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South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices

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Re: South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices

#181

Post by nano9 »

vlunkr wrote: post #58
technion wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife worked for the government. When they deployed wfh, they used mfa. They banned Google authenticator out of the view Google can't be trusted. But told people to search the app store for any other mfa app. They one my wife found makes you wait for an ad run before it displays the code. It sometimes crashes and is generally terrible. The point being banning certain apps seems far more political than well thought…

Authy is good, or freeotp if you want to go full FOSS.

Duo Mobile on iOS lets you save and restore your TOTP tokens across iPhone backups with a symmetric passphrase. It provides some peace of mind in the event you would lose your phone.

Re: South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices

#182

Post by unethical_ban »

hammock wrote: post #156
unethical_ban wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opindia citing Tucker Carlson, Stephen Crowder, and using "alleged" videos of non gender normative people as examples of bad content is pretty revolting. I'll also say that Instagram is just as much trash as TikTok, but it's our trash instead of china's. Infinite-scroll short form trash content is this generation's trash TV, yet more addictive.

The left-leaning head of the FBI made similar comments today: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/fb... And you won’t believe me when I say this, but in US-China diplomatic terms, an official saying a technology “allows them…if they want to” to perform influence operations means they already are. As further corroboration, Andrew Schultz revealed earlier this week on the PBD podcast that sources…

Oh, I have little doubt personally that TikTok is a malignant tumor, I just don't cite other tumors (Carlson and Crowder) for anything, even the sky being blue.

I am quite critical of TikTok, of people who have it installed on their phones, and as someone who unfortunately has Instagram for certain reasons, I see the same mechanisms of hypertracking and attempts to push addictive mind-melting entertainment and softcore porn to people.

I am unaware of legitimate critique's of Chris Wray as head of the FBI, but that's besides the point, I suppose. At least we have a comedian on a business writers' podcast to tell us about it.

Re: South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices

#183

Post by laweijfmvo »

Karunamon wrote: post #144
purpleblue wrote: post #65

I have a fairly large position in Meta because I'm sure that the US government is going to ban TikTok. I think once it spikes from that announcement, it will at least make it back up to over $200, for the time being.

I'm curious, why Meta? As far as I can tell all of their properties are in decline and don't have much cachet among younger users.

One possible reason is because if Meta did have a product that was appealing, they’re ready for 100M new users overnight. Not just infrastructure but regulatory, compliance, etc. on a global scale.

Any new contender would have to build out very quickly.

Re: South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices

#184

Post by KingMachiavelli »

onetimeusename wrote: post #111
wildrhythms wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People in the US believe that the top science and engineering roles should be filled by immigrants Huh? Anecdotally, I have never heard this sentiment before.

Ya I wrote the reasoning following that. Look at these statistics[1]. It shows the ever growing number of foreign people earning both undergraduate and graduate STEM degrees in the US. foreign students accounted for 54% of master’s degrees and 44% of doctorate degrees issued in STEM fields in the United States in SY2016-2017. We rely on tens of thousands of H1-B visas per year to fill STEM roles which has been debate…

The report leaves out a crucial detail; the total number of STEM degrees increased significantly. Doing some backwards math, the total number of STEM degrees increased by 108% (x2.08) between 1988 to 2016. The US population only increased ~35% in the same period. Even if we assume the increase in the college age population was a bit higher (accounting for birth rate decline), the overall trend is growth in STEM degrees by both native and foreign students.

Given how much population and economic growth the main sources of foreign exchange students had during the same period, what we see is expected unless we actively tried to limit foreign exchange students. Native students aren't being replaced, they are still there.

We don't depend on visas to 'sustain' our economy. We use immigration to keep the massive comparative advantage we have had for the last ~80 years (since WW2). It's classic brain drain and the US has been on the winning side for most of recent history.

Re: South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices

#186

Post by scarface74 »

nemothekid wrote: post #163
heavyset_go wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The claim isn't fake. But the idea that this is some TikTok plot to poison America is ridiculous and sinophobic. Oh please, all countries do it. The US uses Twitter and other social media to instigate civil unrest all over the world. Literal revolutions and genocides have been instigated over US-run social media platforms. I don't know of a superpower that doesn't use the internet as a vector to sow discord and pro…

I think you are generalizing my claim. My claim is specifically that the claim that the Chinese is using TikTok as some American programming vector is sinophobic. The CCP could be tracking the location of government officials through tiktok; that is a legitimate concern. If you want TikTok banned in the US because you believe that they promote dumb content as part of some strategic Chinese plot and you conveniently i…

> The CCP could be tracking the location of government officials through tiktok; that is a legitimate concern

Are you claiming that TikTok is able to track users and bypass mobile phones opt in requirements for location data ? Yes I know they can do course tracking based on IP address.

Re: South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices

#187

Post by scarface74 »

chihuahua wrote: post #180
nonethewiser wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cable TV is hardly relevant at this point. Its about streaming services, social media, and other internet media.

This may be a cliche, but I seriously don't understand why anyone still watches cable TV - it's been unbearable for many years and it's expensive. I sort of understand that some people enjoy sports broadcasts that are only available on cable, but the rest is just unbearable and incomprehensible to me.

If you had said “I haven’t watched TV in 20 years. Do people still watch TV?”, that would have been cliche.

But I agree with you. My wife and I are doing thr digital nomad thing traveling across the US staying in hotels. The first thing I do when I arrive is plug in my Roku stick.

Re: South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices

#188

Post by scarface74 »

nradov wrote: post #113
onetimeusename wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a serious issue but underestimated. People in the US believe that the top science and engineering roles should be filled by immigrants which I don't think is sustainable or even a healthy view of education. I am basing this on the huge foreign population of our top schools and the push for H1-B visas. It can be a self fulfilling prophecy if people remove themselves from the running for STEM in earlier…

It's not so much people in the US who believe that top science and engineering roles should be filled by immigrants, but rather employers who want cheap labor and can control the immigration laws indirectly via lobbying and campaign contributions. US work visa laws give preference to foreign students who earn advanced degrees in US universities. Those students are thus more willing to tolerate low wages and poor trea…

Which BigTech employers are getting “cheap labor”? Cry me a river about a returning intern with no experience “only” being able to make $160K right out of college and a mid level developer “only” making in the mid $200 in a couple of years.

Yes I work in BigTech and I’m one of only a very few native English speakers on my team and probably in my wider department. I never look at my coworkers and think if it weren’t for them I would be making even more than 3x to 4x the median income in the US.

Even on the corp dev side, after 3 or four years and one job hop, you can make twice the median income in any major city in the US.

Re: South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices

#190

Post by RGamma »

hammock wrote: post #5

The bigger deal (bigger than the tracking that people usually focus on) might be how the algorithm is specifically tuned to reward dumb content in the US, compared to rewarding STEM and other educational content in China. One minute video that explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hus9fWz0RRk Further reading: https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...

And idiocy begets idiocy, but this is a problem with US-style social/entertainment media already. Though Chinese and US players do it for different reasons...
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