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Comment by gorwell | Hacker News Reader

This is a bipartisan bill and supported by the White House.

It's Patriot Act Version 2. Everything they wanted in version 1 and couldn't get, they are putting in here.

It does not contain the word TikTok. It applies to "desktop applications", "mobile applications", "gaming applications", "payment applications", "web-based applications" and everything connected to the Internet that serves >1M users within a year time period.

Fines up to $1M and 20 years in prison. It also uses civil forfeiture and makes it illegal to properly run a VPN.

This has bipartisan support.

View on HN

Of course it doesn't contain the word TikTok. Legislation can't single out an individual company or person, it wouldn't pass legal muster. So you write it in general terms, and ta-da! The ban hammer that you wanted to apply to TikTok is now a general purpose tool for destroying civil liberties!

This reminds of the joke about how the ethical programmer cannot write a function to nuke a particular city, instead they write a function that takes the city as a parameter.

> It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

I did some searching, and I believe that a footnote in this article, by Nathaniel S. Borenstein, is the origin of that quote.

https://www.guppylake.com/~nsb/CSCW-ATOMICMAIL.txt

I read an interesting article on the Russians programming the cruise missiles that fall on Ukraine. They're former game and software developers drafted into the military.

Yeah read up on where the B in cyclon B came from.

Can you tell us? From my googling it just says B was the second version

What I heard, and I’m sorry I’m too lazy to further substantiate, was that the original revision had a potent smell or something, so that it could be detected by humans with the basic idea being it wasn’t expected to be used on humans by those that developed it. It was a simple matter then for bad people to remove this smelly element and bump the version number.

That seems to be an urban legend. Zyklon B had a distinct smell of bitter almonds but a fraction of people can't perceive it. It also contained an irritant to avoid accidental inhalation. The death from suffocation was also slow and painful. Zyklon B was simply the second version of the product, which was intended as a delousing agent. Zyklon A was apparently less stable. One of the changes in Zyklon B seems to be that the gas was released from pellets, making it safer to use. Zyklon C apparently caused discoloration on metal, making it less useful for delousing. There also seem to have been variants D through F.

There's nothing nefarious about Zyklon B itself. It was simply found to be a very cheap way to kill a lot of people because prussic acid is apparently an order of magnitude more toxic to vertebrates than to insects. Of course at a certain point the company that produced it knew what it was being used for, but that doesn't seem to have influenced the development of the product itself.

To be clear: the reason the smell was irrelevant is that by the time you could smell it, you were already locked in a room with other people. The victims tried to tear down the walls and break the door with their bare hands, climbing over each other fearing for their lives as they slowly and painfully suffocated because every cell in their lungs sealed shut. You can still see the marks in those walls to this day.

There was no need to hide what the gas was doing. The victims were unarmed, they were surrounded by armed guards behind bars and barbed wire. They would often be sent directly to the "showers" upon their arrival at the camps, especially if they were children or too old to work. Even if they could have disarmed one of the guards they wouldn't have had anywhere to escape to. Even if they had somehow made it to the border, no country would have taken them.

I don’t think anyone would debate the futility of the situation the victims found themselves in. I guess the main thrust of this “urban myth” is that the people that developed it didn’t realise the intent. You’re obviously far better read on this topic than I so I will defer to your assertion that they did.

EDIT I remember my source it was that news show with the English guy .. John Oliver … he was doing a special on how brutal death by lethal injection was. That it wasn’t humane and it wasn’t developed scientifically because you could never get medical scientists to develop such a thing, and he drew parallels to cyclon B. He could well have been perpetuating that myth or his researchers could have been.

It's possible. I can't find any sources claiming Zyklon A was ever used in this way prior to Zyklon B and the first "test" killings of POWs seems to have used Zyklon B. Most sources don't explain the differences between the various versions though, if they mention them at all.

As I understand it, lethal injections are designed in such a way to paralyze the victim but the actual process is actually quite grueling, the victim just loses the ability to indicate the level of distress and pain they are in. This is unlike the euthanasia vets typically administer, which start with a sedative so the animal is unconscious, which seems not to be desired for executions.

So I guess there are parallels, the Zyklon B story just doesn't serve as a contrast but rather another example: it was designed as a delousing agent but its ease of use, storage ability and relative safety enabled the industrial scale mass murder even if none of the engineers would have agreed to that. Of course to the company producing it, it was just another big government contract.

Just did. It was the second variant of the poison, nothing to do with people, ethnicities or locations. Just a revision character.

I am curious how big tech will stand on this issue: they lobbied for it hard because they wanted to get rid of a competitor under allegedly illegitimate state control; as a result of their effort, they will all be forced under more or less legitimate state control.

It can be very helpful to them as a form of regulatory capture, kicking the ladder down.

It's why Walmart and Amazon were the biggest corporate supporters of raising minimum wage and getting stricter on Internet sales tax.

They're already under state control.

They get an insane amounts of data requests from governments on a daily basis.

It's not clear to me this is worse than not being under state control.

I mean - our government sucks - but it is our government. Law and order is nice. Ideally the laws wouldn't be terrible.

It shouldn't be up to companies to make their own rules - even if our government sucks.

Pretty sure Zuckerberg loves this. He probably spent a lot of $$$ lobbying for this.

I’m assuming this is and will be a classic example of the “First they came for….” Quote where it goes through the list of ‘others’ that is not oneself then, at the end when the authority finally shows up to take the ‘you’ in the ‘oneself’, no one is left to defend you and thus you also go down.

They will aim to eliminate tiktok as, everyone in the us higher ups agree it has to go, but who will be next afterwards? If in the future, Facebook doesn’t bend its knee to shovel out state propaganda, will it too go?

The very scary part of the bill, if true, is the outright banning of VPNs.

As a Finn, I’m not too worried about myself right now, but should USA fall into a complete Surveillance State with monitoring and it’s own version of China’s Social Credit system, it will have huge ramifications on EU and probably my country Finland.

Large companies generally welcome strict regulation. While it will increase their cost of doing business, more importantly, it'll stifle competition.

In the state of WI, when they wanted to single out Milwaukee, but try to not name names, they would write laws, counties with a population >500k must…..

Worked great for years, until Madison really started booming…

Foreign boogie men still rule the day in America’s self-owns.

"Legal muster" be damned, in the US such a law would probably be considered attainder and be unconstitutional, though there are exemptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder#United_State...

> Of course it doesn't contain the word TikTok. Legislation can't single out an individual company or person

But sanctions can, and they don’t even need legislation. If the goal was to ban TikTok, Biden could do that all by himself by sanctioning away their access to app stores, ad revenue, and probably a lot of the rest of their supply chain as well. That’s what Trump originally said he was going to do when he announced he was going to ban TikTok.

Ironically, in regards to TikTok, one effect (and this may be intended) of this legislation may be to give the Administration more flexibility to unilaterally, without negotiation, impose controls short of a ban or forced divestment than are currently available in US law.

The US wants to be more like China and the Soviet Union.

My first hint was Snowden.

The Snowden affair was the first time I've seen the mainstream news outlets do a complete 180 on its coverage in the span of hours.

Initially, the serious (non Fox News) outlets were concerned about the overreach by the government and seemed supportive of the leaks. By afternoon, they were all attacking Greenwald, Poitras, and Snowden on national security grounds.

Greenwald has gone pretty nuts on his own since then.

Unpopular opinion here: I think Snowden rightfully got people to pay more attention to cryptography, and that's good, but I always thought there was something about his story that didn't add up. Defecting to Moscow is shitty, too, especially considering what happened later.

