Now that the Chinese owned TikTok is such a desirable app to use in the USA, the US government is blocking it in a similar fashion.
To be honest it's all quite petty.
It's all getting very Orwellian.
It can forbid government workers from using it on government-provided devices. This is sensible due to the capabilities for arbitrary code execution and the full permissions to the device the app requires of the user. Amazon has done that with their employees as well. But the US government doesn't have a Great Firewall. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't ban or block it.
Edit: Apologies. I mistook the unlikelihood of anything like this being effective as reason enough for no one (let alone the President) to make statements like this. I stand corrected.
And while it’s not clear exactly how they’d ban it, it certainly isn’t impossible. They could tell major telcos to block IP ranges. Or tell Apple and Google to pull the app. Everyone involved could just say no to the government but it’s not all that clear that they would.
Sigh. We're living in an Onion story.
Personally, I hold anything said on Twitter to be at the same level of informational trust as something said in general chat in an on-line game.
The President may think he's playing a MMORPG, but I can thankfully shut the chat window.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/10/21320196/amazon-employees...