> In a statement, a representative from TikTok said they are disappointed by the news.
> "We're disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok," spokesperson Jamal Brown wrote.
Regardless of you stance on Texas and Texans and politics, the above is a pretty funny statement to make. We have to protect the integrity of short video apps that are built for advertisers to push products and services through ads and influencers.
That's pretty easy to do; to characterize nationalist censorship in terms of trivialities. I could literally use being "built for advertisers to push products and services through ads and influencers" to ban television, newspapers, and every social network.
But like... what cybersecurity threat is there to using TikTok while on UT wifi?
The concerns with TikTok are always around data collection and propaganda, not it pwning other stuff on the same network with malicious network traffic?
I'm no security professional, but I am familiar with the ultra crap security standards of many institutions. It's really just removing a drop from the ocean of potential risks, but doesn't seem that outlandish given the nature of TikTok and where it comes from.
Well, sure, I think you're right: if the Chinese state wants access to UT-Austin's networks, they definitely have that already, and cutting this out doesn't help anything.
I suppose they're just going along with their new law in a way that buys some political points.
Personally, I'd love it if we banned the damn thing everywhere, but only because I hate the mindless content :)
Especially given that TikTok will work fine on devices that are connected to the cell network and not wifi. I can't tell what is being protected, exactly.
This is like saying, if students can assault students outside of UT Austin - I don't know why we should ban students assaulting each other inside of UT Austin.
If you believe you're doing the right thing in some cases - you don't give up because you can't do the right thing in all cases.
UT Austin can be in the wrong. I'm just saying - simply because UT Austin banned TikTok doesn't mean they're doing it for censorship reasons. There could be other reasons...
> ban ________ television, newspapers, and every social network…
^ “advertiser supported”.
For the sake of argument, imagine if advertiser supported content was in fact banned in certain places. Don’t you think that non-advertiser supported models would quickly fill the gap?
They're already there. You just don't know it because the algo creates a textbook filter bubble to keep you happy.
This is one of TikTok's greatest strengths as an entertainment platform (compare to Youtube or whatever). People never see shit they'd be Outraged(TM) at keeping their user experience generally positive, or if not generally positive at least basically never negative.
I’m sure there are plenty of right-wing influencers on TikTok. It’s a service that locks you tightly into an algorithmic bubble once it has an idea of what kind of content turns you on. Alt-right TikTok in Texas must be “interesting.”
>"We're disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok," spokesperson Jamal Brown wrote. "We're especially sorry to see the unintended consequences of these rushed policies beginning to impact universities' ability to share information, recruit students, and build communities around athletic teams, student groups, campus publications, and more."
Jamal Brown has quite the resume. Revolving door and all of that.
He's a lobbyist by any other definition of the word. "Spokesman" is kind of a cop-out to deliberately undersell why he's working with TikTok/Bytedance.
Everyone has a price, and I assume Bytedance knows how valuable having a former DoD spokesman as their PR guy is - especially in this new environment of geopolitical realism. Whatever that price was, I think it's safe to assume it was met.
A job's a job. A DOD spokesperson isn't receiving any confidential information. Their job is political, just as it would be at Facebook, if they chose to work there.
You can just say that Chinese nationals without residency in the US can’t own land. Canada did something similar for foreigners and the legal defensibility of it seemed pretty good based on lawyers talking about it.
Basically, you can say (in legalese) that X group can’t be the controller of the land. They can open trusts or LLCs or whatever… but it’s transitive so their trust can’t name them as the beneficiaries and their LLCs can’t honor them as shareholders.
What would that accomplish? Most LLCs are created (incorporated) by a lawyer who then cedes control to the intended owners. Even if you had a requirement for a US person, you'd just have figureheads collecting some nominal salary. Plenty of low-income folks would be eager to get an extra $500 a month for doing nothing.
For what it's worth, the formation of an LLC is a state affair, and every state has its own rules around requirements, reporting, transparency, etc. Most states keep the paperwork public; some states don't, but these are not the states where housing shortages are all that profound.
> Plenty of low-income folks would be eager to get an extra $500 a month for doing nothing.
If this hypothetical low income person owned the LLC so that others could operate it, nothing is stopping them from cleaning out the LLC's bank account whenever they want since they own it!
