The Internet & Political Control of It

[LFC]

Republican politicians have been trying to gain greater control over the internet and the companies that use it for quite some time now. They understand its importance to messaging and they want to bend it to their will. They also wish to reward those companies they like i.e. the ones who pay them lots of campaign cash. The whole net neutrality issue was just such a classic payola scheme. One interesting part of that push which the Trump administration (of course) never told us what that the public commenting system was abruptly shut down because the companies that stood to benefit were astroturfing it. I have no doubt they knew about it.

American broadband companies funded a campaign that filed millions of fake comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its proposal to repeal net neutrality regulations, an investigation by New York's attorney general found.

Authorities said the industry poured more than $4.2 million through a nonprofit called Broadband for America into “lead generation” firms that created comments by using prizes to trick consumers into giving up personal information.

The three marketing firms used to generate the comments -- Fluent, Opt-Intelligence, and React2Media -- were required to implement “comprehensive reforms” and pay $4.4 million in penalties as a result of the investigation.

The office, however, did not uncover evidence that the broadband companies had direct knowledge of the alleged fraud and is not naming the firms for a "variety of reasons."

Those allegedly fraudulent astroturfing efforts generated 8.5 million comments to the FCC, according to the investigation.

“Americans voices are being drowned out by masses of fake comments and messages being submitted to the government to sway decision-making,” New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) said in a statement.

“Instead of actually looking for real responses from the American people, marketing companies are luring vulnerable individuals to their websites with freebies, co-opting their identities, and fabricating responses that giant corporations are then using to influence the polices and laws that govern our lives.”

So what were the real American opinions like?

About 800,000 of the nearly 23 million comments were unique, and 99.7 percent of those were in favor of maintaining net neutrality, according to subsequent studies of the data.

[goldenvalley]

Turn the Internet over to private enterprise and this is what we get. And it's so weird...people will give personal information to a website run by a private company but are suspicious of doing that with a public website. The former can do whatever it wants with the information while the latter has rules about its use.

[Traveler]

And both get hacked with regularity...

[goldenvalley]

May 7, 2021 18:56:45 GMT Traveler said:

And both get hacked with regularity...

True. But some would say the government can screw you over by using the personal info...it has police power.  Yet private industry can do everything but put you jail and in fact can screw you over financially in ways that would make you wish to go to jail.

[Deleted]

May 6, 2021 20:16:08 GMT goldenvalley said:

Turn the Internet over to private enterprise and this is what we get. And it's so weird...people will give personal information to a website run by a private company but are suspicious of doing that with a public website. The former can do whatever it wants with the information while the latter has rules about its use.

As yet not everything. Private enterprise does not have the power of arrest or prosecution. However, wait till DHS and FBI get privatized: Atomwaffen and Patriot militia will take us back to the early 19th century - MAGAtopia. The military has shown the way.

[Traveler]

Great window in how effed up FB is.  


Here is how warped they are: 

And this is their BS response:

Facebook has made a conscious decision to surface low-quality content and recognizes its dangers. Shortly after the November election, Facebook temporarily tweaked its algorithm to emphasize "'news ecosystem quality' scores, or N.E.Q., a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism." The purpose was to attempt to cut down on election misinformation being spread on the platform by Trump and his allies. The result was "a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages, such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats, became less visible."



BuzzFeed reported that some Facebook staff members wanted to make the change permanent. But that suggestion was opposed by Joel Kaplan, a top Facebook executive and Republican operative who frequently intervenes on behalf of right-wing publishers. The algorithm change was quickly rolled back. Facebook made a similar change after January 6, but only for a few days. Other proposed changes to the Facebook algorithm over the years have been rejected or altered because of their potential negative impact on right-wing sites like The Daily Wire.

[LFC]

This is the natural result of "hands-off capitalism" that Republicans defend in so many ways (except for social media companies they don't like). This is why the internet should be heavily regulated like the public utility that it is.

