Comment by mrtksn

Comment by mrtksn 2 days ago

126 replies

Ha, maybe this will be the turning point for international corporations becoming national-only? Or maybe make the big brands like Apple/Samsung the only trusted device manufacturers and completely wipe out the small ones?

No iPhones exploded so far but I wouldn't be surprised if the paranoia takes over everywhere and local supply chains and local producers become a thing. "Foreign social media platforms" was already a concern but this is "foreign hardware is booby trapped as you can see". Another nail for the globalized world, united humanity, citizens of the world etc. If a big brand has a supply chain is infiltrated too, then its all over.

Also, are those people blind? Don't they see that booby trapping large number of devices rhymes with poisoning the well? It wouldn't help with antisemitism but that's another discussion.

DevX101 2 days ago

If they have the capacity to intercept the supply chain, they almost certainly have been implanting listening devices in electronics of all sorts. If you're not in Hezbollah or Hamas you probably don't need to worry about getting blown up by your phone, but if you've got a large platform and been very critical of Israel, it wouldn't be a huge stretch to imagine that you might get personally targeted by communication interception.

  • nebula8804 20 hours ago

    Israel maintains public lists of people criticizing Israel (if you publicly apologize to them and renounce your views you can be removed) so I wouldn't be surprised that they are also maintaining a large network of interception. Maybe even using multiple avenues to collect data like buying from data brokers.

    [1]:https://canarymission.org/

  • VertanaNinjai 2 days ago

    Not so sure you need anything to do with Hezbollah to be afraid. One example of many.

    https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/israel-opt-ne...

    • negativeonehalf 2 days ago

      OK, also don't stand near Hamas fighters when they flagrantly violate international law and fight from designated humanitarian zones.

      (Obviously, voting in Hamas was a huge mistake, but Palestinians probably didn't expect Hamas to make that the last election. Unfortunately, you only need to elect a totalitarian government once.)

  • [removed] 2 days ago
    [deleted]
tamimio 2 days ago

I think the results of these that people or even businesses let alone governments will double check anything that was manufactured by their allies, will probably boost the Chinese and Korean markets in the future.

creer 17 hours ago

> make the big brands like Apple/Samsung the only trusted device manufacturers and completely wipe out the small ones?

It's not a question of manufacturing but one of intercepting devices in the transit / shipping network. The brands most likely have nothing to do with it except allowing repair manuals to fall into the wrong hands - which they can't prevent even if they wanted to.

dmicah 2 days ago

I think the variety of consumer electronics is too large to be limited to only a few large manufacturers.

  • miki123211 2 days ago

    I'm pretty sure you could run an entire household on nothing but Samsung at this point.

    Phone? Check. Watch? Check. TV? check. Washer? Dryer? Fridge? Dishwasher? All there. Laptop? Well, they at least used to make those, not sure if they still do.

    • kotaKat 2 days ago

      "Someday you will drive your Sony to the sony to pick up some more Sony"

      https://everything2.com/title/Someday+you+will+drive+your+So...

      • thomastjeffery 2 days ago

        Why wait? Why drive, even?

        Today, you can use an Amazon smart speaker to interface (via an Amazon-produced, Amazon-cloud-hosted voice-command interface) with the Amazon web store to buy an ebook published by Amazon, for you to read on an Amazon tablet, that you bought from the same Amazon web store, that was delivered by Amazon, from an Amazon fulfillment warehouse to your front door.

        • miki123211 a day ago

          And soon, that book will be written by an Amazon-owned AI

    • whazor 2 days ago

      Why limit yourself to only electronics? You can study at Samsung university, go to the amusement park of Samsung, take the Samsung metro, work at Samsung factories while living in a Samsung apartment, if you get sick you could go to the Samsung medical centre.

    • cozzyd 2 days ago

      they make chromebooks, at least...

Zironic 2 days ago

Yeah, I can't say I'm a big fan of this massive scale booby trapping devices all over civilian society and I suspect most nation stats are not very happy about this either. The EU is probably not going to be happy at all about Israel using an EU flagged company to do it either.

