>I've never seen Zivver used in German Healthcare.
How would you even be sure of this just from what you can see from the outside? That doesn't mean your health insurance company isn't using Zivver internally same how they use Office 365 or SAP. It's not like they tell you all the SW they use.
Internally, you have the Hospital Information System where you can look up all the informations you need.
I can just say I know the inside of one of Germany's biggest Hospitals, since I'm a Doctor. And requesting Patient Data or giving it out to other Parties is unfortunately a Task that Doctors still have to do on their own
And for communication with the outside world it's down to Fax, Phone or Letter.
Theoretically they could already send this via S/MIME encrypted Mail (KIM) to the family doctor, but most Hospitals haven't rolled out this service yet.
They just started installing Card Readers for the Doctor Identity Cards, so they can issue electronic prescriptions
For communication with Patients some Hospitals have Web Portals/Apps for getting/sending information.
That's pretty interesting. We have electronic prescriptions too (though it goes straight to the pharmacy however - we don't see it).
As far as I know, I don't think the hospital portal has ever been used for communication like that. An email seems more "obvious" perhaps to the docs, and that's what they use most of the time.
It's always companies run by Unit 8200 ex-Israeli spies that are running these telemetry-/ad- surveillance dragnets, and there's never any retaliatory action against them.
Like how about a call to Benny's office saying "hey buddy, reign your dogs in, our citizens are off limits"?
It's really, truly strange just how intertwined the US is with Israeli spies at all levels. If people affiliated with The Netherlands or Rwanda had this much influence in the US, nobody would tolerate it.
At this point it's all a i-controlled spy operation everywhere in the US. Just check where the main "cyber-security" firms come from. They're just fronts for spy operations.
Unit 8200 hand-picks the best and brightest young Israelis and trains them in computer science. You might as well say "It's always MIT" - of course an elite educational institution produces a lot of successful startups.
If you're looking for a sinister plot, look no further than In-Q-Tel.
MIT students have different loyalty than to a fascist government like Trump's administration. The political situation in USA is also not like the one in Israel (which country is a direct result of the outcome of WWII and hatred by nazi-Germany, who are in constant fight with their neighbors). It isn't a fair comparison. One should also take into account that Mossad's way of operating is aggressive.
The English article doesn't mention this, but vulnerabilities were found in Zivver. See my comment elsewhere in the thread referring to the Dutch version of the article.
Why would you assume the said counties wouldn't want their citizens surveilled? "But they will know what our citizens do..." yeah unfortunately 5 eyes proves otherwise.
Govt surveillance is a big club, and you ain't in it.
It isn't a "telemetry-/ad- surveillance dragnet". Kitenet's product is a "Private Data Network (PDN) to control, monitor, and secure data exchanged between people, machines, and systems across user collaboration, automated workflows, and enterprise AI".
It stands to reason that ex-cryptographers from Unit 8200 would use the expertise they gained to launch legitimate companies that provide cybersecurity solutions.
Is there any factual basis to this claim, or just your personal opinion?
It's like claiming Oracle's real business isn't a database, but rather stealing customers data which was stored in Oracle's databases. Or practically any other company that has access to customers data.
Please feel free to translate and read the Dutch version of this article. On the bottom, several security researchers found vulnerabilities in Zivver [1]
So Zivver created a product with security vulnerabilities, Kitenet bought Zivver (probably for their customer base), and it's all some sort of conspiracy to steal personal data?
We merely bought the honeypot, Your Honor! We didn't know what we were buying!
Perfect cover story /slowclap
Secret services use companies as cover all the time. Nothing new there.
The conspiracy is that it is a dragnet for the data, and given the data is first send plaintext to Zivver (see the Dutch FTM article I already linked), it isn't far-fetched.
Looking at the current geopolitical situation, it also isn't far-fetched. It even fits in the Israeli secret services' M.O.
Actually, anyone who uses Zivver can find these vulnerabilities. I was worried about this, and reported it to my former employer (while still employed), but alas I did not have a PoC and they had a lot of other security related incidents so this was low priority. Also, this was at a time when the company was still privately owned by the Dutch founders. My hypothesis is that someone working for such an organization passed it to the Israeli secret service, who then got motivated to buy this honeypot.
Chinese do something similar: release some piece of technology, never provide any meaningful updates to the product, and voila it is insecure as hell (yet 'we didn't know' provides plausible deniability). I saw this first-hand with KRACK vulnerability.
Also... Kiteworks [1] is the name of the company. Not sure why you keep calling it Kitenet.
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?
This framing is a cheap rhetorical trick. Restated this leads to the statement “all companies by default are in the business of capturing customer data, all other claims about their product and smoke screens to hide that.”
Which is something you can believe but it falls into the extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence category. But by claiming it about Oracle or Israeli cyber firms or whatever you swap the evidence burden to the person who has the not extraordinary claim, that most businesses are doing what it claims on the tin.
It's not just a rhetorical trick. Amazon collects most of their data in Virginia, right at the doorsteps of a well known "intelligence" org in the USA. These companies that handle data all around the world are authorized to exist for some reason...