It's no surprise that cable companies charge lower prices for broadband when they face competition from fiber-to-the-home services. But an article yesterday by Stop the Cap provides a good example of how dramatically promotional prices for Charter's Spectrum Internet service can vary from one street to the next.

In this example, Charter charges $20 more per month for slower speeds on the street where it faces no serious competition. When customers in two areas purchase the same speeds, the customer on the street without competition could have to pay $40 more per month and would have their promotional rates expire after only one year instead of two.

Stop the Cap said it examined promotional offers to new customers in the metro Rochester, New York, market, "where Spectrum faces token competition from Frontier's slow speed DSL service" and more robust competition in limited areas from Greenlight Networks' fiber service. Greenlight fiber is available in 23 percent of Rochester, while Charter cable is available to homes throughout the city, according to BroadbandNow. Greenlight prices start at $50 per month for 500Mbps.

"Charter's offers are address-sensitive," Stop the Cap founder Phillip Dampier wrote. "The cable company knows its competition and almost exactly where those competitors offer service. That is why the company asks for your service address before it quotes you pricing."

[LFC]

The big boys have their knives out for funding of public broadband. Of course they do. They're milking Americans on the daily by providing less for more than most other industrialized nations.

AT&T CEO John Stankey yesterday called President Biden's plan to fund municipal broadband networks "misguided" and said the US shouldn't pay for any broadband deployment in areas that already have networks. But as AT&T and other ISPs lobby against public networks and government-funded competition, Stankey said he is confident that Congress will steer legislation in the more "pragmatic" direction that AT&T favors.

In an interview with The Economic Club of Washington, DC, (video), Stankey was asked, "Do you support the president's proposal to have municipalities own broadband facilities?" Stankey responded, "I think actually the president's proposal is probably a bit misguided in that regard."

"It would be a shame that we take taxpayer money or ask local governments to go into a business that they don't run today," Stankey said. "You know, their job is to deliver water, patch streets, things like that, not be in a capital-intensive technology business that requires constant refresh and constant management."

AT&T and other private ISPs have taken billions from the government to deploy incremental upgrades in rural areas over the years, and they don't want public networks getting any of the cash they're accustomed to receiving. Stankey claimed there isn't much of a broadband problem to be solved, as networks "functioned incredibly well for the vast majority of citizens in the United States" during the pandemic. "Why would we want to go overbuild in areas where there's already great infrastructure?" Stankey said, saying that would be a "waste" of subsidy dollars.

[LFC]

With the cash they can muster I don't see this happening.

Five new bills aim to break up Big Tech platforms, force them to play nice
Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon would struggle to evade new regulations.

Legislators in the US House of Representatives introduced five new bills Friday afternoon that promise the biggest overhaul of antitrust law since the trust-busting era of the early 1900s.

The bills take aim at the many platforms that Big Tech companies have rolled out over the last decade or so, including Apple’s iOS, Google’s search and ad platforms, Amazon’s marketplace, and Facebook’s social media and messaging networks. The proposed legislation would usher in sweeping changes both in the way monopoly regulations are enforced and in how companies run their platforms. They would require divestments in some cases while mandating interoperability and portability in others.

“Right now, unregulated tech monopolies have too much power over our economy,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who introduced one of the bills. “They are in a unique position to pick winners and losers, destroy small businesses, raise prices on consumers, and put folks out of work. Our agenda will level the playing field and ensure the wealthiest, most powerful tech monopolies play by the same rules as the rest of us.”

“Big Tech companies are stifling American innovation with their monopolistic behavior,” said Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Tex.), who co-sponsored two of the bills. “By acquiring their competition and eliminating alternatives in the marketplace, they are denying fair access to the free market for small businesses across the country.”

While the legislation would not ban the platforms outright, it would subject companies to new regulations that would constrain their ability to provide certain products and services, while leveling the playing field for competitors.

[Deleted]

Play nice with whom and to what end?

All that the tech companies have to do to overcome their current predicament is dangle a nice cushy position, like Senior VP of fuck-all with a mind blowing compensation, paid in stock of course, not company money.

