What are you saying actually happened? It sounds like the concern is that in a certain context, messages are cloud hosted instead of client-side e2e encrypted? Did anyone even claim otherwise?
How is this different from suggesting Netflix was all a secret plot by Stanford to spy on Europeans' TV binging?
Two anonymous security researchers working at Dutch government found the data is send plaintext [1]. One independent security researcher was able to verify their claim.
This should be a concern if the company is owned by Dutch people, but more so if it is owned by a company with questionable jurisdiction. Which unfortunately the USA and Israel are these days.
Did they ever claim otherwise? They say "Zivver scans the content of every email" prominently on the front page. The flow seems to be TLS to Zivver first, scanning, then encryption.
If all it takes to convince us that a communication product was created as a front for spying operations is not having a strict e2e design like Signal's, then do you think virtually all of them are fronts for spying operations?
Listen, I am Dutch. I am loyal to the Dutch government, Dutch society, and therein lie my interests. This is also my potential bias.
> Did they ever claim otherwise? They say "Zivver scans the content of every email" prominently on the front page. The flow seems to be TLS to Zivver first, scanning, then encryption.
I worked at a government organization which used Zivver. This was around 2018. It was assumed to be E2E encrypted. I wrote about the issue in my security audit, but it had low priority for a myriad of reasons (they had worse issues at the time). Zivver is more akin to the Lavabit situation.
Proton's OpenPGP.js is slightly more secure than this implementation (it encrypts client-side), but because Proton can decide (and be forced) to serve a different OpenPGP.js, it suffers from a similar issue.
> If all it takes to convince us that a communication product was created as a front for spying operations is not having a strict e2e design like Signal's, then do you think virtually all of them are fronts for spying operations?
I never wrote it was created as a front. I don't believe anyone asserted that. The company was founded by a couple of Dutch people in 2015, it was a Dutch company. So they fell under Dutch jurisdiction. I honestly haven't looked them up.
Fast forward to June 2025 and this company got acquired by an American company where the higher echelons are ex-Israeli spies. This could be a front, I don't know. I very much question this sale should've been ACK'ed by the Dutch government. Because due to the CLOUD act, the data now falls under American jurisdiction. Around the time of the acquisition though, the Dutch government fell. responsible up to then was Dirk Beljaarts. Around that time (June 2025), Vincent Karremans took his place. Fast forward a couple of months later, we had the Nexperia crisis, where Karremans intervened. A fallout from a stopped acquisition due to national security is lower than Nexperia fallout though.
I copied the title of the article verbatim. The Dutch article has a different title, and is IMO of better quality. The title of that article calls it a strategic blunder. I very much agree with that, but not because the top of Kiteworks is Israeli and ex-Unit 8200. That is just a cherry on top, worse case scenario a red herring. No, because of the current geopolitical situation with regards to Trump and the CLOUD act. Can you blame them for trying, given the situation and stakes? The acquisition occurred at a perfect timing.
The TL;DR is not that a American or Israeli entity supposedly succeeded. It is that the Dutch government failed. And while Zivver is heavily in use in The Netherlands, it also is within EU. So we failed to serve the best interests of EU here as well.
Thanks for the added context, that sounds reasonable to have wanted the product to continue under Dutch ownership.
> I never wrote it was created as a front. I don't believe anyone asserted that.
There seem to be vague insinuations of a conspiracy floating around, rather than an explicit conspiracy theory, so I may have mischaracterized it. But for example, you mentioned elsewhere that "Mossad's way of operating is aggressive". Could you clarify what you're insinuating, if anything?
Hmm, from EU PoV, given many other EU countries rely on it, I believe NL is a reasonable host, but other EU countries could be as well.
I'm no expert on that subject, just following Hubert's assessment that it falls in their M.O. (already linked), following Modderkolk's recent assessment on how Mossad operates [1]. Look at all the flak I get in this thread while I just went with HN rule of 1:1 using title. Problem is all these sources are in my native language. And finally, yes my suspicion is on high alert ever since the Maccabi riots in Amsterdam [2], to which Modderkolk also refers to.
And yes, I am well aware every Israeli adult is ex-military [3]. If it were up to me, we'd restart this practice here in NL.
ICJ has made no such finding. They will probably making a ruling on genocide allegations in the coming years; they certain have not made one yet. The opinions they've issued so far are here https://www.icj-cij.org/decisions
ICJ found the accusation plausible, and did later in another case conclude that the israeli occupation of palestinian land and apartheid is not lawful and must stop.
