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People want a single global pool of content they can access but many options for how they access that content.

In the United States at least there's plenty of land far away from crowds, and inexpensive too. People just don't want to live there.

What’s the point of explicitly assigning “accountability” to a client? They aren’t answerable to you so there’s no practical outcome to them being declared accountable. Why not just define the tasks they are responsible for and leave it at that?

It’s mostly a legacy protocol at this point.

For what it’s worth, this is driven by federal regulations and carrier requirements, not by Twilio itself.

This article is from 2012

Do you have a reference for this? In interviews I read the Wachowskis defended the whole “batteries” explanation, which lessened my opinion of them.

Edit: found a pretty good reference for it being true: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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

You're right, the definition of transaction is quite broad here. However in order for VPN to run afoul of this bill, the gov't would first need to enforce the bill by banning individual users from accessing specific sites on the internet, which the VPN would then bypass. That kind of censorship has never been permitted under the first amendment and I don't see anything here that changes that.

The bill applies to only to financial transactions ("covered transactions" in the bill) and holdings ("covered holdings"), there's nothing in it at all directly regulating access to data or websites by individuals.

The provider would have to be controlled by China or other designated foreign adversary, and they would indeed have to be doing something determined to be a serious threat to the US.

The bill only applies to companies where a foreign national from an adversary country has a "controlling holding". i.e., none of the companies you listed or any other American owned company are subject to it at all.

No this interpretation is negated by sec 2-2, it has to be a "controlling holding" to count as a "covered holding":

> (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.

I think the VPN concern comes from a misreading of what is meant by "holding". A "holding" in this context is a financial asset like a stock. The section you highlighted:

> (B) includes any other holding, the structure of which is designed or intended to evade or circumvent the application of this Act, subject to regulations prescribed by the Secretary.

This is referring to intermediary holding companies intended to disguise an ownership stake by foreign nationals (like a shell company). Nothing to do with VPN or any other technology.

The intent there is to deal with people trying to get around the provision via intermediary holding companies. At its core there still must be some ownership stake or controlling interest by a foreign national, whether direct or indirect.

Edit: the key parts of the bill that specify it applies only for controlling interests:

> Sec 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.

> Sec 2-3-a (emphasis mine): COVERED HOLDING.—The term “covered holding”— means [...] a controlling holding held, directly or indirectly, in an ICTS covered holding entity by— [...]

I've read the bill and while I'm not a fan for more general reasons, it doesn't say anything like this at all. The bill is strictly about foreigners from designated US "adversaries" having an ownership stake in large technology companies operating in the US. The text cherry picked in some of these news articles is just a list of the types of technology companies the bill specifies should be the prioritized when evaluating which foreign owned companies should be scrutinized.

The bill doesn't directly ban data sharing but instead focuses on foreign ownership in US companies. It would be enforced similar to anti-trust laws today, by preventing Chinese nationals from purchasing or having an ownership stake in certain large technology companies deemed a security risk. I don't like the bill because I think it's unnecessary but it has nothing to do with searching people's phones or regulating actual data in any way.

The point of the bill is to give the executive branch the power to do exactly that: investigate and potentially ban or force divestment on any large technology business owned by a US adversary like China and determined to pose a serious security risk.

> But when one says that GPT is "just a statistical model" they're implying a capacity cap of statistical models

Except there is no “capacity cap” on statistical models, we have no idea what they are or are not capable of yet.

This is not true anymore, they changed their terms so this is now opt in.

Full article here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368849088_A_highly_...

Their training data comes from repos, not from you using the tool.

It's a shopping mall conglomerate. They specialize in massive multi-level shopping malls.

That is exactly what birdwatch is: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...