(hint: politicians and their benefit)

[LFC]

Republicans, bought and paid for. There is zero reasonable justification for this. It's just payback to their donors and a thumb in the eye of cities, which trend blue, rather than letting them set up a critical piece of infrastructure to make them more attractive for employers.

Ohio's Republican-controlled legislature is on the verge of imposing a state law to dramatically restrict the rights of cities and towns to build and operate municipal broadband networks.

The Ohio Senate on June 9 approved a budget bill that contains an anti-municipal broadband amendment. It's not a done deal yet, and advocates for public networks are urging the legislature to strip the amendment from the final budget. The budget bill is expected to be hammered out within the next two weeks.

If passed, the proposed law could kill existing broadband services and prevent new ones from being deployed. There are reportedly 30 or more municipal broadband providers in Ohio that "would not be allowed to operate so long as there is a private-sector company operating in the area, as there are in most, if not all of the cities."

"If the amendment contained in the Senate's budget survives the budget process, it would make Ohio the first state in a decade to erect barriers to the establishment and expansion of municipal broadband networks," according to the Community Networks team at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), which has been tracking the legislative process.

The amendment would let cities and towns provide broadband service only to unserved areas and uses a definition of "unserved" that reportedly makes over 98 percent of the state ineligible for municipal broadband. The proposed law defines "unserved areas" as those without access to service with download speeds of at least 10Mbps and upload speeds of at least 1Mbps. Any cable provider and even many DSL lines can provide those speeds—but no one considers DSL to be modern broadband.

[LFC]

The people had their say and Ohio Republicans folded on banning local broadband. I guess some people just don't like transparent schemes designed to allow big donors to pull more money out of their pockets. Who woulda' thunk it.

After coming close to imposing a near-total ban on municipal broadband networks, Ohio's Republican-controlled legislature has reportedly dropped the proposed law in final negotiations over the state budget.

The final budget agreement "axed a proposal to limit local governments from offering broadband services," The Columbus Dispatch wrote. With a June 30 deadline looming, Ohio's House and Senate approved the budget and sent it to Gov. Mike DeWine for final approval on Monday night, the Dispatch wrote.

As we wrote earlier this month, the Ohio Senate approved a version of the budget containing an amendment that would have forced existing municipal broadband services to shut down and prevented the formation of new public networks. The proposed law was reportedly "inserted without prior public discussion," and no state senator publicly sponsored the amendment. It was approved in a party-line vote as Democrats opposed the restrictions in municipal broadband.

The House version did not contain the amendment, and it was dropped during negotiations between the House and Senate.

Lawmakers apparently relented to public pressure from supporters of municipal broadband and cities and towns that operate the networks. People and businesses from Fairlawn, where the city-run FairlawnGig network offers fiber Internet, played a significant role in the protests. FairlawnGig itself asked users to put pressure on lawmakers, and the subscribers did so in great numbers.

"We had a real grassroots movement here in Fairlawn. We are thrilled our residents, subscribers, and businesses came together and helped us defeat this amendment," Fairlawn Service Director Ernie Staten said yesterday, according to an article by the Community Networks team at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). "We appreciate that the State of Ohio recognizes that municipal broadband has a place in this state and we hope to continue this great endeavor."

Fairlawn subscribers sent more than 700 emails telling lawmakers, "Don't take this (municipal broadband) away!" Staten said.

[LFC]

President Biden has pushed to restore net neutrality.

Companies discriminatorily slowing down internet access: Big providers can use their power to discriminatorily block or slow down online services. The Obama-Biden Administration’s FCC adopted “Net Neutrality” rules that required these companies to treat all internet services equally, but this was undone in 2017.

In the Order, the President encourages the FCC to:

- Restore Net Neutrality rules undone by the prior administration.

[Deleted]

What's a strange turn or language: I hereby order you to encourage to be, on the net, neutral?! If I ever were to receive such an order I would be shaking in my boots.

