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Comment by atwood22 | Hacker News Reader

There are two issues:

1) Data collection and algorithmic manipulation. This has been discussed to death, but why you'd let an adversary control the information flow to a huge portion of the population is beyond me. This is obviously a national security issue.

2) Fairness in the marketplace. No, I'm not talking about the U.S. marketplace. U.S. tech companies have had their IP stolen and unfair regulations placed on them in China. Why should the U.S. let Chinese tech companies compete in the U.S. marketplace when China doesn't let U.S tech companies compete in their marketplace?

I'm not going to feel pity for TikTok.

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> Data collection and algorithmic manipulation. This has been discussed to death, but why you'd let an adversary control the information flow to a huge portion of the population is beyond me. This is obviously a national security issue.

I understand your concern, I honestly do, but Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU, put measures in place to curtail the amount of data collection that happens by US firms (you even made that complaint about China yourself). At least in the EU we're not advocating the complete removal of access to foreign social networks. And that's the real crux of the issue here. You want a borderless internet but only when it's US companies in control. And you don't want government intervention just so long as it's only US companies abusing their position. From an outsider looking in, it all looks a little hypocritical. Which is why I Personally feel the EU approach is a lot smarter: allow other nations to operate equally but put legislation in place to protect consumer rights.

Which Americans are crying foul? I don’t think many everyday people really care about how the EU regulates tech companies. Ask your parents how they feel, or the bartender next time you’re out.

Also the US isn’t an adversary, so it’s different. The stakes are different.

The main issue with the EU approach is that they only view surface level compliance.

> Which Americans are crying foul?

On this website, many of those with FAANG in their financial portfolio or on their CV. More generally? Virtually nobody.

There are plenty of anti-GDPR comments any time the subject comes up. Whether they’re FAANG shills or not, they’re numerous and obviously American.

It would be interesting to know what their position is when the shoe is on the other foot.

Let me know when the EU stops extract bullshit tolls from US tech companies via fines.

I don't think Americans would have the same complaints about national security for the EU, nor do Americans have the same level of concern with regards to market fairness in the EU. American relations with China is very different from the EU.

Also, I'm not sure the public at large cares much about the competitiveness concerns that big tech companies have with the EU. It's not really a story in the sphere of public conversation.

Yes, good for the EU. It's good to approach new problems with new solutions. Americans worship a decrepit ~250 year old document that was never meant to last that long, and will be left behind because of it.

Please no more internet laws from the EU. At least that 250 year old document doesn't require us to click a cookie popup on every site visit.

GDPR isn’t the only set of data privacy laws in the world.

On top of that, many companies are doing a fantastic job at procuring PII through these consent notices. Some of them are downright predatory and give hundreds of companies around the world a mandate to process, store, enrich and sell your private information, including but not limited to things you buy anywhere offline or online, your web history, your location history, your health records, all your social media posts, all your instant messages, everything you’ve ever typed on any of your phones or other mobile devices (except laptops — maybe), and of course any leaked information about you that may be gathered or bought online.

All with a single click, in effect permanently.

The cookie popups are caused by lazy companies who choose not to comply with the law. It's not caused by the EU.

No, it’s absolutely caused by the EU. What you’re seeing, as many have seen in the past, is idealistic laws meeting reality

Lazy companies wouldn’t bother putting a pop up.

> and will be left behind because of it.

EU vs US GDP growth over the past 15 years, and in fact vs most countries, would strongly suggest Europe is being left behind due to overregulation during an aging crisis.

But hey, why argue in the internet. Let’s let things play out and see where the cards fall

That sounds like great reason to not give healthcare to all, kick money out of politics, limit politician's reach etc. etc.

If you give healthcare to all, but the economic burden is too much for your weak economy to support, then your people might be worse off than they would be living in a strong economy but having to buy their own healthcare.

The richest country in the world (ie. USA) have the worst healthcare metrics due to private healthcare (poorer country that have universal healthcare like Italy, have far better metrics). So I suppose it's better to be poor but healty, then dead.

Metrics that take into account cost can sometimes be misleading, because you have to consider more philosophical points like whether a lower or higher cost is actually better?

Remember that from the countrywide economic perspective, most of the cost of healthcare stays within the country, so the cost of healthcare really is just a wealth redistribution effort. Free healthcare means 'redistribute very little wealth from the sick to the healthy' while expensive healthcare means 'redistribute lots of wealth from the sick to the healthy'. Social support schemes like sick pay or disability allowance are doing the reverse.

Countries already have millions of ways of moving wealth from or to people - and schemes like income tax or sales tax tend to be an even bigger dollar amount of wealth redistributed than healthcare costs.

It isn't obvious that there is an 'ideal' number, and comparing some metric like "years of life per dollar spent on healthcare" might therefore be meaningless.

Most standard bodies have published reports confirming that universal healthcare is cheaper for the economy rather than privatized healthcare. Yes, there are less profits for private businesses in universal healthcare and some vested interests will keep representing that angle (with or without a veil).

That decrepit document has at least partly enabled the US to eclipse and be the defender of Europe in past century. I wouldn't be so dismissive.

I'd say it's the oceans that have done that? The document didn't make it so that the US doesn't have continental military competitors

That would explain Canada’s and Mexico’s dominance.

> Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU, put measures in place to curtail the amount of data collection that happens by US firms

Who complains? FAANG shills? I haven't heard anybody outside of this site complain about such a thing.

Privacy nhilists, mostly. If Facebook has all my data, and I want to keep using Gacebook, I'm forced into some position about their information policies. I've heard if from a lot of guilty-pleasure Tiktok users, many of who are also Facebook users.

Facebook offers a lot of flexibility in terms of data collection. Look at their privacy settings. They’ve gotten really good.

True most people will go with the default. But you have lots of sat, especially compared Reddit.

Google is good about this too.

Saying Facebook and Google are good at privacy now is like saying fast food has better nutrition in recent years.

Meanwhile in countries that actually care a lot about privacy with good historical reason, like Germany, have no problem using open source and self hosted services whenever possible, especially at the state level.