This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

  • mrtksn 2 days ago

    Exactly it’s one thing to target operatives it’s another thing to target large number of people when they’re among the civilians.

    Phone exploding in a market, doesn’t make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant.

    With that logic the Hamas terrorist attack last year isn’t a terrorist attack because many of the victims served in the IDF, which illegally occupies their territory.

    This is getting ridiculous. Israel will loose the last drops of good will, which is a shame considering how much they achieved to do on that barely habitable piece of land. It breaks my heart.

    • tptacek 2 days ago

      Under International Humanitarian Law it absolutely does make it OK if the owner of the phone is a militant. This is black letter Law of Armed Combat.

      • wut42 2 days ago

        No!

        >Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.

        Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch

        https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...

      • tsimionescu 2 days ago

        Attacking millitatns while they are in the middle of civilians, especially when they are not doing that as part of some hostage/human shield operation, is not OK.

      • dredmorbius 2 days ago

        For those unfamiliar with terms:

        "Black Letter Law":

        In common law legal systems, black-letter law refers to well-established legal rules that are no longer subject to reasonable dispute.[1] Black-letter law can be contrasted with legal theory or unsettled legal issues.

        <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-letter_law>

        Searching for black letter and combat turns up:

        International Institute of Humanitarian Law: The Manual on the Law of Non-International Armed Conflict With Commentary (2006)

        Among definitions:

        For the purposes of this Manual, fighters are members of armed forces and dissident armed forces or other organized armed groups, or taking an active (direct) part in hostilities.

        (p. 4)

        Civilians are all those who are not fighters.

        (p. 5)

        Military objectives are objects which by their nature, location, purpose, or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture, or neutralisation, in the circumstances at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

        (p. 5)

        <https://www.humanrightsvoices.org/assets/attachments/documen...>

        (I'll note that one of the co-authors is affiliated with Tel Aviv University in Israel, though others do not appear to be Israeli.)

        The US DoD publishes a law of war manual, last updated in 2023:

        <https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD...>

      • mrtksn 2 days ago

        Most people are not judges in the international court of justice. The legal technicalities are irrelevant.

      • dtornabene 2 days ago

        Were the children militants? What about hospital staff? And, how do you know who these people are? You don't, but you're all over this thread running cover for a terrorist attack. I've already seen plenty of reporting that many of these targeted people were not, in fact, militants, but simply political members of Hezbollah. Would you be running the same cover if Hezbollah, or Iran had targeted Knesset staff? Disgusting stuff man, truly odious.

  • showerst 2 days ago

    > This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

    Is it? If your threat model includes Mossad (or really any nation state) then you shouldn't have trusted those devices in the first place. Even if you didn't have "tiny explosives" on your bingo card, certainly bugs (hardware or software) should've been on there.

    Given that those pagers are commonly used by doctors and none of them have been reported to explode, I think we can guess that it was targeted to the batches delivered directly to Hezbollah.

    • Zironic 2 days ago

      For instance, when Apollo Gold lisenced their pagers to a little known hungarian company, having their brand used as a bomb delivery device in the middle-east was not something they would have had on their list of potential brand risks.

      So now companies engaged in international business not only have to consider exposure to the usual fraud, but also if their counterpart is actively malicious.

      It's also likely going to make nation states start thinking about supply chains they maybe didn't before. How do you know someone didn't put explosives in your mice, keyboards, monitors, headsets and various other things that were probably manufactured in china?

    • ozfive 2 days ago

      There were four ambulance workers and two children in the 12 dead.

  • steventhedev 2 days ago

    I can imagine the EU is far more interested in an EU flagged company doing business with Hezbollah who are a designated terrorist organization and subject to sanctions.

    If there's one thing you learn quick in fintech - it's you absolutely do not fuck with sanctions.

    • Zironic 2 days ago

      If it was a real company that would be the case. However from what I've read the journalists looking into BAC Consulting has found it to be a company in name only with no actual offices or hungarian employees.