Whether ICJ had found genocide perpetrated or just plausible does not matter very much since international law demands that even the risk of genocide triggers state action to put an end to that risk. The ICJ judgement regarding plausibility also made demands towards Israel, which that state has refused to comply with.
Starving a population of millions and systematically destroying their homes and infrastructure does not become jolly fine and dandy just because some court hasn't yet deemed it genocidal.
This is still not accurate. What ICJ found plausible was "some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection". The then-president even clarified explicitly that the plausibility finding was about the existence of these rights, not the occurrence of genocide [1].
Noone is saying things are "jolly fine and dandy", but it's important to stick to facts when making such accusations.
It's not nitpicking - what the court is entirely different from what you stated (though it's understandable as a lot of sources misrepresent it).
The court can issue orders without finding any sort of violation, which is what happened in this case when they ordered Israel to "prevent genocide". It can be interpreted as a reminder to Israel of its obligations.
States have a clear obligation to stop the genocide in Palestine. Only the mentally infirm distrust that one is ongoing. Due to rules of process and the perpetrators waging war against the court it will likely never make a sound judgement in this case.
It has, however, found reason to order Israel to take certain actions, with the express purpose of preventing genocide, which the state of Israel has refused to follow and its politicians, pundits and other prominent members of israeli society have kept declaring their genocidal intent over and over again since then.
Do you worry more about the interpretation of legal minutiae than a developing mainstream in international relations that considers genocide and other forms of indiscriminate murder permissible?
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
I don't see how that would apply at all. These aren't nuclear weapons that take out entire populations, these are tiny munitions used to target Hezbollah operatives.
None of these have anything to do with what you cited above, which was ICRC's summary of customary law about inherently indiscriminate weapons. Your first and second links here are examining entirely different challenges to the operation's legality, and the third is just some vague assertions from questionable sources like Francesca Albanese.
You could ask ChatGPT and get a perfectly cromulent answer on what these have to do with what I cited. The key theme is indiscriminate weapons used for indiscriminate attacks. Alas, you can lead a horse to water...
Tiny explosives are certainly not the sort of inherently indiscriminate weapons ICRC refers to. You might want to read the article you linked to, which uses nuclear weapons as the main example. The difference in energy released by Israel's beeper vs a modern nuclear payload is at least 10 orders of magnitude.
ICRC is not really claiming that those examples are indiscriminate, they're giving examples of weapons that might arguably or sometimes be considered indiscriminate.
Some booby traps might fall into that category, but this isn't a toy or a banana, it's a device specifically issued to enemy personnel.
There can be separate textualist arguments about Israel's operation based on the specific language of CCW, but that's unrelated to the customary IHL you linked to.
For one it wasn't targeted, but either way, if it, as you claim, was targeted then it would be even worse because it's worse to kill and maim kids by targeting them than by being indifferent.
This was about as targeted as anti-personnel landmines, but spread out in civilian areas and detonated without any knowledge of their surroundings at the time.
Because mines are untargeted and designed to maim without discrimination as to who they might hurt there is a long running effort to prohibit their use.
Hezbollah pagers aren't randomly lying around though, they're normally attached to Hezbollah members. These were also much smaller than any anti personnel mine.
This was far more targeted than, say, any artillery strike that a commander could possibly order. Targeted doesn't mean it's impossible to harm something else. That's possible with any weapon, and far more likely with larger munitions like artillery shells.
It's not clear that Israel just set off all Hezbollah issued beepers; we don't know what methodology they used. We can guess based on reported casualties, but we don't know which casualties were involved with Hezbollah's military operations.
> What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted.
It was certainly targeted, it just also had collateral damage, i.e. harm to non-targets.
What you have Israel do instead? Suppose they struck Hezbollah fighters with conventional artillery. They're not sitting around in open fields, so there still would have been collateral damage.
Would you again maintain that the strikes were "untargeted" because there was collateral damage? By this unusual definition, it seems impossible to do a "targeted" strike at least in any urban environment.
Israel should obviously have ended the occupations, payed reparations and prepared for the return of refugees.
The IDF doesn't give a shit about "collateral damage". They mainly attack civilian targets. That's the purpose of the organisation, to make life for indigenous populations in the vicinity of the state of Israel impossible. Destroy their agriculture and water sources, murder their children, displace them, destroy their homes, occupy the land, pretend to be a victim if someone fights back. Then sign some contracts every now and then and don't abide by them while claiming that the other party is the one who doesn't.
