YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I think lots of it has to do with how well the hasbara covers up the scandals from the wider publics perception, combined with the cultural bandwagon of considering them an ally even when their repeated actions say otherwise.

edit: also the idea that they have such good tech and its a pragmatic decision ignores the history of how and who they got it from and the intentions for it. I say this as someone who worked directly with Mellanox for example, before aquisition by Nvidia... I always thought kernel level shims for networking stacks from an Israeli company was dangerous... but the speeds!!!

RTB (real-time bidding) does not incentivise publishers to care about what ads are actually being shown to individual users, so long as CPM is maximised.

The whole point of an influence op is to find a bunch of useful idiots to provide a large multiplicative factor.

And that's the problem with arguing that something is an influence op, because it is going to be mostly genuine people by the time it gets to you, even though you're not wrong.

I'm reminded of the ending of the 2008 film Hancock in which Hancock defaced the moon with a corporate logo. But it was okay because it was "for a good cause".

The ad-tech network probably does make it easier, because any page that includes their ad network could deliver the malicious ad.

Why do you think that is?

lol downvotes

...are also widely considered bad actors. Yet, it isn't "islamophobia" when you criticize Iran or "anti-Orthodox" when you call Russia to account.

Curiously, however, when you similarly criticize the actions of this specific Israeli government and its leaders, you are slandered with the term "antisemite" and there are orgs that exist to doxx you and get you fired from your job.

Isn't that weird?

Thankfully, in many such cases, we can call the skyman to rescue:

  What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this—go and study it!

> The same reason why many great tech companies originate from Israel. That's why Nvidia is the largest private employer in Israel. Why Apple's CTO is from Israel.

You never said what the reason for that is. Their society doesn't seem more tech-oriented than comparable countries. Their universities are OK, but not the best in the world. So what in their society caused this?

wait - what's the reason, though? i don't understand what you're trying to say.

> That's why Nvidia is the largest private employer in Israel. Why Apple's CTO is from Israel.

you cite two american companies with presence in Israel to defend your claim that "many great tech companies originate from Israel".

> is not about the companies and more about you and how you view Israel

your entire response is predicated on your view of Israel but you haven't explained what your view actually is or what it's based on.

what a sad take.

If you put out a fire how many are you allowed to set while people applaud selectively?

I don’t think they’re striking a good balance between how invasive they are compared to the real results they deliver.

In addition Israel is an apartheid state with many undemocratic features:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/66a134337e960f229da81...

  A Discover-Tech ad impression does not in and of itself confirm targeting or infection with spyware.

Exploding pagers. Israel literally killed people with consumer tech.

They use this software to find and kill people. Which they then publicly brag about. How much more hostile do you want to be?

We all end up running closed source code somewhere

If you do you'll be much better off avoiding Israeli tech

As a rule if you boycott everything Israeli it'll be smarter, more ethical, and safer

Israel has openly and publicly threatened western politicians and citizens that don't aid their agenda however, many times. Like Russia, they have also shot down commercial airliners.

Unlike Russia, they have killed American sailors whilst directly attacking American naval assets.

Also, meta discussion about down votes is against him policy, yet magically you're exempt, typical of **

Israel being a (disfunctional and rather illiberal at this point) democracy, means it's much better for it's own citizens (excluding Arabs ofc), but says nothing about the people outside. Same for the US BTW.

At this point, I don’t agree. I’m an immigrant living in the US currently. From an infosec and real-world consequences perspective, I have much less reason to fear what the Chinese government or corporations could do with my information than what either the current US government or its major tech corporations might do.

> Israel still have the reputation of being part of the ‘free world’ in the collective mind.

That collective mind is cognitively challenged and extremely ignorant, but it doesn’t mean I have to be.

seems to me like lots of people are wary of ever criticizing or changing their mind about Israel, because their population once was the target of arguably the most heinous genocide in history, so far, which i'm of course very sorry for. must've caused some heavy, multi-generational trauma, other than that i can't explain why they're acting the way they do. don't make the mistake of translating official government statements or looking at population surveys, truly horrific, barbaric stuff. but of course the only terrorists in all of this are their neighbors which they keep in open-air prisons they at this point have bombed to rubble.