Are you saying the services like Mastadon have widespread adoption in Germany?

Mastodon seems to have a dramatically higher European userbase than US. That much seems clear from my time on it.

Also the German government, French government and others are using open chat systems like Matrix and favoring open source privacy respecting office and documents systems, forgoing giving the US government controlled FAANG companies, who happily have the CIA/NSA as customers, too much control of their internal affairs.

My favorite evidence of the radically different culture is going to hacker conferences.

Go to Defcon and everyone has a stock Chromebook or a Macbook. The Privacy Village asks everyone to accept the ToS of Discord, Twitch, and Google to participate. It would be a funny joke if it were not so sad.

Meanwhile at CCC in Germany... you are hard pressed to find anything proprietary at all from running the conference to the tools of choice of those that attend it. Germans remember well the cost of giving too much control of information to a central party. They have no problem making some UX tradeoffs to have freedom.

Politicians, diplomats and legislators, as that affects USA economy.

It depends on which social media you use but reddit and twitter both have such comments. But of course it also depends on whom you're following/which subreddit you're in.

Authentic comments? Both platforms are stuffed with bots used for manufacturing consent. You can't take anything you read there at face value.

What is a consent manufacturing bot?

Right, yes nobody on HN ever complains about GDPR. Sure thing.

In the beginning a lot of people were concerned about GDPR, because it could open any US business with a website up to liability. FAANG has lawyers to deal with this, but a small business or startup does not. But, I think those fears have calmed down.

It's just yet another step towards a two-tiered society. Those laws are in place and will be selectively enforced as the burden is too high for government departments to proactively monitor / investigate. The small companies least equipped to fight a lawsuit / investigation / fine are more vulnerable than the large companies that have their own lawyers.

Yeah, this isn't something most people even have on their minds. The only complaints I typically see are about all the dumb cookie banners on websites. In terms of the actual protections themselves the only opinions I've encountered are either near total ignorance of the subject or envy that the EU has at least something protecting them while here it's a free for all on your data.

Really? You haven't seen the countless people decrying how confusing and hard GDPR is to implement?

> I understand your concern, I honestly do, but Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU

Even if this statement is true(likely isn't based on the support at least seen online), aren't you supporting the GP? If EU blocks data transfer to US, US would cry and not EU. It is a positive outcome for EU. Similarly, here China could cry and it would be no harm to US.

The problem though, is that that kind of thing doesn't solve problems like those with Reddit and Twitter-- bots, algorithmic manipulation as you mention, hand-picked moderators for critical subforums, or just generally hand-picked moderators can be a tremendous tool for political manipulation.

I've heard the unsubstantiated claim that /r/india is covertly run by Pakistanis, which of course, would be a pretty big problem considering the relations between those countries-- but whether or not it's true it's a claim that people can make because it's entirely possible for it to in fact be the case.

The problem is that solutions that are in accordance with security needs would interfere with free speech. I see the only path where both free speech and security needs are maintained as some kind of genuinely distributed social network with no central control facilities.

> I see the only path where both free speech and security needs are maintained as some kind of genuinely distributed social network with no central control facilities.

You need some central control, otherwise the malicious take over. There are all sorts of malicious behavior that need to be dealt with: spammers, libelers, disinformation spreaders, hackers. You can't expect to offload the responsibility of neutralizing all of that to the users. (We already do enough of that with our centralized networks) The only thing users seem to be able to do is identify out-groups and segment themselves into echo chambers.

I'm not thinking of you specifically when I say that I don't understand the fetishization of lawlessness among the tech crowd. You see that with anonymity too: perfectly anonymous systems also give the attackers an advantage. You can go too far in the other direction too though. Nobody wants some bureaucrat approving everything and giving advantage to the well-connected or persecuting based on the opinions expressed.

I just wish more thought went into thinking of what rules we actually want than continuously rediscovering why we had rules in the first place.

>>>>You can't expect to offload the responsibility of neutralizing all of that to the users.

You dont need to neutralize all. Just enough.

Our system of jury by peers seems to work incredibly well. There is no reason why big tech cant implement a big system at scale to rely on users to police itself, except of course they would lose control themselves.

What is malicious/spam/libel/problem du jour?

Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about obscene:

"I know it when I see it."

A jury is capped at 12 plus some alternates. A script kiddie can spin up hundreds or thousands of "users" overnight and quickly the spammers/bad actors ARE the police.

  There is no reason why big tech cant implement a big system at scale to rely on users to police itself, except of course they would lose control themselves.

Web3 and crypto already exist and HN overwhelmingly hates them. This is like crocodile tears.

> I don't understand the fetishization of lawlessness among the tech crowd

I think most people just want technology to work for them instead of being used to constrain them. When technology doesn't do what we tell it to, and restrictions are put on us artificially that power often ends up getting abused, we become vulnerable to threats and issues we're not allowed to see or address, opportunities for research and development go away, etc.

When it comes to the internet some of it is simply practical. Laws don't fix much because no government can force other nations to comply. Attempts to restrict the freedoms of "bad people" also impact everyone else on the internet and "make the internet less useful and less powerful for everyone" is a hard sell.

That said, very few people want lawlessness either. We want ISPs to keep their networks from causing problems for the rest of us. We want them to take internet abuse issues seriously and things like BGP hijacking are very much frowned upon. When networks routinely misbehave we even build and share blacklists to exile them from our global community.

> perfectly anonymous systems also give the attackers an advantage.

Again, you can't restrict the anonymity of attackers without hurting every single user in the process. Putting everyone at risk and causing people to fall silent out of fear just to make things marginally more difficult for attackers doesn't make a lot of sense. That said, I've yet to see a perfectly anonymous system, if one did exist, I'm pretty sure we could choose to opt out of using it.

All good points. I think we have a lot of common ground.

> I think most people just want technology to work for them instead of being used to constrain them.

