If you decide you can’t trust any Kape-owned VPN, or if you need a VPN for highly sensitive activities such as torrenting or protecting your journalistic sources, there are plenty of independent services you can use instead. Take a look at my Proton VPN review or Mullvad review for two of the most private.
Those who use a commercial VPN (meaning not clients and servers they own) for "privacy" they got what their ignorance deserve... Commercial VPNs are just glorified proxies with their privacy risks.
Stated that I think it's much more interesting is that the maker of most airport security scanner in the world (~84%) is an Israeli intelligence linked company (Vidisco) https://ransomwareattacks.halcyon.ai/attacks/vidisco-ltd-hit... so they can easily makes any items "not seen" i.e. with a simple tag the scanner read and ignore then the real content showing something harmless. This is just an example of why we need MANDATORY FLOSS and open hardware where anything is developed from zero in a public manner to been able to check what's up via public research made by public universities to make it hard slip agreements here and there.
For what purpose? If you need to access home services or company service while outside in the world a PERSONAL VPN, i.e. wireguard on your SOHO server at home/office is ok, because you own BOTH the server and the client and your traffic go through a domestic ISP under domestic laws of your countries, laws you know, your lawyer know, you can easy act as needed etc.
If you need a proxy on steroid to watch netflix from another country well, use any commercial VPN, but ONLY for the needed purpose, not for the rest of your traffic.
Your ISP can snoop on you LESS than a commercial VPN vendor, especially if such vendor is based in exotic places without privacy laws, while obviously claiming the contrary in advertisements. There is NO PRIVACY PURPOSE for using commercial VPNs.
Secrets means not much: secrets from who? A commercial VPN meaning you just have the client, imply your ISP do not know much about your traffic (just data volume and when they pass) but your VPN provider know ANYTHING, with a far bigger access to your system since you typically have a proprietary client installed with high privileges. So you hide from a domestic ISP to be naked shown to a potentially unknown corporation oversee who can pick much more infos from you.
Let's say you are in countries where porn is forbidden, from Saudi Arabia to South Korea, and you want to hide from locals, ok, you knows your porn habits are known by an offshore unknown company but formally not to the local government, formally, because they might have agreements you do not know and typically VPN providers exists in countries with zero customer protections.
The only VPN you can trust is a FLOSS one, like WireGuard, OpenVPN etc, between hosts you own, and they just guarantee the channel, meaning if you have an Android/iOS device with a VPN link between the phone and you home, the phone itself is not trustable since it's a proprietary device remotely handled by it's OEM/third parties, some you might not even know.
A simple example: let's say you have a secure messaging system, your messages will travel hidden from third parties, but you type them with a virtual keyboard, witch is a typically connected application, who talk aside with their creator: who care about your secure messages since they can snoop them as you type them?
The whole point is the level of secrecy you want. Just downloading pirated materials (like most people do, even if formally it's illegal nearly everywhere) appearing from another country to avoid local laws like Hadopi well, essentially nobody care for real so you might feel safe enough. Being an activist in a dictatorship well, it's a far different thing and in that case the top security is not using integrated electronics at all, like exchanging manually encrypted and hand-sewn in some peer dress (an old but still valid WWII technique), when that's not an option you could trust a bit OLD desktop iron (little firmware's inside) running a FLOSS OS in fully FLOSS stack, like messaging via I2P.
not that this isn't also unsubstanciated hearsay but having worked with an ex-8200 member I did hear something similar. That being said Google is orders of magnitude scarier and more intrusive than this is.
> That being said Google is orders of magnitude scarier and more intrusive than this is.
For all evil things Google does, at least it isn't booby trapping consumer electronics with explosives and putting them in the market yet, as far as I know.
The Intercept is being sloppy with its rhetoric, as usual.
However the idea that this was a precisely targeted operation is pure fiction. Mossad understands perfectly well that Hezbollah is a "horizontal" organization, widely permeated in Lebanese society. And though the pagers themselves seem to have wound up in mostly in the intended hands, Mossad knew also that, at the time of their detonation, they would be located would be be wherever the operatives were: in homes, taxis, grocery stores, cafes, hospitals, on street corners, and apparently (per news reports) at at least one funeral.
That's how we ended up with a large if not yet precisely known proportion of civilian deaths and maimings (the latter category being vastly larger of course -- including a staggering 300 cases of persons losing one or both eyes).
Unfortunately we're still lacking in reliable reports, as world attention has moved onto other atrocities. But according to the Lebanese Health Ministry the deaths included 2 children and 4 health workers (one Hezbollah-affiliated), among some 42 total. From this it seems reasonable to extrapolate a "non-affiliated" ratio of at least 20 percent, likely higher.
