Good start. Hopefully the rest of the corporations and world governments follow.
Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
311–320 of 496 posts
Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
#312Looks like TikTok is slowly imploding. I know there's plenty of political implications and a lot of discussion here is on that (which is interesting in its own right), but I wonder if there's opportunity here for a potential competitor.
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.
I'm not so sure. Reddit skews young, yet the narrative there is that TikTok and the Chinese gov are just shy of evil. The iOS clipboard bug in particular has startled reddit into a wave of self-reinforcing "TikTok is spyware" stories and comments. A story like this one just reinforces that narrative, and I'm not sure there's any way TikTok is coming back from it.
Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
With a buffer overflow, you can write your own code into a chunk of memory that ends up being run by the application. In this case, since WhatsApp already had SMS read privileges as part of the signup auth flow, the attacker also had those privileges.
The article has some detail about the remote code execution part of this exploit.
“What this means is that there was a software flaw in the WhatsApp code for handling MP4 media files. If an attacker triggered the flaw, the function in question would crash in a way that could allow a potential attacker to gain “RCE” or Remote Code Execution.
In layman's terms, this means the attacker could inject his own code into the application and, by triggering the flaw, make the application to run with all the privileges and access of the WhatsApp application itself.”
Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
#314Earlier 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.
Ninja, the biggest (English-language) video game streamer in the world, just posted yesterday that he's deleting TikTok for these concerns. I'm not going to get into whether or not this actually makes sense, but he is a massive celebrity among young millennials/gen-z.
idk about that, his tweet only got 10K re-tweets...
Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
#315Looks like TikTok is slowly imploding. I know there's plenty of political implications and a lot of discussion here is on that (which is interesting in its own right), but I wonder if there's opportunity here for a potential competitor.
China is blocking all the US apps, I don't see why the US (or US companies that get blocked in China) shouldn't do the same to popular Chinese apps.
Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Better be safe than sorry. That's quite rational given what we've seen from the Chinese govt.
Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Sure. To the first point, I think it's pretty evident the comment is snarky (even if it has a good point in there). I'm guilty of that too, more often than I'd like and I do get called out on it occasionally. And I don't think that alone is an excuse to just flippantly toss the guidelines at someone, which admittedly is basically what I did.
To the second point, however, I do think you took the worst possible interpretation of swyx's comment, which was basically "nobody cares that the person in question is a murderous tyrant, but he hacked Bezos's phone and so is a bad person now." I don't think that's what he was saying at all, especially given the end about "more than he already is." Whether we like it or not, one of the primary reasons that Saudi Arabia is tolerated in the West is their economic importance, and their connections to the elite, almost entirely because of their wealth. That starts to crack if they go after the elites directly. So I took the comment as basically saying that it didn't seem to serve MBS at all to hack Bezos directly, as it would only (further) delegitimize him interntionally.
Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why bother with Global Times? Why not go straight to the UN. Which countries support china's Xinjiang policy and which oppose? Notice which side most islamic countries are on? And which side the countries that have a muslim ban are on? https://thediplomat.com/2019/07/which-countries-are-for-or-a... It's so absurd! Not a single muslim majority country is against these supposed Xinjiang camps! Why do you think the USA…
Hey, please edit out swipes like "use your brain" from your HN comments. They only make things worse. I realize that it's frustrating to represent a contrarian/minority view on the internet, but there's really only one way to do it effectively and that is to prevent the frustration from boiling over and stick to neutral information. Otherwise you just give people an additional reason to reject what you're saying, whi…
yes done. Apologies.
Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does tiktok have that IG stories or SnapChat does not provide? It appears to me that TikTok is just a perpetuation of exclusivity in Social Networks (the same way kids exited FB when their parents signed up) ...
The "For You" page. Sure its just another algorithmic-based feed. But in my experience (and from talking to a few ppl who enjoy TikTok), the For You page is a differentiator. It's like a combination of what's trending, what's recent (time wise), and what you've spent time interacting (watching, liking, commenting) with previously. Again all platforms do some form of this, but just saying TikTok does it in a pretty ad…
idk whenever and whomsoever's phone i look at it's always just pushing videos of scantily clad underage gals dancing to whatever song is popular att. you have to actively hide that stuff/follow creators and hit "only people i follow" to see any actually creative|interesting stuff.
surprised there hasn't been any controversy about that - tiktok is a predator's paradise.
Re: Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
That framing is the exact point. I'm in the same boat. If my employer mandated that I not be able to use a personal device the way i want, a device I bought with wages i earned from working with my employer, the employer really SHOULD provide a cost free alternative. It falls under the category of providing your own resources to do your job, and that territory enters socioeconomic discrimination territory real quick.
I might be with you if Uber, say, is requiring its drivers to install MDM--which I'm guessing would be a really bad idea for their drivers-not-employees position. But for engineers and other office workers at tech companies? As a practical matter, people have to buy lots of things to do professional jobs that they wouldn't need to buy without those jobs. In this day and age, if you want a second phone, buying a few y…
Wasnt there a recent supreme court ruling regarding the Native Americans of Oklahoma that said something to the effect of 'just because you keep doing an evil, doesnt make it right, and letting it be right is an injustice to those in the right'?