Put another way, OpenAI has acquired an ally and it is in that ally’s best interest to act in ways that increases OpenAI’s share price, or at least the ally avoids contributing to any decreases.
I’d like to be a fly on the news room wall(s) as those guardrails are put in place.
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.
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.
When do you expect to have an alternative to Google sign-in?
The free beta is helpful, but without some idea of that pricing might be eventually, investing resources in a possible commitment is too high a bar for many.
Otherwise, good luck. I’ll bookmark and will keep checking back.
> The massive Ice Age lake roughly 100 miles long and 600 feet deep dried up between 128,000 and 186,000 years ago as the climate warmed in present-day Death Valley National Park,
A perfect example of what the Al Gore climate change gets wrong. That is the earth’s climate has always changed. Those who side with AG love to use the word deniers. Yeah, there are some. There are always camps at the extremes. But there are others who says “The climate has always changed. Maybe current changes aren’t so man-made?”
To their point, there were no man-made greenhouse gases when this lake dried to the first time.
Note: I’m not judging either position. I’m simply trying to clarify the position that’s often misrepresented.
Thank gawd. Flash, gawd bless it, was a low point in internet history. People simply couldn’t resist misusing it and abusing it. I’m not blaming the tool per se. But Flash’s addictiveness caused reasonable people to make gawd-awful UI and UX decisions. Crushing Flash is probably Jobs’ most underrated accomplishment.
Honestly, I blame Adobe most for the death of Flash.
If they had been willing to invest the resources needed to make it both performant and, most importantly, secure, there's a much better chance that it would have survived—it might even have been enough for Jobs to be willing to have it work on the iPhone. (Maybe.)
Too many people lamenting how the death of Flash ended a thriving ecosystem of games and other art forms forget that Flash was also a huge resource hog, one of the #1 sources of crashes on many systems, and an absolutely massive vector for malware. I'd love to see some statistics on just how many infections were enabled by Flash, and how fast that declined once it stopped being a requirement to browse large chunks of the web.
And don't forget, either, that Flash wasn't originally an Adobe product: they took it over when they bought Macromedia, eliminating their biggest competitor and guaranteeing their monopoly. I wasn't really paying that much attention to the space, but it wouldn't surprise me if under Macromedia, it was getting better and more frequent updates.
That kind of Flash is still around and well. Many newer shows are animated in Flash (MLP: FiM, Bluey, the last season of Fairly OddParents, etc.). What was killed wasn't Flash itself, but Shockwave Flash (Flash in the browser).
Eventually we’ll have autonomous vehicles which will mitigate many of these issues, but will the surveillance infrastructure then be reduced? Probably not.
> Global changes have since driven many other giant animals to extinction, but anacondas grow just as big today.
But why? Why have anacondas - and sharks? - been immune to evolving? Why hasn’t a significant predator evolved - or invaded? - to feed on them? Why hasn’t 12 million years made the species fragile?
We can't observe these ancient snakes or sharks actually living, so we can only make assumptions based on their morphology. And morphology certainly constraints and suggests behavior, and so we can make some assumptions here.
That being said if the question is "why have we not seen significant morphological changes" - there are a few ways to think about this.
First is that we would be blind to many types of morphological evolution. For example, if an isolated sub population of snakes or sharks started shrinking due to isolated environmental pressures, we would be unlikely to see this, but also if we fixate on the "largest anaconda", then we would filter out all "smaller snakes".
Second, the way we talk about "not evolving", especially for sharks is probably misleading. When we say sharks haven't changed, we mean to say that the shark body plan hasn't significantly changed. And this makes sense - they have a very efficient body plan for being a hunter in the see. We have "proof" of the suitable-ness since dolphins and other whales have converged onto a very similar body plan. Conversely, there are plenty of extinct sharks with body features that seem totally bizarre (https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/four-fossil-sharks-are-cool...).
Finally, especially in the context of "the largest" - the largest animals that can exist in a given environment is.... environmentally constrained, especially for land animals. The largest anaconda is likely near the largest sizes that the local environment to support, and so something larger appear is unlikely, without drastic environmental changes.
This comment seems to be generating downvotes, but I find the questions fascinating. It is a stretch to say the fossil record rules out any evolutionary changes to anacondas. However, if anacondas represent another form of so-called "living fossils" [0], it is interesting to think about what makes them resistant to the change that seems to occur as a matter of course in many other organisms?
It was my comment. Thanks, cause I see plenty of NH treads that go completely off topic and there are too few down votes for that.
In any case, 12M years a long time for a species to survive, let alone survive “as is”. It makes me think of the creature in Alien and how it evolved into deadly perfection. But these creatures aren’t fictional.
p.s. Aren’t octopuses another species of little to no change? But they’re weird anyway so it’s not a surprise?
Octopuses are all soft tissue (except for their "beak"), so it would be very hard to determine from the fossil record how much change has occurred. Perhaps as a result, they are not mentioned in the "living fossil" article above.
An additional complication is that some cephalopods have a relatively unique ability to change gene expression in response to environmental factors [0]. As a result, even if one were to see physiological change or change in ecological niche, it might not be as a result of speciation.
Hopefuly soon techniques of analyzing ancient DNA [1] will be more broadly used to understand the stories of long surviving species.
I’d like to be a fly on the news room wall(s) as those guardrails are put in place.
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