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America bad ooga booga. Really they both should be banned lol. Like yall slinging shit at each other when they both should be gone. Great use of energy Lemmy
Because white.
Banning the one mentioned is non-partisan
It’s more of a financial security concern from the aligarchy POV.
They are both security risks. The difference is the SA oligarch has already successfully infiltrated our national security and installed himself in a position of power so we can’t do anything about it anymore.
On the cabinet? He bought himself a shadow presidency.
Create
I think you mean buy. Fund is probably the most generous word you could use, but that’s a fat stretch.
Musk created SpaceX, he didn’t buy it.
He founded Space X, but he did not create the technology and do the R&D alone like Tony Stark. He got the funding though.
Who ever claimed he created the technology? That makes no sense at all. And SpaceX got funding from NASA, just like a lot of other aerospace companies. In terms of value they delivered for that money, they’re far ahead of the competition. Boeing got more money for Starliner than SpaceX got for Crew Dragon. And look how that turned out.
Who ever claimed he created the technology?
The initial comment in this thread:
Honestly the way he did it was pretty perfect. Create technology and weapons and R&D for the country you want to infiltrate, ingratiate yourself to it’s people, government, and military. Then start throwing money into politics to buy yourself a spot on the cabinet.
This is what was being responded to.
Original comment…
Create technology
No.
No one can explain.The cynical answer is that the people who run the government like the South African because he helped them win elections.
One’s run by a white guy … the other is Asian
When it comes to choices in North America … it always goes to the white guy
If we were in a commercial passenger jet at 30,000 feet and the pilot and co pilot suddenly died and the crew had to choose who should fly the plane … they’d think twice about the 300 Asian passengers and instead choose the only white guy in first class.
Because tiktok data goes to China, and China is a competitor/geopolitical adversary to the USA. If tiktok was russian, it would be the same story. Besides, tiktok has been proven to be by far the worst data miner you can download from an app store.
And the PRC have been caught repeatedly running influence campaigns over social media platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamouflage
China: bad. X/Musk directly and openly interferes in UK and GER politics : move along, nothing to see.
Its such a bullshit argument. Don’t be the pot blaming the kettle.
We should ban ALL socials. All. Everything becomes an echochamber after 1-2 years filled with bots, algorithms and Ai. Nothing is trustworthy anymore.
China: bad. X/Musk directly and openly interferes in UK and GER politics : move along
Nope.
Other gov spying on yanks: bad with no mitigation.
Yank companies spying on yanks: bad with mitigation option we just don’t take today.
Both: PR and disinfo campaigns to convince illiterate that it’s about more than surveillance, that it’s a conspiracy or nothing tomorrow about at all (paging Dr Schroedinger).
Note that I am not disagreeing. Just pointing out that not being able to trust anything anymore is on-brand.
Source?
Sea lions?
China buys a ton of data from Zuck and Musk and a lot of other people.
The reason it’s being banned is for cutting out the middle man.
If they actually cared about our data going to geopolitical rivals they’d pass comprehensive privacy protections regardless of where the company is headquartered.
Not just a data miner, it has some crazy capabilities that are malicious even by the standards of social media phone apps, which were already explicitly malicious. If I remember right, it can download custom code to augment its capabilities per-target, and has encryption to attempt to thwart any attempt to analyze it, which are both pretty unusual amounts of effort to spend from the POV of “we just want to gather your advertising data and listen to your microphone all the time” which are pretty standard things.
That’s just AB testing, downloading over https, and having DRM. Every app on your phone does this, but it sure sounds scary when framed that way.
Every video game you have does the same thing too.
There is a difference in the data gathered and where it goes. But just like the cheap
Source?
losers sealioning to invert the how-do-you-know question hoping people forget the pedigree of the information isn’t the same, it’s easy for people to both-sides data gathering too.
And I say that’s fine. HAVE it so gathered data must go through a Clearinghouse or two (a gov entity eg SeaLandia or an org like fsf) so it’s provably anonymous and then we carry on. To me, this is the result of the discussion we need to have around who gets to spy on you and how we choose that to get benefits at reduced exposure to risk.
Just, it’s not the same.
Is this a bot response? Where did I mention the US Government buying through a clearing house?
I am not arguing we shouldn’t ban tiktok, I am arguing that they’re not unique and if we’re going to ban them then we should ban Meta too because they are worse. Meta and Twitter have already done the things people are afraid of tiktok maybe doing in the future.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news_but_tbh_if_you_have_tiktiok_just_get/
“There’s also a few snippets of code on the Android version that allows for the downloading of a remote zip file, unzipping it, and executing said binary.”
Obviously, the app creator can write whatever code they want into the app. If they want to update it, including to run an AB test, they can do a new version.
The only reason for unzipping and executing random binaries on-demand, outside of the normal app update process, is if you want to specifically target one individual or a group of individuals and enable functionality specifically for them that is custom to those particular people. Maybe you just have specific needs for them that aren’t served by the overall process, or maybe what you want to install is secret enough that you don’t want security researchers getting their hands on it. That second one would be consistent with the obfuscation around even the stock behavior of the app.
I am obviously not talking about HTTPS when I say “encryption to thwart any attempt to analyze it.”
