Comment by achow

To be fair, they also put Europe and Middle East in quotation marks

You'd think that. Here in America, the NSA has been intercepting and bugging servers for decades, and manufacturers have been suspiciously quiet about the whole affair.

Suffice to say, when enough pressure can be exerted by a government agency, OEMs are happy to keep their mouth shut.

NDTV is an Indian news site...

Thanks. I am usually not super pedantic but I've noticed some people using "mt" for meters recently. I immediately fall into confusion when the wrong symbols are used. Then go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if it is a cultural or regional thing.

I assume that you, as a company, need a special permit to manufacture lethal weapons or military products on EU. Either you have it, or you don't. And if you don't have and still do it, I understand that you are breaking a dozen of EU laws.

The EU now needs to do something about it, and do it fast. Or to pretend that nothing happened, surrender to Israel, create a dangerous legal precedent "for the cause" and send a clear message that EU manufacture laws are a joke: "All those security filters painfully raised around EU products worth zero and can be easily jumped over". This is a really bad message for all the EU makers.

A franchise of your brand also signed a contract to make your product. I assume that changing the functionality or specifications of your registered product is strictly forbidden in that contract. I bet that this move violated some laws on Taiwan also.

If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo I would be fuming and furious at this moment.

Israel not only pushed them into the middle of a war that is not their war, without their consent or knowledge; also destroyed the brand image and painted a target in the backs of each employee and reseller of Gold Apollo.

At this moment, nothing suggests that the Taiwan based company were part of this. They should apologize, clear things, and detach themselves from this PR mess as soon as possible.

I understand that from the Mossad point of view this can be a big success, but from the point of view of the companies that try to sell their legit products, this is an direct attack.

Doesn't matter. Hezbollah are subject to sanctions by the EU as a designated terrorist organization. Presumably, that applies to all companies operating within the EU.

Sanctions violations are very much a "do not pass go" style crime, and this looks like it was an entire batch that was delivered directly to Hezbollah.

> Were the pagers military grade

I don't mean to be "that guy", but "military grade" means nothing nowadays. It can mean anything from "made to exactly standards" to "made by the lowest bidder, and likely to fail the minute it's used".

Just normal pagers with 20g of high explosive inserted in to them. They found a way of remotely getting the battery to overheat with would make the thing go boom.

Toyota will definitely sue to death somebody --selling-- thousands of new Toyotas modified in mass to kill their drivers. If not, they would be sued massively instead, so is not something that they could just let pass.

If the owner wants later to trow their Toyota over a cliff is a different problem and not Toyota's business.

To me the content archived consulting page looks very much like something a large language model would generate. Impressive, but doesn't make any sense considering the size of this company. Probably good enough to fool Hezbollah anyway.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240401000000*/www.bacconsultin...

The timeline of web archive snapshots is strange. No real change or activity for years - then a flurry of changes in 2024.

And now there's a second set of explosions, this time using handheld radios.

I'm hopeful that this won't escalate, but I'm very anxious that it will.

One more thing: she posted Russian propaganda to her LinkedIn feed.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cristiana-b%C3%A0rsony-arcidi...

She also regularly reposts antivaxx posts.

Which does not really mesh with her supposed education level.

Weird.

There are lots of companies with questionable practices in Hungary. One scam I am aware of is companies that are registered in the names of homeless people whose sole function is to churn out receipts that other companies buy at fractions of their face value in order to run “clean” expenses through their books and effectively launder money.

Would not surprise me if this turned out to be something like that.

Am intermediary can be sued just for damaging products through insufficient, they can certainly be sued for adding defects on purpose. Especially lethal defects.

You are right in tha aspect that terrorism doesn't care about excuses (at least externally, it needs to justify its actions to its "follower base" though).

I have an intuition that the grandparent tried to express someting like:

Now Hezbollah has a motivation to attack Hungarian interest in the EU.

