Tik Tok, Tik Tok ...
Microsoft TikTok, Boom, Crash, Tinkle. Er, oops!
Microsoft has confirmed it is considering the purchase of made-in-China social network TikTok and that its CEO Satya Nadella has spoken with US president Donald Trump to re-assure him about the security and taxation implications of the putative purchase. Microsoft has been rumoured to be courting TikTok for the last week, but …
Apologies if I've missed something obvious, but I just can't see what it is...
Umm... how can Microsoft buy TikTok if ByteDance does not want to sell? Will the almighty US just take it away from ByteDance and give it to MS?
Pompeo claims TikTok is feeding all user data to the Chinese Communist Party. So fucking what? Which US tech companies give the US government user data? MS? Cisco? Google? Facebook? IBM? AT&T? Verizon? Amazon? Apple? (might've missed a few hundred)
I'm not into social media type things too much (as in no FB, Insta, etc), but I'm going to download and install TikTok today, coz, I just feel like chucking a tanty!!
"China's ByteDance has agreed to divest the U.S. operations of TikTo"
They're prepared to sell the *US* operations. So Trump is effectively trying to make the US operation worthless, driving down that sale price.
I wonder what his kickback is? There is rarely a thing he doesn't that doesn't include a kickback for Trump. He's pretty strapped for cash right now, he's been taking money out from his PACs in large chunks and has a loan payment coming up for his failing businesses:
Debt ridden failing businesses:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/donald-trump-loans-deutsche-bank/
"Win or lose in November, one thing won’t change for Donald Trump: Over the next few years, his company must settle a series of whopping debts. Before the end of a theoretical second term, his company will have to refinance—or, in a far less likely scenario, pay off—nearly a half-billion dollars in loans linked to some of his most prized assets, including Trump Tower"
Laundering PAC money into Trump money:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/07/21/how-donald-trump-moved-millions-from-his-campaign-donors-to-his-private-business/
"$2.2 million of contributions from other people has turned into $2.2 million of revenue for Trump. And that’s just counting the money flowing directly through the president’s campaign. His reelection apparatus also includes two joint fundraising committees, which work with the Republican Party to raise money for Trump....Then there’s the Republican National Committee, which has spent an additional $2.4 million at Trump properties. Add it all up, and the president, working in concert with the party he leads, has helped push $6.9 million into his businesses since taking office. "
I wonder also what happened to Lev Parnas case, he seems to have shut up since $1 million landed in his wifes account as a 'loan from Russia to buy property'. Lev was charged with laundering foreign money into Trump and RNC PACs, so the money Trump is taking out to pay his bills is money that partly came in from Russia via Parnas.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-16/giuliani-ally-says-1-million-moved-from-russia-was-loan-to-wife
"Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani indicted on U.S. campaign finance charges, said a $1 million transfer into his wife’s bank account from Russia was the proceeds of a loan -- and not an attempt to conceal his assets."
It's all going titsup for Trump. Perhaps he shouldn't have committed treason? Perhaps he shouldn't have sold out the USA to Putin? Just a thought, but how was it ever going to end well for him?
Umm... how can Microsoft buy TikTok if ByteDance does not want to sell?
Chinese owned company is doing well in the USA, but China bans US companies from existing in the Chinese market or requires "technology transfers" that allows Chinese owned companies to build a knockoff product.
The Chinese owned company has no particular intention to sell any ownership because it's doing well in the USA Market.
US President announces that he's going to eliminate any Chinese tech company from the US Market. The Chinese company suddenly decides that actually they might be interested in selling at any price to make some money before the ban comes in since otherwise they will cease to exist with nothing to show for it.
This is the Entities List
All entities on this list are sanctioned for national security reasons such as spying – the company allegedly spies on US citizens or allegedly engages in commercial espionage – or is said to be complicit in human rights violations such as forced labour or surveillance or (and this is the kicker) is said to be a supplier of tech to the Chinese military. I mean, China is not technically an enemy of the US, right?
Within mainland China alone I count some *230* entities. That's not including the international operations of these Chinese entities.
So it turns out that the leader of the so-called free world is not that interested in actual free markets.
Just think about all the suppliers to the US military, large and small, being put on someone's entity list. Haven't most if not all big tech companies in the US some kind of ties to the US military?
I'm really struggling to wrap my head around this Tik Tok move by Microsoft. It reeks to high heaven.
Here are a couple of recent examples of Department of Commerce press releases: Friday, May 22, 2020 – 24 governmental and commercial organizations and Monday, July 20, 2020 – 11 Chinese companies
The US is basically at war economically with China and it's not messing around.
Huawei and Tik Tok are just the tip of the iceberg – they've got name recognition so they are what generate the news column inches. Contextually speaking, this is a particularly shoddy article from The Register. There is obviously so much more going on here, this deal is shady as all hell, and El Reg is commenting on it as if it were just another big tech M&A.
Although a bit off topic, I think people missed something Pompeo said that was key to the coming coup and I want to rant.
https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-07-30/pompeo-reacts-to-trumps-proposal-to-delay-november-election
""I'm not going to enter a legal judgement on the fly this morning," Pompeo told Sen. Tim Kaine during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, after the Virginia Democrat asked about Trump's tweet. "In the end, the DOJ, others, will make that legal determination."
