Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

> I mean, the societ union collapsed remarkably quickly

I don't think comparing these two is all that helpful. The Soviet Union made its authoritarian side too visible, i.e. Prague 68 etc.

Combine this with the fact that the union wasn't really united by any sense of national identity, that is the Czechs viewed the soviets as the Russians and their own party officials as puppets to Moscow. In that sense the Soviets were foreign occupiers. This is not true for the CCP.

Another important point is that quite frankly, most people care about material well being first, political preferences second. By the time the USSR collapsed, its citizens felt like they'd be in a dire economic situation as long as the status quo continues. This is a much more powerful force than the rather vague promises of a democracy, I'd say.

The Soviets made the mistake of not allowing private business to occur basically at all, which means people had no hope of ever "making it".

In America, you have your Zuckerbergs that help keep the idea of an American Dream alive and something to look up to as being possible if one only works hard enough.

The Soviet Union didn't have that motivational force, however deceptive it is, but China does have its Jack Ma figures. Its economy is a mix of centrally planned and free trade and much more complex than the Soviet one was. It's also a bigger internal market. In other words, you could dream about potentially being a billionaire in China, you couldn't in the Soviet Union.

Also, many Chinese enjoy a relatively middle class lives that, as long as one doesn't get too political, probably don't feel that restrictive day to day.

As long as the CCP can keep the economy growing and people can maintain their middle class lifestyles, no revolution is coming.

I’m not claiming that the ban is related to human rights, but rather that the US and China aren’t in the same moral ballpark. Banning TikTok isn’t equivalent to education camps, forced organ harvesting, sterilization, etc of ethnic minorities.

That white paper is scare-mongering garbage, and I don't say that lightly. Some of the horrible things TikTok is supposedly doing:

* Using Java reflection (which almost everyone does)

* Webview (many of your apps are just thin webview wrappers)

* Log device information (uh, logging things like the OS version for diagnostics and metrics is perfectly normal)

The paper uses the word "monitoring" appearing in a debug message as evidence that the app is built to spy on users. Here's the log message that they want to claim proves TikTok evil-doing:

    AFlogger.afInfoLog("Turning on monitoring")

Uh, the word "monitoring" has plenty of perfectly innocuous uses, e.g., monitoring memory use. If this thing really were trying to monitor user behavior in some sneaky way for the CCP, why the hell would they log about it, in English?

In another section of scare-longering, these "researchers" try to cast asperations on the app calling the Java equivalent of system(3) to run a subprocess. Uh, so what? That's also a fairly common thing to do on Android --- people use it to, e.g., run logcat for diagnostics (logcat filters the logs to only ones from the running UID, so there's no privacy leak).

In yet another section of scare-mongering, the document suggests that TikTok's use of MD5 is some kind of deliberate back-door. No, it's probably just like every other use of MD5 these days: some junior developer who hasn't kept up on the recent MD5 attacks.

Yes, TikTok ignores TLS errors. That's just shitty programming. But like the MD5 thing, I'm going to chalk it up to just shitty coding, not some kind of deliberate spyware backdoor. This code would certainly not pass my code review. But I see no evidence of malice. These are errors that junior developers make everywhere.

There's also a SQL injection. The researchers haven't shown that the inputs to the SQL query are unsanitized, and even so, injecting SQL from a UI text book to the local SQLite database is no big deal. The user owns the device! It's certainly not evidence of some kind of nefarious backdoor.

On top of all of that, the app is sandboxed, like every other Android app. Even if there were some ultra-mega remote code execution facility wired directly to Xi Jinping's desk, there'd be minimal risk, because the app couldn't look at the rest of the system! This whole analysis is aggressively, painfully, and conspicuously stupid. All this article tells me is 1) TikTok's software engineering team is too junior, and 2) people really, really, really want to believe that the app is evil.

This execrable article is one of the worst security reviews that I have ever read, and I've read a lot of them. It makes me yearn for the days of Colin Powell bullshitting the UN about Iraqi yellowcake. At least Powell didn't make 6th grade writing and logic errors.

This is "so if she weighs the same as a duck...she must be a witch!" level of analysis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5iMhHCGuOI

> that the US and China aren’t in the same moral ballpark.

I am not saying that it's necessarily the same, but is probably a lot closer than one would hope.

U.S. prison populations are basically forced labor, killing millions of civilians, not its own citizens but still, within living memory is also a thing, millions are without health insurance during a pandemic and still no universal healthcare in sight, police brutality, treatment of migrants, coups in foreign countries, school shootings, drone strikes with over 90% civilian causalities, holding people without trial at CIA black sites and GB etc.

Then you have the crimes that weren't committed directly by the U.S. but by its ales with U.S. encouragement and sale of arms, like what the Saudis are doing in Yemen right now, or the indirect funding of extremist elements in places like Syria via the likes of Qatar.

One area where the U.S. is far worse is overthrowing democratically elected leaders of sovereign countries that weren't sufficiently subservient to American corporate interests. It's basically the government doing the bidding of private interests, which is the very definition of fascism.

Again, I don't think they're exactly the same, but not as far apart as you'd think. The one major difference is the U.S. treats foreigns like trash, while China likes to keep it more domestic on that front.

Right. So the point is really “the winners win.”