aibrahem

For all the faults of these companies, their founders and CEOs, I genuinely believe the world would have been a bit of a sadder place without companies like Apple and Google. That’s not something I can say about most companies (Microsoft), and honestly, there are companies I think the world would be better off without entirely (Oracle).

This is categorically false. After the Islamic conquest it took Egypt around 800 years to be a muslim majority country; under Islamic rule.

I think you’re ignoring the historical context. Jews were being systematically targeted all over Europe, and at the height of the Islamic empire they held ministerial positions in the royal court. Btw, as a native Arabic speaker, I find it extremely interesting how you’re using ‘dhimma’ to mean servitude, when it literally means those who were given an oath to be protected.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli group B’Tselem have published reports characterizing Israel’s legal framework (especially considering the occupied territories) as apartheid or involving systemic discrimination. I’m not sure what more can be said.

The mainstream academic consensus is that Jews generally fared better under Islamic rule than in medieval Christian Europe. Scholars also agree that jizya was paid in lieu of zakat (which Muslims paid) and military service.

Of course, this raises the question: if Jews fared better under Muslim rule than under Christianity, why would they leave their alleged homeland and go to Europe, only to want to go back a thousand years later?

It’s extremely regulated, especially conducting research into the ancestry of Israelis. Which makes you question the legitimacy of the research coming out of Israel about this topic, Not to mention that respected Israeli researchers who colored outside of the party line were reprimanded or called self-hating Jews.

From the beginning, the founders of the Zionist movement were completely on board with the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians from their lands to establish the Israeli state.

I’m not sure if linking the video would violate HN rules, and I find it hard to believe that you haven’t at least heard about it. There is currently global outrage because the soldier in this video was acquitted and allowed to rejoin the army. The video was aired on Israeli TV and the IOF arrested the military official who authorized the leak.

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/statement-ohchr-08aug24/

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/outrage-over-video-leak-of-is...

I belive if you search for ‘Israeli soldiers gang rape prison’ you’ll find multiple links to it.

In all your comments, you keep referring to the resistance groups fighting the Israeli occupation as terrorists, which I’m guessing makes you either an Israeli or pro-Israel.

The IOF has been notoriously lying about killing and torturing civilians. Not only that, but even soldiers caught red-handed on video raping prisoners have not only gotten away scot-free but also been allowed to rejoin the army. Is there a reason why we should trust anything such a genocidal, morally corrupt organization has to say?

There is nothing inherently special about Americans that makes them more democratic. I agree we shouldn't compare the U.S. with Middle Eastern countries; they were never democratic in the first place. A more appropriate comparison would be with the German Weimar Republic, where a charismatic leader managed to overthrow democracy.

Many people raised in democratic societies don't fully understand the intricacies of the relationship between the military and dictatorships; they see the military as a tool in the dictator's hand to wield at will. This couldn't be further from the truth. A (strong) military in a dictatorship is its own institution, largely isolated from the rest of society and granted its own perks and benefits. The dictator can wield the military only to the extent that it aligns with the institution's goals. Competent ones try to align the military's goals with their own; incompetent ones get overthrown.

Because of this isolation from broader society, the officers and soldiers believe that what is good for the institution is good for the country. They're not suppressing their citizens; they believe they are protecting the republic.

The U.S. Army is already operating as an isolated entity from broader U.S. society. Monetary corruption is quite substantial—consider the medium- to high-ranking officers and their relationships and revolving doors with defense contractors.

I'm not saying the U.S. is going to become -insert non-democratic country here-, but if we ignore the usual Western caricature of Stalinist-style dictatorships and realize that there are multiple forms of eroding democracy, you'll start to understand why it's not such a far-fetched idea.

As someone who spent most of his life in a dictatorship, I don’t think you appreciate how easily a society can slide into a totalitarian state and how apathetic most of the population can become.

It’s also interesting that you served in the U.S. military and didn’t recognize how self-serving and institutionally corrupt it is. I come from a country with an oversized military relative to its government, and the parallels I can draw between its behavior and that of the U.S. Army are uncanny.

As someone from the Middle East, I honestly wonder, when Americans say things like that, have they ever read a book, attended a lecture, or even done online research about the history of American intervention in the Middle East? It’s baffling to me that someone would believe that, given America’s track record. I’m not asking sarcastically, I’m genuinely wondering.

