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bawolff 1 hours ago [-]
huh.
I was betting on it being russia.
As a grey-zone war tactic, i feel like it doesnt super make a lot of sense for iran. France isn't super involved, so its more likely to draw them in then make them think the costs of supporting USA is unacceptable.
On the other hand, not much of Iran's strategy has made much long term sense and more has felt like desperation from a gov that is out of options and wants to go down swinging, so i suppose this fits with that.
Ajedi32 1 hours ago [-]
This has been Iran's strategy throughout the entire war. Them attacking France isn't any less rational than attacking, say, Qtar, or blockading non-US ships bound for non-US countries transiting the straight of Hormuz. They can't really fight back against the US directly, so instead they lash out indiscriminately against anyone or anything that's even remotely friendly to the US.
JumpCrisscross 37 minutes ago [-]
> This has been Iran's strategy
Modelling Iran as a monolith seems to lead to errors more than it simplifies analysis. It's absolutely possible that nine parts of their mosaic [1] didn't want to open a new front and one went YOLO.
France is pushing for a two state solution in Israel. So it was dumb to attack it to begin with. I don't know what they are trying to accomplish. Legitimize the recent US and Israeli attacks against Iran? The Iranian leadership probably doesn't want peace in Israel because if that ever happens, they cannot further instrumentalize the Palestinians and Lebanese muslims against Israel.
noduerme 33 minutes ago [-]
Iran's beef with Israel is not because they care about the Sunni Palestinians or Palestinian land rights or something like that. They certainly don't want peace, they want Israel wiped off the face of the earth as a religious goal in itself, and for being the only non-Islamic country in the Middle East. Any concern expressed by Iran for Palestinians is purely for propaganda purposes: It's easier for Westerners to sympathize with than saying they'd like to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews simply for existing.
Matl 1 hours ago [-]
> Them attacking France isn't any less rational than attacking, say, Qtar, or blockading non-US ships bound for non-US countries transiting the straight of Hormuz
It does make sense if you think about it for longer than 5s - it's about U.S. allies putting pressure on the U.S. to end the war. This whole propaganda about Iran being irrational is so dumb it's embarrassing.
The US is threatening to wipe out Iran's civilization, the EU is very tepid about the whole thing at best. Really sad to see, but not surprising. There's zero consistency or principle involved.
Ajedi32 58 minutes ago [-]
Yes, attacking uninvolved third parties seems like a great way to pressure them to end the war, if by "end the war" you mean joining it on the other side and helping finish you off.
Traditionally that has been how countries tend to respond to military attacks on their soil. Iran's only saving grace seems to be that they're too ineffectual to pose any actual, serious threat to countries like France.
optimalsolver 52 minutes ago [-]
Iran's strategy is what caused the GOP their worst electoral disaster in living memory.
It's also why the US is highly reluctant to return to high-tempo combat.
tptacek 50 minutes ago [-]
I don't think attacking France did anything to help that cause. Certainly we know from experience what attacking America would have done for them.
hx8 41 minutes ago [-]
I don't think turning off American Supermarket Refrigeration would cause the US to escalate.
11 minutes ago [-]
tptacek 40 minutes ago [-]
You want to talk about things that might spark an actual US land invasion of Iran? Seems up there.
hx8 20 minutes ago [-]
Why? So far it doesn't seem to be causing much escalation in France, why would it be different for the US?
MomsAVoxell 35 minutes ago [-]
>lash out indiscriminately
Discrimination is a fallacious argument, if this is indeed an Iranian action, since Iran has been the target of a great number of indiscriminate attacks from the NATO bloc, including cyber attacks on its own food systems, also.
>Iran's strategy
I'm curious how you learn of Iran's strategy?
rdtsc 1 hours ago [-]
Then next level would be to think if this were also a false-flag attack who would have wanted to look like Iran did it.
bawolff 1 hours ago [-]
This would be a terrible false flag. I know people like conspiracy theories, but nothing about this suggests false flag.
rdtsc 59 minutes ago [-]
> I know people like conspiracy theories, but nothing about this suggests false flag.
