US-Israeli browser startup valued at $6.4B

Posted by wow_Something 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by tancop 1 day ago

I don't trust any closed source code from an Israeli, Russian or Chinese company. And I'm starting to have serious doubts about America too. There's just too much influence from secret services, government interests and big tech/surveillance advertising connections.

Comment by vconnor 15 hours ago

LOL I’d rather use a Chinese or Russian browser, than a US-Israeli one.

Comment by slim 1 day ago

They sell a browser for entreprise that spies on employees. This is illegal in europe

Comment by alephnerd 23 hours ago

Secure Enterprise Browsers are legal across Europe. In fact, most of European corporates, governments, and even the EU uses them as well as runtime agents to protect employee systems and prevent data exfiltration.

Comment by conartist6 1 day ago

I'm sorry but in WHAT GODDAMN WORLD does that technology justify billions of dollars of value.

I would give them a good 50mil valuation.

Seven

Goddamn

Billion

Dollars

Seriously a lot of people have to be on acid, and I think it's the really good kind and I would like some please

Comment by paxy 1 day ago

Governments spend a lot on spyware.

Comment by alephnerd 23 hours ago

Most enterprises use Island - it's the Wiz of the secure enterprise browser space.

Comment by oddCopper65 1 day ago

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Comment by kashunstva 1 day ago

Israel + U.S. + cybersecurity.

What could possibly go wrong? /s

Comment by ulfw 1 day ago

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Comment by whalesalad 1 day ago

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Comment by suboto 1 day ago

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Comment by ButlerianJihad 1 day ago

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Comment by alephnerd 23 hours ago

Being Jewish doesn't make someone Israeli.

Comment by mancerayder 22 hours ago

Only on HN are people allowed to make these types of tongue-in-cheek anti-Semitic comments of the type you're responding to - while simultaneously attacking any other perceived form of racism/sexism. Somehow attaching random Jews to Israel is considered entirely okay in the hive mind here. I see it a lot in the more controversial popular posts that get posted.

Comment by suboto 22 hours ago

Google is a massive spy apparatus that has ties to Israel. Not tongue in cheek, and not anti semitic.

Attack the argument, not the individual.

Comment by mancerayder 22 hours ago

What's "ties to Israel" to you?

Comment by suboto 18 hours ago

Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nimbus but the rabbit hole goes deeper.

Comment by alephnerd 21 hours ago

Don't feed the trolls. This is how burner accounts are laundered into "normal" HN accounts.

Notice how the most virulent accounts on HN from any side are all post-2023 accounts with low karma, almost no submissions, and almost exclusively comment on political and non-technical topics.

Comment by mancerayder 20 hours ago

Why are burner accounts writing all these anti Israel things? or tying wink wink Jews to big tech or defense or other things in a wink wink fashion? Is it Russian bots on HN? Progressive political groups thinking they are helping Palestinians? Is it humans from Reddit that came in through the HN Sub?

Comment by alephnerd 19 hours ago

My hunch is HN got hit by a couple coordinated and ongoing info ops. I've noticed a couple topics and clusters that automatically gather the same users and a sudden cluster of young low karma accounts. It's not just Israel-Palestine or Iran, but also anything Russia-Ukraine, US elections, or China related.

Despite what the moderators say, their moderation hasn't kept pace with LOTL accounts and other HN account reselling platforms.

At some point this will blow back on YCombinator, especially because my understanding is that YCombinator treats all posts on HN as YC's IP.

That said, I also know two fairly prominent founders who are also fairly active HNers who felt social media activism (especially on HN) would help drive their message. One of them founded a fairly prominent DevOps company.

The silver lining is that HN doesn't actually matter to most people in the industry. It's become an inside joke at my fund to call a pitch or idea "HN worthy". Most younger (below 35) techies don't use HN and most older techies don't either.

Increasingly the mindshare and usage on HN is largely outside of the US, with most activity occuring outside normal US hours (3am-9am PST).

Comment by mancerayder 17 hours ago

That makes a lot of sense.

It's just weird that a bot or political campaigners would think they would sway opinions with one sentence "Reddit-like" comments, since HN isn't like that normally. Also who actually gets swayed? This green guy who's mic-dropping his comments are surely not swaying anybody.

I just hope the mods start upping the bar somehow. The one line mic drops are what make Reddit fairly high noise and low quality unless you really know what you're searching for.

Comment by alephnerd 15 hours ago

> Also who actually gets swayed

Exactly.

> I just hope the mods start upping the bar somehow

I'm sure they are trying, but knowing how under-resourced HN is by YCombinator (barely any staff, handful of mods who are only really doing this because of close ties to old school YC, only really surviving because it's PG's baby) I don't think much will change.

I want to keep attending demo day so I won't say more.

Comment by suboto 18 hours ago

So is it coordinated or does no one care about HN? I can’t determine what you’re saying.

Comment by Karrot_Kream 14 hours ago

If coordinating is cheap enough, you might as well do it whether anyone is listening or not.

Comment by suboto 13 hours ago

I’ve been on HN for longer than most of the accounts on this thread. The issue is that HN doesn’t take kindly to controversial takes (see Michael O’Church fiasco some decade back). So burner accounts are almost a necessity if you want to say anything where someone’s poor feelings might get upset. Called anti semitic? Shit, better let the ADL know then.

I don’t think anyone truly gives a shit about HN enough to have a concentrated attack effort. But Israel, China, Russia, Ukraine and Palestine are all hot topics. Fuck em. Nuke them all from the orbit.

Comment by Karrot_Kream 13 hours ago

Yeah I'm an old account too, and this is my second account (my original from 2008 ish.) Tend to agree that nobody cares enough about HN for a concentrated attack, but I also could be wrong. It's quite cheap these days to spin up burners and small accounts to coordinate. This became trivial from below-frontier models from last year, let alone today's models.

That being said, there's some real changes happening on this site. I'm not sure if it's just the audience getting old, angry, and jaded or something else entirely. I talk a bit about this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225117

Comment by suboto 12 hours ago

This would be an amazing blog post to read, quite frankly. I think I’m only getting the tail end from the stats alone. Thank you for doing this. Looking forward to it.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 18 hours ago

Larry Page is not Israeli. This is true!

But he is only one aliyah away from full citizenship. He has simply not opted-in yet.

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

Larry’s grandfather made aliyah and dwelt there in the Holy Land. Sergei has exactly the same opportunity.

You could too, alephnerd!

Comment by alephnerd 17 hours ago

I'm not Jewish. Now fuck off with the dog whistles. You're one of the other short-lived HN accounts I've been monitoring for sometime.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 17 hours ago

Ooh, I'm being monitored! How exciting! Are you reporting my obvious neural-network activity back to FSB and Mossad? Crazy!

Comment by alephnerd 17 hours ago

Nope. As an indicator for which HN discussions to auto-hide because of their irrelevance and combativeness.

Ever heard of the saying "misery enjoys company"? I'd rather not participate in that.

Also, I try to auto-block all accounts that are AI generated such as you are.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago

That seems like something that a neural network would write.

Comment by a19486 23 hours ago

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Comment by verdverm 21 hours ago

Hope you don't use the Pi harness and their soon to be released enterprise offerings

They refuse to close a major security gap, unclear if it is incompetence or malice

Comment by hackersnooze1 1 day ago

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