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FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

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Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#791

Post by theplumber »

thetinguy wrote: post #780
tremon wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only off-base for citizens of the US. For other countries, there is no material difference between what either is doing. Except that one of them has a track record of extralegal assassinations, of course.

What? One is a democracy and one is a dictatorship.

But as it's well known the U.S didn't mind undermining other democracies(i.e Iran's 1953 coup) and supporting dictatorships. It's really more about "interests" and as it happens sometimes U.S interests and democratic rights align but sometimes the opposite is true. We shouldn't put our data in the hands of any government. I would say thay banning international data harversting is a good thing. Next: ban national data harvesting as well

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#792

Post by theplumber »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #788
thetinguy wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? One is a democracy and one is a dictatorship.

Not only a democracy, but a constitutional republic with an independent court and military, both of which are sworn to uphold that constitution and all the human rights it enumerates. We don't always succeed at that, but at least we have that as our society and government's guidestar, and legal and political processes for self-correcting. The Communist Party has exactly zero of any of that, and an ideology entirely o…

It looks like you've missed the past 10-20 years of history. You are a "party" supporter not a human rights(i.e privacy) supporter

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#793

Post by monocasa »

Xeoncross wrote: post #721
627467 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this data collection done by a foreign government and exploited for surveillance or espionage is a national security risk. How were Snowden revelations of USG Bigtech relationship materially different from what's happening here? Maybe it was less transparent? Any "woke" person can see the cognitive dissonance here. It's all fine that you use the geopolitical rivalry argument but not if you try to paint one side of…

The US isn't rounding thousands (millions actually?) of civil, political, religious, and other kinds of dissenters and imprisoning, reeducating, or killing them. That's kind of a big difference here. The CCP has mandatory seats on the bytedance board and wants a copy of all the data so they can target people. Spying is bad, murder is next-level bad. Stop it all, but start with the bigger issues first.

Sure they are.

> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

~ John Erlichman, Nixon's Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs

And decades of those policies have left the US with close to eight times the prisoners per capita of China. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Prison...

And the US has no problem executing prisoners, and in fact unlike China has no problem executing someone for crimes committed while a minor (only the US, Iran, Pakistan, and Somalia do this).

And that's before even getting into the extrajudicial politically motivated killings like Fred Hampton's murder, the MOVE bombing, or the recent odd proclivity of Ferguson and BLM protest organizers to "kill themselves" by hanging in a public tree, or "shooting themselves" in the head and then torching the car that they were in.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#794

Post by FreqSep »

AlexandrB wrote: post #556
FreqSep wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes western governments are totally full of shit too, the proof of this is that Julian Assange is still being crucified for leaking information, for being a whistle blower. That’s just not true. Many leakers and whistle blowers aren’t prosecuted every year. Julian Assange is a pretty transparent Russian asset and has been for a number of years. There’s a reason he never leaks anything that is negative of Putin. Mea…

> Meanwhile if it’s anti-American he leaks it in full without taking any standard journalist precautions. If it's true, what does saying it's anti-American mean? Would you rather be in the dark about shady shit your government is doing? It's entirely possible that he just has better access to US sources than Russian ones.

> If it's true, what does saying it's anti-American mean? Would you rather be in the dark about shady shit your government is doing?

Sure, as long as it’s accompanied by safe journalist practices (which it isn’t) and also calls out the shady shit of other, opposed, countries (which (which it doesn’t).

> It’s entirely possible that he just has better access to US sources than Russian ones.

That’s fine and possible, but even if that wasn’t the case - and he had access to Russian leaks but didn’t leak them - this is still exactly what he would say.

And it’s possible both are true - that he’s simply releasing what is given to him, and the Russian state saw this and took the opportunity to feed him information as a result. At that point, after he has continually irresponsibly released covert information from a hostile state, how is he any different in practice than an intentional hostile actor?

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#795

Post by zaroth »

jfengel wrote: post #718
encryptluks2 wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, and I'm not fan of Trump, but if Trump hypothetically supported something good... like let's say universal healthcare, a lot of Democrats would oppose it just because Trump supported it.

I don't see any meaningful way to talk about that hypothetical. Much of what Trump says is chosen specifically to enrage people, and Democrats in particular. Even if he chose to support, say, universal health care, it would be buried in so much deliberate harassment that there would be no way to arrive at a workable plan. The suggestion is so counterfactual that I just can't address it one way or the other. He achiev…

Perhaps the real world example of this is the price transparency laws that Trump pushed through. Whether democrats were staunchly against it, I don’t actually recall.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#796

Post by 93po »

jmyeet wrote: post #359

As much as the US government does questionable and bad things (and it does), the CCP is worse. The US still has at least the semblance of the rule of law. There is still some separation between corporations and the government. Corporations in China are extensions of the state and tools of foreign policy in a way they just aren't in the West. The US government can also be replaced. That's why China and the US just are…

>I don't believe the US government has the storage capacity required.

