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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

It would take nothing less than a from-scratch rewrite to achieve a high degree of confidence that all backdoors have been eliminated from the TikTok codebase. I hope Microsoft is up for that.

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What gives you the low degree of confidence MS engineers couldn't do a complete scan of TikTok's codebase?

I don't have confidence about scans in general against novel attacks. Scans are effective against the threat model of off-the-shelf attacks, not a threat model of highly motivated, highly-skilled attackers capable of inserting subtle defects anywhere in a giant codebase.

Funny how Americans see this. I would trust Tiktok less the second it became US owned. We think software and businesses from Russia and PRC does bad things. We know US owned does. It is mindbaffling to me how anyone could believe the risks are lower with US owned software. Snowden's leaks was a complete failure for the common American. They have learned nothing at all. Good old red scare still works way better than facts.

That the US president is essentially threatening to nationalise TikTok shows just how far the US is willing to go to preserve their absolute dominance in social media.

"National security".

Well of course it is. All American social media allows the American intelligence services to surveil just about every person on this planet.

No other nation has ever had this power.

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