Oracle gets its name from a codename of a 1977 project for the Central Intelligence Agency, Oracle's first customer.
In 2004, then-United States Attorney General John Ashcroft sued Oracle Corporation to prevent it from acquiring a multibillion-dollar intelligence contract. After Ashcroft's resignation from government, he founded a lobbying firm, The Ashcroft Group, which Oracle hired in 2005. With the group's help, Oracle went on to acquire the contract.
Following the beginning of the Gaza war in 2023, Oracle’s top executives, including Safra Catz and Larry Ellison, publicly aligned the company with Israel’s military operations. They issued statements of solidarity, paid double salaries to Israeli employees, and donated to organizations connected to Israel’s wartime response.
See. Thats a good comment. “Your use of Oracle is a bad counter factual because…”
Switching to that is commenting in good faith. It educates and argues the point and makes it clear that you aren’t in fact claiming that all companies are surveillance state apparatus. Note that other commenters ran with the “but they are actually argument” because the door was opened.
might not change your mind, but you’re likely to end up realizing customer data hovering is more of a driver of modern business decisions than you realize. To say nothing of the assets such activities provide the intelligence communities.
This is happening. Please don’t dismiss it as conspiracy theory.
It is an obvious and recurring phenomenon to anyone minimally following cybersecurity topics. This isn't the first time, nor the second, nor the third, nor the last.
This is the same as claiming that water isn't wet until someone here on HN brings you 10 articles and news proving otherwise. This particular topic was never really denied, nor even by the authors themselves as you can read on the article.
It's not inevitable. It's up to us in a shared world to decide how to govern ourselves and live our lives. Not to be at the whims of a small group of powerful strangers.
> Download Valley is a cluster of software companies in Israel, producing and delivering adware to be installed alongside downloads of other software.[1] The primary purpose is to monetize shareware and downloads. These software items are commonly browser toolbars, adware, browser hijackers, spyware, and malware. Another group of products are download managers, possibly designed to induce or trick the user to install adware, when downloading a piece of desired software or mobile app from a certain source.
> Although the term references Silicon Valley, it does not refer to a specific valley or any geographical area. Many of the companies are located in Tel Aviv and the surrounding region. It has been used by Israeli media[2] as well as in other reports related to IT business.[3]
Getting an Israeli extradited is almost impossible, their in-group ethnic bias is so strong that they even fight the extradition of rapists. The Israeli government would rather see a jewish rapist escape justice in Israel than face justice in a gentile nation. Extraditing some businessmen who merely scam and destroy people's computers? Fat chance in hell.
I am having extremely hard time believing this, I don't mean that on paper chance exists but out there in real world, especially with current government. Checking for 2024 the number can be counted on all fingers and toes and all were special high profile cases.
US has a law that they will invade International court of justice if ever any US personnel is tried there (ie for war crimes, that one would be easy to pull on thousands of US citizens). That's the US mindset against other jurisdictions.
You're kidding, right? Boca Raton, FL has been widely recognized as the spam capital of the world for decades, and has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion whatsoever. Eastern Europe is known for being a den of cybercrime groups, and Russia is known to turn a blind eye. China is widely known to cooperate with domestic cybercriminal actors. Non-jewish geographically concentrated threat actors are openly discussed all the time.
The difference is that none of these places operate as legal safe havens for child sex predators.
Hey now. Isn't it more likely that the cops spent months preparing this sting, caught the suspect red handed and arrested him, got a confession from the suspect in an interview, and everyone involved just honestly completely forgot to take his passport or impose any sort of travel restrictions?
They already have a major PR problem and are scrambling to fix it.
What they don’t - or don’t care enough to - realize is that given the enormity of the crimes they committed (heck, still are committing!), nothing short of accountability will help cleanse their reputation.
The patch is already on the way: Any public criticism of Israel will be labeled as anti-semitism and any anti-israel posts in US and EU social media will be removed for breaking ToS and "hate speech" laws, similar to what Germany already has in place.
The latter has always been true already of mainstream social platforms like Facebook, and the former isn't a patch, that's the old strategy. It's not working anymore.
It's always so funny how these people use their money to buy all media companies (a "dying" and profitless industry) and still think nobody will even notice...
It's too late to matter. Try finding someone under 30 who isn't already a zionist that has anything positive to say about Israel. It's like pulling teeth.
In the 80s and 90s there was much more idealism than now. There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better. There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users. To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.
This is not true for the vast majority of people making these things. At some point, most businesses go from “make money or die” to financial security: “make line go up forever for no reason”.
I bet the vast majority of people making things also want cutting edge healthcare for themselves and loved ones, for their whole life, which is equivalent to make money or die.
I would agree that it was different, but I also think this may be history viewed through rose-tinted glasses somewhat.
> There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better.
In principle, maybe. In practice, you had to pay for everything. Open source or free software was not widely available. So, the profit motive was there. The conditions didn’t exist yet for the profit model we have today to really take off, or for the appreciation of it to exist. Still, if there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, that means the maturity of software was generally lower, so it’s a bit like pining for the days when people lived on the farm.
