• Why you shouldn't believe the TikTok Ban

    From rek2 hispagatos@rek2@hispagatos.org.invalid to hispagatos.talk,alt.2600.hackers,alt.2600,alt.2600.madrid on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 22:00:11
    From Newsgroup: alt.2600

    EVERYONE IS LYING - Why you shouldn't believe the TikTok Ban

    Privacy friendly url:
    - https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=fkAFNLolebk
    Evil non-private tracker-installer bad-javascript ip-scrapper shit tube:
    - https://youtu.be/fkAFNLolebk


    I am going to show how all involved parties are intentionally misleading
    you to advance their own agenda at your expense. And I also know what
    the ultimate solution to all the problems surrounding TikTok is. The US government’s argument is that TikTok is a hostile app that is controlled
    by the Chinese government and used to conduct covert operations inside
    the United States. They argue that the People’s Republic of China
    conducts mass surveillance on US citizens and that it then uses the data
    it collects to track dissidents, surveil journalists, recruit
    intelligence operatives, develop spies and blackmail assets. TikTok’s
    defense is that the US is violating its free speech and first amendment
    which is why the case made it all the way to the Supreme court. What is TikTok’s speech here? Good question. The algorithm is the speech. Not
    the content of users, not the content of TikTok itself – it’s the algorithm, the code, the bunch of letters, numbers and special
    characters that a computer can read, is literally TikTok’s speech. But let’s leave all the fun and giggles aside for a moment to really look
    what the government is actually saying about TikTok here. Because
    government employees in the US and many allied countries are already
    banned from using TikTok on their phones. The message that this is
    saying is far more profound than you would think if you didn’t know the implications. What all of these government bans are assuming is that the
    TikTok app is potentially malicious. Meaning – it’s actually malware,
    that it’s a virus designed to infect your phone. But on a modern mobile operating system, this is no easy task. If TikTok were indeed a piece of malware, it would have to bypass the entire mobile security model. On
    both Android and iOS, provided they are up-to-date with security
    patches, TikTok would have to escape the application sandbox – the
    guardrails that prevent every app on your phone from accessing data
    outside the app itself. This is something that both iOS and Android
    enforce at the kernel, the very core of the system. Which means TikTok
    would need chains of multiple vulnerabilities to exploit each and every safeguard put in place by multi-billion-dollar security research by
    Apple and Google and thousands of open source cybersecurity researchers
    all around the world. And even then, every new update and reboot of a
    phone would likely erase TikTok’s infiltration, so they would have to do
    that whole exploit chain again and somehow gain persistent access on
    people’s phones. And all of that would have to have happened without
    anyone noticing that something’s off. Which on a scale of millions of simultaneous targets is virtually impossible to achieve. If China can
    make TikTok an actual malicious app that can do all of that, then they
    can do that to literally every other app on the planet, no matter where
    it’s based or who owns it.

    So here is a solution: a nationwide ban on all personal data collection
    and retention beyond the needs of a service delivery. If there is no
    personal data stored by the big tech, then there is no point hacking
    them. Most private data is no data. That would also stop all the
    allegations of developing spies and blackmailing assets and recruiting sympathizers and all that jazz. Not just on TikTok but on all social
    media platforms across the board.

    SOURCES [references in the transcript]

    [0] youtube.com/watch?v=CbIL9EvDykQ&t=0s
    [1] eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech
    [2] pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-code-free-speech
    [3] eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice
    [4] npr.org/2025/01/10/nx-s1-5254236/tiktok-supreme-court-what-to-know
    [5] wsj.com/politics/policy/jeff-yass-tiktok-bytedance-ban-congress-15a41ec4 [6] nytimes.com/2024/12/28/us/politics/trump-tik-tok-ban.html
    [7] npr.org/2025/01/18/nx-s1-5266146/tiktok-offline-supreme-court-ban
    [8] npr.org/2025/01/19/nx-s1-5267568/tiktok-back-online
    [9] bbc.com/news/articles/clyng762q4eo
    [10] washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/13/tiktok-ban-countries-restrictions
    [11] nytimes.com/live/2025/01/10/us/tiktok-ban-supreme-court#tiktok-is-facing-legal-backlash-around-the-world
    [12] nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html


    Happy Hacking
    ReK2
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