His claim there did not necessarily imply rigged explosives, but supply chain attacks either for surveillance or assassination purposes.
And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.
But let's be honest here, this isn't civilian equipment that's been compromised. It's supply chain attacks where the buyer is manipulated into buying goods that they've tampered with, or re-engineered. They weren't pagers anyone could pick up at Radio Shack. (Everyone who got hit was a target, or a direct relative of a target.)
Or just standing next to someone in the line at the supermarket.
Also, lets be clear and admit that if your notion of "target" is "anyone close to a device I sold years ago", you're not the type of person that cares if the balled up paper made it to the trash can: so long as it left your hand you would be satisfied.
The pager operation has been one of the most targeted ones in history for its size. The ratio of civilian by Hezbollah member casualties was very low compared to other military operations or a war.
The perpetrators of pager attack had no way at all to know who would be closest to the pagers when they exploded, nor any way to know that the nominal owner of a particular pager were a combatant in the first place.
So the perpetrators did not know they would actually hurt a lawful target, they just hoped it might.
Oh yeah, just random chance that the Hezbollah combatants would have their military pagers close to them rather than with some random civilian. What an incredible coincidence!
Go get some life. I believe Hitler had the same mentality. Reducing casualty. He asked everyone to wear their stars if they had had circumcision and targeted them systematically. He could have bombed them all but decided to be more deliberate. Yes yes, flipping the script is antisemitism. Of course it is.
Completely bizarre how you are equating killing Hezbollah combatants (a terrorist group known for indiscriminately firing tens of thousands of rockets targeting civilians) with the Nazis exterminating millions of (obviously peaceful) Jewish people simply for being Jews.
You keep repeating than an operation, functionally equivalent to poisoning the water in an area you have seen combatants, is "targeted". It simply isn't, and you are just lying to yourself to feel better about the war crimes you support.
A water source the entire population of an area relies upon is in no way the same as a specific, small organization's private means of communication that it distributed to its members.
Or are you under the impression Israel simply loaded a Lebanese RadioShack with explosive pagers and hoped Hezbollah would be the ones buying them? You could argue that it was not discriminate because there were pagers distributed to civilian Hezbollah members, who may not have been valid targets, but that is not the same argument.
Every bit of reporting on it tries heart-string tugging, just to quietly reveal one of the unintended targets picked up the pager to bring it to a Hezbollah member father, uncle, or brother.
Wait but all the Israeli reporting is the same. Flipping the script, how many military age abled men/women were taken as prisoners? I’d argue y’all over obsess on the few elderly/young ones they took. They weren’t targeted, they just happened to be the grandmothers, sons, nephews of IDF reserve/active members. This sounds good dum dum?
How does one accidentally kidnap someone like Kfir Bibas? A kidnapper has to be physically present, at which point it's rather obvious that a baby is not a soldier.
I bet they feared for his life. Leaving a kid there could have meant death for him/her. Knowing the kind of weird cultist behaviors certain Israeli groups exhibit. Not to talk about fratricide. ;) certainly better than distributing fentanyl laced diapers. A kid could have worn those
I'm confused: you acknowledge the possibility that there could be non-valid targets in Hezbollah, yet you cannot see parallels to the case of an attack against a water supply?
The one distinction I can see you raise is about the spatial concentration of the affected persons, but I don't see how this essential to the point.
You are of course free to put your delineations such that the matter of concentration results in two different arguments, but frankly I think you should just reject the use of analogies altogether and save everyone else a lot of grief.
I do not argue that civilian members of Hezbollah as a political movement are unacceptable targets, I simply acknowledge that perspective exists.
And the location of the target is entirely the point when the alternative to the pager attack is a JDAM, an attack with greater collateral damage, but still a valid target. Imagine instead of an explosive charge, these pagers were somehow phoning home and providing location data that Israel could use to perform airstrikes. Based on that intel, those air strikes would be entirely legitimate, and they would include far more collateral damage than the charge in the pager.
An attack on the water supply is indiscriminate. A water supply poisoning makes no attempt at differentiating between the targets and the civilian population.
By your own definition that same civilian population is 1) actively sponsoring genocide through their vote and their taxes, 2) actively supporting it through military service. Aren’t Israelis using the same language for Palestinian these days?
Btw, y’all called the old Mandela terrorist too. No one cares who you call terrorist.
Also, it's interesting you think the comment about Hitler being more careful in his targeting than the IDF is persuasive enough you need to reply to it.
