mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world

Posts

40

Comments

673

Joined

2 yr. ago

These solutions never work

Source?

Just like in a video game: If you go in a direction and start meeting lots of opponents, you're probably making progress.

Are you saying that TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. is currently exempt from FISA warrants? If a FISA court issues a legally binding request to USDS for internal data, USDS tells them to get lost? If that’s what you’re saying, which part of these proposed regulations is going to change that?

Fair question. Let me be a little more specific to this situation and hopefully make a little more sense. I'm pretty confident there are a lot of people here who won't agree with me on this, which is fine, but I can at least lay it out a little more sensibly:

For a long time, it was okay to say genuinely racist things. It took a really long time to make that not culturally acceptable, but now, you can't officially say that one race is higher than another and also be a professor, or a TV presenter, or etc. But, once we got there, we kept going and started saying, you can't even touch this type of issue in any capacity. You can't say black people are good at basketball, etc etc, and here you can't cite a scientific study that says Ashkenazi Jews seem to have higher IQ scores and a plausible explanation for maybe why. I have a certain amount of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, and in my un-scientific opinion, it's because we spent several hundred years in Europe in a racist and extremely dangerous environment where you had to figure stuff out or you might not make it. That'll put some selection pressure on a population just like circumstances put selection pressure on any other biological organism.

You can disagree with me on that; I don't really know because I haven't studied it. But, I do think it should be permitted to study that and talk about it. Just, it can't be done with racist intent. We started with a noble purpose -- no racism -- and kept going to the point that you can't say something that sounds racist, or refers to some ethnicity, or reminds someone of racism. I get why and where that impulse comes from, but it's gone too far. And, it clouds the very real issue of talking about for-real racism which is plenty alive and well, in its real form, in the world, when you start calling anything and everything that says something about jews racist. I'm fine with people studying the anthropological nature of my people or any other type of people, as long as it's not done with racist intent. If someone uses that to accomplish something racist, well, that's on the racist-accomplisher, not on the scientist or the reporter of the science.

It's like a pendulum.

For a while you could beat up gay people and make a movie where the hero was a rapist.

Oh crap, that was terrible. Okay, now after a whole lot of angst and struggle, it became pretty much accepted that it's okay to be gay and not okay to rape. Phew.

Oh crap, once we had some momentum, it just kept going in the same direction. if you don't think 8-year-olds should be transgender or that Megan Rapinoe is anything less than a goddamned hero or that it's bad to weigh 400 pounds, you are Hitler.

Now though, it's swinging back the other way. People figured out that always-perfect-at-everything Strong Female Characters in godawful movies aren't doing anything for anybody, comedians can mostly tell jokes again, but there's still a lot of debate and the pressure's still building, so it's gonna swing past normal and we're gonna be back on the other side again.

1. We all know why they put "AI-driven" in the headline... I mean, it worked on me; I clicked on it.
2. That doesn't mean they'll be "autonomous" in the sense that people think of when they see the headline and click on it.
3. Having a human in the loop does make a difference. Snowden talked about watching on his desktop people getting killed by drone strikes in real time, as part of his motivating factor for why he turned against the NSA and its mission. The Nazis had a lot of "morale problems" with Nazi soldiers who were assigned to holocaust-adjacent operations and had to find other solutions. Etc. Every human you take out of the equation is one less person who can rotate home and tell people, "Yo what they're telling us to do is really fucked up, let me tell you..."
4. I see the air force's point. I honestly don't blame them for feeling that there's no future in an air warfare system that has to have a squishy slow-thinking meatbag in the middle of it putting limits on its performance. This kind of thing was already part of the plan for the US's next generation fighter (with the pilot as the "commander" of a little network of drones) and has been for a while.
5. If you haven't seen Slaughterbots it's well worth a watch.

It is lol. It's gotten me multiple times.

Literally the entire PRISM operation? It gathered internet traffic from all major US tech companies and could pretty much access any data those companies had on you.

So, I just looked this up. I honestly had some of the details of it wrong in my memory (I remembered it as pretty much only backbone packet eavesdropping, with FISA warrants for a company's internal data as a separate thing, but Snowden describes those two things as working hand in hand under PRISM which I guess makes sense.)

Are you saying that TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. is currently exempt from FISA warrants? If a FISA court issues a legally binding request to USDS for internal data, USDS tells them to get lost? If that's what you're saying, which part of these proposed regulations is going to change that?

That's what keeps blowing my mind about this -- the US loves doing surveillance on people's internet stuff, I'll agree with you 100% on that, and that that's in general a bad thing. But, as far as I can tell, opposing these particular regulations because you're opposed to the US doing that genuinely just makes no sense.