I am not saying it is, just interesting to analyze who it would have been if it was. Does it benefit Iran to attack France? I guess? Maybe just a target of opportunity. US freezers are just too damn locked down(!). Or does it benefit someone else to make it look like Iran did it, kind of a thing...
Well you were betting it was Russia, and I kinda expected that as well. But then, yeah, probably Russia would want to boast that they did it as a threat or show of force not make it look like their semi-allies (Iranians) did it.
heisenbit 48 minutes ago [-]
Russia would benefit if Europe started acting aggressively towards Iran (getting distracted from supporting Ukraine) and they are certainly not beyond false flag operations. Thinking about it their military is using literal false flag operations all the time to dupe their own leadership.
pmarino90 1 hours ago [-]
Considering the help Iran is getting from Russia I am honestly not that surprised.
bawolff 1 hours ago [-]
i mostly meant from a motive perspective.
Russia going, nudge nudge shame about those freezers, maybe if you stopped giving aid to ukraine those freezeers will stop breaking, is a strategy that maybe could work with little downside because what is france going to do? double sanction russia?
But for iran, there is not a lot of room for france to move to be more pro iran that isnt high cost, but lots of low cost ways to be more anti iran, so it seems like a bad strat.
maxglute 37 minutes ago [-]
> doesnt super make a lot of sense for iran
It makes complete sense.
France headlines Operation Aspides, the Euro navy in Gulf of Aden vs Houthis. They are very involved, directly blunting Iran + Houthi trying to impose cost on west via control / attack on commercial shipping. Hence they get targeted, it's just Iran establishing mutual deterrence, you fuck around in our backyard, we fuck around in your infra and extract economic costs. Meanwhile their infra is basically gone, the amount of damage Iran can inflict vs receive via grayzone at this point is asymmetrical.
OhMeadhbh 49 minutes ago [-]
I was guessing North Korea. But then again, I'm in the states and I think we're required to blame everything on North Korea these days.
Roland303 1 hours ago [-]
Iran russia and china and nk are all working for the same efforts as far as destabilizing the west and ideally turning back the clock on the whole citizens have rights thing that western citizens have been so uppity about and influencing the world with since the 1400's, barring that goal, settling on shitting up the place enough to put an end to western lead global order and returning to an age of regional powers with absolute authority in their spheres of influence. I dont think the attack needs to make sense, the statue of liberty stands in new york harbor, we are the same entity to them, they are at war with us.
cgio 49 minutes ago [-]
Let’s not go down the liberty rhetoric. They could claim on their end they are all about self determination against colonialist practices (and with Russia excepted the others have a historical excuse to claim this.) It is obviously a broad power play, we are all wise to want our part to be on the winning side for rational reasons, but moralising a punch fest is not adding anything more than illusions. After all, our western governments are abundantly adopting the authoritarian aspects of population control from these countries, maybe that’s our next problem maybe it’s our current one.
bamboozled 44 minutes ago [-]
They are allies and I guess Russia could've suggested they do it, or at least knew about it and didn't care.
Does it even matter? If you expose a vulnerable software to the open internet, it's gonna get hacked, and it doesn't matter if it's a script-kiddy from Russia, UK, or a North Korean spy. This was an ethically disclosed vulnerability, patched months before the incident in question. Update your stuff!
boringg 42 minutes ago [-]
Yes finding attribution is and will always be important.
As is updating your vulns.
1 hours ago [-]
josefritzishere 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mlmonkey 1 hours ago [-]
I have no idea what tf Iran's leadership is doing.
Israel/Palestine is not their battle anyways; just ignore it and move on! Make peace with Israel, stop supporting Hamas/Hezbollah and just focus on your own problems. What does Iran have to gain from fighting with Israel? It can't be that they hate all Jews, when Iran is one of the few Muslim countries with any Jews left [1].
Just drop it guys, and learn to live in peace. There's a lot more to this world than continuously fighting with each other.
