alt Hacker NewsSo a Unity owned bloatware company being used by Samsung is now somehow controversial because it was founded in Israel? Am i reading this right?
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From Stuxnet to Pegasus to the 2024 pager attack, Israel has a history of leveraging its tech sector to advance its national security aims through clandestine means (this is not unusual: so does the US, and so does China). If you're a country with not-so-friendly relations with Israel, the company being founded in Israel is absolutely pertinent.
RTFA
> The presence of an Israeli-origin technology component on Samsung phones in WANA countries poses additional problems. Several nations in this region legally bar Israeli companies from operating, and in light of the ongoing Israel–Palestine conflict, the preload of an app tied to such a company becomes even more contentious.
So yes, the presence of Israeli software is a problem in many countries, and may even be illegal.
To HN readers, the controversy is likely this:
> the program was found to be quietly invasive as it allows the installer to install programs on the user’s device without permission. It circumvents the user validation process and successfully bypasses multiple security checks, including antivirus programs
I agree that the headline “controversy” is manufactured.
Uhhhh, not sure about you, but I wouldn't want anything Israeli within 10m of my phone.
That's not the controversy based on the article - it's arguing that because the app is Israeli in origin, it may run afoul of local BDS laws thus another reason for AppCloud to be removed from local device, which is notable because the AppCloud app only appears to be installed on African, Asian, and MENA Samsung phones, where the bulk of countries with BDS laws exist.
The article doesn't appear to take a side one way or the other in the conflict, it's just listing a potential compliance issue.
If you want clicks putting "Israel" in the story will do a better job than a fairly boring tale of typical Android phone/Samsung bloatware. Outrage sells, and a loooooot of people (for a range of reasons) are easily outraged by that one word.
Seems reasonable. Same way "Russian" companies are shady. Doesn't matter if they do something inane . This is really basic geopolitics that only had a short respite... Like less than 30 year period as cold war slowed. This is very normal.
Getting upset “because Israel” is not the controversy you think it is. Serious war crimes were committed in the Israeli pager attack.
Israel used its tech sector to commit those war crimes.
It’s only a controversial story, anyway, to those who think that the pager attack was ‘a perfectly acceptable way to wage war’, and the counter to that argument is: are you sure you would be willing to have this same technique, or similar uses of at-scale consumer devices being subverted by a nation state, applied to you?
For those of us who see the war crime nature of that pager attack, Israeli companies can no longer be trusted with supply-side delivery of mobile devices. Or, indeed, with components to be used in such devices, hardware or software.
This has significant relevance to us here on HN, who have to deal with the potential subversion of devices some of us deploy, at massive scale.
Or would you be okay if some state that was hostile to your own decided to just pack malfeasant activities into devices that almost everyone in your neighborhood/company are using?
The willingness to just roll over and let rogue states commit heinous acts is one thing; staying alert of potential threat vectors, at massive scale, is another.. and after all, isn’t this “hacker” news?