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[In2ition]

What can I say? Ridiculous

[Cap]

I think they found actual evidence of the data being sent to China despite promises that it wouldn't be. I'll check when I get home.

Any update on this?

[Mori Chu]

Thanks for the reminder. The most recent article I found about it was this one:

https://fortune.com/2024/04/15/tiktok-c ... ect-texas/

Also US intelligence may have more info than we do. But that would just be speculation.

[Kryptonic]

Wow, Gateway Pundit filing for bankruptcy. Bye Felicia.

Funny how it’s always In2’s trusted sources found liable for defamation, while his truth-telling heroes can’t even find grounds to file a claim against those treasonous leftists.

Yet we’re all still told how we’re all wrong day in and day out…. Love it.

[Cap]

Thanks for the reminder. The most recent article I found about it was this one:

https://fortune.com/2024/04/15/tiktok-c ... ect-texas/

Also US intelligence may have more info than we do. But that would just be speculation.

Paywalled. Can you post the relevant excerpts?

[Mori Chu]

Here are some links that may be accessible.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/ex-t ... -to-china/

Ex-TikTok Employee Says He Was Ordered To Send US Data to China

A former senior employee at TikTok said he was ordered to send American user data to Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, contradicting TikTok’s public claims of operating independently from China, according to a Fortune report published Monday.

Evan Turner, a senior data scientist for TikTok from April to September in 2022, told Fortune that every two weeks TikTok had him email spreadsheets containing millions of American users’ data to ByteDance employees in Beijing, including the users’ names, email addresses, IP addresses, and demographics.

Turner said he "literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China" even though TikTok had launched Project Texas in March 2022, promising U.S. officials that it would stop sharing American user data with its Chinese parent company and keep the data in U.S.-based data centers. "There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this," Turner said.

The former senior data scientist said that while his supervisor was switched from a ByteDance executive in Beijing to an American manager in Seattle, a human resources representative told him he would in reality still report to the Beijing-based ByteDance executive. Turner said he never met with the American manager and continued to have weekly meetings with the ByteDance executive.

"Even though a spreadsheet is probably a very tiny percentage of all of the information that TikTok collects, it can be extremely targeted and very damaging to certain people," Anton Dahbura, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, told Fortune. "Everyone should be really concerned."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-pledged ... g-cbccf203

TikTok Struggles to Protect U.S. Data From Its China Parent
Video-sharing app says it has walled off American data, but employees say data is still sometimes shared with its China-based parent

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/em ... nce-access

Leaked Audio From 80 Internal TikTok Meetings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China

“I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,” said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers.

The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes.

“Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.” (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.)

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tik ... index.html

Analysis: There is now some public evidence that China viewed TikTok data

US officials have long insisted the Chinese government may be able to view the personal information of TikTok users — but that claim was purely speculative. Until now.

In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes.

In a court filing this week, the former employee of ByteDance, Yintao Yu, alleged that the CCP spied on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in 2018 by using “backdoor” access to TikTok to identify and monitor the activists’ locations and communications.

Multiple security experts told CNN that this appears to be the first reported allegation of the CCP accessing actual TikTok user data. The explosive claim, which ByteDance disputes, could inflame a global debate over whether TikTok poses a security threat and whether policymakers are right to ban the short-form video app.

Signage with logo at headquarters of venture capital investment firm Sequoia Capital, on Sand Hill Road in the Silicon Valley town of Menlo Park, California, August 25, 2016. (Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images).

[Mori Chu]

I try not to re-post every stupid thing Elon says. But it is just wild to me that the CEO / owner of a company making electric cars would call people who want to fight climate change "communists." Isn't that an attack on his own customers? What is he thinking?

[Nodack]

He has managed to turn politics on its side. His anti Dem stance has forced Republicans to defend him. He makes solar roofs, electric vehicles and owns a social media company. Republicans should hate him just based on his businesses. He says mean things against Dems, so they love him. Not enough to buy any of his products though. His anti Dem stance has hurt his sales since it’s mostly Dems buying electric cars and solar roofs and crapping on your base isn’t the best move.

[Mori Chu]

Must be why his companies are doing so well the past few years. Oh, wait.

[In2ition]

He has managed to turn politics on its side. His anti Dem stance has forced Republicans to defend him. He makes solar roofs, electric vehicles and owns a social media company. Republicans should hate him just based on his businesses. He says mean things against Dems, so they love him. Not enough to buy any of his products though. His anti Dem stance has hurt his sales since it’s mostly Dems buying electric cars and solar roofs and crapping on your base isn’t the best move.

Why should Republicans hate Musk for building these things? No one hates people that make solar panels or electric vehicles. I hope that's not shocking for you, or challenges your paradigm of what some else should or shouldn't hate.

[Nodack]

Maybe they don’t hate the people making EV’s. They do hate EV’s and Solar though.

Trump’s Violent Language Toward EVs
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/clim ... 0of%20jobs.
Trump has been applying to electric vehicles, one of his favorite foils. He has long claimed electric cars will “kill” America's auto industry. He has called them an “assassination” of jobs.

With violent rhetoric, Trump fights electric vehicles to defeat Biden in Michigan
Trump has warned that Biden's policies encouraging the transition to electric vehicles would result in an economic “bloodbath” in the U.S. economy that would “kill” the auto industry.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-e ... rcna145689
While President Joe Biden has made the transition to electric vehicles a cornerstone of his administration, Trump sounds determined to undo many of Biden’s EV policies and move the needle back in favor of gasoline-powered cars.

Did you know your car could be a political statement? Biden and Trump views clash on EVs
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 042653007/
And as they move closer to the mainstream, EVs have become the latest culture war flashpoint between Republicans and Democrats, with Biden pushing heavily for their adoption and Trump promising a “bloodbath” of regulatory restrictions to block imports and protect American auto workers, many of whom are based in the swing state of Michigan.

Donald Trump trashes electric cars and again shows he knows nothing about them
https://electrek.co/2024/03/12/donald-t ... bout-them/

Trump’s War on Solar
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... er-968511/

Trump’s sneering at solar is stupid in the Sunshine State
https://floridaphoenix.com/2020/10/29/t ... ine-state/

Donald Trump Bashes Solar Power and 'Windmills'
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-c ... on-1370707

As Trump Dismisses Renewables, Energy Sector Doubles Down
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianmurra ... 4cc5553e13

Analysis: Trump solar tariffs cost 62K US jobs
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-envir ... k-us-jobs/

[In2ition]

Instead of hating people, how about they hate the rhetoric that EVs, solar panels, and wind generators are the panacea? Everything has their own limitations and harms that they put on the environment.

[Nodack]

And of course according to Cons anything considered green is bad for the environment.

[Mori Chu]

Colin Jost (SNL Weekend Update co-host) delivers the 2024 White House Correspondent's Dinner speech. These are always funny.

[Mori Chu]

Gamers can no longer post to Twitter/X because they have closed off their API. Seems like a bad idea, but oh well!

[Mori Chu]

Uh oh.

[TOO]

Man, who saw that coming?

[Mori Chu]

Maybe they can put a chip in RFK's brain where the worm used to be.