      It makes me slightly curious which company Israel convinced to actually produce these pagers and radios.

      • qubitcoder 2 days ago

        From the BBC [1].

        BBC Verify has accessed BAC’s company records, which reveal it was first incorporated in 2022 and has a single shareholder. It is registered to a building in Budapest's 14th district.

        As well as BAC, a further 13 companies and one person are registered at the same building.

        However, our search of a financial information database does not reveal that BAC has any connections to other companies or people.

        The same database shows no trading information about BAC. For example, there are no records of any shipments between it and any other firms.

        However, BAC's website, which is now inaccessible, previously said it was scaling up its business in Asia, and had a goal to "develop international technology co-operation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products".

        The website listed one person as BAC’s chief executive and founder - Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono - and does not appear to mention other employees.

        [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cew12r5qe1ro

  • tptacek 2 days ago

    These aren't civilian devices.

    • gruez 2 days ago

      The claim isn't that they're "civilian devices", it's that they're "devices all over civilian society". That's relevant because bobby trapping them is liable to cause casualties.

      • Zironic 2 days ago

        It's like cluster bombs and landmines. You have no idea where all these things are. You have no idea how many of them exploded and which didn't and it's extremely hard to clean up the duds.

        • mrguyorama 2 days ago

          And neither are against the laws of war. The US has decided to reduce their usage, but Russia uses air deployed landmines with high dud rates and it is not a war crime.

      • loeg 2 days ago

        Notably, these are not booby traps. (The defining feature of booby traps is that they are triggered by the victim.)

      • exe34 2 days ago

        this was a special shipment created for the terrorists. this isn't just putting a bomb into every pager.

    • tamimio 2 days ago

      Says who? Pagers are used by doctors and icom are used by pretty much anyone who needs that communication, like construction workers in a site or first responders.

      • loeg 2 days ago

        Not the ones distributed to Hezbollah.

      • petre 2 days ago

        Being linked to Hezbollah carries certain occupational risks.

  • caeril 2 days ago

    > The EU is probably not going to be happy

    Happiness is irrelevant, especially when it comes to geopolitics.

    In the US, criticism of Israel is antagonistic to our Judeo-Christian values.

    In the EU, criticism of Israel is tantamount to the rise of a Fourth Reich.

    Germany, in particular, is scared shitless of this accusation, and will accept any and all actions by Israel. This is a country who can do no wrong, and will get away with whatever they feel like.

    > This is going to create a lot of distrust in the international supply chain.

    This reminds me of people who were legitimately shocked to learn about the Snowden disclosures. If you don't already know the supply chain is thoroughly poisoned, and has been for decades, there is no helping you.

kjkjadksj 19 hours ago

Nothing new even happened. Agencies like CIA and NSA are able to intercept equipment and replace with bugged equipment with no change to ship time to you already. Most military or intelligence services are aware of this possibility and take steps to ensure their hardware is not compromised. I guess hezzbolah was obviously not, likewise with the internet community also surprised by this.

exe34 2 days ago

> Don't they see that booby trapping large number of devices rhymes with poisoning the well? It wouldn't help with antisemitism but that's another discussion.

could you expand on what you mean here? I don't understand either the argument or the conclusion. thanks!

  • mrtksn 2 days ago

    Well poisoning is an antisemitic talking point, its used as an excuse to target Jewish people by claiming that Jews are secretly poisoning the well from who their people during water.

    • xenospn 2 days ago

      I’ve never heard that phrase before. Did you come up with it?

      • mrtksn 2 days ago

        Obviously, otherwise you would have heard of it.

      • meepmorp 2 days ago

        Jews poisoning wells was a common antisemitic accusation for centuries (and still - Mahmoud Abbas made a very similar, unsubstantiated claim in 2016) Also, accusations of murdering Christian babies to make matzo, generally worshiping the devil and desecrating communion hosts, etc.

        • exe34 a day ago

          what I didn't get was how the poster above was trying to make it sound like a bad thing ("don't they see") - making the enemy of Western values swear off Western infidel technology a perfect well to poison in my opinion.