Microsoft to buy TikTok????

If you show anyone on your TikTok under 16 you get immediately banned. It wasn’t always that way but it is now. All it takes is one person in the background to do it.

FWIW TikTok is the only social network that feels innovative and creative right now. Specifically the way one video’s audio is used as a context and structure for other videos. It’s also the only network that feels discoverable.

How would they know? do they have some magic software that can tell a 14 from a 16 year old?

lol, they’ve datamined all your contacts and your contacts contacts from your phone and other social media accounts, silly!

It’s not actually as strict as I said. But if your TikTok primarily features someone who could be under 16, especially if they are not with an obvious adult, it sets off their system. Background is ok.

This is apparently the argument for MS to buy TikTok. Yes, there are no synergies, but TikTok is primed to explode. All MS has to do is leave it alone, and it could reap all the rewards.

The really unlucky part was when that dev was asked about providing proof of his assertions, the dog ate his homework (unlucky!) [1]


bangorlol

3 points · 1 month ago

I don’t have a good chunk of it thats easily accessible anymore. Apparently I never pushed it to my git server nor github, instead choosing to leave it on my MBP which had a motherboard failure shortly after finishing. Replacing the mobo/getting the SSD off of it is kind of a pain and I haven’t had the time to do any data recovery on it.

I’ve provided a couple of consultants with the payloads + some frida scripts I used to help them get started on their attempts at reversing it, but haven’t posted much other than a few structs and scripts for everyone else.


[1] I wouldn’t be surprised if everything he asserts is true, but it would have been real nice to not have lost all the evidence. Some people have pushed forward the notion that this isn’t really this author’s work, but hard to say much of anything when all the information except the assertion vanished.

Yeah, it strikes me as weird that folks are saying, “why would anyone buy tiktok?”

Because… Every kid in the universe is addicted to tiktok?

The crazy thing is that tiktok is just Vine. But Twitter bought Vine, and then killed it. If they hadn’t, Twitter would already own TikTok and be even more dominant in social media.

Relevent writeups.

China, which combines this tradition with a totalitarian government, takes data collection to the max. Facial recognition is omnipresent, nearly all transactions, even in the real world, are digital, and social networks like WeChat are completely open to censors, both from Tencent and the government; the government even hacks your computers as a matter of policy. Given this reality it is completely reasonable to be concerned about TikTok data!

That, though, is not the primary risk: what should truly concern Americans is the algorithm.

TikTok’s Algorithm


After all, this certainly wasn’t the first time that TikTok has seemed to act politically: the service censored #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd, blocked a teenager discussing China’s genocide in Xinjiang, and blocked a video of Tank Man. The Guardian published TikTok guidelines that censored Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, and the Falun Gong, and I myself demonstrated that TikTok appeared to be censoring the Hong Kong protests and Houston Rockets basketball team.

The point, though, is not just censorship, but its inverse: propaganda. TikTok’s algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone — except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company — knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?

One of the more pernicious mistruths surrounding the debate about TikTok is that this will potentially lead to the splintering of the Internet; this completely erases the history of China’s Great Firewall, started 23 years ago, which effectively cut China off from most Western services. That the U.S. may finally respond in kind is a reflection of reality, not the creation of a new one.

What is new is the increased splintering in the non-China Internet: the U.S. model is still the default for most of the world, but the European Union and India are increasingly pursuing their own paths.

I saw a twitter post that said ticktok provides Microsoft with cradle to grave social network

Minecraft—Xbox Live—Ticktok—Teams—Skype—Linked In—Excel
Kids early teen old teen Gen Z Gen X Gen X Boomer
there was some debate if older senior managers actually use Excel

Xi Jinping endorsed this explanation for the Soviet collapse in a 2013 address to party cadres. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he asked his audience. “An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce!” The party leadership is determined to avoid the Soviet mistake. A leaked internal party directive from 2013 describes “the very real threat of Western anti-China forces and their attempt at carrying out westernization” within China. The directive describes the party as being in the midst of an “intense, ideological struggle” for survival. According to the directive, the ideas that threaten China with “major disorder” include concepts such as “separation of powers,” “independent judiciaries,” “universal human rights,” “Western freedom,” “civil society,” “economic liberalism,” “total privatization,” “freedom of the press,” and “free flow of information on the internet.” To allow the Chinese people to contemplate these concepts would “dismantle [our] party’s social foundation” and jeopardize the party’s aim to build a modern, socialist future.

Not Orwellian at all!

(I always like the part in dystopian fiction where the bad guy explicitly says that human rights and freedom will ruin everything)

Anyone have a good technical breakdown of TikTok? Is it actually worse than Facebook or other information greedy apps on the iPhone? Apple does a decent job with containing app requests. Is it bypassing their restrictions?

Why not just say ‘two weeks’?

That’s good - it’ll also give the Trump Administration 45 more days to figure out a legal way to actually do the banning. The First Amendment would like a word with you, sir.

Or “when the comprehensive healthcare bill is signed”

I assume this is the same thing in the Tweet above.

https://www.ft.com/content/a1162b60-977d-400c-9758-edc4aa006f72

This is straight up extortion, right?

It’s not just extortion, it’s straight out of a bad mob movie.

Trump: Hey TikTok, it’d be a shame if someone had to shut down your operations in the US
TikTok: We agree, what can we do to prevent that?
Trump: Well, you can sell yourself to an American company, then I wouldn’t ban you
TikTok: OK, we’ll do that
Trump: Oh, and by the way, I want 30% of the sale price. Remember, if you don’t sell, you’re banned.

But it’s cool, because it’s a Republican.

Well it’s at least partly cool, but because the ‘victim’ is the CCP.

The blog post they made over the weekend read like something pre-written by them for the CCP.