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Leaked documents expose deep ties between Israeli army and Microsoft
- mackyspace 2y agoJust like IBM and the Holocaust.
- cempaka 2y agoOnly this time the mass mind control has been so well perfected, they can just conduct the indiscriminate killing in broad daylight.
- myrmidon 2y agoI honestly believe that the single thing that allowed the levelling of the Gaza strip is October 7th. This is an easy "excuse" for an outside observer, because the scales are just not obvious enough; On one hand, you have a desperate/futile lashing out from palestinian terrorists (killing about a thousand civilians), on the other hand, a coldblooded strategic bombing campaign (with >20000 victims and basically no building left behind). I would be really hesitant with assigning blame on either side here. What do you think would have happened without that "mass mind control"? How could specifically western/external states have helped the situation in hindsight?
- mackyspace 2y agoWhat helps is to know the history of Israel’s ethic cleansing campaign against Palestinians. Zionists have been murdering civilians en mass since Israel was founded. We don’t hear about it in the West, but it’s actually well documented. They even sniped over a thousand people during the peaceful March of Return protest, leaving Hamas essentially no option.
- myrmidon 2y agoSure, but the low inhibitions on murdering civilians are entirely mutual- it's not like all the suicide bombing during the second intifada was mainly aimed against military targets... I'll absolutely concede that as outsider its more important to keep the Israelis in check, but this is simply because of how the power balance looks: Israel is a modern industrialized state with a highly effective military-- the palestinians, on the other hand, have some smuggled RPGs and a bunch of guns at best. But when assigning blame for all the bloodshed, also consider the following: If you swapped the roles over night, took all the military capabilities from Israel and gave it to the Palestinians: Do you think the situation would actually improve, or stabilize? Honestly? My external view of the whole conflict is that Israel is a state that does not want to care for or govern its palestinian minority (which is unethical and very problematic); a lot of palestinians, on the other hand, simply want the Jewish population dead or banished, and finding a solution from this position is immensely difficult.
- mackyspace 2y agoThat ignores history though. There’s a very clear right and wrong here. Israel was artificially constructed through ethnic cleansing. The Balfour Declaration and Nakba pretty much explain it all.
- myrmidon 2y agoI can absolutely see your point that Israelis in the past did unethical things to make their state happen. And many Israelis do unethical things still, or abuse the power of their state to disproportionally react to attacks. But my point is-- this is completely unhelpful and almost irrelevant for conflict resolution now. Because what are you gonna do? Throw all the Israelis back to Europe or wherever their ancestors used to live at some point? Give all the military power to Palestinians and just... find out what happens? It's also important to note that pretty much every modern nation has figurative ethical skeletons ins its closet, and frequently in the rather recent past-- would you sanction/break up the US for segregation (or, worse, their past with native americans)? White South Africans for apartheid? France for colonialism/Vietnam? I'm just saying that it is very difficult to deal with historical injustice consistently... If you got to call the shots, what would you do with todays Israel? PS: thank you for the discussion-- i really appreciate getting feedback from a different PoV in a civil manner!
- weatherlite 2y ago> We don’t hear about it in the West Lol right, we never hear about it. You people are so meek and quiet about the perceived evilness of Israel. People only speak about Sudan, Syria, Yemen and countless other places with worse atrocities. No one ever mentions the Palestinians.
- mackyspace 2y agoThe vast majority of Americans do not know about The Balfour Declaration, Nakba, The March of Return… they know what Zionist media teaches them, which is nothing about the actual history of the region. This is the source of demographic split in how Israel is viewed. People who grew up with the internet vs msm are more informed.
- weatherlite 2y agoRight the whole world needs to talk about the Nakba and Balfour, constantly. That's the major historical event the world needs to be obsessed about and the most important thing on our plates now.
- mackyspace 2y agoYes. It’s directly related to the most major issues of today including the post we are currently commenting on.
- weatherlite 2y agoThe fact we're talking about it does not mean its related to the most major issues of today. That's your opinion and I can't think of anything you can back this up with.
