In Northern Places, strange things happen in the middle of winter when everybody is housebound for too long. It's spreading.
1. What I think is the very first political cyberwar is going on, there. Not the stucknet stuff with Iran, but a good bit of apparently unofficial and very public hacking on 'sides' with masses of victims whose credit information has been posted or whose facilities have been fouled, who are bearing the weight of it.
This mess seems to have started with a hacker whose screen handle is either Ox-Omar or Ox-Omer, or both, who claimed he was a Saudi and, whatever he is, started releasing Israeli credit card information for thousands of Israeli credit card holders over the internet. The news reports claimed that he said on the internet that he did it because he wanted to hurt Israel. The newspapers have been covering it and I send you there directly rather than link and link and link. There were several rounds of someone who identified himself as an individual Saudi hacker, who was at one point traced to Mexico of all places. Round one was several releases of the credit card information of Israelis on the internet. Round two was hacking El Al and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Round three is Israeli hackers hacking back against the Saudi Stock Exchange and the Abu Dhabi stock exchange. reported here. and here.. Holding up their side and making the allegedly Saudi hacker, whose work they also demeaned, pay.
The accounts todayhere suggest that a lot of the computers from which the hacking came were in Israel, presumed but not clearly known to have been done by a 'bot' which infiltrated various computers and turned them to uses their owners did not intend. Of course, Official Israel says it is putting in protections against these hacks and programs. But we will see what tomorrow brings. Aargh.
There have been enough military actions in this area which have bad effects on civilians, but this in its own way is much worse, since one has only the word of the hacker for any connection between him and the latest two targets at all. And this one will cause thousands of Israelis to have to make alternative credit arrangements, as there has thusfar been raised no issue that the information is not accurate, and major troubles in major regional exchanges for customers who did not think they were putting themselves in the line of fire of IP.
Please do not ask ME about the technical matters of the hacking. I am the wrong person for that.
2. Yesterday, we began to see reports of Hamas persons attacking what were described as Shi'ites in Gaza. Reported here by Ma'an. Simultaneously there are reports of talks between Hamas and Islamic Jihad here arising from opinions of Iran about Hamas' position on Syria. This Ha'aretz article suggests that the cause of the attack was part of a plan to oppose the supposedly growing influence of Iran in Gaza, personified in Islamic Jihad. This will, if correct, be of interest to those who see the influence of Iran on all Muslim parties, under every bush, and will certainly create peculiar issues for Israel because it is not clear whether it would want to undermine Hamas if the alternative is Islamic Jihad with connections to Iran which it does appear that Hamas does not have and is opposing.
3. A French governmental agency has published a report about water use in the occupied West Bank and accused Israel of "water 'apartheid'". The basic charges and the response of the Israeli government and others is summarized here, and here. The basic grievance, posted here before but not recently, is that by use of the provisions of Olso II and otherwise, Israel has taken control of water supplies in the occupied West Bank, and grossly and unfairly allocated them to settlers there and users in Israel proper to the extreme prejudice of Palestinian residents. Mention is made in the report of the same matter discussed in the ICJ decision on 'the Wall' which noted that the position of the wall, for example, gave Israel exclusive control of a WB aquifer by the route selected for the wall.
Two problems with the report. First and shackwackiest is that the report came out about two weeks ago, and apparently none of the various mechanisms which the Israeli Embassy uses to find out about reports concerning its nation were used to find out about or negotiate modificatoons in the language with the French official issuers of this one before it came flying out. The reporting indicates they were entirely blindsided, something which has a bit of improbability to it given the relations of Israel and France and the careful work on negotiation of language used by governmental entities which is a core part of Israeli diplomacy. Second, of course, is that the Israeli government has raised issues about the propriety of some of the statements in the report and how they got there, whether done by committee or added by a specific person, noted in the JPost article. If true, this is a truly awful messup by the Israeli Embassy which has brought up again at the time of the Amman talks the messy but essential issue of water as a major matter which must be resolved. And made the Israeli Foreign Ministry look like idiots, something I usually do not say.
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That being said, I will be intermittently available if needed, as my town is getting the record blizzard tomorrow and I have a few proactive things to do to prepare for that, and do remember that power outages is part of what blizzards are here, when it comes to my computer, so I may be involuntarily unavailable from a few hours from now until much later.