Pinboard (jm)
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recent bookmarks from jmThe Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of 'The Last of Us Part II'2023-12-04T20:57:25+00:00
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv8da4/the-not-so-hidden-israeli-politics-of-the-last-of-us-part-ii
jmThe Last of Us Part II focuses on what has been broadly defined by some of its creators as a "cycle of violence." While some zombie fiction shows human depravity in response to fear or scarcity in the immediate aftermath of an outbreak, The Last of Us Part II takes place in a more stabilized post apocalypse, decades after societal collapse, where individuals and communities choose to hurt each other as opposed to taking heinous actions out of desperation.
More specifically, the cycle of violence in The Last of Us Part II appears to be largely modeled after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I suspect that some players, if they consciously clock the parallels at all, will think The Last of Us Part II is taking a balanced and fair perspective on that conflict, humanizing and exposing flaws in both sides of its in-game analogues. But as someone who grew up in Israel, I recognized a familiar, firmly Israeli way of seeing and explaining the conflict which tries to appear evenhanded and even enlightened, but in practice marginalizes Palestinian experience in a manner that perpetuates a horrific status quo.
(via Alex)]]>vice commentary ethics games hate politics the-last-of-us israel palestine fiction via:alexhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d186b719864f/‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza2023-12-01T12:21:58+00:00
https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/
jmAccording to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”
According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.
In the majority of cases, the sources added, military activity is not conducted from these targeted homes. “I remember thinking that it was like if [Palestinian militants] would bomb all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend,” one source, who was critical of this practice, recalled.
Another source said that a senior intelligence officer told his officers after October 7 that the goal was to “kill as many Hamas operatives as possible,” for which the criteria around harming Palestinian civilians were significantly relaxed. As such, there are “cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians. This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing,” said the source.
]]>ai gaza palestine israel war-crimes grim-meathook-future habsora war future hamashttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cf754ad64959/We just saw the future of war2023-10-12T11:13:09+00:00
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2023/10/10/we-just-saw-the-future-of-war-00120788
jm
[..] The famous maxim “‘The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” — apocryphally attributed to the writer William Gibson — takes on a very different meaning from the one now commonly understood. Big, rich states might inflate their defense budgets and boast of systems like Israel’s Iron Dome, but the extent to which sophisticated technology is “distributed” across a broad consumer landscape is enough for highly motivated smaller actors to do whatever violence they wish.
]]>culture politics world war israel tech gaza palestinehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:13a6c09d752c/Association between vaccination status and reported incidence of long COVID-192022-01-19T11:20:21+00:00
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v2.full.pdf
jmvia:rsynnott long-covid covid sars-cov-2 papers israel vaccines vaccinationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5a5b9de5eb46/Good thread on the COVID-19 situation in Israel2020-10-07T14:58:19+00:00
https://twitter.com/segal_eran/status/1313831721981415428
jmcovid-19 israel pandemics lockdownhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a9ec6c868c9d/The Israeli Digital Rights Movement's campaign for privacy | Internet Policy Review2017-09-29T09:41:58+00:00
https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/israeli-digital-rights-movements-campaign-privacy
jmThis study explores the persuasion techniques used by the Israeli Digital Rights Movement in its campaign against Israel’s biometric database. The research was based on analysing the movement's official publications and announcements and the journalistic discourse that surrounded their campaign within the political, judicial, and public arenas in 2009-2017. The results demonstrate how the organisation navigated three persuasion frames to achieve its goals: the unnecessity of a biometric database in democracy; the database’s ineffectiveness; and governmental incompetence in securing it. I conclude by discussing how analysing civil society privacy campaigns can shed light over different regimes of privacy governance. [....]
1. Why the database should be abolished: because it's not necessary - As the organisation highlighted repeatedly throughout the campaign with the backing of cyber experts, there is a significant difference between issuing smart documents and creating a database. Issuing smart documents effectively solves the problem of stealing and forging official documents, but does it necessarily entail the creation of a database? The activists’ answer is no: they declared that while they do support the transition to smart documents (passports and ID cards) for Israeli citizens, they object to the creation of a database due to its violation of citizens' privacy.
2. Why the database should be abolished: because it's ineffective; [...]
3. Why the database should be abolished: because it will be breached - The final argument was that the database should be abolished because the government would not be able to guarantee protection against security breaches, and hence possible identity theft.
]]>digital-rights privacy databases id-cards israel psc drm identity-theft securityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:eaa5bdc6ab84/The Double Identity of an "Anti-Semitic" Commenter2014-08-21T23:29:13+00:00
http://www.commondreams.org/hambaconeggs
jmHis intricate campaign, which he has admitted to Common Dreams, included posting comments by a screen name, "JewishProgressive," whose purpose was to draw attention to and denounce the anti-Semitic comments that he had written under many other screen names. The deception was many-layered. At one point he had one of his characters charge that the anti-Semitic comments and the criticism of the anti-Semitic comments must be written by "internet trolls who have been known to impersonate anti-Semites in order to then double-back and accuse others of supporting anti-Semitism"--exactly what he was doing.
]]>hasbara israel trolls propaganda web racism comments anonymity commondreamshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:63905cec0841/Israeli general claims Stuxnet attacks as one of his successes2011-02-16T12:06:20+00:00
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10596
jmisrael iran stuxnet cyberwar via:slashdot malwarehttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b3a918773520/Stuxnet Worm Used Against Iran Was Tested in Israel - NYTimes.com2011-01-16T22:14:44+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?_r=1
jmsecurity iran israel usa stuxnet politics espionage nytimes testinghttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ec38bde2d296/RFID "zapper" constructed from disposable camera2010-04-21T14:54:04+00:00
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.02.html#subj2
jmrfid via:risks security hardware rf radio jamming israelhttps://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5a380109b047/