get a vpn (that isn't proton) now people cause it'll only get worse
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Zuckerberg is behind it, just like he was when they banned it on India. Politicians get what they want by eliminating a company that doesn't support them, Meta gets more usershare in the U.S. they can control the narrative and keep their guys in place so they don't get regulated and they get more tax breaks.
Meanwhile China says no American internet sites in their country and I guess that’s ok for some reason.
In other words, the US government exists solely to serve its wealthiest constituents.
They are going to ban themselves as protest for banning them..?
It was either this or self immolation
Essentially yea, the laws enforcement mechanism as-is is just having the app delisted from app stores
Everything else is of TikToks own doing
And that’s all it should be. Currently, the US government does not have the facilities to block traffic to specific websites or IP addresses on a country-wide basis. We don’t have a “great firewall” the way China does, and we should keep it that way.
Yes it does? All it would take is a single piece of legislation and a couple of hours for all ISPs to block all traffic to certain IP ranges.
Sure, it doesn't prevent VPNs but it would block 95% of access. The remaining 5% can be blocked through banning VPNs and deep packet inspection, the latter of which doesn't require that much new infrastructure.
Idk why you are downvoted. They have that yes
Except banning vpns would kill the economy immediately. Pretty much every big corporation is utilizing vpns to facilitate their work from home infrastructure. Hell, often even internally. Not to mention state and federal governments also use them. Suggesting they could do that is a joke.
From what I understand, in my country OpenVPN and Wireguard work fine within the borders, but the protocols are blocked to foreign servers.
I wasn't talking about the technology behind VPNs. Every single country that "bans VPNs" still uses them commercially to some extent.
What I consider a ban on VPNs is a ban on commercial B2C VPN providers that do not comply with US legislation - meaning they'd allow customers to access banned sites.
Add the fact that pretty much all major payment providers happen to be US companies and I'd wager 99% of "normal" access could be blocked.
They'll just make legal carveouts for government and commercial use, and go after consumer-facing VPN providers that refuse to comply. For VPN providers based outside the US, they could delist their websites from DNS or block their IPs. They can't stop someone who's determined from finding a way, of course, but just a few simple barriers prevents most people from putting in the effort.
That many carveouts pretty much renders the entire thing pointless.
Are you seriously trying to predict the actions of the US federal government using an argument based on logic and common sense?
No, I'm trying to predict when their corporate overloads would tell them to sit the fuck down.
False, feds have taken down whole domains for violations
Actually...
I think if people in the US had the capacity for introspection and empathy we would have had a collective
are we the baddies
moment every year for the past 250y...
I completely misunderstood the ban then. If you go back and read my previous thoughts on the matter, I debated IF this was good or bad.
And my debate was, do you allow actual spy services to keep spying in your country? Or do you ban the services, and introduce a precident which could easily be used towards a government lockdown of services?
And ultimately I landed of the belief that we shouldn't ban tiktok. But that was under the assumption that it was a nationwide services ban. Not just a delisting from the app store.
Tiktok can still host the apk on their own website. Any other installations already installed on apple devices would still work. This isn't a ban. It's an app store delisting. And that's fine. That initself doesn't fly against the concepts of net neutrality. It becomes a matter of availability at that point.
And if tiktok is doing this of their own choice, then that doesn't go against net neutrality either. That's YOUR choice (if you are tiktok).
So, yeah. This small clarification really made this "debate" not much of a debate to me anymore. Ignore all previous positions I held. This issue just became simple. Fuck tiktok. Thats on them. The government didn't ban them. They delisted an app.
Childporn is illegal on any network. As well it should be. Tiktok is not illegal as a result of this "ban". That's what I thought was happening. It's not (assuming you are correct, which I have no reason to doubt).
(Edit 2: read the bill, it also bans American companies from offering hosting services to a company that is banned through the law https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text)
Arguably, if the app isn't easy to obtain then the cost of all the US-based servers would become an enormous expense. All US customer data is on its own US-based infra hosted by Oracle. Migrating all the US data elsewhere would also be an enormous expense. Server infa for 170 million Americans on an App is not gonna be cheap to keep running, esp since even if tiktok tried, the best they could do is get apk's to android users. iOS users are SOL.
Given how iOS dominates the US still and only a small portion of android users are comfortable manually installing apps from non-store locations, why would they go through the effort to stay around for a fraction of the previous user base.