Unfortunately there is an unimaginable amount of ignorance on the internet so I think it's good to be very explicit about even the most basic things. I would also reply if it were some other insane comment saying that e.g. the Holocaust didn't happen or that "Hitler was right".
Now can you be explicit about what you are implying? You are implying that I found the comment persuasive. If I chastised some absurd comment saying that the Holocaust didn't happened or that "Hitler was right", would you say that implies I actually think those things are true?
I did not imply anything, I stated outright what I meant to say.
However, to clarify further I will say that your reply seems to indicate you confuse the property of being "persuasive" with the state of being "persuaded"
>And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.
Except we don't know. "virtually every potential theater" is intentionally very vague language that could mean anything.
They weren't flagged because they went into Lebanon which has very little import security, and because it was a supply chain attack.
The batteries were swapped for a combination battery / explosive charge. The follow-up attack where Hezbollah moved to using walkie-talkies that were also rigged to explode was the real shocker, though.
Canada loses a lot of its top talent every year to the US, mostly because of the TN visa. Canadian talent leaves Canada every year, and less investment is not going to help.
This is made worse by Canadian investment culture being very conservative, and not loving startups in general.
Cloudflare is right. But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.
In this case, hitting a massive number of small sites, which aren't engaged in piracy, to protect a few large entities from some other small piracy sites. It's what's happening in both Italy and Spain.
> But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.
It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit) is mentioned, people find a way of pinning it on the European Union. The article has literally nothing to do with EU, and everything to do with individual European countries, yet you somehow found a way of blaming EU for it :)
Sincerely, Spanish internet user who gets blocked from half the internet every time a semi-popular football match is played in this country.
I was actually like 30 years old when I realized "EU" meant "European Union" and wasn't a 2 letter abbreviation for the continent of Europe. In the US, we call states by their two letter abbreviations (IL, NY, CA, etc), often call countries by 2 letter abbreviations too (depends on the country, but JP, AR, CR come to mind as common examples), so it's a pretty natural assumption to think of 'EU' as 'all of the continent Europe, independent of whether they participate in the governing body known as the European Union'
If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.
Yeah, similarly, growing up as a European, I thought "America" was "the USA", but turns out it's the entire continent, and even "North America" isn't just the US, but the two neighbors too! I don't think it's too bad to be confused about something, we can't be expected to know it all, every time. We learn and move past it :)
> If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.
Not sure even this makes sense, it's not something that is happening Europe wide, and it seems like there is only two countries so far that been engaging in this, with another one thinking about it. For something to be a "pretty typical European play" I'd probably say it has to have happened more times than "twice".
I think that might be popular and common in the US, but outside the US and in the rest of the world, particularly in Ibero-America, "America" is the entire of South, Central and North America together. But again, what you say seem to be true inside the US, so understandable that many understand it as such.
I don't think anyone (outside the US at least) use "The Americas" in daily language, while "America" certainly is.
Here in Asia, most people with whom I talk are more likely to call the USA "America" rather than the "United States".
Probably because of its closer association with the adjective "American".
If someone with limited English asks where I'm from, they're more likely to understand if I say "America" than "United States". And no one has ever asked "oh but which country in America?".
> If someone with limited English asks where I'm from, they're more likely to understand if I say "America" than "United States". And no one has ever asked "oh but which country in America?".
That's interesting! In my experience, meeting people from the US outside of the US mostly, when you ask where they are from, they tend to always say the city or the state, but never actually specify either "United States" or "America". If you don't happen to know that that state/city is in the US, and they never specified the country, you're usually safe to assume they're from the US :)
> It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit)
Living in the US, I've noticed many Americans don't really make distinctions like that. They see "EU" as a kind of shorthand for "Europe", or something along those lines. Even the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU doesn't affect this - it's still part of what Americans think of as "the EU".
Probably because most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time when the EU was, comparative to today, insignificant in # of countries, population, GDP, and general importance, and so very little talked about in either news or text books compared to Europe as an economic and political block. And since Europe was abbreviated 'Eur' well, easy to see how dropping the 'r' hasn't resulted in universal US intuition that it's not the same thing. In general though it does seem pretty understandable to think something calling itself "The European Union" is comprised of just about all of Europe. Especially back with the expanded in '93 countries it was a little presumptuous at only a small fraction of the continent getting together and calling itself that? I do remember learning something about it in school at the time, under the EEC name.
Want to avoid confusion? Call it something like "United Nations", 'UN'. Confusion solved, Americans happy, call off the tariffs, peace, etc.
That's a lot of justification for what ultimately just amounts to ignorance of the outside world.