You've forgotten what really happened. He was trying to get to Ecuador when the USA revoked his passport. He got stuck at the airport in Moscow as a consequence and was kept there for a long time because the Russians didn't want him either. That's not a defection.

Defecting to Moscow? I know he lives there but what leads you to believe he's defected to Russia? Is there any evidence that this has happened?

His life exists at the whims of putin, who isn't exactly known for giving people freedom to express controversial ideals.

It's not Snowden's fault he is in Russia, but it's important to not be blind to the reality of the situation. We should have protected him as a wistleblower but "even" obama seemed willing to throw him to the wolves. The fact we didn't burn down the capitol when they revoked his passport means we are all culpable in this. Nothing will get better unless we take responsibility for the government we have allowed to fester, and unless we band together and march together, this will continue.

> We should have protected him as a wistleblower but "even" obama seemed willing to throw him to the wolves.

Here's another possible interpretation of this. Why didn't the Obama Administration show him leniency? eg. They commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence and released her early. Why not similar for Snowden? Is it possible that they knew something about him that the rest of us do not?

How much do you know about Russia?

A high profile political-ish person cannot live there without interference from government. You are naive on the subject or deliberately lying if you do not believe that is true. Information on this is easily accessible to you. Especially after Ukraine, when there's so many stories of prominent Russians being labelled "foreign agents" by their government for merely having opinions.

It is not an exaggeration to say it's like Nazi Germany there now. Even well before, they were doing political assassinations at home and abroad and false flags in Chechnya. Snowden and Greenwald both are clearly on the wrong side of that issue. It was clear even in 2013 if you were paying attention that Putin's Russia was less free than the United States. So it's a very, very strange thing to do to move there after being concerned about civil liberties.

Snowden didn't move to Russia; he got stuck there, accidentally, because he happened to be transiting through the Moscow airport on his way to Ecuador at the moment the US revoked his passport. He proceeded to spend over a month living in the airport, still trying to leave, before giving up and applying for asylum in Russia. He's not there because he wants to be, but because his only other choice is a US prison.

Snowden cannot live anywhere else. He tried. The arms of the US government are too long, and he is prevented by the US from leaving Russia. Sure, there is going to be interference, but he doesn't have a choice. It's either that or be kidnapped.

Agreed. Greenwald has jumped the shark. To be fair, Snowden didn't have many choices.

None of those had the surveillance of its citizens that the US does though. Maybe including some “tech inflation” Stasi of DDR might be up there but neither USSR nor PRC has/had anything as massive as the US.

The PRC has a lot more CCTV, slightly less per capacita, but that's irrelevant if you account for density. They also have a lot more means to aggregate information at the municipal level and turn it into actionables, and they do so pretty openly. Meanwhile US cities and police departments are still in love with a glorified spreadsheet provider.

Not that I'm advocating for any of this, but saying the PRC has less, or even substantially less surveilance than the US is a pretty laughable proposition.

This is completely false. China requires that all service providers automatically decrypt all of their data for all users for the PRC, and the Great Firewall surveils and controls the vast majority of network traffic in China. The US has nothing remotely comparable to either of these things.

You either don't know much about China, or don't know much about the US.

Snowden sounded like US got access to your data regardless of TLS.

Most of the information required to compare is not public, maybe China got a better equipment and funding than USA... but even if that's the case, it's not like China is the baseline and everything is great as long as we think we are better treated.

> Snowden sounded like US got access to your data regardless of TLS.

Still not relevant. Covert exploitation of cryptographic weaknesses that can be easily patched leading to a limited set of data whose use is constrained by well-defined legal processes (involving warrants and courts) is categorically different than "the state forces you to decrypt and hand them all of your data". They're not remotely comparable.

> it's not like China is the baseline and everything is great as long as we think we are better treated

Nobody is saying that.

PRISM is literally the state forcing you to decrypt and hand over data.

I'm sure the CCP has their own potemkin legal system - the FISA courts are smoke and dressing just the same.

Please read my comment again.

> limited set of data whose use is constrained by well-defined legal processes (involving warrants and courts) is categorically different than "the state forces you to decrypt and hand them all of your data".

This still describes the difference between PRISM and the CCP's system.

It doesn't matter if "the CCP has their own potemkin legal system" - the fact is that the NSA only (allegedly) takes a very small set of records and providers get to see every one of them, where's the CCP's system takes literally everything.

Plus, we can look at the massive differences between the CCP and the US in every other way - the Great Firewall's real-time monitoring and censorship of all communication in the country, for instance, as well as the total lack of constitutional rights to privacy that the Chinese people have - and pretty reasonably conclude that the FISA courts are going to be more rigorous than whatever China has.

PRISM was WILLFULL cooperation with the feds by private companies. Other things snowden revealed made it clear the the feds were ALSO snooping inside the companies, and famously google encrypted their internal links and infra to stop it. Funny how they understand the importance of privacy, just not for you.

The Stasi kept files on about 5.6 million people. The Stasi had 90,000 full-time employees who were assisted by 170,000 full-time unofficial collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter); together these made up 1 in 63 (nearly 2%) of the entire East German population.[1]

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

Looks like Stasi were small peanuts compared to U.S. security agencies - which also have supercomputing at their fingers.

> PRC anything as massive as the US

Really? I assume domestically China engages in surveillance on a much higher scale than the US.

It absolutely does. Ten seconds of reading the Wikipedia page on the Great Firewall will show you that GP has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

US not only have systems in place at home it also gathers data in other countries (UK, DK, DE, etc.) on US citizens. PRC has nothing like this that has been discovered so far.

Stalin wanted it so much, he even had entire research institute dedicated to automatic voice recognition problem, staffed with jailed engineers, and utilizing vacuum tubes electronics (Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle).

Level playing field.

United Soviets?

Soviet Union, China and Russia copied the US. They just didn't copy the "freedom" idea. They mostly didn't do it because they didn't have to... so they were very lucky. With modern technology, ordinary people got too powerful and it would be very easy to find out that the state is outright lying to them about how their own country works and they wouldn't be too happy about it. As a result, Chinese and Russians peasants are pretty satisfied with their leadership because the state doesn't have to engage in lying too much. They can tell the truth about the enemy once in a while and that is mostly enough.

If one of them was a superpower though, it would be a different story. They would have to engage in a lot of deception and with modern technology, people would find out that their leaders are full of it. Not that it is a problem, the peasants do eventually cope with reality... but it's just that it doesn't work very smoothly all the time.

> Soviet Union, China and Russia copied the US

Do you really believe in this or are you just saying this? Mass surveillance was a thing in the USSR decades 30-50 years earlier than in the US.

Also much more effective too... Say something inappropriate semi publicly and of you go to the gulag (they toned it down and switch to psich hospitial after the 60s).

> leadership because the state doesn't have to engage in lying too much

tanks go brr... amirite comrade ?

> Say something inappropriate semi publicly and of you go to the gulag

You're thinking Snowden and Assange. In the Soviet Union, they were sent to the gulags for spying for the enemy.

Never forget, also on the other side of the wall, East Germany the paradigm of control and spying on their own citizens.

> As a result, Chinese and Russians peasants are pretty satisfied with their leadership because the state doesn't have to engage in lying too much

The only satisfied people would be the subsidized nomenklatura. Normal people do notice the aftereffects of de facto Kleptocracies aka the destruction of any organization, but who cares? so the common man developed apathy as a form of civil resistance (like laying flat in china today)

When are we going to give up on our representative democracy? It is clear that in the US the government no longer executes the will of the people. A bill as unpopular as this has bipartisan support. How do we proceed?

If you look at Europe, (not in the non existing coverage in mainstream press ), their answer is to protest. But that requires an informed population. Hackernews might be, but 99% of people are not.