If I were engaged in anything hostile to Israel I utterly would not trust Israeli stuff. But Israel is normally quite careful about target selection, if I was not engaged in anything hostile to Israel I would expect anything they slip in to be secure and to not do any harm beyond it's existence. A scene from Lebanon not too long ago makes it very clear: A whole bunch of people milling about, setting up for selfies and the like--then we see the building behind destroyed by an airstrike. Clearly all those people around knew the building was going to be destroyed and they trusted Israeli accuracy enough to be standing not too far from where the bomb would land.

China, though, I would utterly not trust target selection or security against misuse.

Sure it did. The content coming from elsewhere doesn’t change their decision to include it when the user loads their page.

It just makes the decision wildly important.

This is no different than the “I’m too big, can’t tell what my subsidiaries are doing!” wink

Pay attention, do due diligence to do things correctly, or don’t do them.

It shouldn't fall on the person just going to a website to track down the vendors and third parties the website contracts with.

The ad platform that allows malware to be served to anyone is at fault.

As is the individual website that has selected to allow a 3rd party's code to be delivered to your machine without controlling that risk, often for very silly reasons.

In that one incident, they killed and injured more than double the number killed and injured by Al Qaeda in the attack on the USS Cole.

But yeah the country under an eternal international microscope is the one “getting away with it.”

2. Israel is embedded in US politics. So US government is allowed to purchase this from Israeli contractors but I doubt they would be allowed to purchase sensitive stuff like from a neutral country like UAE.

So, the US is the customer and also protects Israel so Israel has built an entire industry around it.

China doesn't have large sanctions because it plays a key role in the economy, but the US had massive regime change intelligence operations against them in the 90s, but they failed and were dismantled.

But good on you for recognizing that we have a pattern of this kind of thing, even if you've stopped just short of noticing that it's a problem.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-plummets-to-worst-ever-...

Yes, orthodox jews are a significant part of the population (~1.4 million in 2025 [1]), and I wouldn't go there looking for modern ideas like women's rights, but go a couple km in any direction and you'd find completely different people, living modern lives just like in the rest of the western world. Schools, research universities (Tel Aviv University, Waitzmann Institue of Science, Technion), tech companies, startups, makerspaces, and many more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haredi_Judaism

As an atheist Jew, it's weird to me as well...

> stay "indoors" on, I think it was, the Shabbat

Can't say I'm familiar with that one. What I'm generally familiar with is that you're not allowed to "work" on Shabbat, and the definition of work is extremely broad. For example, lighting a fire is considered work, turning a light switch on creates a tiny spark between the contacts, that counts as fire, so it's work.

This extends to pretty much every electrical device, so for those who observe Shabbat, using a computer or phone, turning the AC on or off, is all disallowed.

As a result there are many workarounds as you've described, timers, non-Jews (though you can't ask directly! You can say "it's hot in here", but not "Please turn the AC on"), fridges without a light bulb inside, and more.

> they do this with all things, from a young age.

Religious families do, to varying degrees. But I've met plenty of extremely talented programmers and hackers who do not follow any of the Jewish law.

Edit: Just noticed your username, I also want to say I really like your projects on YouTube!

See professor john mearsheimer on the history & future of israel

https://www.youtube.com/live/z8wooQEYyzc?si=_STtJSdEjDUwIl72

Good for them. They learned to cooperate with their neighbors, created alliances and friends, and restrained to kill other people.

If you have one enemy, the enemy is the problem

If everybody else is your enemy, YOU are the problem.

Check your behavior and see if you can improve as human being.

TBH, considering the number of dead in palestine and the number of people in europe/us who literally lost everyone who ever mattered to them, the number of "terrorist" attacks seems relatively low.

Wat.

Sure, maybe if NATO stopped the USSR in the Fulda Gap. But you know that the USSR's war plans definitely involved invading France, right?

And don't make the mistake of judging probability with the benefit of hindsight, that'd be a terrible intellectual tarpit to fall into.

"Unit 8200 was established in 1952," and apparently the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology was founded in 1912 [2]. I don't think Israel became a tech centre until the 1980s or 90s.

I'm not an expert on this. But similar to how military spending created Silicon Valley, I think Israeli military structure created its tech industry.