> There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users.
I’m not so sure this appeal was so important (and investors do care about appeal!). If you had market dominance like Microsoft did, you could rest on your laurels quite a bit (and that they did). The software ecosystem you needed to use also determined your choices for you.
> To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.
As I said earlier, the profit motive was always there. It was just expressed differently. But I will grant you that the image is different. In a way, the mask has been dropped. When facebook was new, no one thought of it as a vulgar engine for monetizing people either (I even recall offending a Facebook employee years ago when I mentioned this, what should frankly have been obvious), but it was just that. It was all just that, because the basic blueprint of the revenue model was there from day one.
As a private individual, you didn't actually have to pay for anything once you got an Internet connection. Most countries never even tried enforcing copyright laws against small fish. DRM was barely a thing and was easily broken within days by l33t teenagers.
Things like hypertext, search, email and early social networks (chat networks connecting disparate people) and also the paperless office (finally). Images and video corrupted everything as they now became that which addicted eyeballs.
I think you may be looking at history through rose-tinted glasses. Sure, social media today is not the same, so the comparison isn’t quite sensible, but IRC was an unpleasant place full of petty egos and nasty people.
A trope in the first season of HBO’s Silicon Valley is literally every company other than the main characters professing their mission statement to be “Making the world a better place through (technobabble)”
The subtle running joke was that while the main characters technobabble was fake, every other background SV startup was “Making the world a better place through Paxos-based distributed consensus” and other real world serious tech.
>> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
>We win or we learn.
Jensen Huang said that failure is learning but sometimes failure is just failure and you should know when to cut your losses before the failure goes from learning to bankruptcy. And Germany did far more failure than actually learning.
> So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
Does anyone, ever, in any role, do this?
Do CEOs return their bonuses and pay and pensions when they close a business, let alone when they cut the workforce, let alone when they miss the growth of a competitor that is currently still not a direct threat and is instead fighting a battle of attrition with friend of the CEO and would only become a threat if they can take that friend's resources without the attrition destroying everything of value?
> Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
The penalty for most errors in politics is the same as the penalty in any other job: you lose the job.
Most errors, because the really bad errors get you killed, either by an angry mob or by an invading army or by special forces (who may be from the latter while pretending to be the former).
>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century.
You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower.
"Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?"
This is exactly right, IMHO. We were in a course to counter China's momentum, we had handled COVID so much better, our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it and was poised to take tiff.
And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students.
We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation.
We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.
This was reported all over, but certain circles considered it politically incorrect to acknowledge that anything good happened in the years 2020-2024, so perhaps you can be excused for missing it. Some random web hits. Check out the graphs herein the massive investment in factories:
Back then when I would inform the politically cloistered about this massive boom in factory construction and the hope for US manufacturing in strategically important energy tech, the most pointed critique was "yeah there's lots of spending but that doesn't mean that the factories are going to make anything." Turns out the skeptics were right. It was a huge mistake that all this stuff went into areas where it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that clean energy is changing the world. Management was not able to trumpet the new investment and the workers dont want to acknowledge what's driving the new higher wages.
As for the US being the most admired country, I work in science and a bit in entrepreneurship. The US was so far and away the leader in these that there's no comparison at all to any other country. Any visitor is completely blown away when they see what's going on, even when they heard ahead of time how much better science and startups are in the US. It's a bit shocking that you think the US was not one of the most admired countries out there, unless you're posting from China or Russia.
It was that Trump and the MAGA crowd conceded to the Chinese by destroying US goodwill and credibility built up over decades. The US will probably never recover those advantages, just as China is ratcheting up its program of dominance. Trump et al have destroyed many things that made the US great.
It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.
>This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 in the US.
Irrelevant comparison since US is a widely different animal to most European countries.
It might be expensive compared to the US, but Germany is still one of the countries with the most affordable income-to-cost ratios for car ownership in the Eurozone, so car commuting is incredibly common, especially for those not living in densely populated metro areas.
Well yes, not difficult to see why. Germany is quite big and quite sprawled, and given how expensive home ownership is in big metro areas people choose commute longer in exchange for affordable housing.
And also the government gives you tax rebates for your fuel expenses the further you have to commute for work which is a double edged sword.
It's not that Amazon is irreplaceable, but sometimes it's the best option by far depending on where you live and what you're looking for.
I'm in Austria (not Australia) and local retail prices are infamous for being 25% to 100% higher than in neighboring Germany for the same stuff because of cartel behavior of local retail industry.
Buying from amazon Germany means I can get the same prices as Germans (with +1% extra for higher Austrian VAT) for the same goods.
I'd love to give up Amazon in favor of local stores but local cartels are just as bad or even worse.
So to fix the Amazon problem you need to fix the competition problem first, which is caused by players other than Amazon too.
How would you even be sure of this just from what you can see from the outside? That doesn't mean your health insurance company isn't using Zivver internally same how they use Office 365 or SAP. It's not like they tell you all the SW they use.
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