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US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

reuters.com

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Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#331

Post by sabbaticaldev »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #167

This is one of the things in my lifetime that gives me the most optimism, alongisde the IRA Bill. as someone in Australia who strongly supports our recent U16 ban, I hope META gets removed/broken up for you guys soon after, at least for underage users. I'm 22 and often wish I had never been born into a world with social media, with the belief that it is one of the worst things we have ever made as a species. I know t…

> as someone in Australia who strongly supports our recent U16 ban, I hope META gets removed/broken up for you guys soon after, at least for underage users.

oh boy… your optimism sounds childish after reading the second line

Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#332

Post by rdm_blackhole »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #315
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your entire argument for supporting U16 ban is that despite knowing that: - it will put every Australian's PII in the hands of people who have a bad track record on security - de anonymize the internet as we know it - make it easy for a foreign actor to break in (remember if there is a backdoor, it will be exploited) - increase the state's surveillance capabilities on their own citizens All of this to do what exac…

My hope is that maybe people will stop viewing life from such a productised and artificial lens that's so far removed from the natural human experience.

Yeah, that is what I thought.

I think you are trolling and your response is just a bunch of word salad without much meaning.

You agree with the ban because you agree with the ban because you think the ban is good. There seem to be no critical analysis as to why this is good besides some supposed good intentions.

Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#333

Post by sabbaticaldev »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #315
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your entire argument for supporting U16 ban is that despite knowing that: - it will put every Australian's PII in the hands of people who have a bad track record on security - de anonymize the internet as we know it - make it easy for a foreign actor to break in (remember if there is a backdoor, it will be exploited) - increase the state's surveillance capabilities on their own citizens All of this to do what exac…

My hope is that maybe people will stop viewing life from such a productised and artificial lens that's so far removed from the natural human experience.

you are hoping wrong then, tiktok block will only exacerbates this.

Coincidence: in portuguese tolo means fool

Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#334

Post by tgma »

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #326
tgma wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audits can only conclusively prove existence of backdoors, not lack of backdoors. At best , you get some assurance.

That's not very logical at all. I believe that a flying unicorn orbits the moon. When no unicorn is found, does that prove that a unicorn may exist? You can't use a negative to prove a point. Either the point is proven and supported by evidence or it is just speculation. If it is speculation, then it can be dismissed since it has no basis in reality. In this particular case, if an audit was done and found no backdoor…

> If it is speculation, then it can be dismissed since it has no basis in reality.

This line has no basis in logic actually.

Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#335

Post by Pikamander2 »

sadeshmukh wrote: post #74

I'm not sure how exactly the First Amendment works, so someone please correct me, but does banning a platform constitute a violation if individuals can choose other platforms?

The real answer is that it depends on what the Supreme Court says.

There's a valid legal argument to be made here either way; that the government has some amount of leeway to censor foreign propaganda, or that the first amendment prevents it from doing so at all.

We'll really just have to wait and see how they rule on it, because the issue will definitely make its way there at some point in the near future.

It's also likely that the verdict won't have a neat and tidy partisan breakdown, so the final result will be hard to predict.

Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#336

Post by pixelatedindex »

kelnos wrote: post #308
pixelatedindex wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either you are being sarcastic or you forgot about the Cambridge Analytica incident. Elections can be influenced via the latest prevalent platform in a region. If it’s not TikTok, it’ll be Facebook / Instagram / YouTube.

Sure, but consider that we actually found out about Cambridge Analytica, Facebook got egg on its face, and made changes in how they share data as a result. (We can argue over how meaningful those changes were, of course.) And on the other side, we have a company owned in part by entities that are beholden to every whim of the Chinese government. That's by design, and they can't change that, and have no motivation to…

I’d argue FB getting egg on its face has done nothing. Bytedance has also made changes to how data is stored and shared as well, which may or may not be meaningful. It seems to me that it’s ok for US agencies to exploit and data mine the crap of US citizens, but if it’s another country doing it then we go “wait not like that”.

Either way, China will get the data through whatever data broker the predominant US social media company is. And if it pushes hard in one direction, then people will sour and leave the platform, look at Twitter.

It’s very evident that this is a power play by the media empire to squash competition, now that Musk is in cabinet and Zuck is more than happy to grease Trumps hand.

Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#337

Post by kome »

gkanai wrote: post #100

Reciprocity is key. Google and Facebook and most Western web services are blocked in China. If that is the case, then there should be no complaint with blocking Bytedance/other Chinese apps in the West.

so, you are telling me that democracy doesn't mean anything nowadays. you don't want to be better than china.

Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#338

Post by supriyo-biswas »

> it would "not directly prohibit the continued use of TikTok" by Apple or Google users who have already downloaded TikTok. But it conceded the prohibitions on providing support "will eventually be to render the application unworkable."

I have a technical question with regards to this.

Typically, censorship* investigation efforts (from academia or elsewhere, such as OONI, Apernet etc.) have tended to focus on non-American countries to map their firewalling infrastructure used to this end.

Since the US was never brought up in these investigations, as an outsider, I got the distinct impression that TLS packets were never interfered with, and the US mostly relied on either seizing the domain and its associated resources (such as in the various piracy cases, the raidforums/breachforums investigation etc.)

Does this mean that a second-order effect of this directive would be asking the ISPs to block requests based on SNI, and in that case would it be a first in the US?

* For the purposes of this discussion, let us step aside the discussion about "censorship" and simply use that term to mean any kind of network filtering used by ISPs.

Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#339

Post by throawayonthe »

gkanai wrote: post #100

Reciprocity is key. Google and Facebook and most Western web services are blocked in China. If that is the case, then there should be no complaint with blocking Bytedance/other Chinese apps in the West.

their barbarous censorship vs our blessed national security

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...

Re: US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

#340

Post by jingyibo123 »

kelnos wrote: post #244
brookst wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So… if China mistreats their citizens, reciprocity says we must mistreat ours? You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness. As soon as you find yourself arguing that you have no choice but to engage in the same behaviors you claim to dislike, you have literally become the enemy.

"Mistreat" is a bit unnecessarily dramatic. People in the US were fine (possibly even better off) before TikTok, and they'll be just fine if it goes away. China's level of internet control and censorship does seem to rise to the level of mistreatment (in that they control and shape access to information, in ways that further the interests of state propaganda), but denying Chinese companies (and the Chinese government…

> If the US government were suppressing particular views or discussion of some topics (as the Chinese government does to their own citizens), then I would be alarmed.

As someone mentioned above, several officials openly admittted the "ban" is related to palestine-related matirials on TikTok's platform, as opposed to some other platforms.

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