[LFC]

I don't much like this. I understand this case but if Trump had this hammer he would have pummeled the tech companies for allowing real but politically inconvenient information through.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced new legislation today that aims to finally hold tech companies responsible for allowing misinformation about vaccines and other health issues to spread online.

The bill, called the Health Misinformation Act and co-sponsored by Sen. Ray Luján (D-NM), would create an exception to the landmark internet law Section 230, which has always shielded tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter from being sued over almost any of the content people post on their platforms.

Klobuchar’s bill would change that — but only when a social media platform’s algorithm promotes health misinformation related to an “existing public health emergency.” The legislation tasks the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to define health misinformation in these scenarios.

“Features that are built into technology platforms have contributed to the spread of misinformation and disinformation,” reads a draft of the law seen by Recode, “with social media platforms incentivizing individuals to share content to get likes, comments, and other positive signals of engagement, which rewards engagement rather than accuracy.”

The law wouldn’t apply in cases where a platform shows people posts using a “neutral mechanism,” like a social media feed that ranks posts chronologically, rather than algorithmically. This would be a big change for the major internet platforms. Right now, almost all of the major social media platforms rely on algorithms to determine what content they show users in their feeds. And these ranking algorithms are generally designed to show users the content that they engage with the most — posts that produce an emotional response — which can prioritize inaccurate information.

[Deleted]

Jul 23, 2021 21:10:29 GMT LFC said:

I don't much like this.

Neither do I. Singularly bad idea to hand over the power to politicians to declare what might be misinformation and further grant the authority to prevent its dissemination. Misinformation cannot be prevented from spreading by suppression. Many countries/societies continue to belabor under such illusions where some authority attempts to precisely do what's been suggested by the senator from MN, with perverse results. The senator is seeking myopic accommodations against free flow of information thinking it would not chip away at one of the fundamental precepts of liberalism - as if, enlightenment and liberalism are no longer sufficiently robust models in these modern times, implicitly succumbing to the Chinese CP critique.

[LFC]

The FTC is hitting Facebook with a suit claiming it is a monopoly.

Amid a Facebook marketing blitz, the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday refiled its antitrust lawsuit against the company, claiming that it “holds monopoly power” in the social media market, and maintains that monopoly by “systematically” purchasing rivals and creating other barriers to competition.

The refiled lawsuit is seen as the FTC’s first major battle as it seeks to reign in the dominance of major tech companies that have come to dominate American life. It is also seen as a test of the agency’s new chair, Lina Khan, who was a vocal critic of Big Tech in her work in academia and whom Facebook argued should recuse herself because of that work.

“Facebook is the world’s dominant online social network, with a purported three billion-plus regular users. Facebook has maintained its monopoly position in significant part by pursuing Chief Executive Officer (‘CEO’ ) Mark Zuckerberg’s strategy, expressed in 2008: ‘it is better to buy than compete,’” the FTC complaint says. “True to that maxim, Facebook has systematically tracked potential rivals and acquired companies that it viewed as serious competitive threats. Facebook supplemented this anticompetitive acquisition strategy with anticompetitive conditional dealing policies, designed to erect or maintain entry barriers and to neutralize perceived competitive threats.”

The new filing describes schemes in which Facebook wielded its supremacy to undermine any potential for competition; not by out-innovating other companies, but by imposing contractual restrictions on developers that outright prohibited them from competing against Facebook. The outcome—impeding the growth of emerging potential rivals in its industry to further its monopoly—is no different, the FTC said, than had Facebook simply paid its competitors to disappear.

[LFC]

It seems to me that owner of a company that sells software with a primary purpose of committing crimes should be tried as a criminal, not just be shut down.

It’s a surveillance software that can spy on the texts, calls, location, and social media of romantic partners without their consent. But in an unprecedented move, the Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that it was banning the maker of the stalkerware, SpyFone.

The FTC also banned the CEO of the company, Scott Zuckerman, from the surveillance business over allegations that he and his company have been running “brazen” invasions of Americans’ privacy for years.

