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Hizonner a day ago

> Here is how Pegasus seems: - China has 1.5 billion people, lots of resources, would profit a lot economically if they found a way to hack iOS, etc. But yet couldn't hack it.

That you know of. Maybe they just don't indiscriminately sell the results to anybody who shows they have money. Or maybe they have different strategies for spying.

> - Israel with its 7 million people, not only hacks iOS multiple times,

NSO and friends find zero-days or buy them on the open market (not just from Israel). Citizen Lab has identified specific vulnerabilities used to install Pegasus. The exploits don't require or use CPU back doors.

... and you think Israel's smaller population somehow translates into better infiltrators than China has, but not better hackers than China has? Israel also makes better halva than China, by the way.

That kind of "logic" is what turns you into a loony raving on a street corner somewhere.

> but does it to spy on its allies.

Everybody spies on their allies, at least opportunistically. But Pegasus is a commercial product, sold to basically every government and mostly used to spy on normal people, not other governments. The people writing it have ties to Israeli spies, and I'm sure it's been used by Israeli spies, but it's general-purpose.

> Israel has a lot of silicon fabs

As far as I can tell, Israel has one facility capable of making remotely serious CPUs. It's owned by Intel. There are no phones using Intel processors.

The processors in iPhones are "Designed by Apple in Cupertino" and fabbed by TSMC in Taiwan. The processors in basically all other phones are ARM, and most of them also come from TSMC. Pegasus does not run on Intel processors, ever.

> And I compared the dates of when intel started putting the Intel Management Engine in all of their CPU and the date of which they built their biggest fab in Israel

So the fab somehow reached out into the rest of Intel and retroactively caused it to develop a heavily advertised feature?