People don't want constraints on them, sure, but they also don't want others to be unconstrained. "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins." There's a balancing act. A system that is fully unconstrained is one that nobody will want to use, and/or facilitates behavior that is rightfully illegal.

Let's take the spammer for instance. The opposite is true: people are perfectly happy to have technology and/or laws constrain the spammer. Those constraints on others is how the system works for them!

> Laws don't fix much because no government can force other nations to comply.

But also

> When networks routinely misbehave we even build and share blacklists to exile them from our global community.

Even if laws aren't being drafted by a government, they still happen organically. In this case, the ISP is acting as the government. A system where blacklisting can't happen isn't one that users will benefit from.

Maybe it'd help if we started thinking of laws as another piece of technology. They're imperfect but serve a useful purpose.

The way I see it, central control allows malicious takeover.

Spammers are certainly a problem, but they are generally controlled by distributed moderation, rather than by centralized moderation. Furthermore, I believe that it is more interesting to know who moderates what how, in order to deal with hostile meta-filtering. Libelers I don't see as a problem. If it is interesting libel, what concern is it to me that it is libel?

Disinformation spreaders can't be controlled by a centralized mechanism. Whoever wants to spread important disinformation will acquire control of these mechanisms, and will be willing spend a great deal of money to do so. This in fact the primarily problem I see distributed forums as addressing, and the most important problem.

The most important thing is that no one can spread his view without everyone having the ability to contradict him, even the most important and highly person should not be able to so.

This is not a view that places hope in lawlessness. It is a view which places hope in order, and an order belonging to ordinary people and not to centralized institutions.

Just to set things straight: central control doesn't have to mean that there is only one authority. We'd say that Twitter and Facebook both exercize central control today for example.

Re "central control allows malicious takeover.": Decentralized or no control also allows for malicious takeover. Bad actors are a force that has to be actively pushed back on, and individual users shouldn't have to, don't want to, and don't have the capacity to do that on their own. It's a specialized skill that the average person doesn't have. They can do it to a limited extent, sure, (I like this post!) but do you expect your users to do the research to detect the meta patterns being used by attackers? To look at horrifying images? How would you grant them the authority to do something about it while restricting that power from the attackers? How do you give them the detailed information that they'd need to assist them in their quest while also preserving users' privacy?

You could probably stop reading there and get the point of this comment.

Every time you go into your email inbox, do you want the responsibility for training your mail filters? When some new type of fraud starts happening, it'll be up to you to catch it on day 1. I'm sure that you want to offload that responsibility to some central system that can react to threats like that across all its users at once, and that has people paid to do so. Maybe I'm missing something -- what is the distributed moderation system that is generally used, and how is it goverened?

Re: Libel, sure, you might not care that something is libel when you're reading about someone else. What about when someone else is saying false things about you? What if they have a bigger platform than you and you start experiencing real-life consequences from something that you can prove is false but you don't have the ability to get the word out? If you want it stopped in that case, then it's a classic case of "rules for thee but not for me".

Disinformation definitely can be controlled by a centralized mechanism. Twitter, Facebook, and others have blocked disinformation networks. Are you saying that it can't be blocked 100%? I don't think that's a useful point to make, unless you have an example of a system that would be capable of blocking 100% of disinformation. I don't see what decentralization changes in the face of attackers willing to spend a great deal of money to get their way, only that in the decentralized system, the targets are weaker.

re: "The most important thing is that no one can spread his view without everyone having the ability to contradict him, even the most important and highly person should not be able to so." I don't know what the argument is here. Chinese-style censorship is wrong, yes. Other centralized systems don't have that problem though, so let's go with them instead. Decentralized systems have a similar problem: if enough users (and they might be malicious) don't want to hear what you're saying, what is the mechanism for getting your message out? If you're showing messages that your users don't want to see, how do you pick?

> I've heard the unsubstantiated claim that /r/india is covertly run by Pakistanis, which of course, would be a pretty big problem considering the relations between those countries-

Assuming that it's actually true (and that's a huge assumption since pretty much everyone with an unpopular opinion makes those kinds of accusations), is it really a big problem? The reddit solution would be for someone to create a new subreddit (/r/TrueIndia?) with more diverse moderators or at the very least a moderation style less likely to invite the accusation. Repeat as often as necessary until you get the community that you want. Name recognition/discoverability is a bit of a problem, but not an insurmountable one. There are thriving communities with names that have almost nothing to do with the topic (/trees being a perfect example).

When it comes to reddit at least, the biggest problem is the admins. They've demonstrated a willingness to ban things they don't like, their ban process is not transparent, and there's zero oversight or veto power in the hands of the users. If reddit admins target your message or your community you're only option is to rehome at a new site.

The issue there would be about the information on an “official” subreddit being shaped by a hostile country, or loyal members of a hostile country. The public perceives certain subreddit names as being “of record” and subscriber numbers tend to reflect that. I’m not from either country.

Subreddits with ideal names got an early advantage which helps boost the subscriber count, especially because reddit's search has always been terrible. Like I said, discoverability is tricky and not every subreddit that tries to fork off from a popular one is successful, but if people think that /r/india is more "official" than /r/india2 or even /r/india4204eva it's because they don't understand how reddit works.

The closest thing reddit had to official public subreddits were the defaults. For just about everything else it was 'first come first serve' to get a good subreddit name and then you're still at the whims of the current moderation team. People have the option to take over subreddits and change the culture through mod replacement, convincing the admins to give it them, or by brigading.

I think reddit could do a better job letting people know that the subreddits with the most obvious name aren't necessarily the most active, the most fairly moderated, or the highest quality. Even better, I think they should go back to having defaults and letting the community choose who gets them with a means to vote to put them under new management so that people can put more faith in a documented subset of subreddit names.

You identified the issue in the first paragraph, which is that the public doesn't understand how reddit works so the default named subs have that advantage, which in the case of nationally-oriented subs makes some members nervous about the moderation team.

I participate in reddit and appreciate the endless forking of True____ communities to preserve discussion quality, but it's a different issue.

Yes, it would be a very severe problem.

