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Just finished reading pegasus today. Fascinating how this will keep evolving, keep getting worse and we might as well act as if we are getting surveilled. Too m

Just finished reading pegasus today. Fascinating how this will keep evolving, keep getting worse and we might as well act as if we are getting surveilled. Too much incentive to not have adversarial actors. Link for the lazy - not an affiliate link - https://www.amazon.com/Pegasus-Threatens-Privacy-Dignity-Democracy-ebook/dp/B09NK4VSG4/ https://www.amazon.com/Pegasus-Threatens-Privacy-Dignity-Dem...

tptacek 2y ago
The fact that you've heard about it --- heck, the fact that there's a book about it --- should tip you off to the idea that Pegasus is not the SOTA implant. There's a whole marketplace of companies providing these services, both exploit chains and implant stacks, and most of then are firms you've never heard of before.
- cylemons 2y ago
  Dumb question, what is SOTA implant?
  - js2 2y ago
    I don't know either but perhaps "state of the art."
  - reaperman 2y ago
    SOTA = “State of the art” “Implant” would be like any remotely installable persistent exploit that grants access to an attacker over a period of time. Also, I’m pretty luddite when it comes to highly-hyped AI stuff, (in spite of my income being heavily tied to developing AI models) but I have found ChatGPT to be shockingly good at explaining super niche terminology and even jokes. So I do recommend people feel comfortable turning to that if they ever feel uncomfortable asking “dumb” questions publicly.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      @simonw made a custom GPT called the dejargonizer just for that purpose: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-3V1JcLD92-dejargonizer https://chatgpt.com/g/g-3V1JcLD92-dejargonizer
    - pockmarked19 2y ago
      Or you could just Google it. [0] That's right. People can just Google things. [0] https://i.imgur.com/1Yx0m1U.png https://i.imgur.com/1Yx0m1U.png
      - cylemons 2y ago
        I googled "SOTA implant" and got something totally different.
      - gambiting 2y ago
        Yeah except Google is just so often wrong or pushing crappy SEO results that I honestly think it's worthless nowadays.
      - maeil 2y ago
        Bit of a tangent, but.. Google has been going down hill for many years but since the December update a few weeks ago it has genuinely become atrocious. In their quest to combat AI slop (good idea), they've gone and made domain authority so much more important than the content, that now when you search for A B C, you get 20 pages from very "authoritive" sites that are about A, are slighyly about B and don't even mention C. This is despite plenty of great pages about A B C existing and serving the content we're looking for - we just never get to see them because the places they're hosted on aren't "authoritive" enough. Before, you'd get 5 pages, 1 of which likely had what you were looking for, and maybe 1-2 were AI slop. Now zero of them are what you're looking for, but at least we no longer have the (generally very obvious) slop? Brilliant improvement for the users.. The reason behind this is pretty obvious: most AI slop that had been ranking well likely had 0 ad spend, meanwhile the "authoritive" sites tend to have high ad spend. Ads was seeing numbers go down and unhappy customers, and they run the company.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 2y ago
    An "implant" is like a rootkit; it's all the things you do with a compromise once your exploit chain pays off, and threat actors generally have standardized implant stacks. "SOTA" is just an abbreviation for "state of the art".
- hammock 2y ago
  You make this comment everywhere Pegasus comes up. Half a dozen times on one submission.[1] Can you name some of the other firms we've never heard of? [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42476828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42476828
  - tptacek 2y ago
    No.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      Alright then, keep your secrets.
    - daneel_w 2y ago
      So it's either because you, too, have never heard of them, or because you're obliged not to. Which one is it? Are you making an educated guess about their presence?
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        No he knows what they are he's just being annoying
        daneel_w 2y ago
        My questions were rhetorical ;) I've commented on his "patterns" previously, in particular whenever Signal's lack of anonymity is the topic. Apparently it's an offense so one must watch the way they phrase their responses to such statements.
        tptacek 2y ago
        I have no idea how to parse this, but if you thought I was going to give you a list of all the CNE vendors I'm aware of on an HN thread, obviously, no. Why would you care anyways? I know enough to know that I'm speaking factually about the state of the market, but I don't work in it or interact with it in any meaningful way, so you could just as easily say "if you know about that vendor, that means they're not a SOTA CNE vendor either". You might be right! On this leg of the thread, we're considering basically one issue: is NSO Group one of the {only,most} {important,impactful,sophisticated,whatever} CNE vendors. Is someone seriously arguing that's the case? I'd assume the idea that there are lots of vendors more impactful would be pretty banal, but maybe there really are people on this thread whose understanding of CNE comes entirely from that book linked upthread?