If you said that Project Texas was a cover for US surveillance, that would actually make some sense, since that was what put US Tiktok operations physically and corporate-structure-wise more within the US hence subject to US courts and physical spying. But that already happened. Forbes is writing this article pretending that now that they've seen the new regulations, they're a shocking overreach expanding US surveillance, and I honestly just don't see anything in the new regulations that would justify that statement.

Let me ask something else: Are all these countries also singling out Tiktok for this same type of treatment out of this same desire to surveil Tiktok users?

mildlyinfuriating has this in its CSS, along with something that looks quite convincingly like there's a hair stuck to your screen.

The US has consensual access to pretty much every major player in the social media marketplace

I believe this to be true, yes. (It's acknowledged that they have access through subpeonas, and personally I think they have active spy operations in pretty much every major internet community including Tiktok. They have active spy operations in actively hostile foreign governments, and compared to that, getting clandestine access to a large internet community is child's play.)

(as we know from the Snowden leaks)

What part of the Snowden leaks? The big things I'm aware of Snowden revealing were massive efforts to capture and store phone and backbone raw-packet data, partial compromise of TLS, and another massive effort at compromising email. Then there were some other more minor specifically targeted things, but I didn't see any social media in those. Can you send me a source on this?

Until TikTok opens itself up to US surveillance

I think I spent a pretty good length of time documentation and explaining why I think that these rules do not represent opening up Tiktok to US surveillance. Y'all keep repeating that these new rules represent opening up Tiktok to US surveillance, and then riffing on from there the further conclusions. If you want to talk to me about this, can you back it up a little and say why you think these specific rules represent surveillance?

E.g. the NSA (according to rumor) installed their hardware decades ago at some AT&T backbone sites, with consent of AT&T. When Verizon later became a major player, they tapped into major Verizon backbones, without the consent of Verizon (as was leaked by Snowden.) Both of those are surveillance. What they didn't do was get involved in AT&T's terms of service, ask for the right to veto hiring certain executives, conduct audits and assessments of AT&T's operations... because that's unnecessary if what you want to do is surveillance. You just surveil. Why, then, are you saying that when the US wants to do those things to Tiktok, that represents some kind of surveillance?

Yeah, I think you're right in this instance. I looked back at my comments here and I was definitely a dick.

IDK, I've become sort of embittered talking with people on lemmy.world. I think my comment history overall can speak for itself in terms of whether I'm looking for a conversation or an argument most of the time... but I've also had many interactions where it's very clear the other people are simply not operating on a level of "let's talk about it because we're both interested in the truth." I've noticed that over time I've tended more and more towards jumping to the conclusion that the person I'm talking to is not operating in good faith.

That's not to excuse this instance. You're honestly 100% right, and even my "polite" initial message in this case is basically looking for a fight, which isn't helpful whether I'm right or wrong. IDK, maybe the answer is for me to go to some community where I won't need to feel this cynicism at people I'm talking to right out of the gate. I don't think me being embittered when talking to anyone is good for anything, no.

You don't owe me anything, now or later. You did make time to lay out what we love about Tiktok within a few minutes of the first post, so I had some follow-up questions. If you think my message is worth spending the time to address, feel free to respond, but not's okay too. I feel like I already pretty much said what I have to say on it.

I think they're making a pointed joke

Why are you reacting this way to laws which seem very specifically aimed at curbing (or attempting to curb) the use of Tiktok for Chinese surveillance? If the US government was demanding that Tiktok install a keylogger and provide the data to it, that would justify what you're saying. But, as I keep repeatedly saying with sourcing, it's the opposite. Do you have an argument for why this represents any kind of US surveillance, beyond just repeating the assertion?

Edit: Let me ask in a little more distilled form. Why, if the US government wanted to use Tiktok for surveillance, would they keep attempting to ban it from various classes of people's phones, and keep talking about banning it from everybody's? That seems counterproductive to the surveillance mission, no?

It could be a Chinabot. At a certain point on Lemmy I realized that there are quite a few bots or bot-like users here that will just fire-and-forget some statement that's (1) psychologically persuasive (2) vaguely plausible if you don't scrutinize it, and (3) in support of some point of view that a state actor wants people to have. Then, they'll never respond again.

Maybe I'm being cynical and this person will be open to a back and forth with some kind of justification or something, but my money's against it. The "destroy what we love about Tiktok" was the giveaway for me. Again I could be wrong, but that's generally not how real human people phrase things.