This has been ongoing for about a century, it was how the Haganah, Irgun, Stern gang operated. This is why the IDF has such a bad army, they aren't trained for combat and hardly ever have to experience it. Instead they're used for genocidal atrocities against unarmed civilians.
Ended the occupations meaning what, never enter Lebanon? What do you think Israel should have done about Hezbollah’s terrorism, just tolerate it and never let Israelis return to their homes in the north?
Apart from that it seems like you’re just switching topics to a variety of other accusations. We were talking about a particular operation which you claimed was “untargeted”, yet you haven’t suggested any better alternative (besides being nicer to terrorists in hopes that they stop?). In reality the operation had far less collateral damage than what’s possible with any conventional alternative.
Using force to halt or slow a genocide is not terrorism. And yes, Israel ought to retreat from lebanese as well as syrian and palestinian territory, stop it's cross-border attacks, allow displaced people to return to their homes and pay reparations.
The alternative is exactly that, to stop doing apartheid and occupation and allow justice to prevail.
There’s no question that Hezbollah’s bombardment was terrorism. It would be absurd to claim that they were targeting military assets when they routinely use unguided rockets which aren’t capable of doing so. Israel had every right to enter Lebanon in response.
Suppose we believe all captions in your links, so for example we'll assume that guy in shorts and flip flops was some sort of “spy balloon manager.”
It wouldn’t matter, because once you perform terrorist attacks, you’re still a terrorist even if you also attack valid targets sometimes. Same as Hamas, which is still a terrorist org despite attacking some IDF bases.
Even Amnesty has acknowledged Hezbollah’s routine use of unguided rockets, which can’t possibly target military assets but are just lobbed in the general direction of population centers. That makes them terrorists, regardless of what else they do.
My suspicion is that you expect it to short circuit the conversation, and that no one is willing to side with terrorism or affiliate themselves with it in any way, which would give you a degree of power over the conversation.
It's a weasely word, and has about zero relevance in criminal law regarding warfare, it being a political designation mainly used by states that meet resistance to colonisation and the like.
Yeah, sure, Hezbollah has committed war crimes. So what? They look like a pathetic little rounding error beside the usian and israeli war crimes over the past decades, or even just the last year or so. Like Hamas I'm sure Hezbollah would gladly send people to the Hague for prosecution if Israel did too.
So tell us, why is this designation so important to you? Is it because you lack arguments? Is it because you're lazy and just want to waste other people's time?
While there isn't one standard definition of terrorism, Hezbollah's untargeted bombardment of Israeli towns qualifies under pretty much any definition.
You seemed happy to use the term against Israel [1], claiming an operation which specifically targeted Hezbollah operatives was somehow terrorism. Why do you suddenly have a blanket objection to a term that you were just using yourself?
Under what definition would the targeting of villages where the IDF is operating qualify? Why are you back to lying about the pager attacks being "targeted", even though they clearly were not, and even if they were, that would make the israeli crime a lot worse?
I used it as a rhetorical device, and as is obvious above and elsewhere, it's not something I'm monotonically trying to rub in as part of an astroturfing campaign.
They were widely distributed and there was no way for the israelis to know where they were when they detonated them, which they likely did out of desperation and not because they had good reason to believe they were in such and such a position.
It is fucking grim to incessantly defend state terrorism.
You don't seem to have an inch of a problem with terrorist, islamist militants that not only terrorise Israel, they also terrorise Lebanon. Ask the Arab League. Even they define them as terrorists.
Something here is grim indeed and it is not restricted to some regretable educational deficiencies.
Projectiles hit the wrong target all the time. Especially when we get into artillery or air strikes where there's no line of sight to a uniformed soldier, commanders can't be sure if they're going to hit the intended target. That's why we have the principle of proportionality rather than an impossible standard of zero collateral damage.
But surely "the most targeted strike of all time" would be "a single-target strike on a visually confirmed intended individual", right? Or at least that would be more targeted than any strike without LoS?
A parent comment claimed it was the most targeted “operation”, not “strike”. Some small individual strikes have 100% perfect targeting; I think the claim was about large scale operations like artillery barrages or aerial campaigns.
(I think the claim is technically false if we include open field conflicts, but probably true if we narrow it to comparable environments.)
Targeting Hezbollah operatives is certainly targeting, yes. The fact that there was still some nonzero harm to civilians, despite the targeting, does not refute that. Targeting doesn't imply zero collateral damage, which is an impossible standard.
The collateral damage was obvious and predictable. If you know about the potential collateral damage and do it anyway, then it's not targeted, even if you say it's targeted.
