This app should have been banned from both appstores when it was found to be exfiltrating all clipboard data. Insane that it's still permitted by Apple and Google after such an obvious display of malevolence.
Privacy concerns obviously become much more critical when an aggressive foreign power is involved and is likely to weaponise the data.
Particularly a country like China that operates the most sophisticated control/surveillance systems in the world on its own citizens.
>What other explanation is there for this other than some type of china-USA (or global) conspiracy?
Perhaps the fact that every other major social company has been found of doing the same (Facebook and Google multiple times) and yet nothing happened to their apps, at best they got a "slap on the wrist" at times...
The focus on Tik-Tok is more about a shot in the US-China trade and geopolitical rivarly than because it's somehow unique
For me the geopolitics are a lot more adversarial than that. For ex can't use FB or Google in China why - its American espionage against Chinese citizens. The question is why America (via Apple/Google) are allowing TikTok to spy on American citizens.
Heh, in red states where unconditional support for Israel among white evangelical protestants is more popular than in the Jewish-American community itself? Where every other car seems to have a bumper sticker featuring the Israeli and American flag depicted together in unison? Hating Jewish people is very fringe in any American state, the mainstream will ostracize you for it anywhere in the country. Obviously so in blue states, but also in red states as well. Speaking out against Israel is a good way to get yourself banned from most red state businesses, and as many red states as blue states have passed anti-BDS laws.
> where unconditional support for Israel among white evangelical protestants is more popular than in the Jewish-American community itself?
Dominionist support for Israel can easily coexist with (arguably, is grounded in) anti-Semitism, and non-Dominionist right-wing support for Israel is often more grounded in Islamophobia than positive feelings about Jewish people, and is itself compatible with anti-Semitism.
Support for Israel when it comes to American foreign policy doesn’t mean positive, or even neutral, treatment of Jewish people, particularly those immediately present around the Israel-supporter.
The wacky derivations of their beliefs doesn't change the fact that most businesses in red states would kick you straight out the door for antisemitism or any criticism of Israel. Anti-semitism is far outside the mainstream anywhere in the country you choose. The closest you'll find to mainstream overt antisemitism is probably Idaho, but even there it is very fringe. You'll be hard pressed to even find a church that accuses Jews of killing Christ, while a century ago this was common doctrine. The American public at large no longer tolerate this sort of thought.
In practice, right-wing support for Israel boils down to "God hates anti-Semites. God loves His chosen people." You'd think that ought to be pretty hard to square with a Jew-hating attitude, but politics is the farthest thing from rational thinking so at the end of the day anything is possible. It's nonetheless the case that most people in right-wing states are not anti-Semitic.
Where is that narrative coming from? It doesn't seem to be what the article is pushing.
The perp seems like a nutjob who had a violent melt down, no need for a grander narrative. This sort of thing happens thousands of times a year all across the country, the only reason this case is on HN is because of who they worked for. If this were about a Redmond retail worker stabbing another, in the same town, it wouldn't be here.
That's not definitive because you're assuming motivation, it could be that someone didn't want a vaccine, and you're assuming all research was publicized to us. This was the fastest vaccine ever developed in human history, it's worth noting.
The research out of this lab didn't help develop the vaccine, so what were they doing in the first place? Weapons research, it's as simple as that. As soon as the virus started circulating through the public, that was their chance to shine! They could have released everything they knew and jump-started vaccine development.. but they didn't. They covered it up, because fighting bugs was never their interest in the first place.
Why should anybody believe otherwise? Principle of charity? Please.
Even if I were to accept the (ridiculous) premise, it's still wrong.
Wuhan Institute of Virology did actively contribute to the development of the Vero vaccine by Sinopharm.
Regarding the premise, there's no reason to believe that a lab working on coronaviruses (quite common) that did not happen to contribute directly to a successful vaccine development effort (profoundly uncommon) was necessarily working on a bioweapon.
FWIW, there are ~59 operational BSL-4 labs in the world, and only a BSL-3 is necessary to work on potentially airborne diseases like coronaviruses. According to this study[1] of published research papers, there are probably about 150 BSL-3 labs in the United States alone. Are those all bioweapon programs because they didn't contribute to the vax development programs?
> I'm not sure what world you're living in but we've been shooting missiles at Chinese military objects
Only after several days of failing to resolve the balloon matter diplomatically. Shooting it down was not their first resort, and that's probably because diplomatic considerations with China were being weighed against the domestic political situation. When the diplomatic situation can be kept relatively smooth and normal by keeping the public in the dark, that's the 'rational' choice.
The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulating through the population, did these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is done, and silence the people who already understand it with the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't participate in this ban.
Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research has the power to kill billions and no demonstrable upside. It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility would be hard pressed to release his work on the global public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman's willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.
We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the understanding of common people, and it's getting people killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw the wizards off the top of it.
> The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years.
This kind of sloppy hyperbole is tremendously damaging, feeding the false narrative that we must choose between the benefits of modern virology--smallpox wasn't eradicated until 1977!--and the catastrophic risks of experiments on novel potential pandemic pathogens.
Almost all modern virological research involves either existing pathogens already present in humans, or novel pathogens in systems incapable of replicating in humans. The WIV's research was a narrow exception, and one that was controversial long before this pandemic. For example, here's David Relman asking Ralph Baric a question about those risks, back in 2014:
That narrow area carries almost all the risk of a catastrophic research accident, and has yet to deliver any significant benefit. It could be banned with minimal impact on almost all modern virological research. That narrow regulation is what we need, and there are people (like the new NGO Protect Our Future) working to draft and enact it. Your conflation between modern virology in aggregate and that narrow area doesn't help them, and I hope you will stop.
Hackernews now advocating for burning books, wow. This is the end result in allowing political ragebait threads instead of focusing on tech and startups.
That's as dense as claiming we should punish the Cambridge Analytica incident by reverting the entire humanity's computing technology by a century. There are numerous perspectives in which you and I are the evil wizards simply because we're in this move-fast-and-break-things industry. Don't burn the field just to punish a few.