tptacek 2y ago

The fact that you've heard about it --- heck, the fact that there's a book about it --- should tip you off to the idea that Pegasus is not the SOTA implant. There's a whole marketplace of companies providing these services, both exploit chains and implant stacks, and most of then are firms you've never heard of before.

cylemons 2y ago
Dumb question, what is SOTA implant?
- js2 2y ago
  I don't know either but perhaps "state of the art."
- reaperman 2y ago
  SOTA = “State of the art” “Implant” would be like any remotely installable persistent exploit that grants access to an attacker over a period of time. Also, I’m pretty luddite when it comes to highly-hyped AI stuff, (in spite of my income being heavily tied to developing AI models) but I have found ChatGPT to be shockingly good at explaining super niche terminology and even jokes. So I do recommend people feel comfortable turning to that if they ever feel uncomfortable asking “dumb” questions publicly.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    @simonw made a custom GPT called the dejargonizer just for that purpose: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-3V1JcLD92-dejargonizer https://chatgpt.com/g/g-3V1JcLD92-dejargonizer
  - pockmarked19 2y ago
    Or you could just Google it. [0] That's right. People can just Google things. [0] https://i.imgur.com/1Yx0m1U.png https://i.imgur.com/1Yx0m1U.png
    - cylemons 2y ago
      I googled "SOTA implant" and got something totally different.
    - gambiting 2y ago
      Yeah except Google is just so often wrong or pushing crappy SEO results that I honestly think it's worthless nowadays.
    - maeil 2y ago
      Bit of a tangent, but.. Google has been going down hill for many years but since the December update a few weeks ago it has genuinely become atrocious. In their quest to combat AI slop (good idea), they've gone and made domain authority so much more important than the content, that now when you search for A B C, you get 20 pages from very "authoritive" sites that are about A, are slighyly about B and don't even mention C. This is despite plenty of great pages about A B C existing and serving the content we're looking for - we just never get to see them because the places they're hosted on aren't "authoritive" enough. Before, you'd get 5 pages, 1 of which likely had what you were looking for, and maybe 1-2 were AI slop. Now zero of them are what you're looking for, but at least we no longer have the (generally very obvious) slop? Brilliant improvement for the users.. The reason behind this is pretty obvious: most AI slop that had been ranking well likely had 0 ad spend, meanwhile the "authoritive" sites tend to have high ad spend. Ads was seeing numbers go down and unhappy customers, and they run the company.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 2y ago
  An "implant" is like a rootkit; it's all the things you do with a compromise once your exploit chain pays off, and threat actors generally have standardized implant stacks. "SOTA" is just an abbreviation for "state of the art".
hammock 2y ago
You make this comment everywhere Pegasus comes up. Half a dozen times on one submission.[1] Can you name some of the other firms we've never heard of? [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42476828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42476828
- tptacek 2y ago
  No.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Alright then, keep your secrets.
  - daneel_w 2y ago
    So it's either because you, too, have never heard of them, or because you're obliged not to. Which one is it? Are you making an educated guess about their presence?
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      No he knows what they are he's just being annoying
      - daneel_w 2y ago
        My questions were rhetorical ;) I've commented on his "patterns" previously, in particular whenever Signal's lack of anonymity is the topic. Apparently it's an offense so one must watch the way they phrase their responses to such statements.
        tptacek 2y ago
        I have no idea how to parse this, but if you thought I was going to give you a list of all the CNE vendors I'm aware of on an HN thread, obviously, no. Why would you care anyways? I know enough to know that I'm speaking factually about the state of the market, but I don't work in it or interact with it in any meaningful way, so you could just as easily say "if you know about that vendor, that means they're not a SOTA CNE vendor either". You might be right! On this leg of the thread, we're considering basically one issue: is NSO Group one of the {only,most} {important,impactful,sophisticated,whatever} CNE vendors. Is someone seriously arguing that's the case? I'd assume the idea that there are lots of vendors more impactful would be pretty banal, but maybe there really are people on this thread whose understanding of CNE comes entirely from that book linked upthread?