Which I'd simplify as something more concerning for me, as a Hungarian: Now Hazbollah has motivation to attack Hungarians.

Israel is the terrorist here

The terrorists didn't need an excuse to put bombs in pagers. The person you were responding was talking about the Hezbollah, though.

Or to really drive the point home, the only reason we give companies exclusive control over certain names (trademarks) is so that they can build a reputation. If companies are going to just license out the names to whoever gives them money anyway then we might as well get rid of trademarks entirely and let anybody produce crap knock off products without having to pay a trademark owner.

Ironically this appears to be because another company wanted to protect its trademark.

> In the United States, Tefal is marketed as T-fal. This is to comply with DuPont's objection that the name "Tefal" was too close to DuPont's trademark "Teflon". The T-fal brand is also used in Canada and Japan.

The alphabet T is pronounced "teh" in French. So insofar as the French company is concerned, T-fal sounds close enough to Tefal.

> This sort of thing could happen with any smartphone

The amount of intelligence services that could pull this off if you ordered iphones directly from apple is very very low.

Correct, but the country hosting those companies should. Of course since this is Israel, I doubt the EU is going to demand an answer.

CTC bought Paderno, a Prince Edward Island perennial, to juice out more brand value after they’re done sucking T-Fal dry.

It's worse than that.

Panerno, a high quality manufacturer of stainless steel cookware, using North American steel, was indeed bought by Canadian Tire.

Immediately after purchase, the factory was sold to a Chinese firm, who wanted to import crappy Chinese steel, but still label cookware "Made in Canada".

It is their ingress into the North American market.

And as Paderno's plant is gone, it means that Paderno of Canadian Tire is now made with Chinese steel, not North American steel, and built to lowest quality standards.

But of course it still says "Made in Canada".

Canadian Tire has boasted in earning reports that more than 60% of its profits now come from its own brands. Often like this, quality brands bought and turned into junk.

This is one pf the reasons why many jurisdictions in Canada have warranty laws that say the retailer is liable too.

A front yes. A front for who though? Was it a front for Hezbollah that got infiltrated or a front setup by Israel fit for purpose.

I have no sympathy for Hezbollah but empathy a plenty - I've been on that side of a security breech and step one involves tearing things apart; things that are the problem and invariably unless you've got ice water in your veins you'll tear apart things that are not the problem as well.

Working at an electronics retailer a few years ago, this was well-known (though news to me, when I started). They hid the fact that the company no longer manufactured their products, and/or that multiple companies were selling similar or even the same product (produced in the same factory, even).

It is trouble, though, since the entire point of a "brand" is to signal provenance in manufacturing, quality, etc. It's supposed to be a way to know something about the product (if nothing else, who to hold accountable when something goes wrong). If it doesn't, what's the point?

To make money, like with all the merchandising that happens with a popular movie. Any number of things are licensed with the owner of the IP having very limited involvement in it, like turning down certain types of licenses as bad for the brand but not getting into the weeds of manufacturing. It's not like if there was some branded Disney cell phone that Disney is going to inspect all the board-level components. I can't speak about this pager company other than to think they're glad for any business they could get, so would license the brand.

To prepare for lawsuits from families of the injured in what appears to be a supply chain attack maybe without the knowledge of their licensee in Budapest (BAC Consulting), and likely without their (Gold Apollo) knowledge. Deny and distance.

Possibly the pagers had to have a popular brand to "work as designed", and this brand was up for sale, but declares it won't admit this to the real customers.

Brands died as anything reliable from the consumer perspective when the Chinese bought all the dying brands in the 2000s.

The only cheap goods with maintained brands are things like McDonald's which have recurring relationship with consumers.

Few civilian brands would survive the scrutiny if every product they put their stickers on were required to be Mossad-proof.

Selling your own parts to be restamped as another brand is common though. Selling your brand to be stamped on someone else's parts is basically only useful to do this exact thing though.