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Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

congress.gov

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Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#121

Post by symlinkk »

NLPaep wrote: post #57
spiderice wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm fine if TikTok gets banned How are so many people (especially on HN) fine with this? Haven't we criticized "The Great Firewall of China" for literally decades? How is this not the start of that? Genuine question. This ban seems to set horrible precedent to me. Bet everyones "coolness" with it makes me think I'm not understanding something.

The media is the fourth branch of government. It is wildly considered to be essential for a healthy democracy. You don’t want to have it controlled (for many people) by an untrustworthy and adversarial party, especially when they have a long track record of censorship and are trying to extend their own influence and rules globally. We can still say and post what we want - it’s not content that’s being censored.

How about I choose for myself what I want to read? Why do you think you know better than me?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#122

Post by bastard_op »

Aside from the politics, I can't say I disagree starting with TikTok, but what about all the countless other Chinese applications they otherwise still allow that do even worse things unknown yet? Much as the other recent incident with Pinduoduo randomly adding spyware to their feature set. Every gadget with wifi, every game/app on our phones from random unknown International sources are a potential weapon of unknown potential payloads with a remote update.

As a Network/Security engineer, I personally trust American companies as little or less than anything Chinese, but I know nothing good comes from anything connecting to or from there for 99% of everything most of my non-international customers of mine or I do. They simply do not play by ours or any rules but their own. Given my druthers or by request with a capable firewall with geolocation, I gladly block anything to/from China and most anything outside the the US, particularly SLED/FED or regionally local to US only businesses. Not that I endorse isolationism, but as a practical engineer, it would likely save our incumbent non-security-savvy sheeple (or simply lazy businesses) from more blatant direct attacks and siphoning of data at least from the less tricky foreign villains without their own domestic botnets.

If later I actually do need to send something to/from blocked geolocations, there will be an exception policy for it that shall be documented.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#123

Post by edgyquant »

ecshafer wrote: post #97
ramblenode wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China doesn't allow FB, Insta, Twitter, etc to operate in its market > If western social media companies were able to offer their services in China I've seen this meme floating around a lot recently and feel the need to add in some relevant history. Between the mid and late aughts Google, Facebook, and Twitter were all operating in China. Around this time the Chinese government got very serious about content filter…

There has been a very large increase in aggressive talk vs China. It feels very strange considering these same areas were against economic warfare with China when Trump was in Charge, and I would be money were against the Iraq and/or Afghanistan wars at some point. The "facts" don't matter. For what its worth, my memory is in line with yours, the back lash was absolutely on the US side.

Chinese containment has been a bipartisan agenda since the Obama presidency at least. It was the “trade war” being fought through used tariffs that certain people disliked and placing them on our allies that was overwhelmingly rejected.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#124

Post by yed »

bastard_op wrote: post #122

Aside from the politics, I can't say I disagree starting with TikTok, but what about all the countless other Chinese applications they otherwise still allow that do even worse things unknown yet? Much as the other recent incident with Pinduoduo randomly adding spyware to their feature set. Every gadget with wifi, every game/app on our phones from random unknown International sources are a potential weapon of unknown…

The point of the bill is to give the executive branch the power to do exactly that: investigate and potentially ban or force divestment on any large technology business owned by a US adversary like China and determined to pose a serious security risk.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#125

Post by bigmattystyles »

somedude895 wrote: post #111
bigmattystyles wrote: post #106

I feel like they could have done this by creating a bill saying that US social media companies must be given the same access and freedoms to the Chinese market as TikTok has to ours. It would put the onus back on the CCP, they would never allow it and they would get TikTok banned in the US without being the ones to directly ban it. I am sure someone smarter than I can tell me why this is not a viable strategy.

Because market access is not the reason they're banning it. It wouldn't be very believable to now act like it's about a different issue than national security. You'd basically be saying "if you give us market access, then we'll let you spy on our citizens." In a democracy you get the types of discussions that we've been seeing about TikTok, so that door's shut now. This sort of "trickery" only really works for author…

Washington operates on fig leaves and I feel like the market access argument is an overcoat.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#126

Post by Miner49er »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #24
sircastor wrote: post #18

I heard on a podcast yesterday a suggestion that the reason the intelligence community doesn't like TikTok is that, unlike with Twitter, Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc, they can't just hand a warrant over to ByteDance get the data they want. If there's one thing the intelligence community hates, it's not getting the data they want. Back in the previous administration, I figured this was all a temper-tantrum being t…

TikTok has a US business presence and definitely can be subpoenaed for information. This is not something you have to speculate about, they clearly outline the process for law enforcement to get information: https://www.tiktok.com/legal/page/global/law-enforcement/en

I think OP is talking about the backdoor, full access that US companies give agencies like the NSA. Not subpoenas.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#127

Post by [deleted] »

NLPaep wrote: post #57
spiderice wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm fine if TikTok gets banned How are so many people (especially on HN) fine with this? Haven't we criticized "The Great Firewall of China" for literally decades? How is this not the start of that? Genuine question. This ban seems to set horrible precedent to me. Bet everyones "coolness" with it makes me think I'm not understanding something.

The media is the fourth branch of government. It is wildly considered to be essential for a healthy democracy. You don’t want to have it controlled (for many people) by an untrustworthy and adversarial party, especially when they have a long track record of censorship and are trying to extend their own influence and rules globally. We can still say and post what we want - it’s not content that’s being censored.

[deleted]

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#128

Post by srcreigh »

ozymandias12 wrote: post #103
ramblenode wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China doesn't allow FB, Insta, Twitter, etc to operate in its market > If western social media companies were able to offer their services in China I've seen this meme floating around a lot recently and feel the need to add in some relevant history. Between the mid and late aughts Google, Facebook, and Twitter were all operating in China. Around this time the Chinese government got very serious about content filter…

Allow me to elaborate a bit more: by implementing the firewall, China not only isolated itself, it enabled the western internet to concentrate western investment on Silicon Valley firms, that with no big Chinese companies around, established today’s western world internet monopolies. Or in plain English, by closing itself, China literally helped US companies dominate the www. China on the other hand, not only had the…

I’m having trouble finding useful info about size of china online sector vs USA in terms of GDP. But it definitely isn’t US dominating. Some sites say china is close 2nd to USA, but when I look at numbers china is 3x USA (7.1T Chinese digital economy vs apparently 2.1T in USA).

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#129

Post by CSSer »

breck wrote: post #9

1) I understand that the CCP bans sites and apps. Let's not sink to their level. (Instead, let's build more and more technologies to enable their people to get around said bans). 2) This is embarrassing. You don't like TikTok? Man up and compete. Don't ban it. 3) The complexity in this bills makes it reak of corruption. There will be winners and losers in this bill. The losers we can bet are 99% of the population.

Could you highlight any particular complexity you're referring to? I read this bill and, independent of my thoughts and feelings about it, I do not find it overly complex.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#130

Post by hi5eyes »

lurker919 wrote: post #98
Gigachad wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiktok is not just a dumb video host. They chose the content they show to users. And the content their system is shoving in users faces is destructive.

Are you saying there are engineers sitting behind their laptops who upvote the "bathroom destruction" trend in some kind of global dashboard? You sound very certain about the degree of control they have over recommendation systems.

google devious lick

tiktok incentivizes teenagers to create content, and makes going viral extremely easy... as long as you can up the ante on current edgy activity

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