None of which would have been accidental from Mossad's point of view. If anything, we can be entirely sure these numbers (and the fact that they would surely include children), along with all the horrifying scenes reported in hospital rooms in the immediate aftermath, are in close agreement with the thoughtful, meticulous predictions they made when they decided to sit down and press the buttons for these attacks.
Finally:
I don't believe anyone can name a more targeted military operation.
This is just silly of course, as every large war (including the current one in Ukraine) includes countless incidents of military installations being precisely targeted with 100+ entirely military KIA, and so forth.
I guess if you're a fan of carnage and mayhem like this, then that's the sort of thing you're a fan of.
On Sept. 17, just before 3:30 p.m., the small waiting room of Dr. Nour’s three-room pediatrics clinic in southern Beirut was packed. A mother was waiting to get preschool checkups for her three children. Two elderly patients were booked in for cataract treatments at the ophthalmologist office next door. Sitting next to them was a young couple whom Nour, whose name has been changed for security reasons, had not met before. The father bounced a 10-day-old baby on his lap. Clipped to his belt was a Gold Apollo Rugged Pager.
Nour brought the young couple into her examination room. She pulled out a blank file for the newborn and wrote his name: Aiman. She placed him on the scales: a little over 7 pounds. She lay Aiman on his back on an examination table and began to record his weight. As she did so, the man’s pager beeped twice.
“Excuse me,” he said, and reached down to silence it.
As he did so, about an ounce of explosives concealed within the pager detonated, sending shards of metal and fragments of its thick plastic casing out in all directions. The shrapnel tore deep wounds in the man’s abdomen, lodged in the ceiling of the clinic and lacerated the face of the baby as he lay on his back. Nour was thrown backward as the room filled with dust. She could not see through the smoke, but she could hear the woman’s voice shouting: “Aiman!”
Nour did not know that scenes like these were being repeated all over Lebanon. Simultaneously, some 4,000 booby-trapped pagers that had been handed out to members of Hezbollah began beeping and then exploded. In shops, in houses and on sidewalks across the country, pagers blasted their users as well as anyone in their vicinity with small clouds of shrapnel.
I don't think you read it that closely, or are operating with the same biases as the author, as arguably yes, there are obvious inaccuracies.
A simple example
"Unit 8200, for example, has been the source of much of the world’s most infamous spying software, including Cellebrite and Pegasus"
Cellebrite and Pegasus aren't products of Unit 8200. They are not the source of them. At best one can say that alumni of 8200 created them (or if one wants to get the closest the source, "products" (i.e. alumni) of 8200 created them).
The language they use is not accurate and they do it purposefully to be inflammatory.
If they wanted to write Unit 8200 has trained a pipeline of people that these companies can gobble up, that would be accurate. But how is that fundamentally different than MIT, Stanford et al training a pipeline of people that go to big tech firms that also arguably violate privacy? Would we blame the schools for the privacy violations or simply blame the companies their alumni work for?
I appreciate you pointing out the inaccuracies. Was actually hoping for that.
> But how is that fundamentally different than MIT, Stanford et al training a pipeline of people that go to big tech firms that also arguably violate privacy?
Unit 8200 is a military intelligence unit focused on online spying and hacking right?
the point is that 8200 didn't create them. Alumni did. The wording of the article tries to imply that 8200 created them and perhaps were just marketed by private companies (the only way I can understand their wording). This simply isn't true.
The point of comparing alumni of 8200 to a university was to give the more favorable reading to the concept of "product" of, but why I also dont think its a fair reading.
Well, technically NSO needs permission from the government to sell Pegasus, so those aren't really "private companies" either. They are private arms of the state.
There's bias, and then there's this kind of bias (from WP):
MintPress News supports Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia, Iran, and Syria. In one contentious article, MintPress News asserted that the Ghouta chemical attack in Syria was perpetrated by rebel groups rather than by the Syrian government, a claim pushed by the Russian and Syrian governments and rejected by much of the international community.
In Syria, Obama armed a bunch of "moderates" as he put it. They were all just extremist terrorists. Our media covered for him. Why don't you equally distrust our media?
Because of the former's highly Kool-aidy and ideological slant, and the nonsense conspiracy theories it regularly peddles. You don't notice that stuff?
Everything is biased; the main difference is how good they are at hiding it. Heck, Wikipedia’s cofounder calls it “propaganda” and said the site has “become merely left-wing advocacy essays.”
