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Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

congress.gov

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Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#391

Post by Mezzie »

alexose wrote: post #328
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, telling parents (who are the voters) that actually they should just be doing a better job monitoring their kids activities online seems like a losing political strategy!

Maybe it's not a binary choice. Parents can do a better job monitoring their kids and the state can make it mildly harder for kids to spend all day on social media.

We could also educate the parents/adults. I feel like a lot of these issues come from the fact that the newer generation(s) have so much more knowledge of what they're using than their elders. Society has changed things and implemented safeguards in the past (seatbelts, driving laws, etc.) Yet for some reason the social media discussion always ends up only presenting two options: Censorship or anarchy.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#392

Post by [deleted] »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #325
FormerBandmate wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah, ByteDance directly takes orders from the Chinese government. Big Tech can also take orders from the American government, but America is bound by the rule of law and isn't actively imprisoning millions in concentration camps so it's way better

> America is bound by the rule of law People keep saying this, but the Snowden leaks make clear this is a fantasy. > America… isn’t actively imprisoning millions… It’s a good thing you said “in concentration camps” or that would have been a doozy!

[deleted]

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#393

Post by batch12 »

I am no tiktok fan, but this may spawn a new generation of crackers and rebels. At least maybe infuse new blood into the ranks of people who really understand how technology works. Most users don't know how to bypass a ban like this, but when they're sufficiently angry and motivated... maybe thats temporary.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#394

Post by boopmaster »

withinboredom wrote: post #211
throwaway4837 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children. This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their qu…

> [The] US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China. Yeah, except that any business can just buy that information. I can buy your day-to-day movements for dirt cheap. I own a non-American company (though I'm still an American citizen, but that isn't a factor), and it is insanely cheap to get information about any American you want. Hell, BingBot will tell you all about…

I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership, but I assume at face value that there is some very embarrassing facts that our local spooks are not keen to share with China. What does the great firewall of America look like, from the infrastructure & interface angle? Would we want to share that with China? Your Google searches and all your metadata that can likely be accessed with relative ease… is there a similar surveillance capability that we’d wish to share with China in how spooks make data requests?

China has no jurisdiction over you… there’s no real punishing to relate to what you have viewed on TikTok, so why are your viewing habits a threat to national security?

I don’t believe this to be a zero sum game. This is further extension of authoritarianism from a government that is terrified of anything short of pervasive colonoscopy-tier data collection.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#395

Post by jrsj »

withinboredom wrote: post #346
sebzim4500 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe that a significant portion of iOS users are going to set up an Apple development account and manually reinstall TikTok every week then I have a bridge to sell you. They will just switch to a different social network, which is equally destructive but not Chinese.

I didn’t do anything special. I just installed Xcode, and bam. Done. We ripped CDs so we didn’t have to buy them. Hell, we sat by boomboxes until the right song came on the radio just to push record on the tape player. Kids will do whatever it takes to get what they want. I’d buy that bridge.

Except a MacBook costs $1000+ when TikTok clones are free

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#396

Post by dotancohen »

hgsgm wrote: post #327
Aunche wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can get your address and phone number from just about anywhere. What you can't purchase are the thousands of data points that Facebook or Google has about your habits, location, and preferences. That's their secret sauce after all.

You can't get it from Google , but you can get it from other data harvesters and brokers with a different business model.

What keywords should I search for, for more information?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#398

Post by withinboredom »

deltree7 wrote: post #343
withinboredom wrote: post #164

Maybe someone will scroll all the way down to this comment. Probably not. For half a decade, I have lived outside of the US, and I've watched as it has fallen to shit in slow motion. I make a decent chunk of income in USD and this terrifies me... but this. This move saddens me. There are only so many hours that congress has to make real decisions ... and this, this is what they spent their time on? Talking about how…

Don't worry about the US. It is still the greatest country and will remain so for at least 50 years. It's reddit/HN who have never traveled or lived outside US that has jaded your view of US. You know which country released chatGPT? or NVIDIA A100 or made a huge step towards Quantum Computing / Nuclear Fusion? I'd rather congress focus on irrelevant details, while startups solve / tackle important issues. When it rea…

It’s a pretty decent country. Beautiful even. Very obviously not the greatest country (or were you being sarcastic?).

I have some jaded views. Perhaps my jading moment was when my unit was used as a political pawn by Obama to get re-elected. That pissed me off to no end and broke my rose colored glasses.

I sincerely miss US startups sometimes. I work at a startup here and they actually (somehow) have a work/life balance, 20 days paid vacation, and other perks with no gimmicks, like a chef who cooks us lunch every day, but no shenanigans (like “unlimited” vacations that aren’t actually unlimited).

I (sometimes) miss working weekends and impossible deadlines while devouring cheap pizza and passing out on the couch. But there’s a good chance even US startups have evolved in the last ten years… but the last US startup I worked at in the early teens was like that. My then-girlfriend-now-wife would come hang out with us nerds for dinner before we got back to work. Hell, I fixed a rare database issue on my honeymoon because everyone else was asleep and I wasn’t while my new wife cussed out my CEO on the phone. He ordered us a really nice bottle wine from the hotel, so I can’t complain…

Meh, maybe I don’t miss it, but you make some valuable points.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#399

Post by akerl_ »

yed wrote: post #300
akerl_ wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bill doesn’t require an ownership stake, it even includes provisions to consider an entity hostile if the holding is indirect.

The intent there is to deal with people trying to get around the provision via intermediary holding companies. At its core there still must be some ownership stake or controlling interest by a foreign national, whether direct or indirect. Edit: the key parts of the bill that specify it applies only for controlling interests: > Sec 2-2: CONTROLLING HOLDING.—The term “controlling holding” means a holding with the power…

The bill doesn’t seem to require that an interest be controlling, nor define any boundaries on what counts as indirect stakes

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#400

Post by winter_blue »

This bill is like a joke. It's like the lawyers who wrote this intentionally wrote it to be so Machiavellian, horrible, and 1984-esque, so that this bill would not pass.

This bill literally references parts of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and the Controlled Substances Act. It's beyond absurd. A good video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xudlYSLFls8

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