If you can find me a large app that doesn’t have that capability then I’d be shocked. This is extremely common behavior for apps, and every piece of software I have ever been employed for has done this. That code is also still sandboxed by iOS and Android and has to go through the same APIs to interact with the OS, unless Pegasus found a way to infiltrate via app payloads.
This is one of those things that sounds really scary if you go into extreme detail and the other party doesn’t have enough experience to realize that it’s normal; like the way republicans talk about “hyper processed foods” and seed oils.
I know you’re not talking about https, which is why I mentioned DRM too. Nintendo encrypts all of their software, which is why they were able to DMCA Switch emulators.
Show me where in the Chrome or Firefox app there is code to download an executable – not a versioned update to the app through the Play Store, but a random chunk of code – and run it.
In iOS, sure, just give me the app source code and… oh wait, the compiled apps from the store are also obfuscated, guess I can’t search the code for you.
On Windows though you can look at what process runs when you click “update and restart” in Firefox or Chrome. Both have an updater service that is just there to run an update exe with admin permissions. Both could be used for the same attack vector you’re afraid of. Every
{softwarename}_helper.exeis the same thing.Chrome on iOS can execute javascript and has a history of vulnerabilities using that code execution, so much so that I even had to use the browser to jailbreak once, so I am not sure what point you’re trying to make other than fear mongering. You also still haven’t addressed the fact that the code execution is still sandboxed. Any app that uses electron can download a zipped bundle of code and run it as well. Also any app with a built-in web browser is allowed to do this
But you can also just look at Bloons TD 6 and their “downloading new content” windows when the game starts.
Let’s also look at the comment from the reddit thread you originally linked.
Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
Yeah that’s pretty normal, even javascript can get that just to render a page. I don’t like that it’s normal, but none-the-less
Other apps you have installed (I’ve even seen some I’ve deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
Yeah this is normal too, and imo a huge issue. On windows there’s even an unprotected API for it. Again, I don’t like it, but it is normal.
Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
Sketchy as hell, I agree, but every app you give local network access to does the same, so we should ban Messenger too.
Whether or not you’re rooted/jailbroken
Every banking app and Pokemon Go do this. This one can be very dangerous if you’re jailbroken.
Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
Normal for social media. Shitty, but normal. We should just ban this feature
They set up a local proxy server on your device for “transcoding media”, but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication
As does Adobe Premier Pro and Final Cut. Sketchy again, but maybe we should just ban proxying without notifying the user.
Edit: The source your reddit source gave is agreeing with me. https://www.zimperium.com/blog/zimperium-analyzes-tiktoks-security-and-privacy-risks/
Over the last few months, we’ve analyzed top banking apps and top travel apps, related to security and privacy issues. Much like TikTok, some of the results are alarming
Their other source appears to not do anything and gets “suspected phising” warnings on firefox https://penetrum.com/research/
This is a pretty impressive amount of deflection.
“All apps on iOS are obfuscated, so it’s not important that TikTok on Android takes extra trouble to obfuscate itself in a very weird way which other Android apps generally don’t do.”
“All Windows apps work by downloading new binaries for themselves, because there’s no package management, so it’s not important that TikTok on Android takes extra trouble to bypass the package management and enable downloading custom per-user executables and running them.”
“Some apps have vulnerabilities by accident, so it’s not important that TikTok has a remote code execution vulnerability built in on purpose.”
“Apps have a security model, which by the way can be jailbroken, so it’s not important if something malicious happens within the app. Actually, forget what I said about jailbreaking.”
You haven’t actually addressed anything I said, just threw a whole bunch of words about related topics to make it sound like what I described about this particular topic is, within the scope of this topic, a normal thing. It’s not.
Ok, so Bytedance does exactly what Microsoft, Google and Apple do. Got it.
All 3 can and do run arbitrary code on their platforms. All three share your data with third parties. All three encrypt stuff in their codebase and especially google tries it’s hardest to break networking standards just to obfuscate what their code is doing.
… And two of them can be sued by the DoJ and forced into revolving compliance evals .
… if we had a non-toothless DoJ; I get it. But the ability is there.
Yep, the thing is actual malware which for some reason gets a pass from Google/Apple.
That kinda makes Apple and Google malware too IMO, I should really switch to Graphene…
Yeah it’s been over a decade since I’ve dealt with the Apple App Store. But at the time, when publishing an app, they did all of this review and analysis of your app and they did not allow downloading additional executable code IIRC. Though if you are clever enough, you can get around that.
Messenger is worse by far.
Simple. The South African has a vested interest in keeping the US extant so that he can rule it. The CCP does not share that same interest.
Lol. Capitalists don’t think beyond quarterly profits, they’ll strip out the wiring and doom the country and the planet for a quick buck.
TIL I have something in common with the CCP.
They are all a security risk
Because Zuckerberg spent a lot of money bribing Congress into this opinion. And everyone in Congress owns Facebook stock, so TikTok is a security threat to their portfolio balance.
bc china
Serious question: do you consider it worse to be tracked and profiled by a foreign government or your own?
I actually consider it way worse when my domestic country is doing it. What is a foreign country gonna do with the information on me? Very little. What can the domestic do? Quite a lot.
Goes to show how little
most peoplelaw enforcement have a fundamental understanding of the US Constitution given how popular your comment is across social media.