No, the difference is whether they try to be unbiased or not. Wikipedia used to try, somewhat, occasionally. Now they are indeed "merely left-wing advocacy essays.”
Hardly any news outlets are trying anymore, so I can see why you think that.
Trying to be unbiased is a futile effort, and most journalists know that. What good journalists do is take their inherit bias into account and adjust for it. The reporting should be truthful, and people should know the facts after reading it. Biased media often editorializes the truth so it conveys one message rather then another. This can be bad, or it can be good, it depends on the message. When the message is “a genocidal army is doing a bad thing”, I lean towards this editorializing being good actually.
That seems to be the conventional wisdom. I sometimes get on newspapers.com (not free, unfortunately) for my articles, and for the Pullman Strike series I used the NYT for excerpts. This was 1894-95.
So no, it's not futile; it's just difficult. They were doing it, and that's part of what made them the "newspaper of record" (a rep which they're busy squandering now).
I'll refrain from the shameless self-promotion for a change and not include links, but I posted all of them to HN. Or of course you could use the 7-day free trial on newspapers.com.
As for your last, sentence: no, the adjective "genocidal" is not OK. "Unbiased" would be a description of what the army is doing, with another story "Does this qualify as genocide?" Or quotes from organizations calling it genocide.
Presenting both sides is not the same as being unbiased. The bias materializes in e.g.
a) Giving one side a favorable treatment
b) not presenting the full argument of the other
c) missing the viewpoint of a third, fourth, etc. side
d) when one side is just plain wrong, not presenting it as wrong, but of equal merit.
e) etc.
The bias can be as simple as who you present as the subject in your headline.
As for the Pullman strikes, I don‘t know much about the subject but when the New York Times called it: a struggle between the greatest and most important labor organization and the entire railroad capital. (quote I got from Wikipedia) they were definitely showing a bias, theirs just happened be judged better by history than the rest of the journalistic world at the time who had a different and much worse bias (and as such much more obvious in hindsight).
I would think that unbiased would mean presenting all the pertinent facts.
Nowadays, "bothsideism" is considered a mortal sin in journalism and only the facts that support a particular viewpoint should be transmitted. Any other facts are d/misinformation and should be censored.
Thats not what journalists do (or at least not good ones). Journalists’ job is to contextualize the facts and interpret them in a wider sense.
I’m also not sure this is actually an Edward R. Murrow quote. I went looking but couldn’t find the source. The closes I found was:
> American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.
Which actually place more into what I’m saying, that a good journalist will tell a truthful story with the aim of persuading people of their viewpoint (which hopefully is a worthy one; not e.g. denying a genocide)
The quote you presented I only found one instance of on the web which was here:
> I learned from my first daily newspaper editor, when I was pitching a story about improper personal favors dispensed by local government to a prominent landowner, that my suspicions meant nothing until I could prove it. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you know,” the late Joe Ellis, editor and publisher of the Clarksdale (Mississippi) Press-Register, admonished me.
And even here the context around the quote is advocating for using true stories to persuade the readers of a certain viewpoint, that corrupt politicians are bad actually.
The context here of Mintpress News being a heavily biased journal—which they undoubtedly are—presenting a true story while trying to persuade readers that a genocidal army is doing other bad things. This is good journalism actually.
Those figures are credible, based on research [1][2] that estimated total deaths including those by secondary effects from the attacks, like diseases and famine spread by purposeful destruction of medical[3][4], water treatment/sanitation[5][6] infrastructure and crops[7]. The figures quoted more often in the media, over 40,000 people killed, reflect only people that were directly killed and whose bodies could be recovered and identified, and so are gross underestimates of total loss of life.
Can’t wait for their follow-up investigation: “exposed: how Israeli restaurants use Palestinian blood to make Passover matzo!” With multiple upvotes and “it checks out!” in the HN comment section.
There was no reference to Luminati or Hola VPN which, iirc, were exposed to be working together to offer scrapers "residential proxies" by using their free users internet as proxy servers
The globalist Jew that controls the media... Next you're going to say you're not an anti-Semite because Israel does lobbying and influence. Same as Russia, Iran, China etc. Whose propaganda/influence are somehow OK.
But thank you for confirming your anti-Sematism proving my point and explaining the article so perfectly. People like you (and 2000 years of violence) are the reason Israel feels paranoid. That's exactly why they do these sorts of things, and in the case of Israel it's not empty paranoia. Enemies are literally seeking its destruction.
You are making loaded statements using Orwellian weaponized terminology. Now that I have the time, allow me to explain.