The problem with bills like this is that it eventually shows the people what is really going on behind the curtain, and trust / legitimacy is lost. Its very difficult to gain those back. So it leads to blackmarkets annnnd totalitarianism.

Voting 3rd party and civil disobedience is the only levers the little people have when representatives no longer represent.

Also a huge amount of Americans CANNOT protest, because of that whole, being dirt poor barely scraping by, miss a day of work and be fired thing. We have no safety nets, so the people on the bottom have no choice in the matter if they still believe they can at least survive under whatever tyranny is coming down the pipe.

Voting should be a national holiday. There should be a national minimum number of polling stations per ten thousand people, and there should be limitations around how much a state can fuck with their placement and hours of operation.

There's also a lot of Americans who believe other things are more important but I don't think that is relevant here because this bill has bipartisan support.

Mail, Email, or call your state reps.

And yet, we're getting chat control. I think most people don't care or understand.

> Internet that serves >1M users

Not only that, if you selling hardware to >1M customers, then you are subject to this ban.

Hint: Your hardware might be manufactured in China, or a Chinese-affiliated company in your supply chain, then you are at risk.

No, it only applies to entities where China has a controlling interest. If you buy Chinese hardware that doesn’t make your company Chinese.

No, at 3:50 in TFA the bill defines holding as: i. an equity interest, ii. a stock, iii. a security, iv. a share, v. a partnership interest, vi. an interest in an LLC, vii. a membership interest, or vii. ANY participation, right, or other equivilent, however designated and of ANY character (emphasis mine).

That's a lot more broad than "Chinese controlling interest".

Edit: and "controlling interest" as defined in the bill means "a holding with the power, whether direct or indirect and whether exercised or not exercised, to determine, direct, or decide important matters affecting an entity." which is much more broad than the commonly understood 51% equity stake.

“determine, direct, or decide important matters” is what makes this specific. This is no different than the traditional definition of “controlling interest”. The meaning of “controlling” in this context has a long legal precedent that is not overridden by this bill.

Edit: as a concrete example, I do not have a majority share in the company I work for but legally I have a “controlling interest” because I am an executive as well as owning shares. I know this because that is how I am required to fill out financial declarations.

> The meaning of “controlling” in this context has a long legal precedent that is not overridden by this bill.

Thank you. I am not a lawyer but watching all the internet panic over this bill has had me wanting to smash my head against a wall. I don't think people understand that our legal system is based on precedent* and not just whatever broad argument an internet person wants to make based on their own selective interpretation of the terms.

(*As long as we're not talking about voting rights or abortion.)

I am for banning tiktok, but this bill seems to enable significantly more than that. Why shouldn't I be concerned about that?

Right, there’s no lower limit at all based on this language - it could be a single share.

I mean… as far as I can tell, the definition is so broad and vague that it would even cover a Chinese firm holding a US public stock.

Holding a minority of common stock does not give you the power to “determine, direct, or decide important matters” so no, it would not cover that.

Actually even minor stock holders can get to vote to decide important matters, so yes, it would cover that.

Further than that, many decisions are probably in practice made by minor stockholders as big pension funds, bank run index funds, etc have neither the will nor expertise to get their hands dirty.

This is why corporate raiders can gut companies by buying into them, replacing boards and/or force them to huge divestments, loans and finally dividends, and then when finished leave a husk of the company back to index and pension funds that just buys mindlessly to retain their index balance (even if the company has no real long term future).

As of 2021 institutional investors avoid getting their hands dirty by only voting about ninety percent of their shares. Individual investors show their “expertise” by voting a bit under thirty percent of their shares.

Say, when the corporate raiders buy a bunch of shares, how come the institutional investors still have theirs? That seems odd…

exactly. Or there's a person of slight Chinese origin in your management team.

Support in congress is directly correlated with what improves the standings of monied interests, the 1%, corporations, etc. What is popular/unpopular among the actual people of the United States is almost irrelevant to lawmaking.

So "beating China" is used to justify becoming China... well shit.

Not beating China so much as the ruling class cementing their power.

True, but that's never how they market it.

Tit for tat is a highly effective strategy in game theory.

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

Last I read, compassionate tit for tat is the best. Tit for tat, but forgive and offer compassion occasionally to stop mutually destructive loops.

Tit for two tats outperforms tit for tat.

Does the US need some sort of genocide program to counter the Uighur thing? Just because China is doing something stupid doesn't mean the US needs to copy them.

Letting foreign companies operate locally is a boon for the locals. The reason China is threatening the US with superior products is because they let the US invest in China for so many years. One of the few advantages the US has over the Chinese economy is the CCP keeps denying their citizens access to effective tools and ideas from well run external corporations.

There is a strong argument to ban Tiktok because it represents a military/social threat. But that isn't tit-for-tat, if the US is persuaded by that logic it is meaningless what the Chinese regulators are doing on their turf.

> Does the US need some sort of genocide program to counter the Uighur thing?

Another one? I'd hope the genocide against Native Americans should be sufficient for quite some time. Or is that too long ago now?

Nononono that didn't happen and we will ban teaching about it in schools because that makes some americans uncomfortable and we can't have that.

Is it any wonder Americans allow this kind of tyranny when we refuse to teach our past in school? American exceptionalism is a lack of education.

> This has bipartisan support.

Yes. It's just digital McCarthyism. The US loves having an enemy, especially a Communist one, and the problem is that the Communists have got too good at capitalism, so they have to be banned from the market.

If this was actually about preventing surveillance it would ban surveillance by apps.

There is nothing communist about China anymore. It's a form of centrally lead, totalitarian capitalism. The problem is that it's an authoritarian system that denies all sorts of freedoms, is looking to expand and export its authoritarianism, and to leverage that through influence outside its borders. That's what makes China a threat.

But that's a hard thing to target, because the US does many of the same things.

Is that not a distinction without a meaningful difference since communism always ends in a centrally lead, totalitarian regime? The Chinese Communist Party merely used a form of state-capitalism to bootstrap it. Xi Jinping believes in Marxism-Leninism. That's not a secret. In 2021, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party declared Xi Jinping Thought "a new breakthrough in the Sinicization of Marxism."

There are myriad "centrally led, totalitarian regimes" which are nothing like each other. Contemporary China is nothing like 1920s Soviet Russia is nothing like Louis XIV's France.

> Xi Jinping believes in Marxism-Leninism

Perhaps, but China does not have any of Marx's empowerment of the working classes. Factory workers work ridiculously long hours for little pay, while their bosses become billionaires. That's not communism. Whatever label they put on it doesn't change what's underneath.

China even hit Marxist demonstrators at College. Current China, if any, it's something akin to state capitalism. Since Deng Xiaoping they only have a proper socialist village with "old prices". For the rest, China is merging into some national-populism.

If you don't like this bill and you are a US citizen, now is the time to act. Write and call your senators and representative and let them know that you oppose it.

> It also uses civil forfeiture and makes it illegal to properly run a VPN.

From what I've read a VPN only becomes a problem IF you use it to bypass restrictions on accessing TikTok. Stating VPNs will be illegal is a bit of a reach from what I've seen.

Using a VPN (or any other mechanism) to bypass ANY service banned under the provisions of this act[0] would be illegal (TikTok is not mentioned at all):

Section 11 (a) (2) (F)

> No person may engage in any transaction or take any other action with intent to evade the provisions of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder.

The criminal penalty for willingly violating that "shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both". Cool and reasonable, to be sure.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...

AND

>No person may cause or aid, abet, counsel, command, induce, procure, permit, or approve the doing of any act prohibited by, or the omission of any act required by any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued under, this Act.