- mackyspace 2y agoIf you don’t think the war in Israel, AIPAC, Zionist owned AI, Zionist VCs, the presidential election… are important, then there’s not much for us to discuss. Side note, the pathological Israeli desire to have the last word is super obnoxious. You can just let a conversation end without adding one more reiteration of the same thing you’ve already said many times. I find this bad trait is omnipresent amongst Zionists.
- cempaka 2y agoObviously the United States could simply have refused to sell weapons or crucial technology to the Israelis. The impact this could have is often overblown but it's not nothing. We also could not have taken part in the atrocity propaganda around October 7 which has advanced numerous falsehoods like "mass rape," "40 beheaded babies," or even "1000 civilians killed."
- Avicebron 2y agoDeeply ironic
- carabiner 2y agoJust like YC and a cruise missile company: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41305736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41305736
- 752963e64 2y ago[dead]
- tacheiordache 2y agoThis kind of story gets flagged these days on HN
- JohnMakin 2y agoAnd it's a shame, because this is a deeply relevant topic - unfortunately people cannot discuss it rationally whatsoever.
- cempaka 2y agoA not insignificant number of HN readers are actively working on these systems, we wouldn't want them getting cold feet.
- JohnMakin 2y agoI don't necessarily disagree, I just wish that if we're going to decide to nuke stuff like this I also don't have to see 5,000 word PG screed on the front page for half a week. It suggests a particular bias that I don't think actually exists to the degree people think.
- cempaka 2y agoHeh I was being sarcastic, but yeah, you can't really expect to discuss the MIC's worst crimes openly on a forum that represents an industry tied so closely to it.
- zadler 2y agoWe are all sleepwalking into a terminator scenario or dangerous surveillance state at least. Not just Israel. This kind of tech is eventually turned inwards.
- bsnnkv 2y agoThis is known as the "imperial boomerang"[1] for anyone who would like to do further research and look at historical examples. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y agoDoesn't really contain specifics on how this technology is being used from what I could tell. Presumably, one avenue is to aid in target acquisition. I would imagine being to more accurate determine a target is more efficient and results in less innocent lives lost than blanket bombing. Compare carpet bombing of German cities in WW2 to the laser guided munitions of today. Or those "sword" bombs that have been used to crush people in a car while not harming anyone on the sidewalk.
- cempaka 2y agoIsraeli politicians and military officials are quite open about their desire to remove as many people from Gaza and the West Bank as possible. Better targeting is about more efficiently eliminating the resistance to these efforts.
- zadler 2y agoWhich is not the same as avoiding collateral damage.
- jraby3 2y agoIt mentioned about 50% of the budget went towards translation and 25% towards chat gpt.
- myrmidon 2y agoThis is a dangerous argument though, because it equates "improved target aquisition" with "less blanket bombing". This does not necessarily hold, because less "probabilistic" target aquisition capabilities might also just mean that less bombing is done because it is no longer cost effective. Consider WW2 Germany-- them having less access to "targetting data" (e.g. religion registers) was typically better for the population, because it made extermination campaigns less feasible: Contrast Netherlands vs France.
- yomansat 2y agoMakes me sick to my stomach, this is such an evil stance as they're directly involved in the warcrimes, and deserves far more attention by boycotts.
- chacham15 2y ago> According to the documents, the AI services that the Defense Ministry purchased from Microsoft include translation (about half of the average monthly consumption during the first year of the war), OpenAI’s GPT-4 model (about a quarter of the consumption), a speech-to-text conversion tool, and an automatic document analysis tool. > The leaked documents show that the Israeli military’s average monthly use of Azure’s cloud storage facilities in the first six months of the war was 60 percent higher than in the four months leading up to it. This is the actual data in the article, the rest is a bunch of speculation around these pieces of data. They note that GPT-4 may have been used in air gapped systems which would make it impossible to know how it was used, but it would be interesting to have more detail here. I also find it interesting that the largest usage of services is actually in translation more than anything else.
- tartoran 2y agoYes this was promptly flagged. Need I say more?