My dude, I am positive. My cake day: June 8 2023. Your cake day: June 12, 2023. Do you not realize that people can have multiple accounts? Dick measuring and attempts at gate keeping based on time on a platform is super cringe.

I created the community you’re posting in right now. You should probably get off the internet and chill bro. You woke up and made the choice to behave this way, and it’s pretty fucking embarrassing tbh.

It’s an amazing feeling, enjoy it. It’s a probably equally as awesome a feeling as when you see ads while on public wifi somewhere and realize that the no ad experience has been completely normalized for you again.

So which is it?

Is the US unable to hold Tiktok accountable or is it/should it be allowed to dictate the ownership of Tiktok?

I was wrong, TikTok has a US subsidiary, so accountability can been enforced. I was under the mistaken impression they didn’t, so operating on the assumption that any accountability action would be functionally unenforceable.

Run a pihole dns server on your network, I didn’t even realize they ran ads on the site. I just popped off wifi and on to cellular, and wow yeah it’s rough.

The US could, if there was the political will, hold Facebook accountable for this because Meta is an American company. The US would not be able to hold a non-American company accountable in the same way. I do not see a conflict between wanting Meta held accountable for allowing things like Cambridge Analytica to occur and not minding the US taking proactive action on TikTok.

I’m planning to get one at a local datacenter

Ah, never mind then, ignore everything I said.

So my plan is to set up a VPS and configure my own private VPN

Unless I’m misunderstanding, you don’t need a VPS for this. RouterOS supports you enabling a built-in VPN server, which you can then connect to directly, you don’t need to set up a VPS or anything. Then you can just put allow rules in the firewall for traffic from the VPN subnet in to your main subnet, your NASs subnet, your camera subnet, etc. This is how I access my homes resources remotely, the only ports open to the Internet are the VPN ports on my CCR1036.

Agreed on the Republican party bit.

If Facebook could be considered a nefarious conspiracy (or at least subservient to the powers engaging in said conspiracy), why is it unbelievable that TikTok could also be?

It is not about preventing foreign or private influence that his harmful to the citizens. It is about controling that influence.

No, it is about preventing foreign influence on citizens. The fact that some level of control (or more accurately accountability) can be exerted by the US government on companies like Meta is true but unrelated. If ByteDance was a company in the EU we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Preventing an oppressive government from exerting undue influence on another sovereign nation’s citizenry is an oppressive act itself?

Nope that’s not what i’m saying, try again.

If having a nuanced and often extremely critical opinion is being a subservient puppy, woofwoof I guess?

Imagine the uproar if China demanded that Google stopped being a US military contractor.

China is actively demanding that all Chinese companies excise American hardware and software from their technology stacks. They know that they can’t divorce a US tech company headquartered in the US from the US intelligence agencies, so it is the next best option. This is colloquially known in China as “Delete A” or “Delete America”. Who is being xenophobic again?

or installing a great firewall to prevent US citizens from accessing their site.

Literally no one is suggesting this, but keep firing yourself up I guess.

Right. So if they sell ads on it, it’s not a speech platform right? Reddit, not a speech platform? The Washington Post? The Guardian? Lemmy, when lemmy instances start running ads, Not a speech platform? Gmail? Not a speech platform?

It’s not a speech platform, at best it could be loosely defines as “press”. Even if I’m generous and concede that, pretty sure there’s Supreme Court precedent for allowing the government to block the publication and dissemination of foreign press. Also no, Gmail is not a speech platform in this context lol.

It’s my ability to use the speech platform that gets banned in the process.

You need to stop picking the things in my comment you want to argue with and ignoring the rest. The First Amendment prevents the government from criminalizing or penalizing you, an American citizen, from engaging in protected speech. It does not prevent them from forcing a foreign company to divest or cease local US operations. Doing so does not infringe on your speech. Infringing on your speech would be something like criminalizing the act of downloading a tiktok apk and using the app after ByteDance was forced to shutter US operations.

You see the difference right? You’ll still be able to use TikTok after the (probably not happening) ban without any criminal or civil liability. If ByteDance says fuck it and geoblocks the US, you still haven’t been blocked from your speech by the US government, you’ve been blocked by ByteDance, and if you felt like suing them in China you could full send it if that was for you.

They can ban TikTok from being able to “do business” in the US, that is different from pulling it from the app store

Ban TikTok from earning any revenue in the US and they will pull the app themselves. Do you think TikTok is a charity or a non-profit or something?

And frankly, “doing business” has been an inherent part of speech platforms for decades, selling advertising on speech platforms is how they can exist, all the way back to the days of newspapers and radio.

Sure, press publications sell ads, no one said otherwise, not really sure what purpose stating the obvious serves. Ultimately, the US government is under no obligation to allow a foreign company to offer goods or services within its borders, regardless of whether it’s a “press” good or service.