Imagine if a major American newspaper, let's say the New York Times, was secretly run by Russia for example. I'd go as far as to say that if the India subreddit were run by Pakistanis, then it might even be a more severe problem than if the NYT was secretly run by Russia.

> I understand your concern, I honestly do, but Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU, put measures in place to curtail the amount of data collection that happens by US firms (you even made that complaint about China yourself).

What? Why do you think American people care that Europeans have better digital privacy laws? And why do you think that those that do care are angry at Europe??

EU has much more concerns about China than about the US fyi.

Where do you get your information? This is not even remotely close to being a true statement.

The average European doesn't know what Taiwan is, where Taiwan is, and couldn't care less if China invaded it, as long as they keep buying expensive German cars and luxury French handbags.

The EU has no interest or capability to do anything in China except make more money. To bring my point home, no EU country even has a navy capable of doing anything in the pacific without extreme US support.

US is the only country in the world that cares or has any chance of keeping China in check. It will be a success if EU nations can prevent the EU from collapsing and try not to insult and backstab the US all the time, just like most Europeans are currently trying to do to Ukraine, because Russian gas & oil is more important to them than Ukrainian lives.

There's some truth for you.

> The average European doesn't know what Taiwan is, where Taiwan is, and couldn't care less if China invaded it, as long as they keep buying expensive German cars and luxury French handbags.

How many Europeans have you met personally? Just trying to figure out the sample size for your ”average”, lol.

Your comment reads like Russian jealousy. Russians really like expensive German cars and luxury French handbags… :)

I'm European ( belgium ) fyi.

Not really sure what you're rambling about.

no offence, I am sure that there are people in EU who don't know what Taiwan is, where Taiwan is, but they are a minority.

> Americans are always the first to cry foul

Perhaps an unjust over-generalisation?

>Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU, put measures in place to curtail the amount of data collection that happens by US firms

I think Americans cry foul at how feckless the regulations are. Is forcing me to accept cookies really making my life better or the Internet worse?

Given that the regulations don’t require that, it’s mostly that companies that choose to do it are making the internet worse because they believe they have the right to harvest personal information.

I think you're missing the point - this is about 'adversaries' not 'foreign.'

I do see risk with the algorithm being manipulated in the future, but right now it seems like I have the most personal control over the Tiktok feed than any other social media app.

If I click the not interested button, it stops sending me videos of content similar to that. Youtube, Facebook, Google News, and Twitter all seem to ignore me when I click their equivalent buttons. I have been attempting for years to get Google News to stop showing me Meghan Markle drama, and have blocked half of the news outlets in the UK.

The videos are attached to the sounds used in them.

Anyone can literally stick a totally false political statement or whatever they want over "OhNo" by Creeper and it's highly likely to trend. It's also why the song OhNo, and many variations of it played so often on the platform. There is always a limited and interchangeable pool of songs designated by the platforms to trend, in order to make the ruse less obvious. The designated sounds can also be muted so that uploaded video sound can only be heard as well, but plays of the original sound still get the royalties.

On the back-end of that, Creeper makes royalties from each stream, and gives a cut to sponsors and TikTok... Literally millions of dollars each day are generated by any associated video plays... The entire music industry is looted by this too.

This is the BS involved with the algorithm on TikTok, it's not mostly AI driven recommendations, it's driven by a pre-designated sounds that make a lot of money because of royalty plays. TikTok gains popularity and money each time these trending sounds play picks the songs that trend. Other musicians, thinking they have a chance (without being endorsed by the platform) struggle fruitlessly to get their sounds to trend, but undercover they can't because they are not aligned with the right brand partnerships that lobby TikTok and pay heavily for advertising.

It's primarily not the algorithm in charge based on my observations as a developer, and the idea of content "choice" on TikTok is mostly a fallacy, though taxonomy does play a minor role in the mix, user accounts also manipulate their taxonomy to insert their content regularly into your feed.

> The designated sounds can also be muted so that uploaded video sound can only be heard as well, but plays of the original sound still get the royalties.

I'm not sure I'm parsing this correctly: Is the implication here that TikTok is using popular music in a similar manner to a scrambler [1], allowing them to descramble and extract a "clean" version of whatever was recorded from the user's environment? If so, it's not clear to what purpose, and how that ties in to nefarious royalty games.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrambler

No, you make a video with your own audio but when preparing it for publish, you add a popular audio track and set its volume to zero. This means your video will be associated with the track and may show in more feeds or searches and royalties will still be paid even though no one heard the track.

This seems very much like a tangential side rant but I one hundred percent agree with you. I was even thinking of writing an extension to block any links and mentions of the royal family. I'm British and I can't stand the amount of media coverage they get.

> Why should the U.S. let Chinese tech companies compete in the U.S. marketplace when China doesn't let U.S tech companies compete in their marketplace?

That is a point that very few people grasp. I've found that it's a bit easier to explain how the policies impact the technical side. You can extrapolate other facets from there (say, sales, for which I don't have direct expertise, although from what I hear, it's worse).

Let's say you want to sell stuff over there. Given that it's 2022, maybe you want a website to go with that? Possibly using some AWS services?

Ok let's do this.

Maybe you just want to translate your stuff and continue hosting from the US(or anywhere else really). Well, even if the traffic was allowed(it probably will be, at least initially), the firewall will make the experience miserable (ranges wildly, down to single digit bytes per second). The first request to anywhere is usually blocked. Geographical distance doesn't matter. Cross the border and the experience is terrible. So, that's not really an option. You really need to host from there.

First of all, your website needs a license. Even if all it says is "coming soon". Doesn't matter. Port 80(and 443) will be blocked until you get your ICP license. If you check wikipedia it talks about a 'grace period'. I'm not sure that is accurate. Traffic is usually blocked by providers regardless.

As a foreign company, you can't get one. You will need boots on the ground. And a lot of documentation. You cannot have non-Chinese DNS servers pointing to IPs in China. Yes this is scanned for and flagged and you better fix it otherwise you can lose your license. No it does not matter that these are automation/internal use domains.

This license thing takes at least a month in a happy day scenario. Potentially more.

You also need your 'AWS' account. It's in quotes because it's not really AWS. And no, it's not like "Amazon", the parent company, has an overseas "branch" or "affiliate" which, even though it's registered locally with the host country, it is effectively also Amazon and controlled by Amazon. No. The Beijing region is operated by Sinnet, Nginxia is operated by NWCDD. They are not Amazon, they are third parties. One wonders why Amazon went that route, since it seems suboptimal.

The process to get this account may take months.

Once you get your account, _you do not get the root credentials_. Those companies have it. They will tell you "there's no root user concept". That's not true(even though this is in the documentation now!). It's still basically the same AWS software, it has a root account. But they hold it, then use it to create an IAM user for you, and hand off that one to you instead. Over email.

Ok you have signed off on all those things. Now let's import some AMIs like we do everywhere else on the planet and start the services? No, you cannot do that. AWS China is a different 'partition'. Just like GovCloud. So they cannot be transferred. Same goes for just about everything else. Even S3 buckets. The one silver lining is that you can reuse the same bucket names. So let's just rebuild those images right? Well, remember the firewall thing? It's going to hit you here too. You will be using unbearably slow links that barely compete with dialup _unless_ everything you need is already mirrored over there.

Containers for the rescue. Or not? Your k8s cluster takes 5 minutes to download all containers in the US? It's going to take hours or days for you. Assuming it's not blocked - I hope none of your stuff uses gcr.io, for example (like K8s own components like to do). If they do, better mirror everything.

Money can help some of these link issues. You can pay companies to get around the firewall(but not around the regulations – if a destination is blocked it will stay blocked). If you do so, you will also have to provide a list of IPs that you will be talking to and what their purpose is. They will be vetted. If you have anything serious there, go that route(but be prepared to pay 5 digits for a link that's slower than your average Comcast business DSL).

"AWS" to AWS connections also seem to have some special rules, because the bandwidth is consistently better(not amazing, but better). So maybe setup your command and control that way. Can't do that via IPSEC tunnels though, that's not allowed. Unless done by "approved" vendors, to approved destinations. If try to do that by yourself, you risk your services getting shutdown, if not your entire account. SSH may or may not work.

Some of that affects local companies too (they all have to get the ICP thing) and can be, charitably, be blamed on excessive bureaucracy. Some of that may be due to decisions made specifically by AWS. But not everything can be explained that way.

And all you wanted to do was to setup a website.

Wow. Comment of the week. What the hell do you do to know all this?

If you go through the process of standing up assets in AWS China regions and using them, you will run into everything the OP has stated: local affiliate, ICP license, GFW, constrained bandwidth, IP escrow agreements, etc.

Anyone who has had to do business in China will be familiar to one degree or another. When I worked anti-piracy, we had to secretly operate in-country servers to track video websites and certain bit-torrent traffic originating there.

Getting everything stood up, and staying functional was a truly abysmal experience.

> You cannot have non-Chinese DNS servers pointing to IPs in China.

Does this mean one can harass companies one doesn't like by pointing DNS entries at them?

I’d assume so. How would one discover their IPs? Also, I wonder if there are technical countermeasures, similar to how sites like Reddit and HN can detect upvote rings.

> This is obviously a national security issue.

Yes, living in a country with free speech is a national security issue. This should be obvious to a child. It's one of the tradeoffs of freedom of speech. Sometimes, people will use it to lie.

Sometimes, malicious foreign actors will use that freedom against it. But here's the problem. Sometimes, malicious domestic actors will use that freedom against it.

If we're going to pick and choose who gets to be the gatekeepers of information, why are you only singling out malicious foreign actors? There's no shortage of malicious domestic actors.

You can't say that you have freedom of speech, if you're not allowing speech that doesn't serve the interests of the state.

Because the scale (resources) of the foreign actor, combined with the reality that they are competing in what they perceive as a no rules zero sum game, make for an exceptional situation.

I don’t read the first amendment as protecting the propaganda of hostile foreign state actors. Do you?

I believe a tax paying citizen has the right to expect our government protect their speech. I don’t extend that right to the PRC army intelligence branch.

If the scale of influence is the problem, the same restrictions should be applied to billionaires or corporations pushing paid speech.

> I believe a tax paying citizen has the right to expect our government protect their speech. I don’t extend that right to the PRC army intelligence branch.

Is there anyone else who shouldn't expect this protection? Fifth columnists (however you define them)? Immigrants? Criminals? Permanent residents? Visitors? Non-tax-payers? Bad people in general? Corporations? Traitors, wreckers, and saboteurs?

These same arguments are the fig leaf used in modern day Russia, to justify its crackdown on speech. The people saying bad speech are subjects of foreign powers acting against the interests of the nation, etc, etc.

> 2) Fairness in the marketplace. No, I'm not talking about the U.S. marketplace. U.S. tech companies have had their IP stolen and unfair regulations placed on them in China. Why should the U.S. let Chinese tech companies compete in the U.S. marketplace when China doesn't let U.S tech companies compete in their marketplace?

The lack of regulatory reciprocity has always bugged me about US economic policy: e.g. if it is unlawful to pay a worker less than 7.50$/hr then shouldn't it be unlawful to import goods made by someone making less than that? Ditto for environmental regulations, privacy requirements, etc.

>let an adversary control the information flow to a huge portion of the population

It is mind-numbing that we made it this far without very serious consideration of this point. I've frankly just never understood it, especially given what we know about the power of algorithms to define reality at scale.

I do believe it is because of e.g. Twitters TPP program and other programs that allow the US govt to exert control over "our" social networks.

>Twitters TPP program

That returns absolutely nothing when searched for yet seems intriguing. Please elaborate.

Conversely the EU needs to ban the FAANG companies

Absolutely. Any country that doesn't ban foreign social media is behaving foolishly. This is true whether it's American social media in Europe, Chinese social media in America, or American social media in China (actually, they're ahead of the curve in this regard.)

I'm not naive with regard to even friendly nations jockeying for control of the information space.

But there is something uniquely irresponsible about letting foreign adversaries run algorithms on your populace.

The EU is partially reining in the abuses of those companies (and more should be done), but this shouldn't be equated to TikTok and what China is doing.

FAANGs aren't state-controlled and Europeans do have access to the American market.

Personally I think whether something is state controlled or not matters less and less the larger corporations get. At the end of the day it still comes down to a large power imbalance between these entities and average consumers and citizens.

> Personally I think whether something is state controlled or not matters less and less the larger corporations get.

Except in China where the CCP (the only party that can control the government) has seats on the governance boards of every large company or outright owns others. Companies only exist there with the approval of the CCP (the government). There's no court in China that can overrule the CCP's leadership so effectively the CCP is the final arbiter of what is legal or not.

The US government doesn't sit on the board of Apple or Google. If Apple sued the government over something they could actually win their case and the government would be bound by the court's decision and both parties could appeal that decision.

I'm not saying the system in the US or EU is perfect but it is a very far cry from the system in China. Large companies are literally state controlled no matter how big they are.

And as an average citizen, how does that change anything to me? Whether some government stooge or some corporate stooge tells me to go fuck myself, it makes not one bit of difference in the end. Both are far too powerful for me to fight and take on. Especially when government policy is mostly decided by corporate money these days anyways.

FAANGS took part in illegal surveillance programmes in the past and they are required to share data with the american government. It doesn't make any difference if they're state owned or not, their complicit.

> FAANGs aren't state-controlled and Europeans do have access to the American market.

When it comes to war-related issues they might as well be controlled by the US Government, the "private entity" thing is just a cover. Yes, in essence, Putin was right a few years ago when he said something like "the Internet is a CIA project".

I think the CLOUD Acts essentially make them proxies of the state.

FAANGs are more powerful than state-controlled in many cases. They can change politicians, change economics easily.

I could see an argument for social media co's but Apple? Why?

Tax evasion? Not made in the EU? Not made within EU human rights standards?

On the first point, EU courts overturned the ruling on the landmark apple tax decision (that said, I also agree the global tax system is awful and favors bigco's). What phone is made in the EU? When I lived there the most popular devices were Apple and a variety of Chinese and Korean brands, none of which were produced in the EU. Which are made within EU human rights standards? I've never heard this claim before about Apple products.

As a US business, they are required by law to share any data they have with the us governement. They were also part of PRISM so they have 0 credibility about protecting EU citizens' data.

What law are you referring to? I'm pretty sure no such law exists. The US government can't request any data as they please. EU governments can and do request data as well since US companies operate in EU countries.

It's the CLOUD ACT. An EU entity's data stored in the EU can be requested without going through an EU court, which is insane.

> It is mind-numbing that we made it this far without very serious consideration of this point.

Simple: because no one want(s/ed) to piss off China too much.

Effectively, the West has been at war with Russia and China for years now. Industrial espionage, rampant IP theft, frauds and forgery in supply chains that yield no intervention by the Chinese government, cyber attacks by actors at least supported if not outright financed and ordered by the governments, holding people hostage [1], undermining of democracy by financing and supporting far-right and separatist movements, undermining of free speech by extortion [2] or by threat campaigns [3], threatening and following through with sanctions on anyone willing to support Taiwan [4], the list is long and doesn't even include the crimes both nations have committed against humanity both domestically and on foreign soil.

But since China has managed to grab up a lot of the world's cheap production and the politically extremely well connected automotive industry has their largest growing market in China, politicians have long been way too silent on even calling China (and Russia) out, much less actually punish them in return or declare the official state of war that both countries completely deserve.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58687071

[2] https://globalnews.ca/news/7734158/china-pressure-activists-...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-57647418

[4] https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1612407/latvian-mp-...

>no one want(s/ed) to piss off China too much.

Agreed. See also NBA retractions, John Cena hostage-video apology, influence on Hollywood messaging, etc.

All of these are products of companies wanting access to Chinese markets, and it's a nauseating sellout of values for profit.

Aside from Taiwan, and Xi, are there other formal restrictions to placate Chinese government?

Of course, commercial companies always need to please their customers, so that's an entirely different topic. You cannot blame the firms who avoid stereotyping Chinese people. Because the customers are going to be mad.

It's because if we start critically examining this, even from perspectives of foreign adversaries, we might also look, similarly, inwards.

Trillion dollar companies and economies exist today because of our aversion to looking inwards when it comes to information flow and privacy.

> especially given what we know about the power of algorithms to define reality at scale.

That it's a completely ineffectual bogeyman?

> Data collection and algorithmic manipulation

These to me are separate issues that should be discussed independently.

So for your post: Data Collection, Algorithmic Manipulation, and Fairness in the Marketplace

Don't complain when the rest of the world starts doing the same with American companies.

You know that other countries do just that especially China.

What are the cases of such events?

How many Google businesses operate in China?

Banned in china: Google Gmail Google Play Google Maps Google Drive Google News Facebook Facebook Messenger Instagram Twitter Reddit Tumblr Pinterest WhatsApp Snapchat Slack Viber Line Discord Telegram Signal Wikipedia Dropbox OneDrive Blogger WordPress Medium Quora BBC The New York Times The Guardian The Washington Post Daily Mail CBC (Canada) ABC (Australia) Spotify SoundCloud Amazon Music Pandora Tinder Pornhub XVideos Chaturbate Twitch PlayStation Coinbase Binance

Plus NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk) the most absurd one I've found so far.

A few high-profile examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

You can also pick one, and check with a tool like this:

https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedin...

None of these are banned. They simply choose to not operate in China, because the laws require them hand over user data. So they choose to monopolize those data themselves, which is allowed in US and so called "free" nations. Go figure how ridiculous that is.

Yes, some of those are banned. Banned means to prohibit, especially by legal means. These websites are not reachable from mainland China, so they are banned in mainland China.

Their operation wasn't suspended for a compliance reason. This article lists some of those, and their (suspected) reason for the ban:

https://www.businessinsider.com/major-us-tech-companies-bloc...

Then there are a lot of Chinese companies are banned from US market.

What's your point?

The point is there is no moral high ground in economic competition.

At least in this case, China is already doing the same and worse, some reciprocal response is decades overdue. This is barely a start.

You just made OP's point. China is already doing exactly that.

It’s not OP’s point at all. Americans want sovereignty over their own social media but gladly benefit from pushing Facebook and google dominance over the world. Big tech / Silicon Valley wouldn’t be the same if it would just be US only

It’s one way direction and it’s hypocrisy.

There exists a policy that avoids hypocrisy: reciprocity.

Treat the EU companies the way the EU treats American companies and treat Chinese companies the way China treats American companies.

China doesn't give American social media companies access to China, so we shouldn't give Chinese social media companies access to America.

The EU imposes all sorts of privacy requirements and data locality restrictions on American companies. Impose those same restrictions but only on companies from the EU.

This doesn't make much sense. At the highest level, America imports more than it exports. I struggle to look at that and call it a one way street.

It's a simple case of reciprocity. If China wants to ban American social media networks then America should obviously respond in kind.

Good. US dominance and oligopolies, at least in the tech sector, have stifled competition and innovation in the global economy. Everyone, including people in the US, would benefit from increased competition that monopolies have snuffed out for years, now.

Any company in any country that over-collects and/or misuses the personal information of its users (or anyone) should be penalized in the same way.

Where are the Americans claiming otherwise? It's perplexing to see all this shadowboxing with a made-up argument that we shouldn't hold FB to the same standard as Tiktok.

I encourage the rest of the world to do everything they can to weaken the grip of social media companies with >100M users. All companies that big, really.

Dear Europeans; Please stop threatening that and start actually doing it. Please. Americans taking these American companies down a peg seems completely intractable. Please Europeans, you are the best hope we have. Ban American tech companies!

The EU is just an American puppet though - there is no investment or support for European alternatives or FOSS projects, etc.

Huh? The EU’s GDP and population are significantly greater than the US.

And yet Europe is more or less dependent on the US for defense. That’s probably the bigger lever.

US GDP is bigger than the EU's https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

Agreed, but I will miss the unbridled level of insane people I get to watch filming themselves in short intervals throughout my week though.

There's so many good alternatives now: YouTube's shorts, Instagram's Reels, Snapchat's Spotlight

all full of videos that were first popular on TikTok a month ago

> let an adversary control the information flow to a huge portion of the population is beyond me.

Because most of the possible responses are various forms of censorship.

Wait, censorship or reduction in choices? They are different concepts with some overlap.

China has the most draconian censorship in the world: lethal censorship. Nothing like the "de-platformed" or "down-voted" censorship Americans face.

And what, you think the chinese government never censors anything in their black-box algorithmic-feed app?

Censorship is going to happen, on all platforms, no matter what. Call it "moderation" or "upvoting" or "algorithmic recommendation", doesn't matter, the censorship is there, like it or not.

Instead of knee-jerk opposition to anything that reminds you explicitly of the abstract idea of "censorship", consider instead what forms censorship can take on any particular platform and whether you trust the people with the ability to leverage those forms to use it responsibly.

> Because most of the possible responses are various forms of censorship.

I have come across some deeply misguided interpretations of the word "censorship" - this might take the cake.

I've just developed such a hatred for Facebook and Instagram at this point, really all of the US social networks, that I like TikTok out of spite. and it's fun, to me, in a way the others just aren't.

I see the national security angle, but I want Meta to burn.

But aren't users free to choose to install or not install an app? Why federal government has to make the choice for all citizens.

Moreover if the apps are not doing anything illegal what is the justification for taking such a measure.

This deserves it's own thread, but just read this piece after this thread thought it was worth chaining to this comment as relevant.

"China lured graduate jobseekers into digital espionage."

Sure all governments spy. But you can't discount the massive digital dragnet (targeting their entire own country and us as well) and huge mechanical turk of p2p spies they have built.

https://archive.ph/t2w0b

3) Protection of end-users, the owners of the data at issue, instead of treating them as pawns in a game.

This seems to be a blind spot for those who support "tech" companies.

1) TikTok is a powerful platform, but for privacy is the least offender amongst all social apps because of its nature. It doesn't have personal information from your and your social circle.

2) Didn't US just take Huawei out not only from its market, but also forced its allies to do the same? There is nothing about fairness in the marketplace, just different interests.

US wants to kill its competitor, I am fine with it. It is expected to happen, just our nature.

> IP stolen

The notion that imaginary property can be "stolen" is so ridiculous and dystopian to me. Information isn't ownable, and the assertion that it can be was dreamt up by and for lawyers. We finally invent something - The Internet - that lets information be free and available to everyone, and computers that let people share copies of thing at effectively no cost, and rent seeking lawyers go and invent some bullshit to fuck it all up by bribing congress to make it law that benefits them immensely to everyone else's net detriment.

China doesn't recognize dystopian American copyright laws. Why should they? They're not China's laws, and they're detrimental to China.

Asserting "fairness in the marketplace" and copyright infringement (and calling it theft) in the same paragraph is absurd. In a fair marketplace, copyright infringement isn't a thing, and neither is "Imaginary Property" law. And don't get me started on software patents.

That said, I also feel no pity for TikTok and I'll never install it. I don't have the facebook app either.

I wish there were no software patents, and I can even understand why someone might cheer on countries that don't respect their IP treaty commitments[0] as a sort of anarchist burn-it-down position.

But as long as IP is a thing in the world economy we shouldn't be surprised that the countries where it's protected take issue with the countries where it's not.

The original "imaginary property" is land. There are people who make the same argument against the legal fiction of "owning" a piece of the ground. I'm not sure they're wrong, but I'm happy to "own" my house (subject to the continued good graces of the government in the country in which it's located, etc, YMMV).