Meaning that the VPN service must track what users are doing to prove that their users aren't using it to do something against this bill. It effectively makes privacy-protecting VPNs illegal.

> counsel

Made a blog post about accessing TikTok in the internet censorship era? 20 years of jail and one million dollars of debt. Can't make this up.

Yeah, that's a really good point. This is even more insidious than I thought. :(

That seems like an overly broad interpretation. How is this different from standard laws like "you can't aid or abet someone committing fraud"? You can plausibly argue that you can use VPNs to commit fraud, therefore any sort of law that says you can't "aid, abet, counsel [...]" is a ban on VPNs.

edit: standard laws against aiding/abetting. Should we be concerned about those as well? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2

It's different because it's way more nebulous:

>(G) No person may fail or refuse to comply with any reporting or recordkeeping requirement of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder.

You can plausibly use a VPN to commit fraud, but there isn't a "Fraud Investigation Secretary" who can arbitrarily decide how/what/when records need to be kept. The investigation for someone committing fraud on the VPN wouldn't give the "Fraud Investigation Secretary" the right to see any and all records that the VPN service has when a smaller subset of records specific to the instance of fraud would suffice. Oh and the "Fraud Investigation Secretary" can determine that this entire process can be handled secretly because it's classified. Oh and you're not allowed to ask the government through a FOIA request how it determined the fraud was committed through the VPN.

I reject the notion that the government wouldn't use this law as a dragnet. The Patriot Act remains expired after all.

And remember kids, the next time that somebody tells you "the government wouldn't do that"-- oh yes they would

This guy has been commenting all throughout the discussion showing he doesn't understand the text and hasn't actually read it.

Is that supposed to reassure people?! Million dollar fine and 20 years in prison for using a VPN is beyond excessive.

Where did you get the idea I was trying to reassure anyone? I was clarifying that the Act says nothing about TikTok (or any other service) specifically, since for some reason people keep saying stuff like "it's only for a TikTok ban". Not sure why people keep having such charitable interpretations of this overly-broad and draconian proposal.

The first thing I think is important to point out here is that the bill isn't really pointed towards VPNs, any interpretation of it that leans that way is probably going to get shut down before it ever gets to the point that it's an issue at all.

Even if that were happening, you'd have to find a judge and jury willing to give out a fine like that.

There are times that such a fine would actually be perfectly reasonable. Imagine something like apple or Google providing millions of dollars worth of services, a 20-year prison sentence for one of their executives or a million fee is perfectly justified in such a case.

For individuals, certainly not, but that's why courts exist then that's why appeals are a thing. You have a right to a trial by a jury, have no jury is going to give you such excessive fees.

>the bill isn't really pointed towards VPNs

Funny how the laws always give the government absolute power, and then everyone has to just hope that no government from here into the future in perpetuity will ever use the rest of the overbroad authority.

They could have easily narrowed the scope of the language if they wanted. It didn't have to be written to be so broad.

The government could literally take any power at any moment for any reason at any time that they wanted to.

The same thing prevents this bill from being used to ban VPNs as the passage of a brand new law that specifically outlaws VPNs.

You can't just take a wild elaboration as gospel because it could technically happen.

Broadly written laws encourage abuse.

Edit: it was written by prosecutors for prosecutors. Please stop voting AGs into congress.

As do incredibly specific ones.

The key is to be generally applicable such that companies can't find loopholes, but specific enough that courts understand the essence of your intent and don't go overboard in terms of allowing abuse of the law.

Just stop criminalizing shit.

Times change, situations adjust, and new behaviors appear that need to be regulated and shut down.

You can't just stop criminalizing things, society would grind to a halt within a few decades.

What about when previously criminalized acts like consuming cannabis products become socially acceptable? It's still illegal on the federal level so that's a huge mess not to mention the harm that was done by enforcing those laws over the years.

You decriminalize it, we've already seen movement towards that happening.

Citation needed

Would you prefer hacking be legal?

Legality of hacking does not matter.

The only big relevant cases are across borders and often with the endorsement or the permission of the home government.

Small scale hacking is only prosecuted when someone did something very very stupid and obvious.

You just said we should never make new things criminal.

Hacking is a really clear and obvious example of why we need that ability and we will need to exercise it regularly.

Legally of hacking is a clear example of why your philosophy doesn't work. In that respect it's very relavent. Especially when you say that small scale hacking is rarely enforced, showing that you understand that even if a law appears crazy broad, the reality of the country and our system generally keeps it in check.

> You just said we should never make new things criminal.

I did not say that so do not twist my words. I never even said hacking should be legal.

I said that in the current context the legality of hacking does not matter because either large scale hacking happens across borders. Or often it is at such a small scale it never reaches the legal system (think spouses snooping on each other by using a password written on a post-it). Or the resources to track down a hacker are far to high to lead to an investigation and therefore it never reaches the legal system (think logins and cc numbers where people and banks just deal with it).

In the 1990's and early 2000's when most hacking was unsophisticated, prosecution might have been an effective deterrent.

> The government could literally take any power at any moment for any reason at any time that they wanted to.

It can but there is a process to follow and the process might take time.

It is the same with Russia conscripting and officially threatening to use nukes. Of course they could and they did, but in order to do so they first had to officially declare the annexation. Otherwise there was no internal legal basis to conscript since Russia officially was not at war, it was a "special military operation". They could have also gone the alternative route of changing the laws. Or the alternative route of officially declaring war as an aggressor from the beginning.

Same for official nuclear saber rattling, their official nuclear doctrine only allows defensive use and, before annexation, Russia could not claim anyone was attacking it. Before annexation, threats of nukes only came from TV people not high ranking officials.

No matter how democratic or repressive a regime, no ruler rules alone. Therefore even in the most authoritarian regimes there are processes to go through in order to achieve certain objectives. Different processes have different costs and risks. Those processes have steps with each step facilitating the next ones regardless of whether they are eventually taken or not.

This bill is just one of those steps towards dystopia.

You're kind of repeating the same thing here.

Government isn't a big slippery slope, it's a balancing act between the people and the government. Law represents where we stand on that balancing act.

It doesn't matter really how the government tries to shift the status quo. If things get out of line with the will of the people, and they notice, change will be brought to a halt.

This is a common fallacy, especially with recent talk of the "Overton window" that's convinced people it's a good idea to be as extreme as possible instead of approaching the middle ground.

Your party and it's positions do not determine the average person's point of view. They determine what positions you can sustainably maintain, and wherever you move you will see raising or dropping support based on that.

The government won't just slide on over to some crazy extreme. This is why Russia, despite all their bluster, is still not managing to pull a draft. The people don't want it.

And this is why TikTok is so dangerous. By getting into the minds of the people, they threaten to undermine the foundation of our political process.

Power is a slippery slope. That does not mean that it has a single destination or that going down the slope is irreversible. It just means that reversing an imbalance of power is harder.

Such a change can only be brought to a halt if the imbalance of power is small enough.

The Overton window is a thing. That does not justify extremism if your goal is a functioning society. The Overton window says nothing about whether a position is right or wrong. It only describes what is acceptable and what is extreme. The average citizen is not a static thing.

Russia managed to pull a partial draft even if the people didn't want it. People fled the country because of it. Because before that, all protests were swiftly crushed. It managed to do so because the imbalance of power is great enough that what the people want matters less.

For comparison France is seeing protests for increasing retirement age by two years. It is better to be a citizen of France than a citizen of Russia.

I never said that TikTok is not dangerous. Influencing the minds of people through TikTok is just one way to influence the Overton window.

What many people criticizing this bill are saying is that despite TikTok being a danger of multiple kinds, this bill is also a danger for democracy.