SpyFone’s products, which have been on sale since 2018, give stalkers near-total visibility into victims’ every move on their phones, according to the FTC. The products, which range from $99.95 per year to a more premium version that costs nearly $500 annually, are capable of tracking victims’ text messages, call history, live GPS location, emails, keystrokes, video chats, notifications, contacts, pictures, calendars, files, and social media, according to the FTC complaint obtained by The Daily Beast. Some of SpyFone’s products can also give abusers the ability to remotely take pictures, record calls, and record audio through the victim’s microphone as well.

"SpyFone is a brazen brand name for a surveillance business that helped stalkers steal private information," said Samuel Levine, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. "The stalkerware was hidden from device owners, but was fully exposed to hackers who exploited the company’s slipshod security. This case is an important reminder that surveillance-based businesses pose a significant threat to our safety and security. We will be aggressive about seeking surveillance bans when companies and their executives egregiously invade our privacy."

As the FTC noted, what made SpyFone particularly invasive—beyond its powerful monitoring capabilities—was that it lurked on the phones without showing an icon on a victim’s phone.

The move to ban the stalkerware comes amid renewed calls for law enforcement and world leaders to scrutinize surveillance software developers—and to whom they sell products. Following the publication of a report that detailed how victims could have been hit with surveillance software made by Israeli spyware company NSO Group last month, world leaders and policymakers around the globe have begun to place spyware companies—particularly NSO Group—under a microscope.

Although NSO Group and stalkerware applications generally vary in how they gain access to phones, their end result is the same: They leave victims incredibly vulnerable to unwanted monitoring, raising questions about the lackadaisical oversight surrounding their sale, use, and distribution.

“They are in many ways just as powerful,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of cybersecurity, Eva Galperin, told The Daily Beast, referring to NSO Group’s and SpyFone’s products. “Both products once installed will get you keystrokes, microphone, camera, access to passwords, all kinds of things like that. Once you are on the phone you are on the phone.”

[pnwguy]

Sept 2, 2021 19:56:14 GMT LFC said:

It seems to me that owner of a company that sells software with a primary purpose of committing crimes should be tried as a criminal, not just be shut down.

It’s a surveillance software that can spy on the texts, calls, location, and social media of romantic partners without their consent. But in an unprecedented move, the Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that it was banning the maker of the stalkerware, SpyFone.

The FTC also banned the CEO of the company, Scott Zuckerman, from the surveillance business over allegations that he and his company have been running “brazen” invasions of Americans’ privacy for years.

SpyFone’s products, which have been on sale since 2018, give stalkers near-total visibility into victims’ every move on their phones, according to the FTC. The products, which range from $99.95 per year to a more premium version that costs nearly $500 annually, are capable of tracking victims’ text messages, call history, live GPS location, emails, keystrokes, video chats, notifications, contacts, pictures, calendars, files, and social media, according to the FTC complaint obtained by The Daily Beast. Some of SpyFone’s products can also give abusers the ability to remotely take pictures, record calls, and record audio through the victim’s microphone as well.

"SpyFone is a brazen brand name for a surveillance business that helped stalkers steal private information," said Samuel Levine, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. "The stalkerware was hidden from device owners, but was fully exposed to hackers who exploited the company’s slipshod security. This case is an important reminder that surveillance-based businesses pose a significant threat to our safety and security. We will be aggressive about seeking surveillance bans when companies and their executives egregiously invade our privacy."

As the FTC noted, what made SpyFone particularly invasive—beyond its powerful monitoring capabilities—was that it lurked on the phones without showing an icon on a victim’s phone.

The move to ban the stalkerware comes amid renewed calls for law enforcement and world leaders to scrutinize surveillance software developers—and to whom they sell products. Following the publication of a report that detailed how victims could have been hit with surveillance software made by Israeli spyware company NSO Group last month, world leaders and policymakers around the globe have begun to place spyware companies—particularly NSO Group—under a microscope.

