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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 ge

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!

dmix 4y ago
Foreign boogie men still rule the day in America’s self-owns.
hsn915 4y ago
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.
- nasfench 4y ago
  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 https://www.guppylake.com/~nsb/CSCW-ATOMICMAIL.txt
- rusk 4y ago
  Yeah read up on where the B in cyclon B came from.
  - ChrisRR 4y ago
    Can you tell us? From my googling it just says B was the second version
    - rusk 4y ago
      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.
      - hnbad 4y ago
        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.
        rusk 4y ago
        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.
  - dijit 4y ago
    Just did. It was the second variant of the poison, nothing to do with people, ethnicities or locations. Just a revision character.
- AniseAbyss 4y ago
  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.
AmericanChopper 4y ago
> 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.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  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.
cornholio 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  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.
- ihatepython 4y ago
  Pretty sure Zuckerberg loves this. He probably spent a lot of $$$ lobbying for this.
  - Proof 4y ago
    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.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  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.
Y_Y 4y ago
"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_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder#United_State...
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    [flagged]
briffle 4y ago
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…

dmix 4y ago

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

hsn915 4y ago

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.

nasfench 4y ago
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 https://www.guppylake.com/~nsb/CSCW-ATOMICMAIL.txt
rusk 4y ago
Yeah read up on where the B in cyclon B came from.
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  Can you tell us? From my googling it just says B was the second version
  - rusk 4y ago
    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.
    - hnbad 4y ago
      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.
      - rusk 4y ago
        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.
- dijit 4y ago
  Just did. It was the second variant of the poison, nothing to do with people, ethnicities or locations. Just a revision character.
AniseAbyss 4y ago
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.

AmericanChopper 4y ago

> 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.

dragonwriter 4y ago
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.

cornholio 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
llanowarelves 4y ago
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.
ihatepython 4y ago
Pretty sure Zuckerberg loves this. He probably spent a lot of $$$ lobbying for this.
- Proof 4y ago
  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.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
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.

Y_Y 4y ago

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

IIAOPSW 4y ago
[flagged]
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  [flagged]

briffle 4y ago

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…