Its a perfectly uneerstsndable business decision, and its one they may be making on the hopes thay the ban will get reversed shortly after its put in place. Its also perfectly understandable to not want to sell the US-based component of the App when they still operate in plenty of other countries, including China, and the sale would devalue what they retained.
(Edit: and while their web offering has improved over the years, they probably are assuming a similar drop of userbase since only so many would be willing to move their usage to a web app that is not super easy to use for capturing video or handling notifications)
Why not read it? It is a ban and no it's not a delisting
First time in years I see something not bad happen in the US
You're not looking very closely then
You got some suggestions on where to look? We're speedrunning the fall of rome over here, it's pretty much to the point that even hope is an unreasonable thing to hope for...
I meant the claim that this was somehow a good thing, and not a performative "anti-china" bill that was really about cutting out the young people's current venue for organizing against the wealthy's interests, like their criticisms of the genocide in Gaza. China will still get all that info by buying it off the hundred other apps that collect it. If they cared about the data collection, they'd have addressed all data collection.
A shutdown would be preferable than a sale of the active app and userbase to Elon no?
I'm surprised they're taking that approach rather than pushing the web version.
Yes TikTok, that’s what a ban is.
Yeah this just sounds like compliance with the media making it seem like a protest for clicks...
Just fucking do it alreadyyyyyy
Wild to me how much people here are celebrating the App ban.
I get that this is the fediverse and the goal is decentralized social media, but this ban also means thousands of small businesses will lose a primary or secondary source of income that they can't just replacewuickly, tons of people will lose access to methods of communication that would otherwise be censored on US platforms, and it eliminates a platform that has excelled at breaking down governments placed barriers of communication between different groups (which is something the fediverse does well, too)
Celebrating this is rather selfish and anti-free speech.
Its a platform that was secretly suppressing people for being disabled, black, queer or ugly. Cheering it's death is reasonable, defending it on the grounds that people will have to advertise somewhere else really isn't.
I think most people on here would agree that TikTok is a shitty app, but you can't deny that just deciding to ban something in the manner they're doing with this bill is shady. The bill is very obviously targeted towards TikTok but is worded in a way that it can be used on any software owned by a "Foreign Adversary" as defined by the government.
It's proposed in the frame of national security with concerns of data collection being sent to China, but if that's the case there are far worse offenders of that violation of privacy than TikTok! Most large tech companies collect data from their users and sell it overseas. They may not sell directly to China but the amount of data collected is insane and once it is out of the hands of Meta or Google or whoever, it becomes hard to know for certain where it ends up.
The point I'm trying to make is that if the real concern is national security, their focus should be on regulating data collection instead of banning a singular app which collects the same data every other app in the world does. I don't defend TikTok, I couldn't care less if it was gone, but the grounds on which it is being banned are concerning and somewhat contradictory.
If I have been misinformed of any of this please let me know, this is just what I've gathered from reading sections of the bill myself and from the court hearings.
Disabled, black, queer, ugly (which is subjective but whatever) seemed quite unsuppressed on tiktok to my perception and the perceptions of many in those spaces... I'm sure there are exceptions due to the large sample size.
I fit several of those categories and have been immersed in those spaces on tiktok for a long time and the opinion has always trended to it being far superior for discussing and being in those groups than Instagram or YouTube. Especially for disabled and queer groups, tiktok was always the bigger audience.
defending it on the grounds that people will have to advertise somewhere else really isn't.
Shop is a lot more than advertising. Much closer to pre-enshittified etsy, and there's a reason a lot of small businesses formed around it instead of instagram. Tiktok would actually allow those products to be shown to people rather than supressed in favor of corporations.
Still time to send them on some luxury vacations, I hear they like those!
Can you order ~~an RV~~ a motor coach from Temu?
Hoping they shut down and open source their algorithm. They already released part of it on github, apparently, but I haven't had a chance to look at it. Would like it if I could somehow use it for a personal Loops server in the future.
That looks to be 2 years old. It’s probably much different than the current one
“They” say they are banning it over national security concerns I think it’s deeper then that. They can’t have a socialist like platform having an audience. Which in my opinion is why they wanted to force a sell or just ban Tiktok.
I don’t think, that they will go after Rednote if it doesn’t gain popularity the way that Tiktok did.
“They” say they are banning it over national security concerns I think it’s deeper then that. They can’t have a socialist like platform having an audience. Which in my opinion is why they wanted to force a sell or just ban Tiktok.
I don’t think, that they will go after Rednote if it doesn’t gain popularity the way that Tiktok did.