So is aiding and actively supporting a genocide and celebrating a war criminal, so what is your point?

I've always heard this argument but never understood it, what other ways are available to have a SRTM?

Besides power management, this is one of my biggest bit peeves with Linux distributions now.

I don't understand why there isn't a single distribution that offers a full Secure Boot implementation or LUKS Encryption with a password sealed by the TPM out of the box.

Also, there seems to be a lot of misconception about what Secure Boot does, unlike what the name implies, Secure Boot doesn't inherently provide any extra security or protection. It's just a mechanism to sign the software running on the system.

To make the most out of Secure Boot the distributions would need to sign and lock the boot-loader, kernel, and initrd, Then they could seal the LUKS encryption passphrase using the TPM, so if anybody tries to run any unauthorized software, they wouldn't be able to access the data on the drive.

It would be very similar to what windows does with bit locker; your hard-drive is automatically decrypted on system boot without entering any passwords.

This is a shameless plug, but I'm really hoping to increase the awareness and the level of understanding about these kind of HW bugs.

I made a blog post trying to explain the Intel ME hardware bug.

Understanding the Intel CSME Vulnerability for Mere Mortals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22534259

Can I ask what is so fascinating about it, It's been recommended to me a couple of times and I've tried everything to enjoy it and failed.

I got the book, tried the audio-book and even tried watching the movie, I couldn't get myself past the first half of the book or the movie.

It just seems (to me) so childish and incoherent, am I missing somthing?

So does the US, I've yet to hear a valid argument on why the US is a better citizen on the global stage than China.

Domistically a very weak argument could be made that the US doesn't violate the rights of their own citizens as bad as China, but between FISA courts, the NSA and programs like PRISM (which is more than a decade old now), this argument barely makes sense.

The vast majority of people aren't infosec experts.

Although this is true my personal experience is that in non-democratic societies there is a huge overlap between people who are tech-savvy and dissenters, you just don't pump into an article about the Tiananmen Square massacre, you actively seek it and you understand the risk behind looking for something like this.

I'm not saying they're world-class experts but they'll at least know to use a VPN.

As someone who lived most of his life in a dictatorship, I really struggle to understand the logic of these employees. I was actually surprised Google stepped out of China a couple of years ago and felt like the decision was taken by a bunch of people who don't understand what it's like to live in a non-democratic country.

Do they think that everybody in China cares that their internet is censored or that they're being watched? I'm pretty sure if there was a poll conducted inside China to choose between censored Google vs no-Google almost everybody would choose censored Google.

It's not like a person who's opposing the Chinese government online is going to be using Google without a secure connection anyway. For the rest, you're providing a service that is significantly better than what they're currently being offered.

Apple always seemed to have had four things going for them; Product Innovation, Developing extremely high-quality HW and SW with attention to both details and user experience, a world-class supply chain and finally a technological edge.

I would argue that under Steve Jobs both the supply chain and the technological edge had some focus but there wasn't a huge gap with the competition, This could be either because it required time to achieve this gap and Steve simply wasn't at the helm for that long or it wasn't his main focus and is currently the focus of Tim Cook considering his background, either way, I think Apple is currently and going to continue to blow everyone out of the water with technologies like their SOC's and will continue having the most efficient supply chain and manufacturing capacity in the world churning out products that beat the industry margins by a mile.

Regarding the quality, design and user experience it mostly stagnated, don't get me wrong they're still way higher than the industry average and I can see Johnny Ives touch in most of their products, but I don’t see the kind of passion that went into designing the interface of a device like the iPhone with ideas like pinch to zoom and the spring effect. Apple seems to have a design team that is world class but uninspired and just doing their job.

Now the most important point and this is what I honestly believe is the problem with Apple is the Product Innovation, this appears to have completely stopped after Steve, I try not to believe that Steve Jobs was THE product manager at Apple and avoid the cult of personality, but it's very hard to shake this idea when during his tenure they've released multiple industry-changing products, and they've failed to release a single one after he left.

I think Apple is going to continue to release high-quality, well designed, cutting edge and high margin products, but I highly doubt with the current leadership they'll be able to release a single new product that changes the status quo like Steve used to.

As someone coming from an Arabic Muslim country, I'm really interested to understand why you have this view.

In my country (Egypt), Turkey is actually seen as being a huge part of Islamic history, and it's often cited as a proof of the diversity of the Islamic and Arabic world that it was hugely impacted by the Turkish culture (Words, Foods..etc).