I think a lot of geopolitics makes more sense if you treat the ethnic divides as "excuses" and instead look at what the parties hope to achieve in terms of power and dominance.
taeric 1 hours ago [-]
Too many people fall on the confusion between justifications, explanations, and excuses. In particular, it can be hard to find what moves something from one to the other of those terms for a lot of people. It often blurs between perspectives, agreed enemies, agreed allies, and inclusion or omission of extra details.
tptacek 37 minutes ago [-]
I think the story is especially clear in Iran, though.
HappyPanacea 1 hours ago [-]
They do have things to gain - credibility with the Arab and Sunni Muslim world for fighting against Israel and perhaps defeating it and excuse to operate their proxies and allies. Not to mention they are true believers, and even if they weren't, it doesn't have to be fully rational from your perspective; just from their own.
As for the Jews in Iran, there used to be 150,000 Jews in Iran before the revolution today there are ~9,000. Furthermore IRGC are very much the ideological inheritors of the type of folks who did the Allahdad (God's Justice) Massacre in Mashhad in 1839.
tptacek 47 minutes ago [-]
They can't gain credibility with the Sunni world; Sunni Arabs are pretty close to their mortal enemies --- not in some dumb religious way, but in a modern geopolitical sense --- and that conflict is far more salient than Israel/Iran.
Iran trying to gain favor with the Sunni Arab world is somewhere in the same ballpark as Russia trying to gain favor with ethnic Ukrainians.
mlmonkey 49 minutes ago [-]
But Iran are Shia! They don't seek Sunni approval; they've been at each other's throats since the beginning!
All of this seems to so insane to me. This region has lots of wealth (dino juice just coming out of the ground), and they're frittering it all away on buying more and more weapons and destroying each other.
greatgib 1 hours ago [-]
Both they don't want Israel to be too powerful and at the same time, the war is a good way to keep tight control on their population and kill any rebellion. You ensure that western ideas would not go into the head of the population by enjoying peace and seeing how it is going well in free neighbor countries, it give you a common enemy that you can accuse of everything.
lenerdenator 39 minutes ago [-]
The existence of a Jewish state in the region also undermines the theological basis of an Islamic republic.
1as5431 1 hours ago [-]
According to the article the attack came from an Iranian IP address. Well ...
Suppose it wasn't a false flag operation. Why would Iran threaten the EU when the EU was skeptical about the war early this year and suffers from it due to lack of Qatari LNG?
The logical step would be to do diplomatic outreach to the EU.
Now the EU has a casus belli (more like supporting the war rather than participating). It all sounds like the EU is selling the war to its population, but maybe Iran is really that stupid.
Jtsummers 58 minutes ago [-]
Russia has demonstrated that they can conduct so-called "hybrid warfare" as long as it doesn't lead to serious injury or death and the response will be meager. But it still creates pain for those targeted nations.
Iran could be seeing that this approach, rather than more blatant attacks, is a useful way to create problems for the US's allies without a lower risk of elevating those US allies to direct enemies. The intention would be to get the US allies to put pressure on the US (in particular) to back out of the US/Israel war on Iran.
lenerdenator 45 minutes ago [-]
> Russia has demonstrated that they can conduct so-called "hybrid warfare" as long as it doesn't lead to serious injury or death and the response will be meager
At a certain point, it stops being "hybrid warfare" and starts being "obnoxious prank".
Russia's deployed (small amounts of) WMDs offensively and has blown up/set fire to some military infrastructure on NATO soil. I'd call these things "hybrid warfare".
Making a grocery store file a claim with their insurance for unrefrigerated food is more along the lines of "dick move".
willmadden 13 minutes ago [-]
They're not that stupid, and it's another lie.
krunck 1 hours ago [-]
We cannot rule out the fanatics running the US had this done to get the EU into the war. More to come, I'm sure.
lenerdenator 41 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, that's what we do to draw people into wars: we set their supermarket freezers to defrost and make the stocking crew stay half-a-shift longer. Then we vote the guy who dragged our own country into the war into lame duck status.