It's gotten to the point where if I see a story in Forbes, I just automatically assume that the reality is the opposite.

unprecedented control over essential functions that it does not have over any other major free speech platform

The US government has claimed for itself the authority to eavesdrop on any and all internet communication inside the United States, alter the plotlines of TV and movies, and (if you accept that Trump can speak for the US government) pull the FCC licenses of news networks that report news the president doesn't like. Nothing in what's proposed on Tiktok comes close to any of that along any of those axes; it's factually wrong to say it's "unprecedented." I actually don't agree with any of those things, but putting what they now want to do in Tiktok beyond any of those categories of behavior is a gross exaggeration.

Ama Adams, a managing partner and CFIUS expert at Ropes & Gray, said that some of the government powers in the draft agreement were somewhat typical — including the right to inspect a company’s facilities and materials, and the use of a third-party monitor.

Yep.

But “setting up a structure that has allegiance to the United States — I’ve never seen language, per se, to that extent.”

Fair enough, but this only came about because Tiktok clearly has allegiance to a conflicting foreign power. Facebook and Google aren't required to have allegiance to the United States because they're allowed to do their own thing, because they seem like they're doing their own thing and that's fine under our system. This is like saying "No one else has to go on house arrest; it's unfair to single me out like this" after you robbed a liquor store.

These provisions seem designed to address fears — expressed by the Biden Administration, the Trump Administration, and legislators in both parties — that TikTok’s foreign ownership and control threaten U.S. national security.

Incorrect. This is designed to address "fears" that Tiktok functions explicitly as a surveillance tool for the Chinese government. It is required to do so by Chinese law, and contains features which are highly unusual which appear designed to spy on its users. That's above and beyond even the extremely invasive data-collection which most other social media apps also do (scanning your contacts, doing facial recognition on you, listening to your microphone, etc). I think it's fair to say that gathering that level of data on millions of individual people and then handing the information to the Chinese government on demand is a unique and dangerous capability which should be addressed in some fashion.

There actually are technologies (e.g. routers) where simply the "ownership and control" is an issue, and maybe those should be treated as a bigger deal than they are, but that's not this.

That would raise serious concerns about the government’s ability to censor or distort what people are saying or watching on TikTok.

Bro, you are lying. Again, they're actually fine with doing that in some other platforms, which I don't agree with either, but that very clearly isn't this. Forbes is only saying that this is the issue to try to distort the facts in order to oppose putting Tiktok under this kind of control. Why Forbes is lying in this specific manner I have no idea, but I'm genuinely very curious why they are.

Etc. etc.

Can you give some examples from the last month or two of these silenced news stories, please (what aspect of it was reported on Tiktok that wasn't in the establishment press)? I see your list, but I could list about ten stories on each from the established press I think, so it's tough to tell what information it is that you're saying you're dependent on Tiktok to get.

Edit: No response, which was what I expected. I believe this person is lying with the aim of influencing people's opinion; i.e. they don't actually value the ability to get news from Tiktok with any specifics that they can talk any further about, but they just crafted that opinion to put out there to create the perception that "people" think Tiktok is a good thing. The silence, when asked for simple details about what they said they believed, is generally a tell (not just that their opinion on the matter is one I disagree with, but that their whole claim to have the opinion in the first place is just some bullshit they fabricated.)

The best part:

As members of the media attempted to ask them how they felt about causing a panic, the pair refused to answer any questions not related to “haircuts of the ’70s.”

And as I remember, someone asked them more or less, what type of haircuts do you think you guys will be getting in prison? And whoever was going to answer the question genuinely hesitated and looked worried.

Jajajaja

... except that Oliver Anthony wrote his song about politicians, including Republicans. The "Republicans = working people, Democrats = scumbags in Washington" propaganda has worked so effectively that even people on the left have been assuming that when this guy says he's in favor of working people, and against scumbags in Washington, that must mean he likes the Republicans. He doesn't, and apparently nobody bothered to ask him before assuming that he does.

"I wrote that song about those people," he said, referring to the candidates featured on the GOP debate.

He also states, more broadly, that "It's aggravating seeing people on conservative news trying to identify with me like I'm one of them."

"It's aggravating to see certain musicians and politicians act like we’re buddies, like we're fighting the same struggle here."

Speaking specifically about the song's use at the Republican debate, he said, with a laugh, "For them to sit there and have to listen to that, that cracks me up."

Covid, strep throat, the flu, and other illnesses, i.e. covid covid covid and covid, but a lot of our parents have a very particular way of approaching what they're willing to accept about why their child is sick.