Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

281–290 of 496 posts

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

#281
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.

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

#282
post #280

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, got his phone hacked and embarrassing text messages stolen off it from a vulnerability in the video parsing library in WhatsApp in a message sent to him by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. So Amazon as a company is now very sensitive to what applications are installed on staff devices and how data on those devices can be extracted from vulnerabilities in other installed apps. Th…

How about making Whatsapp not permitted on Amazon employee’s phones?

How about making Jeff Bezos not permitted on phones with access to Amazon email?

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

#283

Byte.co waiting for adoption on the sidelines.

There are a bunch of TikTok wannabes (Byte, Dubsmash, or the various attempts by Facebook), none that I've seen are as fluid or addictive. TikTok's ability to navigate around with a bunch of responsive swipe gestures and keep showing things that might be interesting is miles ahead of the competition. The fluidity is very dependent on a good internet connection.

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

#284

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, got his phone hacked and embarrassing text messages stolen off it from a vulnerability in the video parsing library in WhatsApp in a message sent to him by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. So Amazon as a company is now very sensitive to what applications are installed on staff devices and how data on those devices can be extracted from vulnerabilities in other installed apps. Th…

Looks like the DNC is also disallowing the app on their employees’s phones too.[1]

Don’t blame them, they don’t want the kind of leaks that happened last cycle.

[1] https://www.kdrv.com/content/news/571708792.html

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

#285
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is the jury still out on whether MBS knowingly sent him that hack? that is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fast path to becoming even more of an international pariah than he already is

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…

Nitpick: Khashoggi was a writer for WaPo, not NYT.

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

#286

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?

Yes, if the owner or organization is found to be breaking the law. Malicious domains are seized every day. Here [1] is one of the most recent examples. Some people try to evade this [2] with varying degrees of success.

[1] - https://www.msn.com/EN-US/news/technology/microsoft-secretly...

[2] - https://torrentfreak.com/how-to-stop-domain-names-being-seiz...

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

#287
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> > One of the challenges of doing that nowadays is we have a president who thinks cultural genocide of Uighur muslims is 'absolutely the right thing to do' and that Tienanmen square massacre was also the right thing to do. > Fake news much? See the 2020 Uyghur Rights Act [1]. I have no idea where you came up with this. This claim originates in John Bolton's book [1] Make of it what you will. Personally it seems pret…

Bolton is consistent. He has consistently been a warmongering villain. Like many other USA "international security experts" he has never shied away from lying in pursuit of his terrible goals. I'm not eager to believe a story from him that only Trump or Xi could contradict, if they even cared to do so.

But sure, Trump could have said it. He could say anything at any time. As he sees it, he got elected by promising to bully minorities. In office, he has bullied minorities. It's not surprising that during negotiations he would attempt to find common ground through shared appreciation of commonplace governmental activities.

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

#288

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.

oh bugs in the parsing libraries are the things MOSTLY used for attacks like this. Parsing is hard, and parsers are buggy and lead to all kind of unsafe C code

Exactly, parsers are complicated, generally involve a lot of manipulation of memory buffers, and for performance reasons are usually written in a language without memory safety (though this is starting to change with languages like https://github.com/p-org/P and rust).

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people I know check their work email from their personal phone. Work either doesn't buy them one or they don't want to carry around two phones.

Most people don't need to be on call 24/7 so they could just divorce themselves from off hours work and live like in the ancient times.

Amen. If you're not paying me to be on-call, I'm not putting any work info on my phone. Whatever's going on can wait until 9 tomorrow morning.

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

#290
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.

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