FYI, Wiz investor and current Wiz board member Gili Raanan, head of Israeli VC Cyberstarts, has been (credibly) accused of paying bribes to major CISOs for buying software from their portfolio companies like Wiz.
This is well known in cybersecurity circles. I mentioned here[1] a couple years back that I know CISOs who've had to clean up big messes because their predecessor was on the Cyberstarts payroll, but on the bright side I also know a couple of those predecessors who were fired for it.
Cyberstarts is the most blatant offender, but to be fair, VC has turned into the next rung on the career ladder for CIOs/CISOs, whose role is otherwise generally terminal (unlike e.g. COO or CMO). So a lot of deals get done now just on giving CISOs a path into VC. It's more subtle than Gili's way, and just as effective.
About 20 years ago I quite liked the idea of becoming a CISO - the CIO I worked for at the time talked me out of it - saying that the role would largely involve being ignored then, when something inevitably did go wrong, you'd get sacked.
The board of a Fortune 1000 financial services company just fired the CISO and Deputy CISO because they did too good a job cataloging all of the risk in their infrastructure. Now that it's documented and defensibly quantified, the company is somewhat obliged to do something about it, and the board was not thrilled.
Not a lawyer but this looks like a grey area and since it's public it can be assumed everyone is trying to do it.
I worked for F500 and one of the VPs was pushing some IT vendor solution that didn't really fit, after so much implementation pains and half working product release the said VP left the company... To become a board member of that IT vendor.
It's almost certainly not legal (it could probably be tried as fraud), and it definitely is a breach of contract for the CISO. I'm not claiming it happened, I have no idea, just commenting on the legality of the claimed acts.
Israel is not an ethnicity. They still have 25% Arab Israelis- a leftover from the days when the founders were still building a secular European style country.
They treat them as second class ofcourse. And it is essentially a manageable minority- they are politically sidelined in the Knesset.
I think it is a fair question: why is this allowed to stay on the front page while the deaths of people in Gaza is not? Israel just killed a bunch of journalists for organizations like the Associated Press in a double tap strike on a hospital and we're not allowed to discuss it?
I graduated 10 years ago from a public university in the US (albeit one of the best ones - so everyone was your typical high achieving student) and all of this tracks except for the functional illiteracy part.
Chronic absenteeism was normal. Disappearing students was normal. Pretending to take notes was normal. Indifference was normal. I'm sure all of the above has __always__ been happening.
I only realized how far down the rabbit hole Marc was when he was one of the first interviewees for a guy who came out of the neo-Nazi Salo forum, which means he was almost certainly reading Salo forum.
> When asked if the companies could shut down services, attorney Zviel Ganz of the legal department at the Finance Ministry said such scenarios had been taken into consideration when formulating the tenders.
> “According to the tender requirements, the answer is no,” he said, adding that the contracts also bar the firms from denying services to particular government entities.
Yeah, I've seen that mentioned as well, and am curious about the details. This techcrunch article[1] states "... strict contractual stipulations that prevent Google and Amazon from bowing to boycott pressure". That could be read as contract terms that don't mention anything about protest/boycott but rather just set a fixed term of contract, with penalties for terminating the contract. However, it also isn't uncommon for contracts with Israel to include anti-BDS clauses, and California has an anti-BDS law[2], which it could also be referring to.
> In addition to the above objectives, we will not design or deploy AI in the following application areas:
> 1. Technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm. Where there is a material risk of harm, we will proceed only where we believe that the benefits substantially outweigh the risks, and will incorporate appropriate safety constraints.
> 2. Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.
> 3. Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.
> 4. Technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.
The contract goes against those principles. Employees rightfully speak out about this and stonewalled.
I don't see any new revelations in that Time article. Project Nimbus from the beginning was publicly announced as providing cloud services to all divisions of the Israeli government, but at commercial security level. So the Defense Ministry is using it, but not for anything sensitive, certainly not building weapons. This is akin to Microsoft providing Office 365 to a military. In my mind there is nothing controversial about the service being provided, just who it is being provided to. That is, at some point a government's actions become so bad that doing any business with them becomes unjustifiable. Israel's conduct during this conflict has certainly pushed them in that direction.
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