Although NSO Group and stalkerware applications generally vary in how they gain access to phones, their end result is the same: They leave victims incredibly vulnerable to unwanted monitoring, raising questions about the lackadaisical oversight surrounding their sale, use, and distribution.

“They are in many ways just as powerful,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of cybersecurity, Eva Galperin, told The Daily Beast, referring to NSO Group’s and SpyFone’s products. “Both products once installed will get you keystrokes, microphone, camera, access to passwords, all kinds of things like that. Once you are on the phone you are on the phone.”

After the Fascists Elections of 2024, all citizens will have their phones hijacked to implant this in iOS and Android automatically. That way the Dear Leader can more easily target traitors for execution.

[Traveler]

Well, waddya know? 

In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm.

The report, written in October 2019 and obtained by MIT Technology Review from a former Facebook employee not involved in researching it, found that after the 2016 election, Facebook failed to prioritize fundamental changes to how its platform promotes and distributes information. The company instead pursued a whack-a-mole strategy that involved monitoring and quashing the activity of bad actors when they engaged in political discourse, and adding some guardrails that prevented “the worst of the worst.”

But this approach did little to stem the underlying problem, the report noted. Troll farms—professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks—were still building massive audiences by running networks of Facebook pages. Their content was reaching 140 million US users per month—75% of whom had never followed any of the pages. They were seeing the content because Facebook’s content-recommendation system had pushed it into their news feeds.
[...]
Collectively, those troll-farm pages—which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes—reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart’s page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million.

The troll farm pages also combined to form:

the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest—reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

the fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

[Bact PhD]

Sept 17, 2021 14:52:33 GMT Traveler said:

Well, waddya know? 

In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm.

The report, written in October 2019 and obtained by MIT Technology Review from a former Facebook employee not involved in researching it, found that after the 2016 election, Facebook failed to prioritize fundamental changes to how its platform promotes and distributes information. The company instead pursued a whack-a-mole strategy that involved monitoring and quashing the activity of bad actors when they engaged in political discourse, and adding some guardrails that prevented “the worst of the worst.”

But this approach did little to stem the underlying problem, the report noted. Troll farms—professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks—were still building massive audiences by running networks of Facebook pages. Their content was reaching 140 million US users per month—75% of whom had never followed any of the pages. They were seeing the content because Facebook’s content-recommendation system had pushed it into their news feeds.
[...]
Collectively, those troll-farm pages—which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes—reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart’s page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million.

The troll farm pages also combined to form:

the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest—reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

the fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

I’m shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you!

[AnBr]

Sept 17, 2021 16:43:54 GMT Bact PhD said:

I’m shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you!

In your best Claude Rains voice.

[LFC]

NSO, the company that makes Pegasus phone spyware, effed up by making one deal that wasn't even all that huge. Who could have foreseen that the government of Uganda would misuse it (i.e. use it as intended but on the wrong political target). I understand now why the U.S. hit them so hard.

In February 2019, an Israeli woman sat across from the son of Uganda’s president and made an audacious pitch—would he want to secretly hack any phone in the world?

Lt. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, in charge of his father’s security and a long-whispered successor to Yoweri Museveni, was keen, said two people familiar with the sales pitch.

After all, the woman, who had ties to Israeli intelligence, was pitching him Pegasus, a piece of spyware so powerful that Middle East dictators and autocratic regimes had been paying tens of millions for it for years.

But for NSO, the Israeli company that created Pegasus, this dalliance into East Africa would prove to be the moment it crossed a red line, infuriating US diplomats and triggering a chain of events that would see it blacklisted by the commerce department, pursued by Apple, and driven to the verge of defaulting on its loans, according to interviews with US and Israeli officials, industry insiders, and NSO employees.

A few months after the initial approach, NSO’s chief executive, Shalev Hulio, landed in Uganda to seal the deal, according to two people familiar with NSO’s East Africa business. Hulio, who flew the world with the permission of the Israeli government to sell Pegasus, liked to demonstrate in real time how it could hack a brand-new, boxed iPhone.

