|
An important and growing area of Israeli science that urgently needs to be boycotted is computer software. Here is a list of Israeli software companies: http://www.science.co.il/SoftwareCo.asp Note that quite a lot of them are based in Herzliya, the small town just north of Tel Aviv where, er, Mossad has its HQ. An example: anyone using the firewall Zone Alarm should be aware that this programme, which was originally developed in the US, was taken over a few years ago by the Israeli "security" software house Checkpoint. The address is 3a Jabotinsky St., Diamond Tower, Ramat Gan. ISRAEL, 52520. Note the street address: Jabotinsky Street. You couldn't make this up. Jabotinsky was notorious for being the founder of the extremist Revisionist wing of Zionism which is today represented by Likud. Is this street address merely a coincidence? There is another reason for boycotting this software. It has been alleged that this programme, which is supposed to protect your computer from online attacks and surveillance, is actually a form of spyware. See these articles about it: http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/13/73792_03OPcringley_1.html http://security.worldwidewarning.net/www/archives/24 Another example of Israeli software that tracks its users' computer activities is the toolbar generator software house Conduit (a most revealing choice of name don't you think?) whose former name was Effective Brands. This software provides a platform that enables anyone to make their own customised toolbar and it is very widely used for this purpose. It seems that its stated privacy policy was contradicted by its actual behaviour. So much so that in 2006 Moziilla and Internet Explorer blocked its use in their addons until its privacy policy was more honest and consistent with the programme's actual behaviour. C-NET also banned the Conduit-based toolbars. See the following online discussions at the Mozilla site: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326579 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326579 In the first of the above pages, note in particular: "When the browser starts, a "login" request is sent with the toolbar ID and a unique user ID. The server echoes this information back, and sets a session cookie". And on the second page:
|