As an immigrant from a Muslim majority country into a European country, I find this approach very troubling.

I completely agree that most of the immigrants have a lot of trouble integrating into the host countries but I believe it’s as much as a problem of the hosting culture as it is the of the immigrants coming in.

It’s not just the Muslims, though they might be the most pronounced case (just because the sheer number of immigrants), immigrants from India, China, and even Eastern Europe face similar issues.

Anytime there is going to be a mass immigration to a specific place there is going to be a concentration of immigrant communities in certain places, it happened with the Irish and Italians in the US, and still happening with a lot of different areas in America (Michigan is one of the heaviest populated areas by Christian Arabs). The reason being is that when you first immigrate to a new place it’s a lot easier to stick to the people you know and share behaviors with than to go out and make a new social circle.

However, the culture of the host society plays a big role in the acceptance of foreigners, for example, people in the US and Canada are usually a perceived to be lot friendlier than most typical Western Europeans, it’s a lot easier to chit-chat with an American than to a Dutch, German, or French person..., It is also very easy to get to know people in the US, meanwhile unless you’ve really gotten to know each other it’s very difficult to get close to a typical European. Norwegians usually joke that if two people get on the bus one of them is going to set at the front and the other all the way in the back.

Another culture tidbit that could contribute to this is that conformity plays a very huge part in the European culture, and they just confirm to a very different set of values than the ones where these immigrants are coming from, find someone walking naked down the street, that’s completely normal but finding a women wearing burqa on a beach and suddenly a lot of heads are turning. Although this might also happen in the US but with the American stress on individualism it’s always reassuring that it’s OK to be who you are, rather than the typical European mindset of why don’t you just take it off and be like everyone else.

Also The Hollywood effect, immigrants coming to America usually have a base understanding of what to expect coming in from watching movies, TV shows or even the news and are usually touched in one way or another by the American culture, meanwhile it’s very difficult to understand the culture subtleties when you don’t understand the language and haven’t been exposed to this culture before and add that to the stress on conformity as mentioned before and very quickly you become an outcast in your social circle.

My point is that brute forcing people to integrate is simply the incorrect approach to solve this issue, culture intricacies needs to be studied and incompatibilities with the immigrant and host culture needs to be addressed to reach an effective solution, otherwise what you’ll have is a very angry socially inept minority that could sing Jingle bells.

As someone who spent almost half his career as a software engineer in automotive companies and the other half in a couple of large tech companies, I could completely understand why there is a high chance of this happening.

Most automotive companies are run like factories, including the hardware, software, and R&D departments, in a factory, the focus is more on the process than on achieving the “correct” results, which although might work great in a factory could be extremely hampering for innovation in development and technology teams.

If you ever wonder why infotainment systems in most cars are stuck in the 90’s UI it’s because it would take weeks to change a single line of code where it would need to go through multiple code reviews, get approved by people who’ve been using the same development tools for the last 20 years and consider IBM RTC as cutting edge, document every single thought that went through the developers head and mindlessly test the crap out of every possible combination.

The way tech companies operate is extremely data-driven, if it works and you have the data to back it up that is usually the end of the discussion. However, in process-oriented companies conformance to the established processes is what is usually valued, a statement that is usually echoed is that it’s more important to follow the process and produce incorrect results than not follow it and produce correct results.

For the last decades, automotive OEM’s have been bringing manufacturing processes to software development, my hope is that any tech company (and Tesla being one of them) would be able to bring agile software development practices to manufacturing.

A couple of years ago both Intel and AMD started developing their own solutions that allows them to offload some the functionality that used to happen on the main processor to another co-processor placed inside the chipset on the motherboard, functionalities like power management, secure booting, USB handling..etc

The problem is not only that this co-processor is running it's own operating system with full unrestricted access to the systems main memory and network interface, but also that the main processor can't actually tell what the co-processor is doing with this data or when does it access it, on top of that both Intel and AMD delivers you the software running on the co-processor as a binary blob so we can't really be sure if it's secure, has backdoors, spying on you, etc..

LibreBoot/Coreboot are projects to write an open-source BIOS for x86 hardware, and since a big part of the BIOS is running on this co-processor you only have a choice of either using the binary blob provided by Intel/AMD or lose the functionality provided.