The eventual business was small for NSO. A person familiar with the transaction said it brought in between $10 million and $20 million, a fraction of the $243 million that Moody’s estimated the privately owned NSO made in revenues in 2020.

But about two years after the sales pitch, someone deployed Pegasus to try to hack the phones of 11 American diplomats and employees of the US embassy in Uganda, according to two US officials, who spoke after notifications were sent out by Apple when the iPhone maker discovered and closed a flaw in its operating system in November.

Here's how the U.S. struck the company. There's also an alleged admission that this kind of capability wouldn't be tolerated forever.

Israeli and US officials declined to confirm that the Ugandan hack directly triggered a decision to blacklist NSO. But one US official who discussed the issue with Israel’s defense ministry said: “Look at the entire sequence of events here—this is careful, not by chance.” He added that putting NSO, one of the jewels of Israel’s tech community, on a US blacklist was designed to “punish and isolate” the company.

The blacklisting, which came in November, means that NSO cannot buy any equipment, service, or intellectual property from US-based companies without approval, crippling a company whose terminals ran on servers from Dell and Intel, routers from Cisco, and whose desktop computers run on Windows operating systems, according to a spec sheet from a sale to Ghana, in West Africa.

In recent weeks, for instance, Intel asked all its employees to cease any ongoing business relationships with NSO, one person familiar with the matter said. Intel said in a statement that it “complies with all applicable US laws, including US export control regulations.”

A new CEO, Itzik Benbenisti, hired from Partner Communications, one of Israel’s largest telecom providers, quit two weeks into his new job after the blacklisting. And while the company tried to cheer up its employees with a Hanukkah party in the beach resort of Eilat, Hulio—who retook the reins after Benbenisti stepped down—was less sanguine in a recent phone call with an old business associate.

“We always knew this thing had an expiration date,” he told the friend, complaining that some clients had asked to shift their contracts to lesser-known rivals, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

[LFC]

I'm putting this here because clearly this idiot had an agenda. It's scary how one person was able to impact so many companies without any checks.

The developer who sabotaged two of his own open source code libraries, causing disruptions for thousands of apps that used them, has a colorful past that includes embracing a QAnon theory involving Aaron Swartz, the well-known hacktivist and programmer who died by suicide in 2013.

Marak Squires, the author of two JavaScript libraries with more than 21,000 dependent apps and more than 22 million weekly downloads, updated his projects late last week after they remained unchanged for more than a year. The updates contained code to produce an infinite loop that caused dependent apps to spew gibberish, prefaced by the words “Liberty Liberty Liberty.” The update sent developers scrambling as they attempted to fix their malfunctioning apps.

[LFC]

The dirtbags at Comcast are trying to shoot down a Biden nominee they don't see as sufficiently friendly. They're purchases party will, of course, do their bidding as best they can.

Comcast's hiring of a new lobbyist is part of an attempt to "torpedo" President Joe Biden's nomination of Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission, advocacy group Free Press alleged yesterday.

"Comcast just hired a lobbying firm to try to torpedo Gigi Sohn's nomination to the FCC. The company clearly knows that Sohn will work for people, not corporations," Free Press wrote in an email to members. The email asked people to call Commerce Committee Chair Sen. Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.) to urge a vote on Sohn's nomination by the end of January.

Comcast's newly hired lobbyist is Kirk Adams of Consilium Consulting in Phoenix, Arizona. Adams' lobbying disclosure, which was filed with Congress on January 6, lists one specific lobbying issue that he expects to work on: "FCC nominations." An amended version of the lobbying registration filed about 11 hours later deleted "FCC Nominations" and replaced it with "telecommunications policy."

We asked Comcast if it hired Adams to lobby against the Sohn nomination and why the change was made to the lobbying registration document. "We don't comment on lobby filings," a Comcast spokesperson responded. "As you note the firm filed a corrected filing."

That took a lot longer to say than "no."