For example: say I want to kill someone. I know they live in NYC. So I target them by dropping a nuke on NYC.
Is this a targeted attack? Obviously not. But I said it was targeted! Doesn't work that way.
If you want to target people, you try your best to kill just them. If you're planting bombs in mundane places and setting them off in public, you are not doing that.
I don't know why we feel the need to defend military operatives by essentially claiming they're the stupidest people on Earth and cannot put 2 and 2 together. No no, they can. Meaning, this was intentional.
If I dive bomb an enemy position, knowing that it's dark and windy and I might end up hitting something else, that's still a targeted operation. Same deal with the pager operation.
> So I target them by dropping a nuke on NYC.
You would have plainly violated the principle of proportionality, which is about the relative weight of military advantage vs civilian harm. The pager operation on the other hand created a massive military advantage, with less civilian harm than what's possible with conventional warfare.
> planting bombs in mundane places and setting them off in public
You would have a stronger point if the conflict looked more like Ukraine, where enemies are mostly sitting in trenches wearing uniforms. Hezbollah operates very differently, storing and firing weapons from mundane civilian places. There's no real way to fight Hezbollah without bombs in such places, it's just a question of whether bombs are delivered by artillery, planes or other means.
> this was intentional
I'm not sure what you mean here. I of course agree Israel could have predicted that there would be non-zero harm to civilians. That's true of pretty much any operation though, at least in urban wars.
For comparison, consider Ukraine's massive truck bomb of the Kerch Bridge. Of course they knew there would be collateral damage, and 5 civilians ended up being killed. It was still widely considered legal, considering the major military advantage gained.
The principle of proportionality is explicitly about expectations, i.e. expected military advantage vs expected collateral damage.
You seem to be holding Israel to an impossible standard of guaranteeing zero collateral damage, which IHL does not require because no military is capable of that.
The latitude you wankers expect is absolutely incredible ... talking of impossible standards around "zero collateral damage" after what Israel has done in Gaza et al ...
In Zcash a quantum attacker could include invalid transactions with forged proofs, but I'm not sure they could actually break Zcash's privacy properties?
I'd need to review the design details more to say for sure, but e.g. from what I recall Pedersen hashes are used in the commitment tree, but not for nullifiers. Those use blake hashes (which are plausibly post-quantum secure), IIRC.
There's also the underlying prover layer, but many proof systems actually have information-theoretic zero-knowledge properties (assuming a suitable source of randomness), even if their soundness guarantees are based on assumptions like DLP.
The deal included remains of deceased hostages, most of which were not released at the agreed 48 hour point.
> they probably died from explosive that were already lying around
The source behind this theory seemed to be a tweet claiming "I’m told by a source familiar", and another tweet which was explicitly speculating ("most likely due to an explosive device ..."). No evidence was offered.
> While the Palestinians have treated their hostages as well as they could even when Gaza was starving
A UN envoy found "clear and convincing information that some [hostages] have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".
Evyatar David also appeared to be the most severely malnourished adult in Gaza, while being forced to dig his own grave.
Hamas only has one charter. Some Westerners like to think of the separate 2017 document as an "updated charter", but Hamas themselves never used such language, and in fact explicitly stated that the 2017 document did not replace the charter.
The position Wales was taking was that Wikipedia shouldn't be calling it a genocide in its own voice ("wikivoice"), which means taking a side rather than neutrally documenting the controversy.
Larry Sanger also made a similar statement. The two Wikipedia founders had a falling out back in the day, and it's the first time in a long time that they've publicly agreed on anything.
Neither has any special power on the wiki though. One might hope that both founders pointing out NPOV issues could be a wake-up call to stop interpreting the NPOV policy "creatively" to push an agenda,[3] but realistically nothing seems likely to change.
[3] As an example of "creative workarounds" to Wikipedia's neutrality policy, one of the justifications for renaming "Allegations ..." to "Gaza genocide" was a rather bizarre idea that neutrality doesn't apply to titles since they're "topics", not statements. The statement implied by the new title was then predictably used as one of the justifications for changing the article body to use "genocide" in wikivoice.
From a textualist standpoint you're right, but in practice the Supreme Court has expanded the First Amendment to prohibit government actions (besides just lawmaking) that would deter speech.
There are a number of them mentioned on Wikipedia itself [1]. I hesitate to use Wikipedia as a source given all the anti-Israel bias lately, but that particular section seems okay-ish for now and I'm not aware of a better list.
How is this different from suggesting Netflix was all a secret plot by Stanford to spy on Europeans' TV binging?
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