US adds Euro spyware makers to export naughty list The US government on Tuesday added commercial spyware makers Intellexa and Cytrox to its Entity List, saying the duo are a possible threat to national security. According to the Feds, Greece's Intellexa SA, Ireland's Intellexa Limited, North Macedonia's Cytrox AD, and Hungary's Cytrox Holdings are allied companies that …
Claims of a device or system being secure should be considered the same as a house or building being called secure. You can work to make things more secure, but ultimately it's impossible for anything to be 100% secure, for a device to be hack-proof or for a house to be burglar-proof. And if you insist on making things even more secure, they eventually become unusable due to the restrictions you need to place on them.
Because device marketers don't advertise their devices as being completely impossible to hack. They advertise them as being pretty secure. They're not idiots; you advertise anything as unhackable and you open yourself to lawsuits as soon as someone finds a vulnerability, and nothing can be perfectly secure. You couldn't point to any advert that actually claims perfect security, and you are already aware of that fact.
“The US government on Tuesday added commercial spyware makers Intellexa and Cytrox to its Entity List, saying the duo are a possible threat to national security.”
translation: NSA haven't yet backdoored these systems
“Two Egyptians .. were hacked with Predator spyware .. the spyware was able to infect the then-latest version (14.6) of Apple’s iOS operating system using single-click links sent via WhatsApp.”
Quote: "...the duo are a possible threat to national security...."
What no mention that the "duo" called NSA and GCHQ are "a threat to personal security"?
And then there are the three other also-rans in the so called "Five Eyes"!!
Don't you just love the misdirection? "We are the good guys.....looking after the security of our citizens.......It's all those others......"
See Edward Snowden, 2013 for a different view of "good guys"!!!
And yet nothing said about what Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft can do in terms of tracking you, your content, device usage and 3 of those have rights to directly muck with your stuff too. And before anyone says linux is different, when's the last time you did a full analysis of all the packages that apt/mintupdate deployed for you? And that's before thinking what's going on with CPU microcode and firmware updates.
""This rule reaffirms the protection of human rights worldwide as a fundamental US. foreign policy interest,"
Are these people morons? Because anyone who isn't, would realize the level of oxymoronism and hypocrisy in this statement and *not say it*.
US is the largest global human rights abuser. At least when we count privacy as human right. China is a good second, but it doesn't have global access to everything, like US does. At least yet.
“US is the largest global human rights abuser.”
The article is about a spyware provider located in *Hungary*. Do you think this is an accident? Hungary’s President is Viktor Orban, a literal fascist. Already for many years, he removed all Jews from positions of public employment, and has made it all but impossible for them to have bank accounts. LGBT people fear him sufficiently that I know several Hungarian refugees who are gay, here in the U.K, alongside maybe a couple dozen Jewish Hungarian refugees. Yes, refugees, for that is what they are.
And next year, Orban takes up the presidency of the EU. That is what you are supporting. There are only two possible positions for you: aware and ashamed but “can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”; or a fascist yourself, who sees nothing wrong with Orban, and thoroughly approves of the global direction of the EU.
Is there a way to kick a country out of the EU?
How is that the EU can have rules about what kind of charging port a phone must have, but no rules preventing one of its members from racial/ethnic discrimination and so forth? Given the history of Europe, I would have thought that would have been one of the first things written down when they decided what they they wanted the EU to be. Or did they just form it as an economic union, and the do-goodery came later?
@DS999 "Is there a way to kick a country out of the EU?"
No there is no mechanism to do that. The best they can do is Article 7 that would allow for suspension of voting rights at the Council level. There is a small problem Article 7 requires a unanimous vote from leaders. So Article 7 proceedings have been started against both Poland and Hungary and then just stopped.
Hotel California: Until 2009 when Article 50 came into force, there was no mechanism to leave. Though if a country stopped paying I think it would have been pretty clear to the EEC/EU said country had left.
Hungary, together with the large majority of EU countries, are huge net recipients of EU largesse, outside the normal channels of EU spending oversight. There’s words, and then there’s actions.
Here’s an action: Russia (Rosatom) is right now expanding its build of Hungary’s nuclear reactor which produces 50% of Hungarys electricity. And France, specifically Macron in person, has been in direct talks with Putin to ensure that French companies are in on the action. Not a conspiracy theory, nor anti-French rhetoric, this is in Le Monde.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/04/28/in-hungary-paris-is-willing-to-help-build-russian-led-nuclear-reactor_6024637_4.html
Everybody knows. This is not a secret. The so-called “support for Ukraine” is entirely fake. All that “geo-political independence of aggressive foreign powers” is pure horseshit, apart from the hate for USA influence, which is real. Everybody knows.
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