Amazon says email banning TikTok from employee phones was ‘sent in error’ • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by vxNsr » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #281

dvt wrote: post #109

Looks 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.

What does the age or gender of the people have to do with this?

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

#332

Post by Rapzid » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

hn3333 wrote: post #29

Does anyone else feel we're suddenly supposed to be anti-China? Is it because of Hong Kong? (Honest question, I have no strong opinion .) Because it feels like after Russia and Muslims now China is the new enemy. Kind of stupid imho. Anyway, the high road would probably be not to ban any apps but to make the operating systems safer..

The CCP and Xi Jinping(have we forgotten president for LIFE?) poses an existential threat to all liberal democracies.

This has been true for a quite a while but there was money to be made and China was keeping a very low profile. In recent years however they have been making extensive soft and hard power plays externally. They were busted infiltrating Australian government, running a propaganda news paper out of New Zealand, and controlling their citizens abroad through means such as the Confucius Institutes. They have been getting countries in Africa under their control by dumping money into them in the form of loans they can't hope to pay back.

Members of the intelligence community have been warning for years that China is the largest national security threat. Governments and businesses are waking up to the fact that it's simply not possible to continue business with China while ignoring the CCP.

These are also not alt-right/left wacka-doodle conspiracy theories. There has been a lot of reporting from most credible news sites over the past 5 or so years on the power struggle we(liberal democracies) are engaged in with China: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/627249909/australia-and-new-z... .

Perhaps how you feel about authoritarianism will determine whether you should view the CCP as an "enemy" or not..

PS: Xi "I've read history so I won't make the same mistakes" Jinping, now President for Life(mistake), is making a fool of himself by putting his ego front and center on issues such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. He wants desperately to unify China(under fascism, hooray!) which is why China has essentially reneged on the Hong Kong timeline and are now forcing authoritarianism down the throats of a population quite set on democracy.

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

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Post by catalogia » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

albatross wrote: post #306

tester756 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>in the image parsing library in WhatsApp in a picture message sent to him by Your link says >Bezos' phone appeared to be infiltrated after he opened a video file sent from the crown prince's number on WhatsApp.

A video is a series of pictures, so not "technically" inaccurate...

A sort of "motion picture" if you will.

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

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Post by TedDoesntTalk » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

jml7c5 wrote: post #264

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #255

This is an example why I don’t use Twitter regularly. Someone mentions the copy/paste sec vuln in TikTok and “Onur Olmez” writes: > LinkedIn app apparently also has this issue [...] Uncalled for to ban apps for this one reason. I mean, wtf? Everybody on Twitter has an opinion about everything, even things they know nothing about.

Are they wrong?

In my opinion, yes. This is an enormous security vulnerability. TikTok can exfiltrate any data that the user types into any application: passwords, any kind of sensitive data.

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

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Post by jessaustin » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #317

jessaustin wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interpr…

I'm glad that some light snarking is still somewhat tolerated. It's one of the things that makes life bearable for me.

To more seriously address the various possible interpretations of the comment in question... yours is a reasonable interpretation, but I don't think I was unresponsive to that interpretation. Of course ethical people object to MbS's previous evil deeds. Still, those are his deeds. If global opprobrium didn't sway him before, there's no reason to believe it did so more recently. If there is evidence that some electronic communication that appeared to come from MbS contained malware, that evidence should be analyzed in itself. It shouldn't be dismissed by vague unsupported perceptions of MbS's interests and motivations. It's not as though Bezos is universally adored, even among other satanically wealthy reptiles.

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

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Post by Firebrand » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #109

Looks 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.

Quibi pivots to user generated content and becomes the comeback kid.

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

#337

Post by michaelmrose » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

jml7c5 wrote: post #297

michaelmrose wrote: post #187

Earlier 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.

I reasonable position is to trust nothing originating from China that can't be dependently verified. I don't think any system can be said to be fully proof against malicious software which could be reintroduced at any given time.

The logical position is to throw out the bathwater and the baby its not like there aren't enough sources of short pointless videos to waste our time on.

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

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Post by suyash » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

asutekku wrote: post #300

dvt wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's simple Math, Great number of Indian users, even if ad dollars per person is not as much as in US, overall it is bound to exceed in the long run.

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

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Post by suyash » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #109

Looks 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.

Real implosion will happen if US bans it.

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

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Post by catalogia » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

jml7c5 wrote: post #312

taurath wrote: post #281

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.

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.

I'd guesstimate the average redditor is somewhere in their late 20s to mid 30s. Compared to Congress, that's certainly young. But that's about twice the age of what I imagine the average tiktok user to be (teens.)