You've traced the very substance and nature of our ridiculously circuitous plan to get the EU to attack Iran. Can we get your thoughts on the Zapruder film while you're here? Maybe you can bring some fresh perspective to that.
xvxvx 2 hours ago [-]
So it was Israel then…
MomsAVoxell 38 minutes ago [-]
"They used Farsi", and "the IP is in the house with you now" are really, really weak bits of evidence.
I hope there will be a full exposé of the actual evidence. "Trust the authorities, bro" just doesn't cut it any more.
nsoam 49 minutes ago [-]
Oh wait wait wait wait... Wasn't it Russia? There were so, so many comments here calling this a 4D move by Putin with absolutely no proof whatsoever, which definitely weren't astroturfed, oh no siree. What will the European people do without a single enemy to hate? We need them laser-focused on one thing to blame our troubles on. Otherwise we may start looking at Brussels.
tl;dr - about more than election hacking, the possibility that the US military is behind various hacks and influence operations by faking being Russia/Iran/NK
dralley 49 minutes ago [-]
Ken is not a credible journalist. Probably not the worst, but he's closer to e.g. Glenn Greenwald than a pure fact-finder.
jmclnx 1 hours ago [-]
Russia, maybe, NK doubtful and Iran ? I do not think Iran is that stupid since in general many EU Countries are not that thrilled about Israel. But to me, it will be hard to know got 100% for sure.
>This included "the use of Farsi and IP addresses traced back to devices located in Iran"
I guess they were caught then. I heard of software that can hide or change these things called "IP addresses", but I guess using it is way too hard for organizations with plenty of resources :
lifestyleguru 2 hours ago [-]
While I believe that Russia might have serious hacking capability, then Iran much less so, but accusing NK is laughable to be honest. America with Israel though? They pwn Europe completely.
verdverm 1 hours ago [-]
NK just pulled off the biggest crypto robbery ever. But its not all about hacking, influence operations are significant too. Ask Jensen.
The accusation here is that the US is doing the bad things while pretending to be other APTs. As an American, I would not be surprised in the slightest if this turned out to be true, very double agent-esce and inline with the hubris, especially under this administration.
I was betting on it being russia.
As a grey-zone war tactic, i feel like it doesnt super make a lot of sense for iran. France isn't super involved, so its more likely to draw them in then make them think the costs of supporting USA is unacceptable.
On the other hand, not much of Iran's strategy has made much long term sense and more has felt like desperation from a gov that is out of options and wants to go down swinging, so i suppose this fits with that.
Modelling Iran as a monolith seems to lead to errors more than it simplifies analysis. It's absolutely possible that nine parts of their mosaic [1] didn't want to open a new front and one went YOLO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_defence_strategy
It does make sense if you think about it for longer than 5s - it's about U.S. allies putting pressure on the U.S. to end the war. This whole propaganda about Iran being irrational is so dumb it's embarrassing.
The US is threatening to wipe out Iran's civilization, the EU is very tepid about the whole thing at best. Really sad to see, but not surprising. There's zero consistency or principle involved.
Traditionally that has been how countries tend to respond to military attacks on their soil. Iran's only saving grace seems to be that they're too ineffectual to pose any actual, serious threat to countries like France.
It's also why the US is highly reluctant to return to high-tempo combat.
Discrimination is a fallacious argument, if this is indeed an Iranian action, since Iran has been the target of a great number of indiscriminate attacks from the NATO bloc, including cyber attacks on its own food systems, also.
>Iran's strategy
I'm curious how you learn of Iran's strategy?
I am not saying it is, just interesting to analyze who it would have been if it was. Does it benefit Iran to attack France? I guess? Maybe just a target of opportunity. US freezers are just too damn locked down(!). Or does it benefit someone else to make it look like Iran did it, kind of a thing...
Well you were betting it was Russia, and I kinda expected that as well. But then, yeah, probably Russia would want to boast that they did it as a threat or show of force not make it look like their semi-allies (Iranians) did it.