It doesn't work that way. An LLC is governed by an operating agreement, and that agreement can specify what actions needs approval from whom. You can have an LLC that is owned by one person and managed by another, and yet another party collects proceeds... sky's the limit, if it's not otherwise illegal, it's fair game.
Same. Just don't give apps all of the permissions. TikTok doesn't have access to my camera, photo library, microphone, local network, location, etc. It's not that hard.
Let me get this straight. You are saying that Google and Apple, in coordination with Bytedance, have introduced code into their operating systems to specifically permit apps signed with Bytedance's signing key to access these APIs without requesting permission. And that they must have done this in an especially sneaky way, given that, at least in the case of Android, the java layer of the code running on your device is trivial to inspect and the entire platform is available as open source. And absolutely nobody has noticed this, despite it being not an especially difficult thing for a security researcher to find (TikTok would need to be accessing an especially strange API since the ordinary APIs do checks in the java side on Android).
And Google and Apple are doing this because... why? Is Bytedance paying them a shitload of money? Are their CEOs secret CCP plants?
If you are concerned about this, how would even refusing to install TikTok protect you? After all, Google and Apple could simply collect the data directly in the OS and send it to Bytedance themselves.
It's for plausible deniability. They want to rally us against them, and they can stand on the sidelines smirking and raking in the cash that TikTok provides them.
I would recommend looking into some independent thinkers and doing your own research on the collusion between these big companies. There's definitely some out there, however they suspiciously get removed from HN as soon as they're posted.
Dang, do you know how bad you sound? TikTok may be crack cocaine but it’s just media, protected expression, and beyond consideration for censorship. You let these bastards turn off this app and they will come back and do it again and again.
Mind cancer!
For the good of national security!
Save the children!
What a bunch of rubbish. Go back to school! Wait, you’re screwed there too!
Is your claim that all media is perfectly fungible so you don’t need to care about its content or origin and that media has no impact on your beliefs and psyche? That doesn’t sound reasonable to me.
No, I'm not claiming that media is so evil it can't be tolerated. I'm claiming that there is a national security risk to letting an adversary control the information flow to the population. This has nothing to do with the contents of the media itself.
Practically, nothing. It achieves geopolitical dick wagging, I guess. TikTok isn't a threat to networks. If it is any threat, it is a threat to users (and to a much lesser extent, to device managers). Disabling it on various networks is meaningless.
Why? They'll pay us to buy the land and if they fight us, we just take it. This is ideal: they give us money to own in name something that we will own in practice.
I wish he would just grow trees on those properties. For all we know all that land will be used to deploy soylent/fake meat alternative/cricket meat a la "eat the bugs".
High schoolers are used to having VPNs for school, time for college students to do that too. Especially since on-campus students have to live with managed WiFi in dorms too.
It's unfortunate to see this political censorship affect grown adults who can make their own decisions - but just happen to be at a state university.
You can say "Use a VPN"... However on multiple VPN providers, Tiktok blocks those endpoints. Instead of the Tiktok feed, you get a rude 403 error for any page.
Tiktok really REALLY wants to know your real IP address.
(edit: this comment pertains to the web page through a browser, not the Tiktok app. I did not test the app+vpn.)
Luckily, a good number of modern home routers support a one-click easy host-your-own-VPN feature.
I have an Amplifi router, and i simply linked my phone to it once, and now I can toggle a VPN on my phone with just one click whenever I need it (just like any third-party VPN service), and it will route the connection through my home network.
No complicated setup, the entire first-time setup took a grand total of 2 minutes. And no one else besides me (and my dad, sometimes) uses that VPN endpoint, so it is extremely unlikely to get detected as a VPN by TikTok or any other service (unless they all just decide to ban my residential ip address).
The point is that the (presumably public or school) network I am connected to will have a hard time blocking any content for me (given it will only keep seeing packets between the phone in my hand and the router at my apartment). It will also encrypt my traffic, so MITMing me or trying to see what I am doing will become rather difficult even for the operator of the network I am connected to.
Edit: I think I just realized what made you confused in my original comment. I didn't specify explicitly, but it was implied that I toggle VPN on my phone when I am outside of my home and am connected to a work/public/etc network. Because otherwise, you are correct, trying to VPN through my home network while my phone is actually at home already connected to that network will serve no purpose at all.
Plenty of reasons. Many people need a VPN to either bypass network restrictions (like this) or add a bit more security to an untrusted network (eg, cafe wifi). Setting up your own VPN is free, and in some cases, more secure than a shady VPN provider.
It's also the business model of Google, Meta, Microsoft, and dozens of tech companies that are used everyday by users here without batting an eye. What is your point?
TikTok is hardly the only service that blocks what it thinks is VPN traffic. I only ever get captcha completion requests when I try to access sites via VPN.
Huh, the app is already on your phone, if it wants to know your location, it can already do that. If it wants to know the ISP, it's also probably quite easy...
Read-only access can still be allowed. I suspect the "violation of ToS" is simply privacy - they don't want to serve traffic to someone they can't stalk.
Read-only access would still be enough to launch DDOS attacks. I've never heard of any social media service offering read-only access to logged in users.
> I've never heard of any social media service offering read-only access to logged in users.
Twitter allows read-only access even to suspended accounts as well as when you go over certain rate-limits (I believe there was a daily tweet limit at one point, not sure if still there).
Well, Tiktok didn't ban vpn, it was those minority number of people who developed bots to capitalize likes/comments/shares. I think it is same with facebook or other social media.
Or they can just toggle the wifi on their phone. When I was in school, wifi wasn't provided and you were prohibited from bringing your own AP. And there were plenty of applications being firewalled.
I was wondering if LTE was also blocked for some reason causing everyone that be forced to use WiFi. Clearly, that's not the case. Are people unable to make the logical jump that WiFi isn't needed on mobile?
Even so, that still meet's whatever UT's goal is that it's not on their network. <shrug>
Edit: clearly, the sarcasm intended in wondering if someone was blocking LTE wasn't self-evident. Followed immediately by "Clearly not the case" should have been a clear indicator that it was a bit rhetorical and not something truly being considered.
The thick walls did precede smartphones, but when I found out that Macy's tracks customers via in-store wifi, [1] I wondered if they might keep using thick walls in the future, to ensure that customers have to use the wifi.
I don't really think their marketing team is getting involved in determining the electromagnetic characteristics of the construction materials used in their locations, if much at all. And while Macy's does own a notable amount of property, much of their real estate is leased. And yet more of the property they own, they did not build. The reason that commercial construction from the 1980s interacts with your phone's signal is the same coincidental reason it will likely do the same in 2040: steel and masonry are good for large commercial buildings.
LTE is provided by national cell networks that aren't state-funded, so the law probably doesn't apply to them. Universities usually administer their own networks (at least they did in my rural uni 10 years ago), so they would have to comply with state laws.
I've never used TikTok, but I understand some people use it for an hour or two daily. What would be the impact on your mobile data with that kind of usage? Some kids might be on unlimited plans, but those who aren't might be hesitant to run up their bill.
Yep, which is increasingly my go-to. No I'm not gonna log into a free wifi that takes 10 seconds to load the portal and is probably less reliable and more restricted than my LTE.
Hey, I learned a lot about cybersecurity working around restrictions on the computers in high school! First it's your school, next it's your government, it's important that kids learn these skills so they have the basics of getting around authoritarian bullshit.
I don't think that's going to happen anymore, everything is too locked down. My 'cybersecurity' education came from having my computer infected with all types of malware in the '00s.
In the mobile era, nearly everything is sanitized and sandboxed. The idea of needing to get all your software through a centralized, vendor-controlled app store would be absurd in the '00s. Yet here we are.
Of note on this point, eduroam service standards require that VPN access be permitted [1, page 32], in part, because VPNs are often part of university infrastructure. Technically, the service definition only requires this for roaming visitors, but it would seem unusual to make a distinction in service on that point.
They did make their own decision. They connected to a network which has some content filtered. I'd imagine porn, gore sites, etc are - if not blocked - logged.
Serious question, does anyone really struggle with staying under their data limit anymore? I pay $28AUD a month and get 85GB, and I use about 20 of that per month?
Governments and businesses block sites on their network all the time for a variety of reasons. This is just adding an entry to a list. They block ports and bandwidth shape as well
Blocking a website on government networking devices is the same thing. The goal is to deny the Chinese government access to Americans via government-owned equipment.
It's a move designed to garner political points and take advantage of the China-related fear-mongering. They don't actually give a shit about your privacy otherwise they would indeed block Facebook and other equally-malicious US-based spyware operators.
It’s not just political points; for example I’m not allowed the app on my personal devices as part of a work contract if I use the same device for anything work related (web emails etc). Nothing to gain there politically. I’m pretty sure Facebook doesn’t send your clipboard to the US government, anyway?
Why should it matter to me who is spying on me rather than being spied on at all?
Also, I don't know about you, but I find the idea of my own government spying on me just slightly more of an immediate threat then a country I have no plans of ever visiting.
A good, albeit somewhat impotent, move. The companies wont yank it from the app stores in the US for fear of reprisal, but that is the better next step.
Why is this good? why are people suddenly down to ban software? I don't use tiktok and never will but seeing all this discussion about how it should be banned is depressing.
If US companies want it to be less popular how about they compete and make a better product? Why are so many people carrying water for social media companies?
To get ahead of the criticism I'll likely get for this comment: I don't think tiktok/china do anything that US companies and every other social media platform have already been doing for years. Why ban tiktok and not every other social media app?
> If US companies want it to be less popular how about they compete and make a better product?
They don't want it to be less popular; the US encourages media monopolies. The larger the better. US government belligerence towards TikTok served the same purpose as US government belligerence towards Twitter and Facebook: leverage in order to be able to censor it and emphasize US narratives.
They won, TikTok is fully censoring based on US government "suggestions," and this state/local-level political grandstanding are people jumping into an operation that is already over.
Seems to me that Google and Apple could simply not provide hardware API access that leaks privacy info. But that would hurt all the other 'legitimate' uses of that information (targeted advertising), and no one wants to be the first person to jump off that gravy train.
Nothing "good" about this move. It's a nothing burger. Everyone's phone literally tracks them with every other app, basically in the same way. Hell, the cell phone carriers are even tracking you, along with the U.S. government. So yeah, great job removing tiktok which ultimately does nothing for your opsec or privacy.
It's completely and utterly political. Just like banning twitter would be, although that actually has more merit than the banning of tiktok.
Its GEO political and the smart move. It's bad enough having local actors surveil citizens, let alone foreign actors, let alone foreign malicious actors.
Google has zero revenue from China. They pulled out of China when told they would have to censor search results years ago. Android phones in China don’t use Google’s android.
Because that’s why we still have a society. You can’t put the ability to launch nuclear missiles in a freely distributed app so consider this a less exaggerated version of that restriction.
Come on man, can you not make absurd false equivalencies? Do you _really_ believe TikTok is comparable to an app launching NUCLEAR WEAPONS?! get a grip
I don’t see why not? I did point out it’s an exaggerated analogy but a hostile nation having a direct propaganda line of access to a nation’s youth can potentially be used destructively.
This is pointless theater. The PRC already has the SF-86 forms for everyone with a security clearance, and our medical histories via health insurance hacks, etc
it's not enacting similar policies though. it's taking a reciprocal stance -- don't want to allow our apps? that's fine, but you can't expect we'll allow yours. default to open but restrict if others restrict feels like a very fair policy to me. right now we have open no matter what. this is too permissive.
China blocks foreign apps just cause they're foreign and popular, under the guise of whatever law was deliberately designed for this purpose, and now we're doing the similar thing with TikTok.
I'm almost ok with this cause of my dislike for China-based companies, esp TikTok, but then I remember how YouTube's been unopposed and twiddling their thumbs for like a decade until they knocked off TikTok. Our economy and world influence grow by building better products, not by trying to limit outside competition to the benefit of a few domestic companies. US govt banning TikTok would be like saying, we have TikTok at home (YT Shorts).
It's not just China, btw. EU is extra protectionist too. I don't want to be like them.
Would you rather know if it was up to the government or not know?
Because the case with TikTok is that we do not know what the Chinese government is going to do with whatever it collects from the app. Or even if they do. Or anything really.
Now, while I think banning TikTok's traffic on the campus network is more of a stunt than anything worthwhile. I do see the argument from banning TikTok and just about any other non-essential app from government issued mobile hardware.
That's an area where you'd want to have as little possible surface area exposed as you can.
This is about banning access to TikTok for client devices of a campus network. It has nothing to do with banning the TikTok app on government-issued phones.
If you don't like TikTok or are concerned about the Chinese government collecting information on you, those are excellent reasons for you not to use TikTok. But what do your preferences have to do with the freedom of other people?
You are explaining why UT-Austin should have the power of say in what traffic they allow on their network, which I agree with they should have. It can be used for many legitimate things, including blocking malicious endpoints associated with DDoS, blocking websites with known malware, stuff that very negatively affects the campus network infra, etc.
However, you aren't explaining why UT-Austin should get to decide which apps (that don't affect network operations or campus device security) people can use on their personal devices on UT-Austin network.
Sure, it technically falls under the very large umbrella of "allowing traffic". No one is disputing that they de-facto have that power. I believe the original question was more along the lines of "how can they reasonably justify doing so without jumping to non-sequeters and bs excuses".
If you are saying they should have to explain or justify why they block traffic to TikTok's services, you are saying they don't have "the power of say". Because you are saying that power is conditional on you accepting their explanation.
I agree that they have the power of say, and it isn't conditional on me (or anyone else) accepting their explanation.
I was just bringing up examples of how I believed those powers should be reasonably used and the kinds of situations they were intended for (in my opinion). And the current situation is not how I believe they should be used, but they technically have the power to do it.
Why should you decide which application I can/can't use? I thought people especially right winged people always cry about "freedom"? I don't care about tiktok/facebook etc... but people celebrating on political agenda is kinda distressing to me.
I absolutely despise how easily a lot of people on HN who were (justifiably) mocking the whole "think of the kids" (Patriot Act and many previous online censorhip attempts come to mind) can be baited into doing a full 180 and using variations of the exact same excuse to do the exact same thing.
Absolutely amazing how 'national security' can just turn off all that personal liberties crap as long as the 'national threat' resonates along your political lines.
And then people on HN and Reddit and Twitter and elsewhere gasp "how were people so short-sighted and stupid to support Patriot Act back then, unlike us, who are so smart and enlightened". The current situation is the prime example of how, except it isn't even comparable to the shock of 9/11 that people experienced back then.
Yeah, and those opposing Patriot Act were clearly anti-american terrorist sympathizers, while those opposing CISPA and other online censorship bills were all just supporting crimes against children and were probably secret pedophiles themselves. /s
Do you realize that core principles matter, regardless of who is on the other side, right? That's the whole point of them. Back in the day, the ones on the receiving end were those opposed to the Vietnam war, and they persevered despite the government and the popular sentiment being against them (being accused of hating the america, being communism sympathizers, etc.) If we didn't hold those core principles dear, regardless of those protestors being "anti-american", imo we would be worse off.
Almost certainly. They definitely turned over data to the US government to help them locate and connect people of interest (see Edward Snowden's revelations), some of which was very likely used to incarcerate people. Whether you consider incarceration equivalent to re-education is debatable. I find it quite likely that they also did this for other governments with less scruples about human rights.
Either way, pretty sure no US citizens have been incarcerated in political re-education camps in the USA because of data shared with any government by either Google or Tik Tok or anyone else.
If you are referencing criminals charged through the justice system, that is decidedly not the same as hunting down ethnic minorities based on their race and religion without charge or trial. You must know this.
> They definitely turned over data to the US government to help them locate and connect people of interest
Citation?
> Whether you consider incarceration equivalent to re-education is debatable.
It's not, see above.
> I find it quite likely that they also did this for other governments with less scruples about human rights.
Citation?
> pretty sure no US citizens have been incarcerated in political re-education camps
You can be very sure because political re-education camps don't exist. There is a lot to criticize about the American justice system, this isn't applicable.
Interesting comparison. What part of TikTok giving data on US persons to a government that uses digital surveillance to intern political enemies and undesirable ethnicities resembles a panic rooted in a religiously motivated paranoia?
Fact #1: Certain dishes from specific Cantonese and Vietnamese restaurants will reliably give me a migraine and induce sleepiness.
Fact #2: The existence of Fact #1 does not make me a racist.
Everyone in the food industry invested in savory food has a motive for tainting safety research on MSG. It happened with the sugar industry [0]. Unlike sugar, MSG can hide behind lots of alternative names, like yeast extract, natural flavors, etc. so the truth is easier to obfuscate.
Citing the very real and horrible history of ethnic discrimination to dismiss valid criticism of an authoritarian state is odd. It's also exactly what the CCP does.
Is it possible to say anything positive or even neutral about China without a comment like this? Do you respond to every mention of the US with links of all the war crimes?
Can you address the content of the comment you're responding to? Can you demonstrate that TikTok causes more harm than MSG?
> Do you respond to every mention of the US with links of all the war crimes?
If the private companies in question was complicit and potentially had a role in these crimes, yes I would. But to highlight your false equivalency, private industry in the US doesn't obey the US government, despite what the bizarre TwitterFiles PR campaign by right wing operatives is trying to tell you.
If you are naive enough to think an authoritarian government obsessed with digital surveillance would simply not use the largest data gathering tool on persons in the world, I don't know what to tell you. Considering what we know what they use their connections to Chinese companies for (theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/15/documents-link-huawei-uyghur-surveillance-projects-report-claims), it's fairly easy to connect the dots.
People who are determined to not accept this reality won't expect it, i'm not going to play the "give me more proof" game if no proof will ever do.
So tiktok wasn't involved in any war crimes or anything like that, but you're still doing it. Can you just admit "i hate china, i hate all enemies of my government" or something?
> So tiktok wasn't involved in any war crimes or anything like that
> People who are determined to not accept this reality won't expect it
I'll save my breath.
> Can you just admit "i hate china"
Nice bit of projection there at the end. "All criticism of an authoritarian government committing human rights atrocities is all just racism, actually." Exactly what CCP state media says.
Looking narrowly at Tiktok, it doesn't really capture any more than what Google/Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Linkedin all would. And regulators and orgs are OK with those systems hoovering up all the data they can. But when Tiktok showed up, it's the "China Restaurant Syndrome" all over again, with breathless scares about the evil Chinese stealing our data!
Yes, China is a communist party-led state, according to the CIA world factbook. Yes, they have terrible abuses in their own history. Yes, they tamp down dissent via black-bagging and other abuses. Yes, they have and continue to do a genocide on the Uighurs (Muslims) in the country.
The US peoples (separate from the government) also has a pretty bad case of anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiment. It was only a few days ago that some 50ish year old white lady stabbed an Asian 18 year old Indiana University student on the city bus, while stating to police “it would be one less person to blow up our country”. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/16/us/indiana-university-student...
This isn't a case of whataboutism. What the Chinese government are doing to their own people is abhorrent, and likely worthy of being charged with crimes against humanity. AND people who hate Chinese for being Chinese heritage are also just as wrong. (And while we're at it, the USA has done its share of abhorrent stuff that it too should be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.)
It may be simple to color every situation with black or white. But there's a great deal of nuance here. Why isn't UT-Austin also blocking Google or Facebook and related properties? Is that because they're USA based companies? Why only Tiktok? Because where I am, it appears to be founded in Sinophobia, pure and simple.
He's trying to suggest that you are a Chinese agent who should be imprisoned. This is based on your "odd" opinions and your way of making arguments "exactly like the CCP does."
I personally would care if my own rhetoric matched that of a government committing human rights atrocities against civilian populations on a scale not seen since WW2, but that's me. And your attempts to put words in my mouth about "Chinese agents" is showing your paranoia, and has nothing to do with me.
> What’s different about the way TikTok collects data?
> TikTok’s data collection methods include the ability to collect user contact lists, access calendars, scan hard drives including external ones and geolocate devices on an hourly basis.
> “When the app is in use, it has significantly more permissions than it really needs,” said Robert Potter, co-CEO of Internet 2.0 and one of the editors of the report.
> “It grants those permissions by default. When a user doesn’t give it permission … [TikTok] persistently asks.
> “If you tell Facebook you don’t want to share something, it won’t ask you again. TikTok is much more aggressive.”
> “The application can and will run successfully without any of this data being gathered. This leads us to believe that the only reason this information has been gathered is for data harvesting,” it concluded.
And that's besides the point. All social media gathers data, it matters what they do with it. TikTok by law cannot refuse a data request from the CCP, a government that has used digital tracking to locate and imprison people.
If none of this matters to you, fine. If you trust an authoritarian government more than a democratic one, ok. Just don't pretend all actors in this play are the same.
Well, CCP is an extremely authoritarian state, and plenty of their constituents would love to be able to access western apps/services.
The cool thing is that US, for all its faults, is not like that, and shouldn't aspire to be like that. If the US constituents want to access TikTok, they should be able to, unless it poses some actual danger. An example of such danger would be what led to the recent ban on Huawei equipment in the networking infra, which I fully support.
But TikTok ain't it, and this is just pure "well those nasty guys did this nasty thing, so we are gonna do the same nasty thing because uhhhh they did that thing!"
Access to foreign goods and services is mediated by US foreign policy and trade policy. These are tools to be used to advantage our home country in the context of global competition.
Aspiration needs to be balanced against the realities of dealing with a powerful adversary.
> Is blocking websites on the european eduroam allowed? I suppose it is ...
It is, unfortunately. Its up to each institution to decide their own network policy.
Eduroam suggests (or at least, did in the past) that the policy should be as permissive as possible, but most institutions block a metric fuckload of shit.
The only network wide blocking suggested is 25/TCP last time I checked, to prevent spam.
And if they round up and arrest political and religious dissidents, we should do the same? We can't lose the repression arms race to China, after all...
Firing a missile is an external action. This is not an external question, this is a question of domestic information policy. It's hypocritical for a nation championing free speech to have a restrictive domestic information policy.
Economic sanctions is an external action. Tariffs are a thing that exist. It's not by any means "repression", so please don't make the argument lame by taking it there.
I'm pretty sure you were the one who took the argument into this direction, by equating banning a chat app to launching missiles - waging war.
I'm not asking us to hold ourselves to China's standards - that's the lowest bar in the universe. I'm asking us to hold ourselves to our own standards.
War is not repression. It is unfortunate but often the only sensible approach when the other party is aggressor. It’s not oppression to respond in kind. It is common sense.
Yes. China has walled itself off economically, preventing American companies from making money in China. It's pretty crazy for the US to let the CCP run rampant in the US and compete against American companies when American companies don't have that same right in China.
I think we should definitely ban Bytedance and all Chinese companies until China opens up their economy to the US. I hate Trump and was against a lot but I supported tariffs against Chinese products.
No, but it has allowed $9bn in Texas pension fund dollars to flow into Tencent and Alibaba, companies heavily involved in churning through all that sweet, sweet US user data.
Follow the money. This is political point scoring at its most brazen.
> Yet through Texas’ seven public pension funds, which are fueled primarily by contributions from members but are guaranteed and backed by state taxpayer dollars, $9.12 billion is invested in companies in China, based on a Hearst Newspapers analysis of figures provided by the seven funds — representing a multi-billion dollar bet in the success of the Communist country’s economy.
Banning this is the right move for the wrong reasons, imo. TikTok (and Youtube shorts) are both terribly addictive and we should make sure we understand their impacts on developing (and developed) minds before just opening the floodgates to them.
Probably a moot point for the most part. Most students will have their own data plans on their phones. Maybe in some classrooms that's not possible. Futhermore, TikTok should be banned... (Carthago Delenda Est)
Aside from the unnamed security risks the admins mention, Texas A&M undoubtedly has an Acceptable Use Policy in place for their campus networks, and this would be an AUP that restricts usage to academic type only. Technically it is against the rules of any university or college or school to be using non-academic, frivolous apps like these, by way of academic resources.
It would be like renting a classroom to hold your bachelor party. Or a homeless person living in the library. That's not what school is for.
Academic institutions are well within their rights to block all kinds of social media, especially when those apps are hogging bandwidth, memory, storage, screen space, or whatever. They're disruptive to the learners who pay tuition and they're a drain on taxpayers and alumni alike.
> "We're disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok," spokesperson Jamal Brown wrote.
Regardless of you stance on Texas and Texans and politics, the above is a pretty funny statement to make. We have to protect the integrity of short video apps that are built for advertisers to push products and services through ads and influencers.