[1] Wikipedia

[2] https://ats.org/explore/videos/1912-today-the-institution-th...

No, their attribution is much more robust than this. Neglecting those details to oversimplify your explanation is intellectually dishonest.

> there is nothing explaining how the DLL becomes zero-click compromised [...]

They do, just a little later in that same section: "Both samples use a COM hijack for persistence [...]" through a malicious DLL.

https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1546/015/

Memory safety, and a number of other glaring holes in common stacks, are ignored by the general public for the same psychological and effort-related reasons that people secure their whole lives with easily-picked Schlage locks, or windows/doors that can be defeated in under 5 seconds, often silently.

Most genuinely do not or can not believe tragedy can find them - until it has.

"About: Old programmer Tel Aviv, Israel"

Most of the information coming from Israel about Israel seems unreliable, too.

No, I will never fund TikTok. This article must have struck a nerve with yourself identity. Speaks volumes about your void of humanity.

[0] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300253375/culture-in-naz...

I think your answer gives us a clue about what went wrong and where.

The fact that internet advertising is run by the big US tech behemoths, makes them difficult to go after by countries that have previously had sane advertising standards. The lack of US regulation is the winning car in the race to the bottom.

There is no universe in which 'gosh it's just too hard' is the correct answer.

I'm assuming that means ad impressions and not unique ads.

Perhaps the actual problem then are these monolith platforms that have done such a good job "eating the world" that they can no longer properly function.

The Web used to be a great place before surveillance capitalism and adtech took over. Some of us remember it. People participated because they wanted to. People contributed content because they enjoyed it. The incentive was a sense of community and contribution and shared knowledge - and usually there was no expectation of direct financial gain. Basic hosting was included in everyone's normal ISP plan. SEO wasn't a thing. Blogspam just to generate pages to host ads wasn't a thing. AI slop just to generate even more pages to host ads wasn't a thing. And there was still more genuine and worthwhile content out there than anyone could read in a lifetime.

If 95% of the modern Web disappeared tomorrow and all that was left was what people or organisations were still willing to contribute because they enjoyed it and/or it provided some direct benefit then the Web would probably be a much better place. I cite as exhibit A the fact that we're all here posting our thoughts on HN - itself a site that has always run without any of the intrusive advertising we're talking about - without any compensation or reward other than the enjoyment of the discussion and perhaps the chance to learn something new.

I see no reason to tolerate any sort of online advertising that conflicts with the above ideals. We should simply set rules that decide what is acceptable and drop legal nukes on any company - or indeed any entire business model or industry - that fails to comply. Low key advertising for YC's next round? I doubt a single contributor here minds the little banner that pops up at certain times of year. In-your-face auto-play videos that accidentally (or not - it doesn't matter) advertise something dangerous before your kid's favourite show plays? Sue everyone and punish the offending businesses without mercy. It's really not that complicated.

Continued lack of regulation, throwing up ones hands and saying "well, it's too big now" will not allow it to be solved.

What has been 'normalised' in the online advertising industry sets my teeth on edge as someone with some amount of security and privacy awareness. Hence I go out of my way to block as much of it as possible, for myself and family and friends.

Even the FBI and NSA make public their recommendation to run ad blockers as a safety requirement for internet browsing. I would have thought this may be some kind of red flag to say that maybe you're doing something not quite as well as would be satisfactory.

We can just decide that if you can't afford a person to vet the ad, it's not allowed to run.

Yes. That will destroy the current online advertising industry. As tempting as it is to say "that's the point", that is in fact not the point. The point is, we are completely in our rights as a society to say through regulation that if you can't vet an ad with a human, you can't run it, and the capital structure can damned well do what it does best and accommodate that whether they like it or not. We absolutely can write laws that say that Google is to some extent directly liable for the ads they run. Nothing is stopping us, at least in principle.

Does that mean it will be a lot harder for the advertising industry? Yes. So be it. That is not a reason this can't happen. Is it expensive for them? Yes. I don't care that this means that they won't be able to run anywhere near as many ads.

It is not a stopper that it would be really hard for them. It should be harder than it is. It should not be profitable to build a vast surveillance apparatus to squeeze literal fractions of a penny at a time out of us. It should not be profitable to have this massive machine that can push such targeted malware at as.