Russia going, nudge nudge shame about those freezers, maybe if you stopped giving aid to ukraine those freezeers will stop breaking, is a strategy that maybe could work with little downside because what is france going to do? double sanction russia?
But for iran, there is not a lot of room for france to move to be more pro iran that isnt high cost, but lots of low cost ways to be more anti iran, so it seems like a bad strat.
It makes complete sense.
France headlines Operation Aspides, the Euro navy in Gulf of Aden vs Houthis. They are very involved, directly blunting Iran + Houthi trying to impose cost on west via control / attack on commercial shipping. Hence they get targeted, it's just Iran establishing mutual deterrence, you fuck around in our backyard, we fuck around in your infra and extract economic costs. Meanwhile their infra is basically gone, the amount of damage Iran can inflict vs receive via grayzone at this point is asymmetrical.
BBC France accuses Iran of supermarket fridge hacking (7 points, 2 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50428440
gouv.fr French CERT and Foreign Ministry Now Attributing Fridge Attacks to Iran (2 points, 2 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50428719
CNN France blames Iran for 'unprecedented' supermarket fridge cyberattack (7 points, 1 hour ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429252
As is updating your vulns.
Israel/Palestine is not their battle anyways; just ignore it and move on! Make peace with Israel, stop supporting Hamas/Hezbollah and just focus on your own problems. What does Iran have to gain from fighting with Israel? It can't be that they hate all Jews, when Iran is one of the few Muslim countries with any Jews left [1].
Just drop it guys, and learn to live in peace. There's a lot more to this world than continuously fighting with each other.
/rant
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Jews
As for the Jews in Iran, there used to be 150,000 Jews in Iran before the revolution today there are ~9,000. Furthermore IRGC are very much the ideological inheritors of the type of folks who did the Allahdad (God's Justice) Massacre in Mashhad in 1839.
Iran trying to gain favor with the Sunni Arab world is somewhere in the same ballpark as Russia trying to gain favor with ethnic Ukrainians.
All of this seems to so insane to me. This region has lots of wealth (dino juice just coming out of the ground), and they're frittering it all away on buying more and more weapons and destroying each other.
Suppose it wasn't a false flag operation. Why would Iran threaten the EU when the EU was skeptical about the war early this year and suffers from it due to lack of Qatari LNG?
The logical step would be to do diplomatic outreach to the EU.
Now the EU has a casus belli (more like supporting the war rather than participating). It all sounds like the EU is selling the war to its population, but maybe Iran is really that stupid.
Iran could be seeing that this approach, rather than more blatant attacks, is a useful way to create problems for the US's allies without a lower risk of elevating those US allies to direct enemies. The intention would be to get the US allies to put pressure on the US (in particular) to back out of the US/Israel war on Iran.
At a certain point, it stops being "hybrid warfare" and starts being "obnoxious prank".
Russia's deployed (small amounts of) WMDs offensively and has blown up/set fire to some military infrastructure on NATO soil. I'd call these things "hybrid warfare".
Making a grocery store file a claim with their insurance for unrefrigerated food is more along the lines of "dick move".
You've traced the very substance and nature of our ridiculously circuitous plan to get the EU to attack Iran. Can we get your thoughts on the Zapruder film while you're here? Maybe you can bring some fresh perspective to that.
I hope there will be a full exposé of the actual evidence. "Trust the authorities, bro" just doesn't cut it any more.
tl;dr - about more than election hacking, the possibility that the US military is behind various hacks and influence operations by faking being Russia/Iran/NK
>This included "the use of Farsi and IP addresses traced back to devices located in Iran"
I guess they were caught then. I heard of software that can hide or change these things called "IP addresses", but I guess using it is way too hard for organizations with plenty of resources :
The accusation here is that the US is doing the bad things while pretending to be other APTs. As an American, I would not be surprised in the slightest if this turned out to be true, very double agent-esce and inline with the hubris, especially under this administration.