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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
by gorwell 4y ago
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.
- aaomidi 4y agoI’ve said this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35123415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35123415
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- est 4y ago> 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.
- yed 4y agoNo, it only applies to entities where China has a controlling interest. If you buy Chinese hardware that doesn’t make your company Chinese.
- syntheticcdo 4y agoNo, 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.
- ladon86 4y agoRight, 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.
- yed 4y agoHolding 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.
- lenkite 4y agoActually even minor stock holders can get to vote to decide important matters, so yes, it would cover that.
- whizzter 4y agoFurther 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).
- singleshot_ 4y agoAs 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…
- est 4y ago
- nico 4y agoThe end of the Internet as we know it is upon us. Interesting times we’re living in.
- amatecha 4y agoYeh, 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.
- acuozzo 4y ago> 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?
- matheusmoreira 4y agoThen the government makes the operation of such things illegal and since they use radio they can home in directly on the signal.
- amatecha 4y agoRight, 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.
- prmoustache 4y agoThey'll call it the dark mesh and show images of faceless people wearing hoodies and doing stuff in the dark with their computers.
- andrewclunn 4y agoSo "beating China" is used to justify becoming China... well shit.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwawaylinux 4y agoNot beating China so much as the ruling class cementing their power.
- andrewclunn 4y agoTrue, but that's never how they market it.
- eddyg 4y agoTit for tat is a highly effective strategy in game theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
- roenxi 4y agoDoes 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.
- AniseAbyss 4y ago[dead]
- Bud 4y agoCould we please have a source on the bill making it illegal to use a VPN?
- bioemerl 4y agoThere 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- neogodless 4y agoWork 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?
- seewhydee 4y agoOf 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!
- dmix 4y agoForeign boogie men still rule the day in America’s self-owns.
- hsn915 4y agoThis 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.
- nasfench 4y agoI 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 https://www.guppylake.com/~nsb/CSCW-ATOMICMAIL.txt
- rusk 4y agoYeah read up on where the B in cyclon B came from.
- ChrisRR 4y agoCan you tell us? From my googling it just says B was the second version
- rusk 4y agoWhat 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.
- duringmath 4y agoWhat's that about VPNs?
- ipv4dhcp 4y agoAlso would like to know
- plugger 4y ago> 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.
- behringer 4y agoSince tiktok is not mentioned in the bill I find this hard to believe.
- bioemerl 4y agoIt 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.
- gruez 4y agoThat 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.
- bioemerl 4y agoI 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.
- yed 4y agoThis 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.
- lazystar 4y agohmm. does that include reddit and disney?
- gruez 4y agoAFAIK tencent owns <10% of reddit, so unless they got super voting shares (unlikely) it's not a controlling interest.
- gorgoiler 4y agoIf 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.
- lazystar 4y agochina 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.
- yed 4y ago“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.
- 4y ago
- atleastoptimal 4y agoSupport 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.
- bboygravity 4y agoThe US wants to be more like China and the Soviet Union. My first hint was Snowden.
- ghostDancer 4y ago[flagged]
- akomtu 4y agoUnited Soviets?
- Dah00n 4y agoNone 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.
- _cenw 4y agoThe 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.
- qwytw 4y ago> PRC anything as massive as the US Really? I assume domestically China engages in surveillance on a much higher scale than the US.
- throw10920 4y agoIt 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.
- roenxi 4y agoIt 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.
- miroljub 4y ago[flagged]
- SteveSmith16384 4y agoI thought the phrase "land of the free" was always meant ironically anyway.
- infinitezest 4y agoI believe the original wording was "land of the free for the first 6 months, no credit card required"
- mrjin 4y agoThey are trimming the branch they standing on, good luck.
- pjc50 4y ago> 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.
- mcv 4y agoThere 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.
- anthk 4y agoChina 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.
- misssocrates 4y agoIs 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."
- andrepd 4y agoThere 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.
- 4y ago
- lumb63 4y agoWhen 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?
- pibechorro 4y agoIf 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.
- teekert 4y agoAnd yet, we're getting chat control. I think most people don't care or understand.
- mrguyorama 4y agoAlso 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.
- jgwil2 4y agoIf 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.
- bithead 4y agoWell kids were spending too much time on social media, which is just industrialized gossip. This bill will fix that. All of it.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoWhat do you suppose will be the domestic political implications of such a ban?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]