A single data warehouse used by the NSA stores exabytes of data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

A single exabyte is enough to support Facebook's entire business operations for 5+ years. Photos, videos, posts, everything. I doubt the NSA is storing every photo on Facebook on their own servers, but it's clearly enough space to store every text message, all browsing history, all texted photos, all emails, all voicemails, all financial transactions into perpetuity for every person on the planet.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#797

Post by coliveira »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #752
coliveira wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't seem to understand that median is not a measure that is much better than mean, especially in the case of high inequality. For example, if I take all the money from the 40% poorer population and distribute it to the 40% richer population, the median is still the same. If you don't believe, just compute the mean and median of these two sequences: [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] [0,0,0,0,5,6,11,11,11,11] Another exa…

>People don't seem to understand that median is not a measure that is much better than mean, especially in the case of high inequality. Yes, they do. I am a PhD mathematician with decades of work using these tools. I am quite clear on the meanings and shortcoming of all sorts of indicators. I am also aware how real world data trends instead of cooked up examples that don't match reality. Median is a common value used…

The two examples show exactly the problem of the median: it is not that different from the mean in many situation when we talk about salaries and incomes. Now, if you start using the percentiles as you're doing here, then you are looking deeper into the data and your results get more accurate and reflective of reality, which just proves my point.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#798

Post by FreqSep »

therealasdf wrote: post #143
jpk wrote: post #33

Lots of folks here arguing that the focus on TikTok is unfair, given the data collection practices of domestic corps like Facebook. From a privacy point of view, this argument is well-founded, but I think it's tangential to the argument TFA is making, which is: this data collection done by a foreign government and exploited for surveillance or espionage is a national security risk. I get it. We want corps to stop hoo…

Why do Americans think they represent the world? Your adversary is not our adversary.

Does America “represent the world”? No.

Does America represent the national security strategy of essentially all of Europe, most non-Chinese nations in Asia, and much of South America?

Absolutely, and to pretend otherwise is to be dreaming.

If you’re not in one of those areas then you are correct that your adversary is not our adversary. But it’s pretty statistically likely you are, and in that case the two are linked.

You’re welcome to return the trillions spent on your defense, of course, and set up your own naval strategy and naval supply chains to defend your trade routes.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#799

Post by unethical_ban »

AlexandrB wrote: post #571
cudgy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if your government gets the data anyway? Hackers could hack TikTok servers and release data or sell to interested parties. Your government may already be tracking your TikTok usage by sniffing traffic on intermediate servers or other measures. Or China may even sell or share this information (or worse, manipulated false information) for strategic purposes.

All good points that equally apply to Meta/Google/etc. why does TikTok deserve special treatment here other than economic protectionism?

I feel like I need to use clapping hands emojis to get the point across, but I will refrain.

---

The US government is more ethical and more respectful of the rule of law and human rights than Russia or China.

Let me paste it in again, so we know it isn't a typo:

The US government is more ethical and more respectful of the rule of law and human rights than Russia or China.

---

The US government is not perfect. Portions of the US government are a danger to the rights of some people, particularly civilians in the middle east. Regarding "cyber", it has several major stains on its history, including PRISM, XKeyscore, warrantless wiretapping, and the current president's support of the Clipper chip in the 90s.

I support privacy protections on mobile devices and mobile apps, and support in general stronger regulations against the collection of personal information by tech giants.

I resent Meta and Google for the amount of data they collect about me and everyone I know with any Android device/Meta app installed.

Every statement I have made can be made while non-hypocritically supporting the statement by the FCC regarding TikTok. It isn't just economic protectionism - it's national security. I don't think a Chinese politician or military official should have Facebook or Instagram installed on their mobile phone, either.

Re: FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

#800

Post by sillystuff »

cowtools wrote: post #107
jmfayard wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US government is a foreign government for 96% of the people, not to mention that its own citizens don't control it much.

The USA is a democracy. Arguing otherwise is the pot calling the kettle black.

> The USA is a democracy.

I'm not sure it is as black and white as you suggest.

If you were to create a time machine and bring an ancient Athenian to the modern day US, the Athenian would not recognize the US system of government as, democracy. With the exception of jury trials and referendums, the demos do not directly engage in governance.

The US doesn't even allow the majority of the population to select those who perform the actual governing. E.g., a person from Wyoming has much more representation in the Senate than a person from California.

And, for the president, the population votes, but the winner of this election is not the one who got the most votes from the population, it is the one with the most electoral college votes. Again, the Wyoming voter gets more representation with one elector per less than 200K Wyoming residents, and only one elector for over 700K California residents. It is how the US got Bush "W" and Trump even though they both lost the vote of the demos.

With all the money in elections, even if there were majority representation, the US would still have moneyed interests dominating politics.

Some argue that the US is an oligarchy:

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

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