One conspiracy that I beleive is that there's a deliberate campaign to conflate the nation-state of Israel, the religion of Judaism, and a particular ethnicity (Ashkenazi). These three things are not the same.
Even in isolation, these three concepts are ambiguous. For example, the nation-state known as "Israel" cannot be equated with the biblical nation of "Israel." The "religion of Judaism" cannot be equated with "Rabbinical judaism." The concept of Jewish as an ethnicity does not exist because there are multiple Jewish ethnicities.
Another conspiracy that I believe is that The conduct of the the nation-state known as "Israel" is largely the responsibility of a specific group of oligarchs who hide behind the meaningless word "Jew" to fabricate a false narrative and evade justice. This specific group of oligarchs associated with the nation-state called "Israel" happens to practice a particular interpretation of rabbinical Judaism, and they employ the tactic of monopolizing mass media to wage information warfare. They also influence world governments and perpetrate genocide, among many other immoral schemes that are exceedingly evil and sophisticated.
> You are making loaded statements using Orwellian weaponized terminology. Now that I have the time, allow me to explain.
Anti-sematic rhetoric, which you very clearly used, literally killed millions of Jews over history and is again used as a weapon to de-legitimize 10 million Israelis right now. But I'm weaponizing, that is some metal gymnastics there... Oh no I caused you an embarrassment, that's a weapon.
> One conspiracy that I beleive is that there's a deliberate campaign to conflate the nation-state of Israel, the religion of Judaism, and a particular ethnicity (Ashkenazi). These three things are not the same.
That's again a load of nonsense. Israel is literally called "Israel". From the old testament. Despite having 20% Muslims as part of its heritage it's very clearly a state for the Jews to escape people like yourself.
> Even in isolation, these three concepts are ambiguous. For example, the nation-state known as "Israel" cannot be equated with the biblical nation of "Israel." The "religion of Judaism" cannot be equated with "Rabbinical judaism." The concept of Jewish as an ethnicity does not exist because there are multiple Jewish ethnicities.
How for f*cks sake is any of that nonsense relevant to anyone. Do Iranian bombs or Nazi gas chambers check these things?
You're trying to conflate a very obvious and clear argument, a minority is persecuted and you're arguing about the purity of the minority. Are you one of the people who claimed Obama can't be black because his father doesn't come from a line of slaves or that his mother was white?
To answer the above BTW, he is black because he drove a car in America while being black.
Also using the word "conspiracy" while discussing Jews. Huge red flag. I don't know if you're literally unaware, ignorant or malicious but seriously... This is DEEPLY blatant rhetoric.
> Another conspiracy that I believe is that The conduct of the the nation-state known as "Israel" is largely the responsibility of a specific group of oligarchs who hide behind the meaningless word "Jew" to fabricate a false narrative and evade justice.
The "powerful Jews that control the world"... That is literally textbook basic anti-Sematism. Wow, people are usually more subtle about it but you went full Monty on that one.
> This specific group of oligarchs associated with the nation-state called "Israel" happens to practice a particular interpretation of rabbinical Judaism, and they employ the tactic of monopolizing mass media to wage information warfare.
And control the media while minimizing the facts about the formation of Israel. The countless deaths in war. The years of open communications and conventions formed by Jews. You are seriously down a conspiracy Rabbit hole.
> They also influence world governments and perpetrate genocide, among many other immoral schemes that are exceedingly evil and sophisticated.
Right "they"... I won't talk about the genocide nonsense, if there was even a remote bit of truth to that there would be a lawsuite in the states based on Leahy's law.
But this is super easy to disprove using facts. There's an actual genocide going on in Sudan, actual people dying. Yet crickets from the same people. Yes, the USA is sending money to Sudan too. The US also armed the Saudis to bomb Yemen and a lot of bad people. China is literally setting up "re-education" camps or concentration camps for minorities. Nothing. Just the Jews are at fault when trying to fight an enemy whose slogan literally means the destruction of Israel. An enemy fueled by Iran who called for the destruction of Israel repeatedly calling it "little Satan" (with the US being the big Satan).
But this one country which is a haven for Jews is the criminal. Not the countless countries for all other religions who did pretty horrible things (and still do). This one country?
There were more UN decisions against Israel than all other countries COMBINED. More than Russia, China, Sudan etc. Does that sound like an all powerful country capable of global brain control?
I'm not sure if you're delusional or malicious but I very much got the antisemitism spot on. I suggest medical help.
https://www.privacyjournal.net/kape-technologies/
which closes with: