Yes. Why would a government (any government) not have the ability to make more or less arbitrary mandates in the interest of national security? It's arguably one of the primary purposes of having a government in the first place.
That said, I'm sure there are complex legal criteria in the US that could lead to a lengthy court case.
There should've been a provision in the constitution against using "national security" as a justification for anything, or any verbiage along those lines. As Picard put it: "The age-old cry of the oppressor."
It's such a beautiful phrase. "National security." Who wouldn't want to help with national security? Are you getting in the way of our nation's security?
(A bit unsettled we now live in an era of "It's illegal to download <app to watch cat videos>," even if the national security concerns were true.)
On the contrary, I highly value civil liberties but am perfectly happy with the government acting aggressively to protect national security. It's literally in my best interests!
Consider that (at an extreme) using the military to repel an armed invasion is most definitely a matter of national security. The authoritarian and the libertarian can both claim "national security" and mean very different things in practice.
Ensuring a robust judicial process and having precise definitions for such terminology are both serious issues here. The police are literally supposed to protect the children (and the adults!), but "protecting the children" is hardly desirable.
Edit:
> (A bit unsettled we now live in an era of "It's illegal to download <app to watch cat videos>," even if the national security concerns were true.)
I'm certainly no fan of the current administration, but how is a centralized and widely used social media app not a potential national security threat? For any country, it seems highly concerning to me for either the employees or infrastructure for such an app to be located in any jurisdiction that isn't a close ally. As an example, consider the destabilizing influence that Google could potentially exert by intentionally skewing search results for a specific topic in a calculated and subtle manner.
Honestly I'm somewhat surprised that the EU hasn't objected to Facebook or Twitter on these grounds. I suppose they mostly trust us not to meddle in their elections (and us them for that matter).
Sure. A simple "You are hereby required to cease distribution of X by <deadline>. Failure to comply will result in a fine of $2,000 per day until compliance."
It's basically what they did to -- uhh, what was it called? The encrypted email service Snowden used when he was smuggling NSA docs. $2k per day, increasing over time, adds up fast.
Once you're staring at an executive order, questions of whether they really have the power fall to lawyers. In the meantime, corporations comply.
This is just a stepping stone. Next comes completely cutting off their servers (sometime in november I believe) from accessing the USA. Sure a few will get around it with VPNs but the young people are easily distracted and will move over to Reels or something else that serves the same purpose.
> Commerce officials said they will not bar additional technical transactions for TikTok until Nov. 12, which gives the company additional time to see if ByteDance can reach a deal for its U.S. operations. "The basic TikTok will stay intact until Nov. 12," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox Business Network.
The people who have the apps installed now can keep using it and it can still talk to their servers. But no new features, no app updates, no new apps, probably can’t negotiate a new data center contract or form a new partnership. But the basic app still works.
Yes they can. And they may, but we don't know for sure whether they disagree or care to react at all.
Given the administration tends to make decisions based more on xenophobia than empirical evidence and there's good reasons to think these apps have shady data practices, nothing about this situation is clear cut.
They can raid the offices, shut down the company’s access to the banking system, seize assets and funds, and arrest the top executives and throw them into what is effectively a torture chamber.
This is not like Google doing business with, say, Adobe. The federal government has absolute authority over international transactions. Their options for enforcement are extensive. Not that it would, but if it came to it, they could shatter Google all the way to the foundation.
Edit: For the galaxy-brains, me pointing out the government has the authority to do this is not an endorsement of them doing it.
If the ban ends up happening (seems unlikely that they won't make a deal with a US company before the deadline) gen Z in the US will grow up with a better understanding of VPNs and other workarounds.
Actually, if how Facebook is installed on Chinese iPhones holds the same, they just need to switch their phones over to the Chinese App Store by setting their region, install WeChat, and then set their region back to the USA. Apps from the Chinese and American app stores can easily co-exist, and worked well for me while I was living in China.
Apple would presumably be required to prevent such workarounds to the best of their ability if the ban came to pass. (I'm honestly surprised to hear that China hasn't forced Apple on the issue.)
That China hasn’t been able to force the issue might mean the USA isn’t either. Geographical blocks are super hard to implement without a firewall, I’m betting that the USA will just be happy if it is off the American App Store and not the other ones.
Sounds pretty unlikely. Gen z has a notably superficial confidence with web technology and the patience to go along with that. I am an early millenial and we are the same way compared with gen x. The main difference seems to be confidence. We are very confident, but when we fail we are less likely to have the patience to actually resolve the issue.
Millenial here, Thats been my experience with Gen Z, technical familiarity, low technical literacy, low patience.
Not bad, just something that should be understood. Millenials are expected to be “internet natives” and “good with computers”. This didnt translate to Gen Z linearly.
So you're saying that you think Millennials are peak computer users? And Gen Z users are worse?
I wonder if this has anything to do with how platforms became locked down at the generational boundary.
Millennials grew up on 90's and 00's internet, where you could download and install anything. It was the most open tech has ever been. Run your own chat software, embed HTML in your MySpace profile, create a forum, etc. Apply patches and cracks to pirated software. Re-skin Winamp. All of it was par for the course for your typical Millennial teenager.
Gen Z has curated experiences in the form of walled silos. Less exposure to the underlying tech.
Granted, some subset will always be attracted to hobbyist pursuit. Game development, app development, Minecraft mods, etc. But it's not as much a part of the day to day experience.
Is it only just walled off? I think its also way more complex then it was 10 years ago. there's a big barrier to entry to just get started. even 20 years ago anyone could put stuff on the web. angelfire was filled with unpolished websites, and beginner site could keep up with the average. even big site were ugly and simple,js wasn't pervasive like it is now, yahoo was not pretty. or even dual booting linux is hard on a laptop with stuff being locked down in the boot process. hacking on stuff seems harder then ever if your starting from nothing
> dual booting linux is hard on a laptop with stuff being locked down in the boot process
All the major distros should work out of the box with secure boot at this point. UEFI USB sticks are incredibly easy to create since you don't have to worry about magic MBR stuff anymore. (The bootloader can just go in a specific folder and have a specific name.) For that matter, turning secure boot off completely is typically a simple toggle in the firmware. Even the drivers "just work" out of the box these days for all the mainstream laptops I've tried.
> hacking on stuff seems harder then ever if your starting from nothing
This is true if all you have is a locked down mobile device. Otherwise there's really no excuse - a Raspberry Pi can be had for $35.
Linux is missing drivers for how my laptop is set up. Something with raid or ahci, it's been a while since I messed with it. For the rpi you really need to go out of your way to hack on it. But that's different then being bored and deciding to break something you have. That's not the only way to hack something. Like game modding, seems more difficult.
The internet during that era cultivated some incredible heuristics for navigating the internet.
During the era (at 14/15) I:
- Stuck behind a firewall, I downloaded gigabytes of porn from unsecured FTP servers by Google dorking
- Played hours of bootleg Quake3 and SOFII on my old-faithful cracked Windows XP (still remember the key to this day)
- Reinstalled XP about 1,000x everytime I downloaded something I shouldn't have
- Found hundreds of weird documentaries on The Pirate Bay and Smoking in the Rain from all over the planet
- Spent countless hours talking with a bunch of weirdos on IRC
- Had an HTML-only website called 'Science Experimenter'
- Dual-booted FreeBSD
- Played around on my SDF Unix shell
- Played Doom and Wolf3D downloaded from Vetusware on Dos 7.1/Win 3.1
- Newsgroups. Oh man, remember bootlegging movies from newsgroups.
That early internet was just incredible. From wandering through Fravia's Searchlores, to Geocities (where I first discovered the term 'Computer Engineering'), to the early MP3s you could find of HOPE and Defcon talks), to Andre Lamothe's XGameStation kit, to the Homebuilt CPUs Webring (I fell in love with Magic-1), to the OsDev wiki DexOS, MenuetOS, etc.
Today's internet is so convenient. It's like you said, it's 'curated.' It's not a jungle of lost Mayan civilization you can Indiana Jones through.
Edit: I realize today's internet is even more rich than the one I describe, but the nostalgia is just too strong. I prefer to live in my simple world.
Is there really such a difference? Older people tend find excuses to accuse younger people of being inferior. We're older people now. Perhaps we should be careful not to fall into that trap.
There is an opportunity for education that just shouldn't be assumed.
“Hey you are good with electronic devices that I had the same 20 years to understand as you, fix this other unrelated thing”
Means something very different when the users don't understand anything about the device they are using.
It isn’t about inferiority it is about understanding the baseline technical literacy and what areas should still be taught, just like they were taught to prior generations, instead of assuming there is a linear and continued proliferation of technical literacy. Its just a patch work.
And in the 80s, “true geeks” would type assembly language programs into their computers from magazines. In the early 90s we would use Gopher servers to get information and post to Usenet. Time marches on.
I don’t miss ripping MP3’s, converting file formats and what the heck is “patching cracked software”? I think I qualify as a true geek, and I’ve never heard of that.
Downloading commercial software, then downloading a tool to alter the binary to remove the license verification check. Alternatively, they would patch the signature check to use some known algorithm, and then you'd generate a key locally that worked.
Skater kids, emo/goth kids, preppy kids. Everybody was doing this to get Photoshop or games or whatever. This wasn't limited to computer nerds.
Kids in the 00s had to learn some skills and read warez instructional text files.
By 92, I was already in college into console games. I wouldn’t even have bothered by 1996 and just pay for stuff. I also stopped downloading music from places like Kazaa when iTunes came out.
In the 80s, I don’t know where my friends got their cache of cracked software for the Apple //.
Why are some people so obsessed with generations (that they even gave name)? Here in India we don't talk like that at all and have no name for generations.
This is a common American pastime. The funniest thing is that they give "personalities" to these supposed generations. In fact these features have nothing to do with the generation, but with the economic conditions of the time. For example, Americans use to say that Gen Xers don't "like" to own houses, when the reality is that due to the Great Recession they didn't have the same opportunity to own property as their parents.
It had never occurred to me that other cultures might be less familiar with the concept of social generations. People find them interesting for the same reason as history and sociology generally – they are useful tools for understanding how the world works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_generations
I think the U.S last century had maybe decades (maybe a bit longer or a bit less than a decade in some cases) that changed what had gone before drastically, as such the feeling came about that every generation was different than the one before and should be categorized.
So, last century U.S, the roaring twenties, the great depression, WW2, then I think the 50s were probably seen as something of a return to normalcy after the war but in some ways quite different because now the U.S was really in charge, followed by the 60s, I don't think the 70s was that big a divergence but lots of big thinkers seem to think it was because of the end of Vietnam, the end of Nixon.
I think the last big decade shift were things were significantly different (last century) was the 80s which began the dismantling under Reagan of the New Deal which kept up in the 90s - however by this time the idea that generational shifts were important had taken hold and somewhat trivial things like changes in musical tastes were taken as examples of such a shift.
Then of course there has been a technological change in this century by widespread use of computers and the internet.
no longer editable: when I say "Then of course there has been a technological change in this century by widespread use of computers and the internet." I meant that would be seen as another generational shift where the new generation was different than the preceding.
It comes from advertising and marketing. It's sorta morphed into a self-fulfilling catch-all identity, as it's much easier cognitively to apply a board generalizing categories to large groups of people.
My experience in tech support was similar though, of course, it also depends on the person. I’ve met CAD folks who didn’t understand a password reset, and secretaries who gave great feedback on infrastructure.
I usually experienced much less resistance explaining tasks and problems to people close to my age. Younger people would listen to a point until I saw their eyes gloss over, waiting for me to get to my point. Many older folks were tuned out from the start and just wanted to hear their problem was fixed. I’m sure part of this involves my lack of skill in explaining technical concepts to non-technical people.
Someone else mentioned that the internet changing over the years affected this. I think part of this also has to do with the pranks of our generation:
-“how do I [x] in this game?” “Alt-F4”
-“how do I get rid of this virus?” “Delete System32”
We’d either look it up first and call BS, or follow the instructions with reckless abandon and learn the hard way.
Somewhat recently we had people microwaving iPhones thinking it’d charge them. I saw more news stories about this than I’d have expected, given it’s metal in a microwave. Something that many of us were taught not to do from a young age.
I think this is an important generalization because it undoes an unhealthy generalization by Gen X and Baby Boomers, the idea that everyone younger is literate with computer use and troubleshooting, the younger the better
Eh don't buy into the bullshit fed to you by older generation. Your generation is just fine. I heard the same BS about my generation when I was just starting out 20 years ago. Gen X was supposedly the worst generation EVER. But you know, we're not and neither are Gen Z or Millenials. You're just people facing a slightly different situation.
You don't need a VPN for this. They are only banning providing the app via the app store, so Android users can just download the app directly from wechat.com instead of the Google store.
(Sorry iOS users -- you use an OS designed by a dictator. You can maybe try switching to the App Store in a freer country than the US, e.g. Canada or UK.)
If you think the iOS users and just gonna cry and tiktok's just gonna be used by Android users -- or iOS users are going to suddenly switch -- you are deeply mistaken imho.
Not necessarily, more like just something that makes you feel like you stand out from the crowd. Whether it actually makes you stand out or not doesn’t matter that much.
Geeks have been saying Apple products were “status symbols” since the iPod was introduced in 2001. Just maybe people want Apple products because they feel they are better?
They're also needed to be in a crowd. If you other upper middle class classmates catch you using a cheap ass android device instead of the latest iPhone you could get ostracized.
Has Apple survived 40+ years selling more expensive electronics than the competition by being a status symbol? Why are adults also buying iPhones then?
Would students really be “ostracized” if they had high priced Samsung phones?
You realize the $349 iPhone SE is more performant than any Android phone at any cost.
Not being able to talk to your family and friends in tiktok.
Nothing stopping you from communicating with them. You can still pick up a phone, text message, or use email, or twitter, or whatsapp, or discord, or slack, or fb messenger, or write a letter, or twitter (or send a carrier pigeon), or instagram, or telegram, or mail them a flash drive with videos on it, idk.
FB and Messenger itself are just not great products anyway when it comes to social media and messaging. Even if they weren't banned, users in China will just use WeChat, Weibo etc that are built specifically and tailored for them.
It's unfortunate that the US is too late in getting in the game with China. They've already caught up (and some) with the US in terms of technological prowess and innovation. China can open up and let the likes of Facebook, Google etc in, but they won't be able to compete with the local companies like Alibaba, Tencent. China at this stage doesn't need the US as much as they did before when it comes to tech. What China needs is the rest of the world (EU, UK, South America, Africa etc) to not join forces against it. Just a shame that the current administration isn't able to see that and prefers being iso-America for America and at the same time pushing its allies away.
Bottom line is, the US got outplayed, and is still getting outplayed. Past administrations should have seen this coming. Current administration should have made better decisions in navigating China. While the US is trying to go toe to toe with China, China is already thinking ahead by forging alliances and making its presence in African and European countries via the Belt and Road initiative as well as reducing its dependency on US agriculture by shifting soybean purchases to South America. I doubt the banning of TikTok and WeChat in the US is really going to concern them.
I thought most old people were still using QQ because wechat was too complicated for them? Well, that was the case 6-8 years ago anyways (QQ was popular because it worked well on feature phones, wechat requires a smartphone).
Everyone says that people will use workaround like VPN's but if content creators can't make any money anymore won't that affect it? I guess there will always be content creators that don't care about money but I'd be surprised if US traffic wouldn't drop by more than 50%
You don't need VPN, it's just the app stores that cannot offer it anymore, you can still side load it.
The States don't have a "Great Firewall" equivalent... yet.
HN is very quick to criticize the administration (which believe me has a ton to criticize) for this move but also defend China's blocking of international apps.
We also have 21% of all people incarcerated in the world with only 4% of the population. The US doesn’t exactly have the moral high ground.
As far as believing in free speech, isn’t the current administration trying to regulate tech because it doesn’t like what is being said on their platforms?
So why is the administration also going after Twitter and FaceBook (unfair to conservatives) and Amazon (because Bezos owns WaPo) but not going after Sinclair (conservative company buying up local TV stations)?
2020 was the year that convinced me that the American empire is drawing to a close.
I guess it comes down to if I can swallow Chinese ideology when the US descends into chaos. Might be an easy decision to swap my blue passport for a red one.
> isn’t the current administration trying to regulate tech
As far as I see, the largest danger to free speech in the US is company policy makers. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook ban all and everything without any suggestions from the government. And media like NY Times also do self-censorship without any government intervention.
So the government should step in and make it “Fair and Balanced”? Oh wait, there is already a popular conservative outlet that has higher ratings than the “liberal news media”.
There is no shortage of ways for conservatives to have their voice heard - Trump got elected despite the “liberal media” didn’t he?
If the current government stepped in would they be more likely to support BLM or “Focus on the Family”?
If the question is framed, Should I stop someone trying to stop someone from exercising their freedom of speech? Definitely. This is the paradox of tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Apple has federal government granted monopolies on patents, copyrights, and trademarks that forward their plan of eliminating a free and open Internet and make it illegal to compete with them.
There is no national security justification for banning TikTok. Where's the relevant source code? It would be easy to make the claim totally obvious, yet this isn't done. Conclusion: It's false.
While there is much to criticize of the HN community, who here is defending China's blocking of international apps? I've seen very little, if any, of that.
Criticizing US blocking stuff != defending China blocking stuff
Allow me to explain:
As long as TikTok was around any talk of controlling or splitting the big tech could have been diverted by saying if you regulate or break us, China will take over the vacuum left behind.
With TikTok not only gone but also will be used as a precedence, big tech have lost the "China will take over" argument. Because the answer would be, no, we won't allow China to fill the vacuum and at the same we are going to heavily regulate you.
Whoever is coordinating (if it's coordinated) the future demise and break up of big tech has definitely earned their think tank salary.
When corporations are too big, this cause the same kind of bloat, corruptions and anti-innovative climate as when states are controlled by too powerful bureaucracies.
There is a threshold, of course, but unfortunately we've allowed a few companies to go well past this deleterious threshold.
The sheer amount that it is used for in China is quite fascinating. Too bad the CCP is almost certainly also using it as a means to track and keep their citizenry in line.
I agree, it would be great for the big tech companies to be split. When was the last time that Google innovated rather than acquired? Maps, gmail, YouTube...
Capitalism works best when there's a wide spread of power and wealth is not too concentrated. There can't be proper markets with monopoly or monopsony.
acquisition is also innovation. It's a skill, and highly sought after - whether to build or buy. There is someone (or multiple) keeping an eye on inorganic growth via acquisitions. The plan was in place to have Maps etc. So, while building road map or having long term discussions - they decided to get a head-start by going via acquisition route. Remember, they did not stop at acquisition or it did not die because the long term was already in place.
I’m much more worried about a corrupt state that has the power to take away my freedom, liberty, and life than a corporation. A corrupt company can’t take my property through eminent domain and civil forfeiture or declare some phony “War on $X” that disproportionately is used against one group. The current administration is not going after Big Tech “for the people”. It is doing it expressly because they think Google, Facebook, and Twitter are being unfair to conservatives.
In what universe is Twitter any type of monopoly that needs to be reigned in by the government?
I can much more easily choose to not by or use a product from any of those companies than I can choose to leave the US.
But isn’t telling that the administration is going after Twitter and not Apple? Could it possibly be that Cook has kissed the golden ring plenty of times and Twitter is pushing back?
You should be wary of government no matter which side you on. Since the government has started meddling in tech in the 90s, has any good law been passed by Democrats or Republicans?
Twitter needs to be reigned in when it is considered the only good option, and there's no chance for a competitor.
Suppose some company had cornered the web search market, and nobody would even try to use some other web search, and used that position to control advertising and all sorts of other access to the web. Perhaps they even come to control the most commonly used web browser; the most commonly used mobile OS. In that environment, where a single company controls the OS and the search and the vast majority of access to the web, are you really more fearful of "eminent domain" than you are of the company wiping you out before you have a chance to capture a piece of the pie by our competing them?
When was the last time a tech company had to worry about civil forfeiture or eminent domain?
Yes I am very much worried about a government that will seize my property because I suspiciously have more money on me than I should without a trial (civil forfeiture). I’m also worried about a government that spies on its citizens (Snowden leaks) and tries to weaken encryption.
You’ll have to excuse me if I am more worried about a corrupt government (Republican and Democratic) that repeatedly uses it power unfairly.
Search, to tell the truth, is relatively easy to displace. Users are fickle, they easily migrate to whatever they consider a better option. See all these "I moved to DDG and it's OK" comments here
Even controlling user data is not that much; one can move the entire email archive, and the entire documents archive, elsewhere. Not easy but doable, and has been done a lot of times.
The real power is controlling the user's identity. Think about all the hundreds of places where one would need to replace a "@gmail.com" address. To say nothing of all the places where one used to use "login with Facebook" and where using another method of logging in means losing the previous account.
I moved, I left my gmail address up forwarding my email to protonmail for about a year, I figured if someone hasn't switched over to my new address by then (or I've changed it with them) I don't need them. Everything has a price.
>In what universe is Twitter any type of monopoly that needs to be reigned in by the government?
Reporters spend about 25 hours a day checking twitter. In most coverage of any tech politics, you're going to see twitter grouped in there as a tech leader, because most reporters feel like it must be just as important as facebook. The numbers obviously disagree, but the attitude can easily spread from the coverage to discussions like this.
I don't think twitter needs to be shutdown but I do think they should take pride in their platform and remove the disinformation campaigns by foreign powers, trolls, and insane conspiracy theorists like qanon.
You gotta think of the government like a gang, except in a different timeline, it would be our gang. A government has human values and morals. It is a social organ. A corporation has only one value: increase profit; it has no morals. Government is a way for us to organize ourselves with the intention of improving life for all. In a corporation, the goal is profit. Any improvement in our standard of living is completely coincidental, and corporations will often take away these life improvements in an attempt to sell them back to us for no other reason than to increase profit.
It's important to make sure the people in power have their priorities straight. The government is already set up to make the country a better place for all. Corporations cannot fulfill this purpose.
And as for twitter, a lot of tech companies these days are vertically integrated monopolies. That means they have a diverse collection of proprietary services which lack inter-operability and stifle innovation and economic development. For example, how microsoft releases inferior versions of almost every kind of software imaginable, in an attempt to keep all people inside their ecosystem. This is what the original anti-trust suit against microsoft was about. Microsoft was found guilty of holding a monopoly multiple times. They only got away with it because they kept appealing until they found themselves in front of a weak judge. Does twitter have this kind of monopoly? I'm not sure. Amazon certainly could be broken up into a few different companies, as could microsoft, apple, google, easily.
> It's important to make sure the people in power have their priorities straight. The government is already set up to make the country a better place for all. Corporations cannot fulfill this purpose.
In the history of the US, when have the people in power ever had their priorities straight?
Before the Civil War? During segregation? The War on Crime? The War on Drugs? When interracial marriage (miscegenation) was illegal? When homosexuality was a crime (laws against “fornication”)? The only western country that still has the death penalty?
Even in the context of “regulating tech” it’s clear that the current administration is only going against companies it doesn’t like for some reason.
Most of the U.S. government was born to steal land and facilitate genocide. That's just a fact. It's where we come from as Americans. We are all beneficiaries of crimes against humanity. The government needs to change, no doubt about that. The government has public interfaces for change. We can change the government to make sure these interfaces are available to as many americans as possible. We could make them available to all, including our friends in Puerto Rico, just with a few signed pieces of paper.
It's important for all of us to have goals and act in a way that is goal-oriented.
That’s not the goal of an electoral majority of the country.
Because of the 2 Senator per state structure of the Senate, 40%+ of the Senate represents 25% of the population. The senate confirms both judges with lifetime appointments and cabinet members. We also have seen twice in the last 20 years where the President won while losing the popular vote.
Also because of the media that generally ignored the poor and minorities before everyone had a video camera in their pocket, thanks to Big Tech, and a platform to stream it live without gatekeepers, again thanks to Big Tech. Even the people who would care weren’t informed. If you were White, middle class and above why wouldn’t you believe that police are always fair and trust the word of police?
On a personal note, seeing how myself and friends who are people of color, gay, etc have been treated by Big Tech and comparing that to the government - yeah I trust Big Tech a lot more.
Twitter facebook and youtube are tools for disinformation. They have created the new world disorder. Worse than any CNN NBC or FOX. It was bad before, but in big tech's quest to optimize "engagement" at the expense of everything else they have made everything so much worse. They don't give a shit.
Not like this. We are the targets of a massive, decentralized effort to create chaos through misinformation. It is very well-funded and organized. I have seen nor heard of nothing like this before. Even during the holocaust, the power to publish bullshit was concentrated in the hands of the few. Now I can distribute a message to millions in a matter of hours at basically no cost. These tools are publicly accessible to anyone on the network. The breakdown of truth and reality is real. With everyone locked inside for covid, we are more vulnerable to misinformation than we ever have been as a species.
You haven’t seen it, because neither you nor anyone in your family has been affected. Your entire history education is probably misinformed if you attended a public school. Look up the “Lost Cause” version of events behind the Civil War.
The government and the MSM have been much worse than any private corporation with respect to misinformation with much more deadly consequences than any private corporation. I’m not referring to just “the liberal media”.
My family came to this country of our own free will in the early 90s, so we certainly missed a lot of the bullshit.
You're ignoring how social media has decentralized the misinformation. Anyone can start posting and people operate on such a purely emotional level, that facts really don't matter. If I was working foreign intelligence, trying to destroy the United States, I would do exactly what qanon is doing. I've been watching that shitshow spiral out of control in slow motion for the past 4 years and social media was an integral part. The way algorithms funnel people into information bubbles. How they engage by showing people inflammatory things. There are people in your neighborhood right now who literally think democrats worship satan and eat babies for power (which is what nazis said about the jews btw). They didnt catch that virus by watching TV news, or reading the paper; they learned it on social media.
You've drunk too much of the far left koolaide. The USA has done so much more than that. Name a country that has been around relatively intact for the past few hundred years that was also a major power than didn't engage in similar or much worse. I get tired of historic revisionism and seeing the past through and judging by the standards of today things that happened in the past. It's fine to see what was wrong with it, but it's academic dishonesty to say pass judgement for today's generation and future generations and say the USA is the ultimate evil like you are saying.
Actually you're the one saying the U.S. is the ultimate evil. I'm just telling facts. Stop projecting and try to consider all sides with neutrality. You're self absorbed, overly sensitive and a bad listener.
Facts don't care about your feelings. I'm not going to revise American history just because you feel ashamed or uncomfortable. I value truth. Maybe stop judging yourself for the crimes of the past. Maybe stop using American history as a stupid prop to make you feel good about yourself.
At the end of the day, if you really want to ignore what happened, that just makes you ignorant. All that means is I know more about our country than you do. It means that when I say I fuckin love America, I actually mean it. Not like you, where you could only love this country if it was some safe-space-hugbox that didn't challenge your fragile ego.
Yes like how much hiring at big tech firms is based on actual engineering needs, vs. just trying to scoop up all the engineering talent before a competitor does (or just pricing startups out of the market)
There is still the international market. The US wields a lot of power by its influence over big tech. The US does not have nearly as much ability to ban Chinese apps from the international market as it does domestically.
Think of it this way: It can be good for FB as an established company that can incorporate in every country like coca-cola opening local plants that play nice with the local government but still make money and “really bad long term consequences” from an intellectual point of view because it will no longer be possible for a startup to grow globally without the resource necessary to incorporate in every country(which is good for FB since no longer a kid in his dorm can make a competitor and bad for everyone else because a kid in his dorm can no longer make a competitor).
So essentially, “go Trump do your thing but I am (personally)very sorry what the Internet has become, must suck to be U“.
Makes sense. TikTok is one of the only app who ever came close to dethroning Facebook as the largest social media site. Instagram and Snapchat were the two others. They acquired one, and after failing to acquire the other, they simply cloned all its functionality. They also are in parallel trying to clone TikTok, but obviously getting it banned is far more efficient.
While I wish open internet prevailed, reality is that there are abuses with national security implications. That being said, this won’t be the answer to the national security quagmire. US needs to out-innovate faster than ever before. It’s high time we got our shit together, cut the bureaucracy and leap frog.
> The Commerce Department will not seek to compel people in the United States to remove the apps or stop using them but will not allow updates or new downloads.
Don't they have a self-updating mechanism independent from the store? I implemented that on all my apps to make them resistant to Google's rage bans.
It seems unreasonable that US government can dictate what apps one can use or not use, and also there is no semblance of a transparent due process being followed for this.
Also TikTok has not broken US laws as per US courts. How can the President ban something which is not app/anything which does not run afoul of existing laws?
That's why this is essentially an arbitrary move.
The national security threat seems a vacuus argument as per many data security analysts, tiktok not being that different from instagram, etc.
The president/executive should not have authority to ban anything at all without a legislative process.
WeChat is the 'do everything' app that's essential for the Chinese. No WeChat, no Chinese customer. Looks like Apple is going to lose its Chinese market completely. Without that big market, Apple's future is on pretty shaky ground. (The Chinese market alone is as big as the whole of the West.)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24515540
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24519307
https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/09/commerc...
That said, I'm sure there are complex legal criteria in the US that could lead to a lengthy court case.
It's such a beautiful phrase. "National security." Who wouldn't want to help with national security? Are you getting in the way of our nation's security?
(A bit unsettled we now live in an era of "It's illegal to download <app to watch cat videos>," even if the national security concerns were true.)
Consider that (at an extreme) using the military to repel an armed invasion is most definitely a matter of national security. The authoritarian and the libertarian can both claim "national security" and mean very different things in practice.
Ensuring a robust judicial process and having precise definitions for such terminology are both serious issues here. The police are literally supposed to protect the children (and the adults!), but "protecting the children" is hardly desirable.
Edit:
> (A bit unsettled we now live in an era of "It's illegal to download <app to watch cat videos>," even if the national security concerns were true.)
I'm certainly no fan of the current administration, but how is a centralized and widely used social media app not a potential national security threat? For any country, it seems highly concerning to me for either the employees or infrastructure for such an app to be located in any jurisdiction that isn't a close ally. As an example, consider the destabilizing influence that Google could potentially exert by intentionally skewing search results for a specific topic in a calculated and subtle manner.
Honestly I'm somewhat surprised that the EU hasn't objected to Facebook or Twitter on these grounds. I suppose they mostly trust us not to meddle in their elections (and us them for that matter).
It's basically what they did to -- uhh, what was it called? The encrypted email service Snowden used when he was smuggling NSA docs. $2k per day, increasing over time, adds up fast.
Once you're staring at an executive order, questions of whether they really have the power fall to lawyers. In the meantime, corporations comply.
Seriously, what does that even mean?
Could they really ignore an executive order? Could they sue the government and get some sort of injuction?
How could the government compel them? With fines? With a police raid?
Police raids and injunctions are both on the table.
Given the administration tends to make decisions based more on xenophobia than empirical evidence and there's good reasons to think these apps have shady data practices, nothing about this situation is clear cut.
Edit: For the galaxy-brains, me pointing out the government has the authority to do this is not an endorsement of them doing it.
I won’t hold my breath.
Not bad, just something that should be understood. Millenials are expected to be “internet natives” and “good with computers”. This didnt translate to Gen Z linearly.
I wonder if this has anything to do with how platforms became locked down at the generational boundary.
Millennials grew up on 90's and 00's internet, where you could download and install anything. It was the most open tech has ever been. Run your own chat software, embed HTML in your MySpace profile, create a forum, etc. Apply patches and cracks to pirated software. Re-skin Winamp. All of it was par for the course for your typical Millennial teenager.
Gen Z has curated experiences in the form of walled silos. Less exposure to the underlying tech.
Granted, some subset will always be attracted to hobbyist pursuit. Game development, app development, Minecraft mods, etc. But it's not as much a part of the day to day experience.
Check out (https://neocities.org/).
> dual booting linux is hard on a laptop with stuff being locked down in the boot process
All the major distros should work out of the box with secure boot at this point. UEFI USB sticks are incredibly easy to create since you don't have to worry about magic MBR stuff anymore. (The bootloader can just go in a specific folder and have a specific name.) For that matter, turning secure boot off completely is typically a simple toggle in the firmware. Even the drivers "just work" out of the box these days for all the mainstream laptops I've tried.
> hacking on stuff seems harder then ever if your starting from nothing
This is true if all you have is a locked down mobile device. Otherwise there's really no excuse - a Raspberry Pi can be had for $35.
Didn't seem any harder with Manjaro Linux and Windows 10 to me.
The internet during that era cultivated some incredible heuristics for navigating the internet.
During the era (at 14/15) I:
- Stuck behind a firewall, I downloaded gigabytes of porn from unsecured FTP servers by Google dorking
- Played hours of bootleg Quake3 and SOFII on my old-faithful cracked Windows XP (still remember the key to this day)
- Reinstalled XP about 1,000x everytime I downloaded something I shouldn't have
- Found hundreds of weird documentaries on The Pirate Bay and Smoking in the Rain from all over the planet
- Spent countless hours talking with a bunch of weirdos on IRC
- Had an HTML-only website called 'Science Experimenter'
- Dual-booted FreeBSD
- Played around on my SDF Unix shell
- Played Doom and Wolf3D downloaded from Vetusware on Dos 7.1/Win 3.1
- Newsgroups. Oh man, remember bootlegging movies from newsgroups.
That early internet was just incredible. From wandering through Fravia's Searchlores, to Geocities (where I first discovered the term 'Computer Engineering'), to the early MP3s you could find of HOPE and Defcon talks), to Andre Lamothe's XGameStation kit, to the Homebuilt CPUs Webring (I fell in love with Magic-1), to the OsDev wiki DexOS, MenuetOS, etc.
Today's internet is so convenient. It's like you said, it's 'curated.' It's not a jungle of lost Mayan civilization you can Indiana Jones through.
Edit: I realize today's internet is even more rich than the one I describe, but the nostalgia is just too strong. I prefer to live in my simple world.
“Hey you are good with electronic devices that I had the same 20 years to understand as you, fix this other unrelated thing”
Means something very different when the users don't understand anything about the device they are using.
It isn’t about inferiority it is about understanding the baseline technical literacy and what areas should still be taught, just like they were taught to prior generations, instead of assuming there is a linear and continued proliferation of technical literacy. Its just a patch work.
There were plenty of "non-geek" people tricking out their MySpace profile.
I don’t miss ripping MP3’s, converting file formats and what the heck is “patching cracked software”? I think I qualify as a true geek, and I’ve never heard of that.
Downloading commercial software, then downloading a tool to alter the binary to remove the license verification check. Alternatively, they would patch the signature check to use some known algorithm, and then you'd generate a key locally that worked.
Skater kids, emo/goth kids, preppy kids. Everybody was doing this to get Photoshop or games or whatever. This wasn't limited to computer nerds.
Kids in the 00s had to learn some skills and read warez instructional text files.
In the 80s, I don’t know where my friends got their cache of cracked software for the Apple //.
Example: My father's generation lived in poverty and had to struggle to get by while the current generation have it easy.
So, last century U.S, the roaring twenties, the great depression, WW2, then I think the 50s were probably seen as something of a return to normalcy after the war but in some ways quite different because now the U.S was really in charge, followed by the 60s, I don't think the 70s was that big a divergence but lots of big thinkers seem to think it was because of the end of Vietnam, the end of Nixon.
I think the last big decade shift were things were significantly different (last century) was the 80s which began the dismantling under Reagan of the New Deal which kept up in the 90s - however by this time the idea that generational shifts were important had taken hold and somewhat trivial things like changes in musical tastes were taken as examples of such a shift.
Then of course there has been a technological change in this century by widespread use of computers and the internet.
I usually experienced much less resistance explaining tasks and problems to people close to my age. Younger people would listen to a point until I saw their eyes gloss over, waiting for me to get to my point. Many older folks were tuned out from the start and just wanted to hear their problem was fixed. I’m sure part of this involves my lack of skill in explaining technical concepts to non-technical people.
Someone else mentioned that the internet changing over the years affected this. I think part of this also has to do with the pranks of our generation:
-“how do I [x] in this game?” “Alt-F4”
-“how do I get rid of this virus?” “Delete System32”
We’d either look it up first and call BS, or follow the instructions with reckless abandon and learn the hard way.
Somewhat recently we had people microwaving iPhones thinking it’d charge them. I saw more news stories about this than I’d have expected, given it’s metal in a microwave. Something that many of us were taught not to do from a young age.
Search for "millennials killed" on Google.
I think this is an important generalization because it undoes an unhealthy generalization by Gen X and Baby Boomers, the idea that everyone younger is literate with computer use and troubleshooting, the younger the better
The older Gen Z are barely graduating college, by the way. Maybe start by looking at the growth of computer science majors.
That being said, many do have a basic understanding already, mostly from things like evading content filters on school wifi.
Edit: But yes, obviously it is not a good thing in the short term.
(Sorry iOS users -- you use an OS designed by a dictator. You can maybe try switching to the App Store in a freer country than the US, e.g. Canada or UK.)
iOS is a status symbol.
Would students really be “ostracized” if they had high priced Samsung phones?
You realize the $349 iPhone SE is more performant than any Android phone at any cost.
there's not free speech in the UK though... so...
s/UK/some other free country/
Nothing stopping you from communicating with them. You can still pick up a phone, text message, or use email, or twitter, or whatsapp, or discord, or slack, or fb messenger, or write a letter, or twitter (or send a carrier pigeon), or instagram, or telegram, or mail them a flash drive with videos on it, idk.
very weak argument, Xi.
> pick up a phone
costs $
> text message
super limited
> use email
yes but not a great UX for instant messaging
> twitter
banned in china and also not a good UX for talking to friends/family
> whatsapp
banned in china and featureless
> discord, or slack
80-year-old grandmas can't use this
> fb messenger
banned in china
> write a letter
too slow
> or twitter (or send a carrier pigeon),
No
> instagram
banned in China, messenger is crap
> telegram
looks like a goddamn military app, lacks features, old people can't figure this one out either
> mail them a flash drive with videos on it, idk.
too slow
> yes but not a great UX for instant messaging
give me a break. it sounds like its not about communicating with family. whats your deal?
They don't need you or Trump policing what app they use.
>> fb messenger
> banned in china
Yup there's your problem. they did it first. we wouldn't be in this mess otherwise. don't blame me or trump. if china opened up so would the US.
It's unfortunate that the US is too late in getting in the game with China. They've already caught up (and some) with the US in terms of technological prowess and innovation. China can open up and let the likes of Facebook, Google etc in, but they won't be able to compete with the local companies like Alibaba, Tencent. China at this stage doesn't need the US as much as they did before when it comes to tech. What China needs is the rest of the world (EU, UK, South America, Africa etc) to not join forces against it. Just a shame that the current administration isn't able to see that and prefers being iso-America for America and at the same time pushing its allies away.
Bottom line is, the US got outplayed, and is still getting outplayed. Past administrations should have seen this coming. Current administration should have made better decisions in navigating China. While the US is trying to go toe to toe with China, China is already thinking ahead by forging alliances and making its presence in African and European countries via the Belt and Road initiative as well as reducing its dependency on US agriculture by shifting soybean purchases to South America. I doubt the banning of TikTok and WeChat in the US is really going to concern them.
Once they see their favourite influencer moving to a new platform, their following automatically migrates with them.
Really, reciprocity (and the paradox of intolerance) is an implicit expectation in many situations and we need to talk about how to deal with it.
China doesn't just not "believe" in free speech, it also bans, imprisons, tortures, spies and do other harmful things.
Also states are not people.
Also there are situations when there are reasons to limit free speech (like war).
And so on.
We also have 21% of all people incarcerated in the world with only 4% of the population. The US doesn’t exactly have the moral high ground.
As far as believing in free speech, isn’t the current administration trying to regulate tech because it doesn’t like what is being said on their platforms?
And just so it can’t be claimed that I’m only citing the MSM
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/facebook-targeted-in-...
It's not clear what that regularion would do.
If for example, it means that I could sue Twitter to force them unban me, I would consider that a good for all win-win regulation.
The second one seems to be unrelated to free speech.
I guess it comes down to if I can swallow Chinese ideology when the US descends into chaos. Might be an easy decision to swap my blue passport for a red one.
As far as I see, the largest danger to free speech in the US is company policy makers. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook ban all and everything without any suggestions from the government. And media like NY Times also do self-censorship without any government intervention.
There is no shortage of ways for conservatives to have their voice heard - Trump got elected despite the “liberal media” didn’t he?
If the current government stepped in would they be more likely to support BLM or “Focus on the Family”?
Not it shouldn't. And it doesn't.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798759/trump-social-medi...
We surely like freedom of speech but still we want to silence, for example, anti-vaxxer.
You always lose freedoms when fighting for freedoms. Some people even lose their lives.
The hope is that we only lose the freedom temporarily (e.g. the freedom to buy a Cuban cigar being reinstated).
So no I don't think there is a real distinction.
A lot has changed in the last 12 hours I guess.
Criticizing US blocking stuff != defending China blocking stuff
Allow me to explain: As long as TikTok was around any talk of controlling or splitting the big tech could have been diverted by saying if you regulate or break us, China will take over the vacuum left behind.
With TikTok not only gone but also will be used as a precedence, big tech have lost the "China will take over" argument. Because the answer would be, no, we won't allow China to fill the vacuum and at the same we are going to heavily regulate you.
Whoever is coordinating (if it's coordinated) the future demise and break up of big tech has definitely earned their think tank salary.
When corporations are too big, this cause the same kind of bloat, corruptions and anti-innovative climate as when states are controlled by too powerful bureaucracies.
There is a threshold, of course, but unfortunately we've allowed a few companies to go well past this deleterious threshold.
Capitalism works best when there's a wide spread of power and wealth is not too concentrated. There can't be proper markets with monopoly or monopsony.