[0]: https://www.mfa.gov.cn/ce/cegv//eng/bjzl/t176937.htm

Stolen IP is often in the form of trade secrets.

> but why you'd let an adversary control the information flow to a huge portion of the population is beyond me.

Because the US has freedom of expression and free publishing, regardless of nationality of the publisher.

Once you start doing the same "foreigners can't publish here [and the local ones are under our influence]" nonsense that China does, it becomes indistinguishable from the adversary.

A state controlled data harvesting and algorithm propaganda machine is not the equivalent of a private market app.

You could easily even argue this doesn’t come under any first amendments rights because it’s obvious TikTok is an adversarial foreign government controlled entity.

No it's not, and even if it was, if corporations have free speech then why should being owned by an adversarial foreign government change that?

It looks like you're writing that you don't understand why adversaries and friendlies/neutrals should be treated differently.

If you can confirm that's the issue you're not understanding I can put together some examples of the typical/possible consequences of treating enemies like neutrals/friendlies.

Please let me know if that would help you.

No, what I don't understand is why foreign governments should be treated as more adversarial than domestic corporations.

Because domestic corporations agree to work under domestic law, which a country created for a reason, in the US's case pretty democratically, and those laws align with things like individual rights, tort law etc.

An app owned by a foreign government that in no way subscribes to these values gives them freedom to do a lot more shady shit that would have consequences domestically, but don't as a foreign government.

But judging form your comment you don't really see any value difference in Chinese Communist Party values (and laws) vs say Facebook's values (and laws it obeys), so perhaps there's not much to talk about. I do see a difference.

> An app owned by a foreign government that in no way subscribes to these values gives them freedom to do a lot more shady shit that would have consequences domestically, but don't as a foreign government.

If they're breaking the law then they should of course be prosecuted for that. But to argue the law should treat them differently because they're more likely to break the law by doing things that would be legal for a corporation is purely circular reasoning.

> But judging form your comment you don't really see any value difference in Chinese Communist Party values (and laws) vs say Facebook's values (and laws it obeys), so perhaps there's not much to talk about. I do see a difference.

I don't see any difference between e.g. Facebook advertising to advocate for law changes that would suit their interests vs the CCP advocating for law changes that would suit their interests. Facebook has their own values which are by no means representative of the US, and could be just as different from those of regular American citizens as the CCP's.

No, they shouldn’t be treated differently.

And if Facebook was handing data over to Chinese government officials and three letter agencies you’d be damned sure they’d be slammed over it. TikTok is doing it, and god knows what else, and again, there is no oversight.

And yes, I know facebook hands data over to the us, but that is done with oversight and warrants

So I agree with you, I just think TikTok is basically above the law right now

> And yes, I know facebook hands data over to the us, but that is done with oversight and warrants

Is it? Don't they have their own secret courts where those warrants can't be challenged? Didn't the NSA head lie to congress about what they were doing (with no consequences)? I'd bet the PRC has some kind of "oversight" when getting data from TikTok too, just not the kind where regular people can see or object - but that's no different from what the US is doing.

All people should enjoy equal protection under the law.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

FYI: these kind of patriotic comments is why we are in such a divided world.

First, if we saw China as another state that was part of the US, 1 would sound like a ridiculous claim. 2 would still be an issue, but this is why we have international regulations, trade agreements, and so on.

3rd reason: It reinforces the low attention span, quick reward impulses of the users much like twitter also does this.

I'm all for banning TikTok on that front alone. Twitter too, but good luck.

An all-American clone of an app like TikTok is not much better than TikTok itself imo, all things considered

There are deeper and farther-reaching issues here than competition between nation-states for information supremacy

Effects of regular use on cognition and attention span, data harvesting, pervasive advertising, etc

This affects humanity at large and the US particularly profoundly, as the US is friendlier to the most pernicious media business models than nearly anywhere else, and we are among the world's most addicted to new media

National sovereignty/security concerns are understandable and legitimate. This is a criticism many outside the US have been leveling at relentless American cultural export for decades

> An all-American clone of an app like TikTok is little better than the Chinese version imo

Tiktok is the all-American clone of Chinese version Douyin.

an American clone would presumably not be built by a Chinese company

> all-American clone

Except every US tech company has some Chinese personals, H-1B or not?

Suppose there is a US company that builds and runs a Tiktok alternative. Should the staff be screened by race and birth certificates to make the company "pure American"?

Can you help me understand the point you're making with regard to my original comment?

The point is what defines "all-american"? all-American funds? all-American CEOs? all-American staff?

ok, I see

maybe one relevant factor is proximity to a nation's power centers or governing bodies, i.e. a company might be judged more or less "American" or "Chinese" not on the basis of its staff's diversity but on the influence of the state in its operations and strategy

my intention wasn't at all to suggest some notion of nationalist purity, it was to emphasize the social and psychological effects of new media platforms on the human mind regardless of country of origin or affiliation

Douyin was a clone of Music.ly , an American developed app.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/09/chinas-toutiao-is-buying-m...

“American” is a granfalloon.

that's a big and messy bag of worms and given the contextual ambiguity I'm having a hard time agreeing or disagreeing with any conviction, although I do agree American identity is in many of its deployments a pretty empty concept

is there anything in particular about my comment that makes you say so?

>Why should the U.S. let Chinese tech companies compete in the U.S. marketplace when China doesn't let U.S tech companies compete in their marketplace?

The final purpose of the market is not to serve producers. It is, rather, to serve consumers through producers. You might protect U.S. companies by preventing U.S. consumers from choosing the best and cheapest products they can find abroad, but you are not protecting U.S. consumers by expecting them to use inferior products. Because TikTok is in a leisure market, neither a self-consistent imperialist philosophy, nor one focused on the happiness of US citizens, can justify favoring it over domestic competitors. Of course, it is in our interest to ban the importation of all products of the labor that we ourselves perform, but let's not pretend there is anything but self-interest behind the desire to do so.

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