[crmd]

it’s a tough infosec situation because the tel aviv-haifa corridor in israel has an enormous amount of computer science R&D going on that gives US companies a competitive advantage.

for example, annapurna labs in haifa develops the technology behind AWS’s nitro cards, which run the hypervisor, block storage, and networking in every EC2 server.

[Cthulhu_]

Is it though? US and EU telecom companies pulled the plug on Huawei products, which were deeply integrated in all of their setup, as soon as someone said they may be spying or remote disabled by China. It was expensive, sure, but they pulled the plug. I don't recall any concrete evidence of backdoors etc to be found, but trust was gone.

And that's the difference I think; US and Israel have high trust, they are aligned in ideals and strategy and the like.

[jazzypants]

I don't think it's wise for us to trust a country that has a whole Wikipedia article dedicated to the ways they spy on us.

I hate that I have to say this, but I'm a Jew and I'm not anti-Semitic in any way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...

[verisimi]

Fair enough. I guess it's fine to be spied on to make sure US companies have that competitive advantage you mention. As its all in a good cause, I'll take the Samsung phone!

[dijit]

To be fair, us over in Europe have been uncomfortable for a while due to the US surveillance apparatus having total dominion over the underlying systems that run our countries.

So, its a little bit tone deaf to hear these complaints from Americans honestly.

We’re told that we’re uncompetitive (yet when rising startups happen they’re bought out before being too large)- we’re told that we shouldn’t run on anything except US SaaS and US cloud providers.

I’m not saying that you specifically make these arguments, but the zeitgeist on HN definitely centres on this notion.

So, please forgive me for not taking this as seriously as you’d like me to.

[crmd]

I think USA tech hegemony is perfectly analogous to this Israeli tech dilemma. As a dual American and EU (Irish) citizen, should my company strive to categorically avoid Intel and Nvidia technologies for national security reasons? I think there is a strong argument for tech nationalism but there is still a hegemonic dilemma.

[pjmlp]

The main problem, even if you would avoid Intel and NVidia, is that during the last decades we confortably let OS and programing languages driven by US companies take over.

So you might go with ARM, RISC V, but still have to make use of an OS and programming stack with strong ties to US based companies, even if open source.

[Melatonic]

And surely no way to monitor what's going on in those VMs

[pjmlp]

Also Microsoft's BlueHat security conference always takes place in Israel, and probably that is where Azure security R&D offices happen to be located.