Just this past week they straight up lied to me about trade-ins. I documented the story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24486769
acquisition is also innovation. It's a skill, and highly sought after - whether to build or buy. There is someone (or multiple) keeping an eye on inorganic growth via acquisitions. The plan was in place to have Maps etc. So, while building road map or having long term discussions - they decided to get a head-start by going via acquisition route. Remember, they did not stop at acquisition or it did not die because the long term was already in place.
In what universe is Twitter any type of monopoly that needs to be reigned in by the government?
But Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook have too much power in their hands.
But isn’t telling that the administration is going after Twitter and not Apple? Could it possibly be that Cook has kissed the golden ring plenty of times and Twitter is pushing back?
You should be wary of government no matter which side you on. Since the government has started meddling in tech in the 90s, has any good law been passed by Democrats or Republicans?
Suppose some company had cornered the web search market, and nobody would even try to use some other web search, and used that position to control advertising and all sorts of other access to the web. Perhaps they even come to control the most commonly used web browser; the most commonly used mobile OS. In that environment, where a single company controls the OS and the search and the vast majority of access to the web, are you really more fearful of "eminent domain" than you are of the company wiping you out before you have a chance to capture a piece of the pie by our competing them?
When was the last time a tech company had to worry about civil forfeiture or eminent domain?
You’ll have to excuse me if I am more worried about a corrupt government (Republican and Democratic) that repeatedly uses it power unfairly.
The real power is controlling the user's identity. Think about all the hundreds of places where one would need to replace a "@gmail.com" address. To say nothing of all the places where one used to use "login with Facebook" and where using another method of logging in means losing the previous account.
Reporters spend about 25 hours a day checking twitter. In most coverage of any tech politics, you're going to see twitter grouped in there as a tech leader, because most reporters feel like it must be just as important as facebook. The numbers obviously disagree, but the attitude can easily spread from the coverage to discussions like this.
It's important to make sure the people in power have their priorities straight. The government is already set up to make the country a better place for all. Corporations cannot fulfill this purpose.
And as for twitter, a lot of tech companies these days are vertically integrated monopolies. That means they have a diverse collection of proprietary services which lack inter-operability and stifle innovation and economic development. For example, how microsoft releases inferior versions of almost every kind of software imaginable, in an attempt to keep all people inside their ecosystem. This is what the original anti-trust suit against microsoft was about. Microsoft was found guilty of holding a monopoly multiple times. They only got away with it because they kept appealing until they found themselves in front of a weak judge. Does twitter have this kind of monopoly? I'm not sure. Amazon certainly could be broken up into a few different companies, as could microsoft, apple, google, easily.
In the history of the US, when have the people in power ever had their priorities straight?
Before the Civil War? During segregation? The War on Crime? The War on Drugs? When interracial marriage (miscegenation) was illegal? When homosexuality was a crime (laws against “fornication”)? The only western country that still has the death penalty?
Even in the context of “regulating tech” it’s clear that the current administration is only going against companies it doesn’t like for some reason.
It's important for all of us to have goals and act in a way that is goal-oriented.
Because of the 2 Senator per state structure of the Senate, 40%+ of the Senate represents 25% of the population. The senate confirms both judges with lifetime appointments and cabinet members. We also have seen twice in the last 20 years where the President won while losing the popular vote.
Also because of the media that generally ignored the poor and minorities before everyone had a video camera in their pocket, thanks to Big Tech, and a platform to stream it live without gatekeepers, again thanks to Big Tech. Even the people who would care weren’t informed. If you were White, middle class and above why wouldn’t you believe that police are always fair and trust the word of police?
On a personal note, seeing how myself and friends who are people of color, gay, etc have been treated by Big Tech and comparing that to the government - yeah I trust Big Tech a lot more.
https://www.poynter.org/maligned-in-black-white/
The government and the MSM have been much worse than any private corporation with respect to misinformation with much more deadly consequences than any private corporation. I’m not referring to just “the liberal media”.
You're ignoring how social media has decentralized the misinformation. Anyone can start posting and people operate on such a purely emotional level, that facts really don't matter. If I was working foreign intelligence, trying to destroy the United States, I would do exactly what qanon is doing. I've been watching that shitshow spiral out of control in slow motion for the past 4 years and social media was an integral part. The way algorithms funnel people into information bubbles. How they engage by showing people inflammatory things. There are people in your neighborhood right now who literally think democrats worship satan and eat babies for power (which is what nazis said about the jews btw). They didnt catch that virus by watching TV news, or reading the paper; they learned it on social media.
Facts don't care about your feelings. I'm not going to revise American history just because you feel ashamed or uncomfortable. I value truth. Maybe stop judging yourself for the crimes of the past. Maybe stop using American history as a stupid prop to make you feel good about yourself.
At the end of the day, if you really want to ignore what happened, that just makes you ignorant. All that means is I know more about our country than you do. It means that when I say I fuckin love America, I actually mean it. Not like you, where you could only love this country if it was some safe-space-hugbox that didn't challenge your fragile ego.
My still living parents grew up in the segregated south. Laws against miscegenation were still in effect 7 years before I was born.
Laws against “fornication” weren’t struck down until the 80s.
Today the “War on Crime/Drugs” is disproportionately applied to minorities. Today the US has 21% of all incarcerated people in the world.
We don't have access to China exactly because they keep us out and force our technology on their hands to get in there.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-st...
I’d you can’t beat ‘em, ask your buddies in government to ban ‘em, I guess?
The two statements were to two different audiences. The one stoking fear of his competitor was in Washington D.C. The other was to his own employees.
So essentially, “go Trump do your thing but I am (personally)very sorry what the Internet has become, must suck to be U“.
Cryptocurrencies for payments
Don't they have a self-updating mechanism independent from the store? I implemented that on all my apps to make them resistant to Google's rage bans.
Also TikTok has not broken US laws as per US courts. How can the President ban something which is not app/anything which does not run afoul of existing laws? That's why this is essentially an arbitrary move.
The national security threat seems a vacuus argument as per many data security analysts, tiktok not being that different from instagram, etc.
The president/executive should not have authority to ban anything at all without a legislative process.
That's the law of unintended consequences.