Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action • Hacker News Board

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#351

Post by searchableguy » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:41 AM UTC

euix wrote: post #48

Shows how far the balance of power has shifted in the last 20 years back when the Chinese government was banning western products to prevent "spiritual pollution" and "western influence". Now we got the reverse and it's also for ideological reasons (at least at face value). Wonder if WeChat is next. That would be fairly effective in prevent overseas Chinese from communicating with the mainland and a lot of mom and po…

> Maybe people will have to invent some kind of transformer software, like you plug a western chat app on one side and it passes messages through a third party relay to a chinese messaging app.

That's what XMPP and matrix is. Self host your own Chinese instance to communicate with people there.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#352

Post by llamaimperative » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:43 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #342

chaostheory wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why give China access to our domestic market when they refuse to give us access theirs? What do you propose then?

because not giving someone access to your market is stupid, in particular if you're not a developing country because there's nothing to be gained from protectionism, other than enabling the increasingly authoritarian tnedencies of the American government against its own citizens. Why does something need to be proposed at all, is the US threatened by zoomers doing funny dances on a smartphone app?

No, they’re threatened by two things:

1. Equipping the CCP with a sensor placed in the pockets of millions of American citizens. This is already a problem when American companies are doing it for ad targeting purposes. But to do the same and funnel the data to an increasingly militaristic near-peer adversary? It in fact makes it qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different.

2. Tiktok opaquely selects which content it shows users. Again, American social media companies do this to a lesser degree (non-chronological feeds), but they don’t tweak their algorithms at the direction of the government to opaquely modify the information environment a citizen exists in. Note that there is currently very public tension between the US establishment and these companies because yes, authoritarians love this capability and no, they don’t yet have it in the US. Tiktok has no ability to refuse CCP’s requests to, e.g. erase any references to their concentration camps or to amplify claims that Bill Gates is trying to inject microchips via the COVID vaccine.

Whether a US executive should be able to single handedly make such a decree, I really don’t know. It doesn’t seem right to me but I ought to think about it more. What is 100% obvious to anyone looking at TikTok and the CCP with clear eyes is that it is a huge threat.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#353

Post by yanishoss » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:44 AM UTC

busymom0 wrote: post #83

closetnerd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume any VPN would do.

Wouldn’t it depend upon where the VPN is hosted?

What it depends upon is not your IP location but in what country your Apple/Google account was said to be made in

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#354

Post by xvector » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:45 AM UTC

glenstein wrote: post #310

markosaric wrote: post #273

Ban Facebook and Google too? Their data collection is so much more powerful. Never seen TikTok scripts anywhere while most apps and sites send your personal data to FB and Google. Pretty much every American is tracked by Google and FB no matter whether they have an account or whether they install their app.

Like the other commenter I'm not so sure it's obvious that domestic data collection is 'so much more powerful' - presumably you can learn remarkably specific things about people via tiktok. And GoogleBook aren't using data collection in service of major world power that is, in many senses, an antagonist to the western world, and we have avenues for oversight/reform available to us that we don't necessarily have with…

> and we have avenues for oversight/reform available to us that we don't necessarily have with tiktok

Avenues that seem to be working oh-so-well, with the NSA continuing to operate PRISM and hand out NSLs and gag orders?

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#355

Post by xvector » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

grazhero99 wrote: post #195

coliveira wrote: post #132

The US is acting like a desperate country that has no idea what it is doing. It is evident to the whole world that the US doesn't want to compete at the level of high technology, which is what the Chinese have achieved in the last couple of years. Whenever a country tries to create a fence around it, then it is just displaying weakness. It would be much more constructive for the US to recognize that they're getting b…

I don't think this is about competition. It's about a belligerent foreign government posing a threat to national security. Now you could argue that's a classic Dubya style ad hoc excuse designed to mask the government's true intentions with this, but I really don't think so. China's behavior is a legitimate threat for which shrugging and saying "let the free market handle it" seems an incredibly dangerous stance to t…

China can harm the US with trade regulations much, much more than the US can harm China.