We're not talking about some minor tweaks that they can toss a few AI tokens at. We're talking about regulation that would rewrite the entire social contract of advertising. A social contract that we have not really signed, either individually or collectively. We can do that. We can rewrite the contract. It's a permissible thing.

We don't have to have a massive surveillance state just to serve us ads. We don't have to have sports gambling advertising on television. We don't have to have billboards on our highways. We don't have to have extra-cheap mailing rates for ads. We don't have to have Roblox and other video game systems exploiting our children's psychologies with deceptive game currency practices and gambling mechanics. We don't have to have state-sponsored gambling running what everyone knows is a backdoor tax on the poor. None of these things are physically inevitable. None of these things are socially inevitable. There are reasons why these things do exist, which economists and game theorists and political theorists have various words for, but none of the reasons are because they are mandatory and we're just stuck with them forever because there are no other possible worlds.

As for the ad provider, it is trivial to not deliver criminal payloads if your business starts from the assumption that doing so is costly instead of something you can foist on society for your own benefit.

Why? An insurance product wouldn't wipe out ad revenues.

> this is not much different from "regular" crime. It happens

Why do you think parking lots have signs that say they aren't responsible for goods stolen out of cars parked there? Because that liability, by default, exists. And if a parking lot is a robbery hotspot, and the owners don't bother putting up cameras or whatnot, they'll absolutely start facing lawsuits and investigations.

> it doesn't relieve you, the citizen, of responsibility to be mindful and exercise situational awareness

Nobody argued as much. That doesn't mean we give negligent actors monetizing malware a free pass.

Exactly. It moves the economic incentives from "serve the ads from the highest bidder and turn a blind eye to the fact that that's a scammer/malware" to "drop an ad platform that can't or won't keep the scammers/malware out".

Or even better, refusing to use ad platforms that let the ads serve arbitrary code. There is no strict reason why an ad can't be an image (re-rendered by the platform) and a link. Slapping scripts all over the place just makes it easier to collect data (among other things to verify that all the companies involved in serving your ad aren't cheating you, because the ecosystem is full of scammers in all directions).

The deterrent here would be prosecuting the accomplices involved in, and directly getting paid for, the crime.

How can you exercise situational awareness against a zero-day attack?

There are several parties who have an opportunity to detect that problem before it causes serious damage to people visiting a website. The visitors themselves are not among them. Trying to make those visitors responsible for the consequences is nonsensical.

And this would motivate fundamental change in the industry to be able to track down the bad actors.

KYC exists for various industries in order to track down the person responsible for bad actions. Implement KYC for the advertising chain, or something equivalent, to ensure there's a validly registered sue-able entity at the end of it.

> be mindful and exercise situational awareness

I'm not going to say victim blaming, but a good percentage of the population just aren't capable of this, especially with "the sheer scale" of advertising they're exposed to. It's exhausting to be on guard for the entirety of your life.

Might as well say: don't use the internet. That might actually be the best advice to come from all this.

https://www.therage.co

But sure, "free content cos adverts", you keep believing that for as long as you can, I jumped ship after 13 years of it, which ironically appears to be how long you've been in the industry.

Let me just say though - adverts can still support free content without all the absolutely scummy things the adtech industry does. You don't have to track users across everything you can possibly track them across to still make money - my former company at one point was going to partner with Shazam to track people via transponders in bus-stop / train station billboards.

That's not "supporting the free Internet", that's "making some amoral shareholders richer".

Hopefully you'll figure out the difference with a few more years under your belt.

If anything, the ad industry helps kill honest contributions because they financially reward dishonest ones who are better at playing the SEO game or other such tactics than they are at giving visitors what they are actually looking for.

And at the end of the day, ad-supported content isn't free at all because we all pay for it in the end - and much more than what the website receives because there are entire industries inbetween that take their cut.

After all, this website doesn't have (traditional) ads

But that aside, I think what we would see is a lot more Facebookification. A bunch of walled gardens that you pay a subscription for and then you get access to a whole slew of sites that FB buys up. Of course, they will make sure every site ends up toeing their line too.