To recap:

1. Banning tiktok does not ban your speech specifically.
2. As no entity protected by the Constitution is being censored, the government isn’t violating the Constitution.
3. There is no 3, that’s it. Congress is free to swing the ban hammer.

Unless you think that the Constitution applies to everyone in the entire world, in which case I guess I’ll need to buy some stock in Northrop and Lockheed.

Mostly privacy. My wife likes to play MP games on her PC, and I don’t want those services to know our IP. I also don’t trust websites generally, so I’d like to hide our IP for most, if not all, traffic. Our current ISP has us behind a NAT (we were assigned a 10.x.x.x static address), but our next ISP may have our IP public facing, and I still don’t want our exact city to be discoverable (we’re in a relatively small city, so easier to doxx).

You do you, I certainly won’t judge your choices or opinions or whatever. I will say that adding a VPN into the mix will add (probably significant amounts of) latency to any connection routed through it. This has the potential to make multiplayer games borderline unplayable depending on the type and its sensitivity to latency in general.

If you’re that worried about being doxxed stand up a site-to-site vpn between your tik and an AWS VPC. Use the right region and you probably won’t have much latency issues, although the transit fees from AWS might bite you.

On the flip side, since the mikrotik can act as a vpn server you could always set up your whole home vpn along with the vpn server, travel overseas to somewhere like Japan, set your upstream vpn’s exit as the same country you’re visiting, VPN in to your house over your phones Japanese cellular carrier data connection, then watch local JP netflix with the knowledge that the traffic is tunneling around the globe to get to you and marvel at the interconnectedness of the modern world. ask me how i know how amazing this is.

Jesus christ bro you’re insufferable.

They get to do whatever they want because they’re a dicatorship. Saying the US government should be allowed to do something “because China does it” is a real slippery slope.

It’s a weird blend of trade war and cyber warfare, but for all intents and purposes it’s a trade war right now. No one was complaining that the US is blocking the sale of H100s in China are they? No.

We aren’t talking about oil extraction or car sales here, we’re talking about something which is explicitly a speech platform. They are different.

Except it’s not, it’s an ad platform.

It’s not just a “company” being banned, it’s the government telling you that you can’t use that companies services for your speech.

Nope, absolutely incorrect, it is indeed just a company being banned. I don’t think you fully understand what “speech” is, or really who the Constitution applies to. You do realize that the First Amendment means that the government may not jail, fine, or impose civil liability on people or organizations based on what they say or write, right? You also realize that preventing a company from doing business in the US because they’re beholden to an openly antagonistic nation-state is decidedly not the same as banning a company from doing business in the US because of its speech right?

Freedom of speech and the press has literally nothing at all to do with this.

Except that’s not my point, but you already knew that didn’t you? It’s pretty obvious you’re not actually here for a conversation.

Who are they worried China is going to influence? Children, right? If it’s adults, that’s almost more insulting, they think we don’t deserve to be able to see all sides of an argument and are too stupid to discern fact from fiction.

Yeah fam, you and me are definitely way too smart to ever be manipulated by military units whose sole job is to effectively manipulate large swaths of the population.

The answer is everyone. They’re worried about anyone and everyone, because they do it also.

https://youtu.be/VA4e0NqyYMw?si=u_d-eDOMYA-FetVn

If China is going prevent US companies from doing profitable business within its economic borders I don’t see why the US should allow Chinese companies to engage in profitable businesses ventures within its country.

Blocking a company from doing business in the US is not the same as the US Government infringing on citizens rights. The better way to do it imo would be to toss ByteDance on the Sanctioned Entities list and block any US financial institution from servicing their US subsidiary. ByteDance wouldn’t stay in the US market for long if they couldn’t get any ad revenue, then it’s their choice to pull out instead of the US Government kicking them out.

It’s really not an infringement of rights either way though.

I mean I’m not saying that this is being gone about the right way or for the right reasons, but when an adversarial nation-state is working to undermine US economic interests within its borders is there really anything wrong with punching back? I personally don’t think so, but I’m fully aware that I’m probably in the minority on this here.

https://twitter.com/lizalinwsj/status/1765615508357779477

(paywalled article from author above https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-technology-software-delete-america-2b8ea89f)

MacOS is really the only one I never understood unless you’re really tied to the Apple ecosystem.

I’d argue the “just use Linux” meme is more relevant for Mac users than Windows.

At this point when I’m choosing a computer I’m really just choosing a hypervisor front end.

MacOS gives me all the familiarity and transferred knowledge that I built up with Linux, but with a much more polished desktop experience. I like the Messenger sync, it helps me actually notice texts from my partner when I’m rabbit-holing hard. I like Mail better than Outlook (or Thunderbird or whatever the modern mail client on Linux is now).

I just prefer MacOS as the glue between all my VMs that I work in each day. I’m personally on the desktop pc with Windows for gaming, MBP for all my work/hobby work (using VMs with whatever OS is necessary that day), and headless Debian on any servers train.