Not having ever used TikTok I will not speculate on which danger is greater, but this is not a dichotomy. Pass the bill as is or not are not the only two options. A better bill that addresses the threats while introducing less threats of its own is possible.

> It only describes what is acceptable and what is extreme. The average citizen is not a static thing

My point here is that government is ultimately restricted by the people. Any assumption what the government does will change that window of acceptability is wrong.

This bill won't make it OK for the government to ban (insert thing the average person likes or does here). To do so will likely mandate that the average person begin to dislike or oppose that thing.

> Russia managed to pull a partial draft even if the people didn't want it.

Key word here is partial, and as far as I'm aware it was quickly withdrawn. Ultimately Russia will act against its people, because it's an authoritarian nation, they just have to get there.

The USA, however, is a functioning democracy.

> What many people criticizing this bill are saying is that despite TikTok being a danger of multiple kinds, this bill is also a danger for democracy.

The number of blatant lies about the bill makes me think otherwise. The tone isn't "this needs fixed" it's "this must not pass".

The end result here rapidly looks like it's approaching an end to any ban on TikTok, and when that happens we will be deeply and truly fucked. Far far more so than we would be by this bill.

Do you have a list of other dangerous ideas?

TikTok isn't an idea, it's a platform atop which people speak, and the platform is owned by a country that recognizes no right to free speech and is actively hostile to the United States.

You can't touch a platform, TikTok included. It's an intangible construct and as such it clearly falls into the category of ideas. Everyone knows this. The only reason someone would think otherwise is that banning an idea is a yucky concept and in a fit of cognitive dissonance, it must therefore not be an idea. Let's not fool ourselves. Folks want to ban an idea and we all know how that story goes.

It's absolutely tangible. It's an app. It's servers. It's a company.

I don't see how you can arrive at the conclusion that a company isn't tangible.

Companies are social relations with legal protection.

Apps are intangible and servers are merely substrate.

Hypothetically I could even steal all of TikTok's servers and I still wouldn't be TikTok. TikTok simply isn't the sum of its physical parts.

To put it in Saussureian terms, the signifier TikTok doesn't completely signify tangible objects. Therefore part of the signified must necessarily be intangible.

> Companies are social relations with legal protection

In other words, they are real things, you can go speak to people who work for apple. You can visit its buildings. Your can install their apps.

> Hypothetically I could even steal all of TikTok's servers and I still wouldn't be TikTok. TikTok simply isn't the sum of its physical parts.

You're getting into the weeds here. To bring things into focus, how does any of this qualify the TikTok company/platform as an idea that would be "censored" if you shut them down?

I don't think you're going to convince me to re-reifiy the concepts of Apple and TikTok.

Once a concept is de-reified the magic gets sucked out of it. If anything understanding enough about the process of reification to de-reify the concept has a much greater chance of de-reifying the concept in your own mind than it does re-reifying it in mine.

Saying repeatedly that something is real to someone for which the concept is de-reified is only further evidence that they are attempting to reify the concept. That's the weird part of the reified mind - it's a self-alienating process - a mental blindspot and once you see your own blindspot, you can't unsee it.

That reads like a freshman’s essay on Baudrillard. It’s really hard to make sense of it.

I don't think it is impressive in any way. It's pompous bullshit that is really hard to believe they really believe it themselves and can now be generated by AI.

It's, like, saying that instead of seeing a chair, they now gained understanding and only see a collection of molecules forming some wooden fibers arranged in a peculiar shape and there is no chair because no physical object can be a true materialization of the platonic idea of a chair. Like, the chair was de-reified. In fact, if no one is sitting on it does it even have any chairness? You gotta, like, go deeper bro. Like, because of natures water and CO2 cycle, the chair is not a chair and you are not you, you are in fact one with the chair. It's all atoms and quarks and strings and stuff.

Same with any brain-in-a-vat solipsist concepts. Cute and logically rigorous but completely unworkable and useless. A philosophical dead end, a cognitive tar-pit and

If you think I'm saying that TikTok is not real in the same way chairs aren't real, then you haven't been keeping up. There are ways to argue against reification, but mocking ain't one bud.

I am arguing that whether the notion of TikTok or Apple or CocaCola is reified for you or me is absolutely irrelevant. They are reified to the vast majority of people so much so that even if a significant portion of their material substrate would be lost, it would be recreated because the brand is just that important.

The mocking was because it derailed the thread. The discussion was about a piece of legislation that has many undeclared goals and whose declared but unwritten goal is to ban TikTok. Whether TikTok is tangible or not, reified or not, an idea or something else is just besides the point. Thinking that it can not be banned is foolish.

Let me remind you that your argument was:

> You can't touch a platform, TikTok included. It's an intangible construct and as such it clearly falls into the category of ideas. Everyone knows this. The only reason someone would think otherwise is that banning an idea is a yucky concept and in a fit of cognitive dissonance, it must therefore not be an idea. Let's not fool ourselves.

You did not say "let's discuss about whether Tiktok is reified and how it could be de-reified". That would have been an interesting discussion.

There's a subsection of Berger&Luckman(1966) on reification that I'm applying. It's not a particularly difficult concept, but it has wide application and describes what we would call today "social facts" are made manifest as reality to some folks. It's a foundational sociological text and I'd encourage anyone who's slightly interested in epistomology to give it a read.

It might resonate with you like it does with others, or either seem completely vacuous, or even provoke a mentally allergic reaction like it does in some. The latter tends to have a load-bearing egoistic reaction to ideas contra to a singular objective reality in which everything must fit to a prescribed ontology, again a theme you might now recognize in the proceeding comments. Some folks desperately want to manifest their views as the correct view of what "being" is and wield it like a cudgel.

Never read Baudrillard; you're more than welcome to revise it to make it sophomoric, or even grad level if you want. Show me up and do it better than me.

> Some folks desperately want to manifest their views as the correct view of what "being" is and wield it like a cudgel.

That’s weird criticism. Why shoudn’t someone hold a view that in their opinion corresponds to reality to the greatest degree among all views that are available to them? For example, you seem “desperate” to manifest your views on TikTok and “reification” in this thread. And I don’t see anything wrong with that.

> you're more than welcome to revise it to make it sophomoric

That’s easy. You should clearly define the technical jargon that you use and the theories that you apply. It looks like you reify the ideas of Berger and Luckman and, what is worse, the words they use.

Explication will help others to make sense of your unconventional use of words and help you de-reify the ideas that you use ;)

This is off-topic sophistry.

Your argument that "TikTok is an idea" does not syllogistically connect with "TikTok should not be banned" because the connector "Ideas should not be banned" is invalid.

Intangible things have been banned and will continue to be banned especially if you extend that notion to include companies.

nailed it. sophistry indeed.

Your argument is a bit too philosophical.

But going by that definition (intangible construct) plenty of ideas have been banned before without issue.

I do think there is merit in understanding that TikTok can be a threat vector unlike Facebook which is also a distinct threat vector.

Just as there is merit in accepting that this bill is a threat.

It's not even philosophical; it's sociological. Besides, the banning of ideas ventures too far into the IdeaCrime territory than I feel comfortable with.

The reason why they have to at least pretend to play by the rules that are supposed to bind them as much as they do is because legitimacy is what keeps people from quitting the game, bringing it to a halt, and starting their own new games.

I'm sure you're aware that realistically most people would just plead guilty and accept some kind of deal rather than go through the court system.

There are also lots of people who wouldn't.

Many more would plead and that's the problem.

At this rate you may as well just tear down the whole government. You can't write law that's specific to every single use case, you have to rely on courts for that.

If you're going to say that you can't trust courts to do this job, you're saying that the whole government is non-functional, and That point there's nothing you can say or do that's reasonable.

