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U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

reuters.com

91–100 of 170 posts

Re: U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

#91

Doesn't matter, they have it on their personal phone. App security is so bad that you pretty much need to virtualize the phone and feed it fake sensor data. The whole idea of unrestricted network access is stupid.

A simple approach is to just ban personal phones while at work. You can forward your number to a work phone while you're on duty, you don't need to carry a personal device with you.

That is what all units in USSOCOM do. No personal cell phones, smart watches, etc allowed in the office. Guests have lock boxes outside main entrance to secure their phone.

About once a week security folks wander through the offices looking for phones with some type of detector. God help the person who brought their phone in.

Re: U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

#92
post #2

Since I’ve seen this asked elsewhere: There is a legitimate usage for these kinds of apps on some devices. Armed services recruiters tend to use various social media apps to communicate with people they are trying to recruit.

Yup, because it's easier to get around the parents' influence when they want to sell kids a line of BS.

Re: U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

#94
post #90
post #53

Tiktok should be kicked out from our country. Chinese government ban everything(google, facebook, twitter, instgram, ...) of our country, why their company can make money in our country?

Please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN. It leads to flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Trying to keep the social harmony to benefit the 1% like Mr Paul Graham?

Re: U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

#95

Doesn't matter, they have it on their personal phone. App security is so bad that you pretty much need to virtualize the phone and feed it fake sensor data. The whole idea of unrestricted network access is stupid.

> The whole idea of unrestricted network access is stupid. I've been coming around to a similar idea. I'd like a setup something like this for my desktop: 1. Some devices representing network connections. One or more are "real"; others may be VPNs. 2. Per-application settings governing which network devices, if any, the application may use. Default to none. For example, the common way to use a VPN is like this: 1. St…

Check out https://www.qubes-os.org/

They secure and compartmentalize at the VM-level so you can setup a VM to work only over Tor or VPN, and others to work directly over your own network. You can also restrict access to hardware per VM.

Re: U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

#96
post #44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyper bureaucracy? It's a whitelist for trusted apps on a government device.

One off bans makes more sense, a whole unit set up to pre-approve millions of potential apps is crazy-town. Then they use Google Chrome and hit a phishing-hole site and get their phone owned. But don't worry, they weren't allowed to install Netflix! The problem here is open-source intelligence because TikTok is very popular among young members who spend all their free time in their bunk on their phone. Limiting the a…

> One off bans makes more sense, a whole unit set up to pre-approve millions of potential apps is crazy-town.

The meta[1] is more real than most probably realize.

[1] https://www.doncio.navy.mil/TagResults.aspx?ID=22

Re: U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? Also, will you post a source for your claim that ProtonMail is compromised? (I remember your username from a thread a few weeks ago)

Compromised and front company are different things I want to emphasize. ProtonMail hasn’t been hacked, it is a deceptive (and smart) company. So again want to make that distinction. For instance, https://joesdatacenter.com and https://datacenterwest.com are front companies. On the other hand, Facebook is just a kind of sad company that has been compromised obviously many times but isn’t a front company and I very muc…

Can you explain or cite sources for how Joe's is a front company?

Re: U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

#98
post #32

Doesn't matter, they have it on their personal phone. App security is so bad that you pretty much need to virtualize the phone and feed it fake sensor data. The whole idea of unrestricted network access is stupid.

Installing a firewall app and checking the connection log on my Android phone really spooked me. There's a ton of traffic in the background that shouldn't be there. It's absolutely crazy that Android doesn't have a first party firewall or the ability to disable internet access permission per app, but that would impact Google's ad revenue, so of course we can't have that.

Settings -> Apps and Notifications -> Data Usage Control

Re: U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices

#99
post #2

Since I’ve seen this asked elsewhere: There is a legitimate usage for these kinds of apps on some devices. Armed services recruiters tend to use various social media apps to communicate with people they are trying to recruit.

They can just use Facebook’s Lasso app instead
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