It's certainly not the case that "most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time..." The EU exceeded $3 trillion in GDP by 1980. The original EU countries included Germany, France, and Italy, so were hardly insignificant.
You don't seem aware that the "EU", in 1980, didn't exist, nor did you do the sums on the ages of the population in school by the time it did exist to realize that yes, by typical textbook replacement timelines in schools, something like the existence of the EU is unlikely to have been in the textbooks during the school days of most people over the age of 30.
In the United States, "North America" and "South America" are generally treated as separate continents, so therefore as a whole are called "the Americas". This frees up the singular "America" to refer to the US without too much risk of ambiguity. My understanding is that in some places, especially non-English speaking, is that North and South America are treated as a single continent called "America", which adds ambiguity.
People often get confused by divisions like this because they feel like they should be real in an objective sense, but continents are almost entirely social constructs. (There is a North American tectonic plate, and that's real, but it doesn't quite line up with the continent)
Be that as it may, the thing that sounds odd (and a bit arrogant) to most "outsiders" is using the name of a whole continent for a single country and its citizens. I (from Europe) would definitely consider a Canadian, Mexican or Columbian citizen as an "American" too, not only a citizen of the United States. BTW, I'm really curious what Trump thinks the "America" in his "Gulf of America" stands for - the whole continent or only the US?
Trump's definitely referring to the United States with his pointless renaming attempt because it's singular and not plural, but I'd be careful accusing him of thinking about anything. I doubt he does that very often.
I guess the Organization of American States exists. But usually it's pretty unambiguous which sense is being used; like, I guess you could call Mark Carney an American head of government but it's basically just being obtuse, unless it was in the context of, say, a meeting of Carney with other heads of government in the hemisphere, and then it'd be unambiguous what was meant.
Even "United States of America" is not unambiguous in the most pathological case; Mexico is also a country consisting of united states existing in the Americas.
US education covers that much pretty well. Just not so much the geography of specific countries that belong to south america, europe, asia, and africa.
That would be the same grind to a halt you'd get on just about anyone's face when they have a random stranger try to explain something obvious in a rude and condescending way. The inside voice goes something like: "Do I walk by, is this person sane, or maybe say something equally condescending like 'Hey buddy, with the bombs we have it will be called whatever we want.'"
> Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.
I assume you must be American. I always find it funny that there is that US belief that Europe is "old-fashioned" with "old tech" and "old progress". I never encountered anyone yet to tell me what progress wasn't in Europe that was in the US.
I actually think this is a bit backward, with US lack of transportation funding, more people struggling with poverty, backward ecological measures, and missing health care with lower life expectancy.
This is like suggesting the policy of the United States is set by "just a panel of less than 10 judges" and not the Federal government. Not only is SCOTUS part of the US government, it may actually be the most powerful part of the Federal government
judges are giving orders based on the law/policy of the country. so if a judge gives a bad order, then the cause is a bad policy/law, and the fix is not to replace the judge, but to change the law.
Apologies for the PDF link. The opinion is amusing, and has some benefits. If it's appealed and this decisions is upheld, the blast zone around the CFAA will be diminished.
The key point is rather simple.
> In doing so, we hold for the first time that, (a) by its text and purpose, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030, does not turn these workplace-policy infractions into federal crimes, and (b) passwords that protect proprietary business information are not themselves trade secrets under federal or Pennsylvania law.
Footnote 2 is also amusing: "To the dismay of IT professionals everywhere, the document was titled "My Passwords.xlsx." App. 2770"
> Even small amounts over time (re: decades) will have adverse effects.
If the adverse effects happen decades after you'll statistically be deceased I'm not sure it's fair to say there's no safe level of exposure.
It's not at the expense of consumers and the environment. It could make much of what consumers buy prohibitively expensive, for potentially no benefit.
The pair of animations on the page are beautifully done, not just technically but aesthetically as well. If the rest of the book is like that I'll be getting a copy.
Prior to expiry would suggest the encryption is broken from the start.
Although I do disagree on the reasonable/unreasonable angle, because I don't tend to analogize the contents of your phone to the contents of your safe, but rather to the contents of your mind.
Well I get that a significant part of our lives is wrapped up in our phones nowadays, but I still try to preserve a safe haven between my ears...mostly...
And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.
But let's be honest here, this isn't civilian equipment that's been compromised. It's supply chain attacks where the buyer is manipulated into buying goods that they've tampered with, or re-engineered. They weren't pagers anyone could pick up at Radio Shack. (Everyone who got hit was a target, or a direct relative of a target.)
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