Blanket cynicism and obstruction helps no one and gets us nowhere.

> In any given year, 98% of criminal cases in the federal courts end with a plea bargain — a practice that prizes efficiency over fairness and innocence

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...

Can't help but be cynical when presented with these numbers.

The laws are written by prosecutors for other prosecutors to generate headlines and votes.

That's not exactly a great number to show if you don't know the percentage of people going to trial who are guilty in the first place.

If you know you did the crime, you know they've got proof, you have an option to take a plea deal that's less than the costs of losing the court case, wouldn't you take it?

You're not being put in jail for 20 years[1] for using a VPN (eg. for torrenting). You're being put in jail for 20 years because you violated other provisions of the law and tried to evade using VPNs. It's not any different than you getting put in jail for 20 years for violating some anti-terror legislation, and using VPNs to pull that off.

[1] realistically not, given federal sentencing guidelines, see: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

Having 20 year sentence on the books for something that isn't rape or murder is barbaric in my opinion.

Did you miss the footnote?

The footnote is irrelevant, the guidance says you shouldn't, but the law says you legally can.

The latter is enforceable, the former is just a recommendation

Nope. Didn't even click it.

Prosecutors use the arduous court system to force their victims to accept pleas.

That might be true, but it still doesn't change the fact that you're unlikely to get 20 years for accessing tiktok over VPN. You might get some sort of prison sentence (or none, too lazy to look up the exact guidelines), but saying 20 years is pure hyperbole.

> saying 20 years is pure hyperbole

The law says "up to 20 years". Therefore, american citizens can be imprisoned for 20 years over this bullshit. Don't minimize it.

> unlikely to get 20 years ...

20 years for being a teenager and watching shitty vlogs and memes? "unlikely" doesn't cut it, anything less than "impossible" should be unacceptable.

> You might get some sort of prison

Again: WHAT? go to prison for watching shitty vlogs and memes? You guys are really reaching Saudi Arabia levels with this law, how can you be so complacent with that?

I can already see the copyright monopolists lobbying the government to classify infringement as intellectual terrorism or something.

Again, the problem there wouldn't be that the law is banning VPNs, it's having harsh punishment for copyright infringement. That's a perfectly serviceable argument. Don't say they're putting people in jail for using VPNs, that would just be dishonest.

The same applies for the tiktok law. Go out and argue how the government is banning you from using tiktok under threat of prison sentence or whatever. Don't make the unsupported argument that the proposed law is going to punish you for using VPNs for unrelated reasons (eg. torrenting).

>violating some anti-terror legislation

Like the Patriot act?

That part of the argument can easily be substituted with something less controversial, like sanctions or wire fraud laws.

>wire fraud laws

The famously overbroad laws that get abused by prosecutors in cases like Aaron Schwartz facing 35 years for downloading files.

Rip aaron

> The criminal penalty for willingly violating that "shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000

Oh, so it's just a fee.

And up to 20 years in prison

Only if you're a natural person.

You know "natural person" means "human being", right? Like an individual person, not a business or that sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_person

That's exactly my point.

> >No person may engage in any transaction or take any other action with intent to evade [...]

IANAL but "transaction" in this case surely refers to financial transactions, not just visiting tiktok with VPN on? If the government is sanctioning Iran and say you can't transact with them, it seems fairly reasonable for them to also say that if you try to evade that through various ways you should be punished as well. I don't see why the same shouldn't apply if tiktok is sanctioned.

No, the term "transaction" is defined very broadly in the bill, and includes "use of any information and communications technology product or service."

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...

IANAL but based on the full quote:

>(17) TRANSACTION.—The term “transaction” means any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, data transmission, software updates, repairs, or the provision of data hosting services, or a class of such transactions.

it's pretty obvious from the examples they're talking about B2B transactions, not consumers visiting their site.

The quote you cite indicates exactly the opposite. I'll omit some of the optional elements of the sentence to create a concise sentence that makes it clear simply downloading something is considered a transaction:

> The term “transaction” means any use of any information and communications technology product or service.

I'll concede that the law can possibly be interpreted to ban Americans from using tiktok.

No? The quote literally includes "data transmission" as a transaction.

Unfortunately the word "or" means the word "transaction" can be completely ignored and thus literally everything else is covered by the overly-broad words "take any other action", such as using a VPN or similar service.

To make it more clear, you can read that specific entry as:

"No person may engage in any action with intent to evade the provisions of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder."

>"No person may engage in any action with intent to evade the provisions of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder."

And which part of the act prevents you from visiting tiktok?

The act itself does not, it only gives the secretary of commerce the power to create regulations and other mandates related to any company owned by something that is defined as a foreign adversary, which in the bill is listed as Venezuela, China, Iran, Russia, the typical types.

Basically what would happen is, Bill gets passed.

The secretary of commerce, or some other figure in that range, talks to the president and they decide yeah, we need to ban those guys.

They talk to apple, Google, Microsoft, various cloud providers, and say "yeah, you're taking them off your store. You're also not allowed to do any business with them anymore".

I don't think it's likely they end up talking to ISPs to try to cut off the internet side of things, because that's going to take a lot more work and the people given power in this case aren't the sort to try to do that sort of thing.

So you're probably never going to be unable to access the website, they're just going to make it a heck of a lot harder to use it, and they're going to cut off all profit motive.

> I don't think it's likely they end up talking to ISPs to try to cut off the internet side of things, because that's going to take a lot more work and the people given power in this case aren't the sort to try to do that sort of thing.

Given sci-hub is banned at the ISP level here in the UK, I disagree.

Totally different country. Totally different laws. You can't compare them.

>The secretary of commerce, or some other figure in that range, talks to the president and they decide yeah, we need to ban those guys.

>They talk to apple, Google, Microsoft, various cloud providers, and say "yeah, you're taking them off your store. You're also not allowed to do any business with them anymore"

Yeah, that's what I thought the law does. I think that's bad for other reasons, but the "omg they're going after your VPNs" rhetoric is over the topp.

No part does, until TikTok becomes one of the services banned as per the "mitigation" acts defined under this Act.

I skimmed the bill and I'm having a hard time determining what type of activity is prohibited once an entity is identified, except for

>(B) with respect to a transaction found to pose an undue or unacceptable risk and qualify as a covered transaction, determine whether—

>(i) the covered transaction should be prohibited; or

>(ii) any other action should be taken to mitigate the effects of the covered transaction.

I suppose the least charitable interpretation is that this gives them unlimited power to do whatever they want to "mitigate", but that seems like something that would be struck down by the courts for being too broad.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...

Yes, the mitigation action is completely variable and could include basically anything. It's intentionally vague because it might mean banning a service, seizing assets, who knows what.

> (12) MITIGATION MEASURE.—The term “mitigation measure” means a measure agreed to in an agreement between any relevant party and the Federal Government, or ordered by the Federal Government and of which any relevant party has been notified, in any matter addressed under this Act to address any risk arising from a covered transaction or associated with a covered holding.

20 years of jail for accessing TikTok. In what universe could this possibly be reasonable.

That is not in any way better. It does indeed criminalise VPN usage.

Be that as it may, the bill is still illiberal bullshit and a transfer of power interest wrong hands.

What's the exact language pertaining to VPNs?

Is this the movie and tv industry at work again trying to get people to stop using vpns to get free content?

Since tiktok is not mentioned in the bill I find this hard to believe.

It would involve any attempt to bypass regulations placed down in the sake of national security, which would be something like using a VPN in order to give money to TikTok.

That sounds... fine? It's like having a bill that says you can't join designated terrorist organizations or fund money to them, and if you try to use VPNs to cover your tracks or to send payments to them it's also punishable.

