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Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

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Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#291
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tricking a [EDIT: thanks 'spyspy!] WaPo journalist into visiting a consulate and then chopping him into pieces with a saw while he screamed and cursed you? Dropping bombs to kill hundreds of thousands of Yemeni children? Making the people of Saudi Arabia somehow less free? Those things were pretty bad sir! But now you've gone too far! How dare you peep on our first trillionaire while he's courting outside his marriag…

> In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky...Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're going to have to spell this one out for me. To my (admittedly poor) judgment, the above comment does not violate the guidelines. I provide relevant examples of behavior that reasonable people would consider far worse than hacking some rich dude's iPhone.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you clarify what you don't believe? You don't believe that "Vocational Education and Training Centers" exist, or you don't believe that they are internment camps, or you do believe in them existing but don't believe in the scale of how many hundreds of thousands of people have been in them?

>> that "Vocational Education and Training Centers" exist Yes - they exist. Kind of like community colleges exist. >> you don't believe that they are internment camps I don't and neither do muslim majority countries all over the world including UAE, Eritrea, Sudan, Pakistan, and Algeria, among others[0] 0: https://thediplomat.com/2019/07/which-countries-are-for-or-a...

>>> you don't believe that they are internment camps

> I don't

Why not? They're officially intended to hold and re-educate violent terrorists and extremists who have been determined to be a danger to society, among other groups. http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2019-03/18/c_1124247196.ht... (Search for 社会危险.) Of course they're internment camps.

> muslim majority countries all over the world including UAE, Eritrea, Sudan, Pakistan, and Algeria, among others

Think that interning Muslims in camps is perfectly justified by the "war on terror", and they're doing it quite often themselves. Of course they're not bothered when China does it.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#293
post #233
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just read/skimmed each of these links. Is this any less data than is collected by Facebook or Google in their apps/websites? This seems like mostly an issue with the fact that Android lets apps get at this much data - something that should be fixed at the OS-level. There's very little mention of similar practices/vulnerabilities on iOS.

[flagged]

>Try again and maybe even read the very first link.

>You are aware that they are currently conducting an operation that is likely the worst human rights crisis since the Holocaust. You need to re-evaluate your views.

Please don't belittle or look down upon others. It does not foster discussion.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#294
post #50
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I read, I think the issue is people keep claiming it does all this various "spyware" stuff, when it sounds like it's doing nothing that any other app could do, given the (what appear to be) lax permissions of android/ios. If people are so worried about what tiktok can be gathering outside of the app, that is a problem for apple & google. For this, I think it's 100% overblown what people think tiktok is doin…

It was the whole read write access that was a massive violation of apple and googles store policy. It can upload and download whatever to your phone. No other app is even close to allowed that.

>It can upload and download whatever to your phone.

>No other app is even close to allowed that.

So an app that is on like a billions people phone is knowingly doing things against google & apples app store policy.. yet they choose to let one of the largest apps exploit them?

If you can read the above and not see why there is a pretty large obvious logic flaw then it's not even worth attempting to convince you otherwise...

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like vine? Twitter bought it and killed it. The founder moved on to launch Byte https://www.byte.co/

Vine was different. I just posted this on another thread couple of days ago. > Vine was 6 second long video clips. Comparing Vine to TikTok is somewhat like comparing TikTok to YouTube videos. They are different. Lot of TikTok popularity has come from offering songs/lip syncing functionality (done better by their acquisition of musica.ly). That wouldn't have worked on 6 second Vines.

> Vine was 6 second long video clips. Comparing Vine to TikTok is somewhat like comparing TikTok to YouTube videos. They are different.

As an aside, it's insane to me that the differentiating feature of an entirely new video hosting platform can simply be the length of the content it supports.

The world of tech companies is truly bizarre. Why doesn't Google launch dozens of Youtube variants under their own branding with their own slightly different length restrictions to just dominate the market?

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#296
post #4
post #2

I'm more surprised Amazon (or any company, really) employees using an employer-managed device would have TikTok on them to start with, to be honest. As the follow-up tweet says: "Completely independent of the specifics in this instance: get a second device before installing an employer's config profile on your personal device"

Does Amazon provide company phones or just install an MDM profile on your personal phone? I have TikTok installed on my phone, and if my employer said I had to remove it to access my work email, I'd ask them to buy me a work phone. It seems a bit ridiculous that they'd want to control what apps you download on your personal device without providing an alternative.

Most companies I've worked for wouldn't provide a work phone and there's no explicit expectation that you read or answer work e-mails on your phone. But like everything else, if you don't read/reply to work e-mails on your phone, and your colleagues do, good luck getting that promotion/raise/bonus.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#297
post #172

I feel like this TikTok backlash is so overblown. I don't think TikTok is spying on US consumers/business, and I don't think TikTok is sharing any US private data with CCP... I believe this because there's no evidence to the contrary, and out of principle you shouldn't assume malintent. In fact, TikTok explicitly left Hong Kong because if they didn't they would have to share private data with CCP to comply with new l…

China is building concentration camps that they use for slave labor, ripping organs out of the still living bodies of political prisonersto give to its rich class, creating an increasingly dystopian super surveillance state wherein you could be subtly punished for associating with the wrong people, has no means of redress or removal of the dictator for life, and treats all enterprises as organs of the state that are…

All that may be true, yet it still does not mean rationality should be thrown out the window when evaluating claims about TikTok.

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#298

Sorry if I missed something obvious, but if we're at the point where the U.S. government is even contemplating banning TikTok, how come it's on Google and Apple stores at this point? They seem to be at least somewhat vigilant about spyware etc.

I doubt the government even has the right to ban an app. If so, could they also ban a website?

government don't need to do anything, they will let google and apple do the work

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone have any technical detail of that story. It is hard to imagine how a bug in the image parse library can be utilise to steal text message.

Sure, the blog post below covers it, and the vulnerability was probably CVE-2019-11931. You can do an awful lot with a buffer overflow if you're clever. https://www.okta.com/blog/2020/04/what-the-jeff-bezos-whatsa...

Does anyone have a "explain it like I'm 5 but took some CS classes back in college"?

I know that if you craft your buffer overflow just right it will overwrite other parts of memory with the new function.

But how do you know what parts will get overwritten?

Does that mean the new function can do almost anything?

Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’

#300
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiktok isn't imploding, its broadly a bunch of old men (senators, CEOs) afraid of china. The userbase of tiktok is tweens and teens. The best thing those old men could do is legislate system level privacy protections onto IOS and Android so an app can never get the level of info they're worried about.

Just a few days ago, TikTok was banned in India (a huge emerging market). I’d say it’s imploding.

India might be an emerging market and you get tons of users from there, but it is not profitable at all. Any mobile app dev can tell you that.
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