSO probably not knowing and Israel as a state definitely not knowing. Was any of the 8 Americans harmed physically btw?

I don't care if it's unwelcome to you...I call it as I see it and you're not doing a great job convincing me otherwise.

I find it very unlikely they knew about state department phones. Why bring up M4 rifles all the time? That's not how the U.S or any other arms seller makes money at all. The big money comes from planes, drones, etc. 350 billion worth over 10 years just to Saudi Arabia alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_States%E2%80%93Sau....

> Only if you count general American military spending

Of course I do. Europe has no real army. France kinda has an army and the U.K got out. If America didn't provide a military umbrella Europe would need to actually build a real army (Europe's contributions to NATO are pitiful). How much would it cost the Europeans to do that? Going back since WW2 that's easily in the trillions.

Attacks Americans? Come on now, don't go overboard sir.

The U.S basically protects the whole of Europe by subsidizing NATO. It's probably in the trillions. Sorry but Trump had a point there. What it gives Israel is peanuts compared to that. Without U.S support to Europe who knows what happens, maybe the Russians and Chinese start looking at Europe as easy prey to pick on. Also the obsession with Israel isn't a uniquely American thing, it's the same in France and Canada and Germany and basically any Western country.

What is your definition of rogue states? The U.S sells weapons to the Saudis in hundreds of billions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_States%E2%80%93Sau....

So I should believe the U.S thinks it's OK to sell F-15 planes but not OK to sell software? I'm gonna assume yes, there are probably other players in cyber warfare who sell to these countries, probably also the U.S.

> unless you consider the existence of a Jewish state within the 1948 armistice lines a "settler colony" (which admittedly some do).

I'm pretty sure OP means exactly that. In fact there are very few progressive leftists who haven't adopted this line of thinking.

What do you mean by settler colony and what are you suggesting exactly - Israel should dismantle itself and send away its citizens to whoever will be willing to take them?

> However Haaretz routinely publishes opinions against the editorial line

NYT also has Bret Stephens , up until recently Bari Weiss and I assume there are a few more centrists? Haaretz tries to challenge its readers with opinions from the other spectrum I'd agree with that. But still, every Israel knows it's a left wing and recently a borderline anti Zionist newspaper ( I don't think Haaretz themselves will dispute this. Their writers acknowledge anti Zionism repeatedly). The fact it has an anti Zionist line, which basically goes against the idea of the country itself, makes it a very niche product. Also let's not forget the left is now in power in the U.S, and even on a bad day it gets almost 50% of the vote. In Israel what Haaretz would call left is 5%-10% of the votes (Meretz and thats pretty much it).

Israel isn't criticized on mainstream news outlets? Lol

It has many tech companies in general, way more than its relative size.

stripclubs? Edit: OK yes there were a bunch of stripclubs lol

I was only saying that tracking adjacent cellphones to find possible Covid carriers is low-tech. It's something that has been done since the 90s and Israel is definitely not some pioneer in the field. And it has not much to do with terrorism.

> Network operators don't just pass along their complete cell tower logs to the authorities

They do under a judge's order, a lot of murder cases or other heavy crime cases are solved that way. The data is collected probably for these reasons or other emergencies. It's possible that Israel is being more aggressive in using these measures but the ability to do this is trivial and I'm pretty sure the data is there in most countries. I don't know how much other countries use these ability though for Covid purposes though, it could be that they hold privacy as a higher value than tracking infected covid people.

mostly this. The "counter terrorism" is a bit of a click-bait. There's no NSA type surveillance with sophisticated machine learning algorithms going on (these are unneedded), its simple tools any police department in any modern country has and uses.

Edit: I meant to say it's the first I have finished (which will happen soon). I'm not saying there aren't other worthy technical books out there I'm sure there's plenty.

Yeah this is probably correct. Still, on some rare occasions it's so hard to get into a topic that if there's a good book I would give it a try. For example: I'm interested in Ruby internals. The codebase is very very complicated and I have no background in interpreters; in that case Ruby Under a Microscope is a life safer. I would say the same if I was looking to get into Linux kernel development.

But in general - if you are just trying to become a better software developer (e.g write clean, well tested code) you are absolutely right no book will get you there, hard work will.