“Implant” would be like any remotely installable persistent exploit that grants access to an attacker over a period of time.
Also, I’m pretty luddite when it comes to highly-hyped AI stuff, (in spite of my income being heavily tied to developing AI models) but I have found ChatGPT to be shockingly good at explaining super niche terminology and even jokes. So I do recommend people feel comfortable turning to that if they ever feel uncomfortable asking “dumb” questions publicly.
That's right. People can just Google things.
Google has been going down hill for many years but since the December update a few weeks ago it has genuinely become atrocious.
In their quest to combat AI slop (good idea), they've gone and made domain authority so much more important than the content, that now when you search for A B C, you get 20 pages from very "authoritive" sites that are about A, are slighyly about B and don't even mention C. This is despite plenty of great pages about A B C existing and serving the content we're looking for - we just never get to see them because the places they're hosted on aren't "authoritive" enough. Before, you'd get 5 pages, 1 of which likely had what you were looking for, and maybe 1-2 were AI slop. Now zero of them are what you're looking for, but at least we no longer have the (generally very obvious) slop? Brilliant improvement for the users..
The reason behind this is pretty obvious: most AI slop that had been ranking well likely had 0 ad spend, meanwhile the "authoritive" sites tend to have high ad spend. Ads was seeing numbers go down and unhappy customers, and they run the company.
Though even in the US it largely holds for niche things. It's been a topic on HN for years, how Google has just stopped surfacing small websites with high quality information on a niche topic that can't be found elsewhere, but it's been greatly accelerated since last month.
Are the shopping results you're seeing ranked higher not from authoritive websites (Amazon, Walmart et al)?
"SOTA" is just an abbreviation for "state of the art".
On this leg of the thread, we're considering basically one issue: is NSO Group one of the {only,most} {important,impactful,sophisticated,whatever} CNE vendors. Is someone seriously arguing that's the case? I'd assume the idea that there are lots of vendors more impactful would be pretty banal, but maybe there really are people on this thread whose understanding of CNE comes entirely from that book linked upthread?
By all means, sue them, sanction them, proscribe them, whatever it is you want to do to make NSO less profitable, I'm fine with it. But don't pretend that's solving the broad social problem of CNE operations. Everybody does it, and most people don't need NSO to do it; they have other, better vendors to work with.
Actually conducting operations, totally different story.