Trump is playing with fire here and it’s honestly not very smart. Not when the US has outsourced its industry to China.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#356

Post by vortico » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

mFixman wrote: post #285

vwat wrote: post #280

From first principles reasoning, this is a good idea. We don’t ban Chinese websites, books or products. Although we tax their products more now. Apps aren’t like physical commodities. They can be used to gather data, quite invasively, shape and form public opinion in a new and more visceral way, as well as take advantage of exploits. Admittedly websites can do that too, but the scale of adoption of Tiktok makes this…

> [...] we gain almost nothing by having tiktok around. We gain an outlet or creativity that's particularly fun for teens. You might as well say that we gain nothing by banning skateboards, video games, or rock music. I would agree more with the ban of there was any evidence of nefarious data mining by TikTok. Outside of weird Internet rumors they only seem to collect basic user data and whatever you write in your pr…

A better analogy for this situation is banning skateboards, video games, or rock music made in China. If TikTok is banned, most teens would switch to an American platform. Their outlet for creativity is not reduced, just changed.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#357

Post by yomly » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

robjan wrote: post #221

free_rms wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's... literally true, you can look up photos of turtle shells with characters etched into them on Wikipedia. That doesn't mean they're perfect or blessed but they've definitely been there the whole time.

I'm not going to get into a debate, but Traditional Chinese characters are only really used in Hong Kong and Taiwan these days.

Plenty of mainlanders can read fanti FYI. Writing is harder as that requires active memory and practice but fanti is perfectly decipherable for a fluent mandarin speaker. And when in doubt using a dictionary is trivial. If the text is digital you can pretty much get a 1-1 mapping 99% of the time. Especially if it is putonghua (as opposed to dialect)

Obviously something as big as the introduction of jianti is quite radical and will have downsides but it's really overplayed by armchair spectators. For a fluent speaker it is at most an inconvenience - like reading chaucer or shakespeare, except the grammar is exactly the same only the spelling differs.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#358

Post by dtech » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

chillacy wrote: post #184

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #106

Not even getting into the CCP ties, it's always struck me as unfair that Western social media companies are banned in China, while Chinese ones have been able to compete Worldwide. In a way this gives Chinese apps an immediate advantage (as some are indirectly calling out in this comment section). If you want to reach out to someone in China, you have to use a Chinese company's app. Since social media is mostly a win…

Reminds me of a Taleb article I read: Most Intolerant Wins https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Jesus what a bad article, it starts out making a sane point with, maybe some slight anti-religious hints, but quickly turns into a personal rant about how all of modern science is in the pocket of GMO-pushing agricultural companies with a personal vendetta against him.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#359

Post by xvector » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:48 AM UTC

quacker wrote: post #206

coliveira wrote: post #132

The US is acting like a desperate country that has no idea what it is doing. It is evident to the whole world that the US doesn't want to compete at the level of high technology, which is what the Chinese have achieved in the last couple of years. Whenever a country tries to create a fence around it, then it is just displaying weakness. It would be much more constructive for the US to recognize that they're getting b…

It is evident to the whole world that the US doesn't want to compete at the level of high technology, which is what the Chinese have achieved in the last couple of years Not sure where this is coming from. TikTok is being banned out of national security interests, not because it is an advanced level of technology that the US thinks it can't compete with.

> TikTok is being banned out of national security interests

I think you meant to say “a thinly-veiled guise of national security interests.”

TikTok is being banned because it’s election season and Trump doesn’t want a repeat of Tulsa.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#360

Post by pupdogg » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:48 AM UTC

949throaway2020 wrote: post #213

sebmellen wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's rather ridiculous. The US has seen massive social instability over the past 400 years. The Revolution, the Civil War, slavery and the Slave Trade, the Great Depression, etc. And the founders of the US, being mostly European, were descended from people who lived through absolutely catastrophic social instability in Europe. Never-ending wars over religion and territory and on and on... What "real chaos" has "Chi…

>What "real chaos" has "China" (which is, by the way, nowhere homogenous) seen that we have not seen? This is ill-informed and easily proven wrong. I'm no China apologist, but the Chinese have suffered the worst human disasters in history. Let's go down the list of top 10 anthropogenic disasters by geometric mean death toll and count the causalities in China [1]: 1. 2nd World War estimated 70 million dead, 17.5 milli…

They also undeaded (if that's a word) 650 million humans since 1960. That's 88.4 billion lbs of weight added to earth, yielding a slight gravitational shift. I see that as a net positive for them!