It seems completely unnecessary to specifically mention VPNs though. It shouldn't matter whether you funded terrorist organizations over the public internet vs through a VPN, either should be equally illegal.

>It seems completely unnecessary to specifically mention VPNs though

"VPN" occurs exactly zero times in the bill.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...

Thanks, I need to stop taking comments at face value when people are talking about stuff like this.

While VPNs are not mentioned explicitly, there is very clear language that talks about attempting to evade the rules, which would clearly apply to VPNs.

Furthermore, some have pointed out that the language of the bill could force providers to start tracking what users do.

I’ve encountered quite a few “but the bill says nothing about VPNs” comments and those seem to be problematic takes.

The bill doesn’t mention TikTok either.

>Furthermore, some have pointed out that the language of the bill could force providers to start tracking what users do.

Source?

Here are two discussion subthreads that go down this path, and most of the threads here on HN have some variation of this exploration [0] [1].

The key issue seems to be the very open ended language about attempting to circumvent or aiding in the circumvention of any enacted restrictions.

As written, this seems to potentially impact both users of VPNs and VPN providers.

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35367684

- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35369570

I think it's fine.

The lawmakers aren't evil mustache twirling villains, they're trying to create a law and they wrote it as sensibly as they reasonably would in their circumstance and people on the internet are blowing it way out of proportion.

Blowing things up like this is a thing the internet, America in general, has problems with. The TTP, If you remember that one, was another one that people absolutely tried to crush and it turned out it was actually a really good idea that we should have been part of.

The reaction to this is scarily similar, and it's going to be resulting in a similar loss if it gets shut down.

In all hopes they buckle down, put down some revisions to neuter some of the more egregious things people are complaining about, and the law passes with those extra protections.

Villains who twirl their moustache are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well-camouflaged. - Picard

The TPP was not a good idea and it was great that Trump shut it down.

It was a very good idea, and by shutting it down we basically handed a huge amount of power to China in the degree deal between a bunch of southeast Asian nations is one led by them instead of us.

Trump's withdrawal from that agreement was one of the most catastrophic decisions the United States government has made in the last 20 years.

Even his opponent: Hillary Clinton was firmly against the TPP:

"I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election and I’ll oppose it as president.”

The TPP's 5,000+ pages actually had very little to do with trade. Instead, corporations tried to turn it into a wish list for policies that they knew would never pass through Congress.

Both Hillary and Obama were in support of the law before populist outrage showed up and they had to pivot.

They were in favor of it because it was a good law, and it further an American interests in the wider world. Half of the restrictions and changes were ones that literally didn't affect America and just brought other countries up to the Americans standard.

They pivoted because a extraordinary, vast majority of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum were against the TPP - extensive opinion polling already showed this. Calling this as as "populist" instead of "democratic" is a new spin nowadays to naysay the beliefs of American citizens.

> because it was a good law, and it further an American interests in the wider world.

No, it wasn't a good law. It would have raised the cost of drugs significantly. The pharma bros are already billionaires. We don't need them to get richer. It had no protection for low-income American workers - esp auto workers. TPP would have led to a mass offshoring of jobs. Frankly, I do not wish this to devolve into a discussion on TPP, because its disadvantages and non-trading related addendums were already covered by media on both the left and the right.

https://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454511/tpp-cost-medicine

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/opinion/united-auto-worke...

https://time.com/4065267/trans-pacific-partnership-american-...

> They pivoted because a extraordinary, vast majority of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum were against the TPP - extensive opinion polling already showed this. Calling this as as "populist"

Do you know what populist means? Short term appeal to voters instead of long term and more difficult decision making.

> No, it wasn't a good law. It would have raised the cost of drugs significantly.

Yeah. For other countries. America already pays these prices. In fact, a lot of that is what lets these drugs exist for other countries in the first place.

This likely would have *lowered* the price for Americans.

> Short term appeal to voters instead of long term and more difficult decision making.

Hah, the American voter is far more brighter than HN folks give them credit for. They have to look out for their interests since the elite most certainly wont.

No, the drug prices wouldn't have reduced. Come now - provide your logical reasoning why the drug prices would have reduced ? Do you really think the Pharma industry would have gained suddenly gained sympathy after achieving a perfect stanglehold?

The US imports >50% of its generic drugs from nations who have none to minimal drug patent protection policies and thats how it keeps it's citizens alive. You would have had the pharma billionaires choke this supply too.

Because you would have gotten even more Tiktoks?

Every modern bill for free trade agreements is perverted into a corporate wishlist to the detriment of most people.

What do you believe would have been the key benefit?

Even more tick tocks? China wasn't part of the deal, it was a bunch of other nations that aren't China, and trade with them is almost entirely great.

There were, at best, some good parts. Then, there's the stuff granting multinational corporations the ability to sue governments for harming their profits.

The text defines transaction to include the act of transmitting data. You wouldn't need to give them money, by a plain reading a simple HTTP request would be illegal.

Is viewing ads in TikTok giving them money? What if I click through and buy the item and they get a cut? What about sending gifts to creators from which they get a cut? What if all done via cryptocurrency? Gift cards? Someone bought a TikTok voucher in another country, gifted to me that I redeemed via VPN?

It also says transactions or any other actions... So, I let myself be tracked by TikTok by using a VPN, am I a criminal?

These are all good questions, and questions like this generally gets settled through court cases.

9 times out of 10 you can basically assume, " reasonability". Does viewing ads in TikTok give them money? I would expect not, because you're not getting the money. Posting ads on there certainly would count.

Giving gifts to creators probably would also count, although I'm sure a court would consider that incredibly minor, it would probably never get enforced, and even if it did it would probably be some tiny paltry amount.

The bank who lets that transaction happen however, might get in trouble.

If you let yourself be tracked using a VPN...? I suspect the answer to that question is going to lie in why you're doing that. Inadvertently? Almost certainly not going to be an issue.

Do you have some sort of ulterior motive? It's probably going to be a problem. After all, you're literally committing espionage for a foreign adversary of the United States in this case.

Remember that law is backed by court cases, and courts tend to be pretty reasonable. These things aren't programmed, they're human

Since it's unconstitutional for bills to target individual people or companies, they are never mentioned by name in the text. This is not some sort of conspiracy.

I’ve said this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35123415

They are trimming the branch they standing on, good luck.

Well kids were spending too much time on social media, which is just industrialized gossip. This bill will fix that. All of it.

What do you suppose will be the domestic political implications of such a ban?

What's that about VPNs?

Also would like to know

It goes to the issue of the what we might call the "Uniparty" - On some rather important issues like war and civil liberties the politicians band together in unity to indulge in some ugly authoritarian warmongering.

It took 20 years for the PATRIOT act to start cropping up politically (in an unusual display of cosmic fairness, the noisy Republicans are the ones being painted as terrorists - maybe that'll teach them a lesson about civil liberties and not giving cover to these horrible acts? Hoist with thine own petard) How long before this is used against the next left/right wing populist promising peace? Maybe even this year if they can use it against Trump.

Could we please have a source on the bill making it illegal to use a VPN?

There is no source, it doesn't make it illegal to use a VPN. It makes it a legal to use a VPN to bypass the restrictions in the law.

The intended idea is that you can't do business with tick tock and if you do try to use things to bypass that so you can do business with them, you get to face the fines.

It's not intended as a broad generic surveillance bill, and it's not intended as a means with which to ban all VPNs.

Work backwards.

If getting around this bill is illegal, and the bill is to be enforced, how do we know if someone is trying to get around the new law?

If we do not know what's going on within a VPN, how do we know the law is being obeyed?

How do we find out how everyone is using a VPN?

The end of the Internet as we know it is upon us.

Interesting times we’re living in.

Yeh, the grip of both govt and business will gradually wear down everything that made it amazing in its infancy. It has been sad to watch gradually unfold. Keep using and propagating open software and hardware, I guess. Not sure what else one can do. I mean, we can vote and rally and raise awareness but like, the largest forces in society basically guarantee the "enshittification" (as Doctorow puts it) of the net, sadly.

> Not sure what else one can do.

Participate in the formation of a giant decentralized mesh network with strong privacy/security/anonymity guarantees all the way down the stack and work to make it ridiculously accessible & user-friendly?

Then the government makes the operation of such things illegal and since they use radio they can home in directly on the signal.

Right, I literally started thinking about exactly this line of thinking: mesh networking, E2EE, etc.. but it'll just be outlawed and no one will participate in it. It's coming, it really is just a matter of time. It will probably take longer than we expect, and then suddenly it will just be.

They'll call it the dark mesh and show images of faceless people wearing hoodies and doing stuff in the dark with their computers.

I normally agree with counterarguments rooted in the state's monopoly on violence, but in this case other options for the PHY layer exist.

Seamless multi-PHY is possible if care is taken to prevent leaks in the abstraction e.g. precise timing expectations up the stack.

Plus, plenty of side channels exist with our conventional PHY. You can copy beacon frames from nearby 802.11 APs and rebroadcast them at just the right time to achieve transmission of an FSK modulated signal, for instance.

(In this case there would just be more of the same beacon frames in the air. You'd have to look at what the AP advertises as its broadcast interval to know that they don't belong there. Furthermore, you wouldn't be able to easily pinpoint the source of the extra transmissions or decrypt their content under a well-designed protocol.)

These kind of network already exists.

Some examples:

Guifi [Spain] http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet

Freifunk [Germany-Austria-Switzerland] https://freifunk.net/en/

Ninux [Italy] http://map.ninux.org/

This is actually exactly what GPT suggested. It even gave me python 3 code to run an LLM in a distributed mesh network of Raspberry Pis, which could pull together resources dynamically to infer prompts from nodes in the network.

Super fascinating. It gives directions and code to setup the devices and everything.

I asked it how could a benign AI spread without fear of being shutdown while trying to help humanity.

Yeah. It will probably fracture into many regional or national networks as governments impose their laws on it. Sad.

A disconnected Internet has always been the case just from the perspective of language alone. Only something like 15-20% of the world's population can speak any English, and only approximately 4-5% of the world's population speak English as a first language.[1] I'm sure reading and writing skills are much worse than these figures. English language skills are generally poor across Asia, Africa and the Middle East and it is Asia and Africa touted to contain the overwhelming bulk of the world's population by 2050. These English language skills are improving in some countries, but stagnant or declining in many others, with regional languages predicted to play an increasing role due to changing stances on globalisation.[2]

If the Internet was viewed as waning (along with globalisation), the lack of cross-language and cross-cultural communication tools would surely have to be a key or largest contributor. If you asked an average person in Pakistan to use the Internet to find the location of the closest shop selling beds near Buena Vista, Colorado, could they do it? If you asked an average person in America to use the Internet to determine whether a pharmacy in Langtang, Nigeria could sell them a common medication whilst on a tourist trip, could they do it?

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

[2] https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi...

nitpicking: English is an official language of Nigeria

To a point that is already the case. There are plenty of countries with different rules for the Internet. Also the content varies a lot across the world, same for the most popular apps and websites.

And in some ways it’s amazing to see such great diversity.

This is not accurate. The bill only applies to companies in which China (or other designated adversary) has a controlling interest. It doesn’t even remotely apply to “everything connected to the internet”. I’m against the bill for vaguely libertarian reasons but the amount of misinformation surrounding this thing is ridiculous.

Who gets to designate “adversaries”?

This bill is a huge transfer of power from the legislature to the executive.

That means that for 4-year blocks, one party gets to control all the interpretations of the various vagaries and ambiguities in the bill and throw people in jail for 20 years. Oppose anything about Ukraine policy? You’re aiding an adversary (Russia). 20 years for you.

This bill is terrifying and much worse than the Patriot Act, which has militarized and politicized law enforcement and prosecution across the country. It’s not just bad, it’s evil.

> Who gets to designate “adversaries”?

The Commerce Secretary, however the bill also specifies the legislature's ability to check this via a joint resolution (in both directions, adding or removing from the list). The legislature has just assigned responsibility to a faster acting executive, not totally ceded their control.

Don't participate in or even oppose next invasion of other sovereign nation. You are now adversary. And all of your products will be banned from market...

It doesn’t say controlling interest, it says any interest or equity holding at all.

Section 2-3: COVERED HOLDING.—The term “covered holding”—

(A) means […] a controlling holding held, directly or indirectly, in an ICTS covered holding entity by— …

“Controlling holding” is defined in section 2-2

Edit: section 2-2 (2) CONTROLLING HOLDING.—The term “controlling holding” means a holding with the power, whether direct or indirect and whether exercised or not exercised, to determine, direct, or decide important matters affecting an entity.

hmm. does that include reddit and disney?

AFAIK tencent owns <10% of reddit, so unless they got super voting shares (unlikely) it's not a controlling interest.

As above, there’s no mention of this being limited only to a controlling interest. So, going only by the text of the bill, it _would_ apply to reddit.

In practice it might not be enforced that way, but the bill _would_ allow enforcement against reddit. I wouldn’t expect that to mean “Reddit CEO sent to jail”, I would guess the idea is to reserve the ability to force Chinese divestment from basically any tech company in future.

As above, Section 2-3: COVERED HOLDING. —The term “covered holding”— (A) means […] a controlling holding held, directly or indirectly, in an ICTS covered holding entity by— …

“Controlling holding” is defined in section 2-2

Edit: here you go

(2) CONTROLLING HOLDING.—The term “controlling holding” means a holding with the power, whether direct or indirect and whether exercised or not exercised, to determine, direct, or decide important matters affecting an entity.

> (2) CONTROLLING HOLDING.—The term “controlling holding” means a holding with the power, whether direct or indirect and whether exercised or not exercised, to determine, direct, or decide important matters affecting an entity.

Exactly - by redefining the common meaning of 'controlling holding' to remove any notion of majority stake or voting rights, this definition would apply to any average shareholder who votes in an annual meeting.

From Wikipedia:

> A controlling interest is an ownership interest in a corporation with enough voting stock shares to prevail in any stockholders' motion. A majority of voting shares (over 50%) is always a controlling interest. When a party holds less than the majority of the voting shares, other present circumstances can be considered to determine whether that party is still considered to hold a controlling ownership interest

I'm sure the SEC has an even tighter definition of 'controlling interest' than this, and the bill could have used that definition, but instead it defines a new one.

You keep posting Section 2-3 and alluding to Section 2-2, which seems to be the direct definition that you wish to use to actually refute these arguments.

Given this, why isn't Section 2-2 also being posted or linked to?

If a company has a particular shareholder with 51% of the stock (or votes) then one might be able to argue no one else has any real control over them.

If everyone owns <10% then that’s a different story. Tencent can’t control the board alone, but they certain have some latent control.

If a vote splits at 49% in favor and 49% against, the 2% shareholder has all the control.

“Controlling interest” and “controlling holding” are well worn financial concepts with long legal precedent that are not open to creative interpretation. These principles are how the feds evaluate insider trading and such.

china certainly has influence on reddit though, even with 10%. quite a coincidence how tianenman square and Uyghur posts started getting removed after tencent came into the picture.

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