IN THE END THE BILL BARR WILL DECIDE IF TRUMP CAN DELAY THE ELECTIONS, claimed Pompeo. No, that's not how laws work, Barr has zero legal basis to decide how to interpret laws.
Pompeo's is really telling you what they have planned here, a specious claim from Bill Barr, and some Republican operatives will follow that specious claim, regardless of legality. The courts will be slow to overrule and Barr will ignore their rulings anyway.
Pompeo didn't just let that slip, he is floating the initial premis of their plan.
Example. You see how the Treasury is required to hand over Trump taxs returns, yet the DOJ invents some non-existent rule and the taxes are not handed over.
Example. You see how the court rules you cannot take kids from parents at the border , and force the parents to waive their rights or never see their kids again. The court ruled it had to stop, and yet it continued anyway. They just stop documenting it, and started keeping the kids somewhere private where rights lawyers were not there to observe!
Just two weeks ago, they found 200 such kidnapped kids under guard in a private hotel with no papers and no way of tracing where they were seized from:
https://www.newsweek.com/hampton-inn-ice-detainees-hotels-1520532
A tip off by the police to a human rights lawyer, led him to the hotel to find the kids they'd grabbed.
So you see how they ignore the courts, and Barr provides cover stopping the court enforcing rulings.
So this guy, Brad Raffensperger, will shut down the vote in Georgia, as will other Republican operatives in other Republican controlled states:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Secretary_of_State
They don't have a legal basis, they don't care, they know they will never face prosecution if they can grab power. Not for their crimes, not for the quarter of million plus they're killing in wave 2 of Covid 19.
People keep talking about laws and courts, as if coups are about laws. They're about complacency. If Brad knew he's be facing murder charges for his actions, he wouldn't have attended that meeting, he wouldn't have agreed to this course of action.
Apathy is how democracies fail.
That's why Portland was a disaster for Trump. He pushed, they pushed back. First blacks, then whites, then moms, then vets. He could have killed them all, not just the few deaths and few blinded people Trump initiated.
It was a disaster for him.
So Brad, how confident do you feel about cancelling that election now? You're on the losing side, take the smart move and do your job and pretend you never had that discussion.
I can think about two probable scenarios:
Microsoft wants to buy TikTok but ByteDance genuinely does not want to sell. Trump bans TikTok so if it does not belong to MICROS~1 it cannot operate on the USA
Microsoft wants to buy TikTok but it is too expensive (they saying "we are not for sale" meaning "you're not putting enough cash over the table"). Trump bans TikTok so its value plummets after losing a big slice of its userbase, then MICROS~1 buys cheaper
One has to look at the relevant statutes to see exactly what Trump can do about TT. If he can label it spyware for the Chinese government with a reasonably straight face he probably has the authority to ban TT or have it seized (to be resold). Either way, the nominal owners lose money directly. Selling TT to a US company even at a bargain basement price will get them some money. This type of seizure or forced sale has been done before during WWI definitely by the Ferals and I think less frequently since then. Also, I believe the origin of RCA was to put control of radio patents in the US under control of a US owned company in the 1920's (the victim was the British Marconi company).
You cannot rely on anything that comes from this administration, and especially Donald Trump, to be true, accurate or realistic.The Los Angeles Time's take on this is:-
"The Trump administration’s choice of an app that teenagers use to share comedy skits and dance moves as its cyberdefense beachhead, despite an absence of any proof the app has been used against U.S. interests, is pure 2020, with the president swirling hard-headed concerns about national security and corporate espionage into a broader campaign of economic and diplomatic gamesmanship against an increasingly powerful rival."
I've read elsewhere that it was retaliation from the "Chinese virus" or because TikTok users were believed behind the Tulsa rally debacle (they ordered an aggregate of a million tickets... it was going to be the rally to end all rallies, a suitable launch for Trump 2020....and a few thousand turned up). As for TikTok being forced to sell their US interests there might be some kind of obscure defense legislation that forces this but in real life this sort of thing would get bogged down in the courts. Its about a ridiculous as claiming that Mercedes-Benz USA is sending sensitive customer information to the German government (well, they probably are, but its to sell more cars -- after all, what else can you use the data for?).
Umm... how can Microsoft buy TikTok if ByteDance does not want to sell?
Everyone is willing to sell anything for the right price. The threats from Trump to ban the service have no doubt pushed that price down. Microsoft was already in talks, so it's obvious ByteDance was seriously considering selling.
Pompeo claims TikTok is feeding all user data to the Chinese Communist Party. So fucking what? Which US tech companies give the US government user data?
China is happy to restrict US companies from selling to their domestic market, it doesn't seem unreasonable for the US to turn this tactic back around on them.
You just couldn't make this shit up:
Donald Trump: "US Treasury should get cut of TikTok deal."
If that isn't Racketeering, I don't know what is.
He seems to have a vested interest in MS - first making sure they got awarded JEDI, now with a(nother) little word from Satya they are going to be 'allowed' to buy something that is not for sale.
Wonder why they weren't up in front of the Judiciary committee with Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google?Maybe Satya had a quick chat with Trumpy. It's alright to have some types of monopoly I guess
When MS bought Hotmail, it took them YEARS to wean Hotmail from BSD and *nix and onto Outlook mail server, and then it failed frequently because Outlook couldn't scale that well. So, even of MS do get to buy the US operations of TikToik, what are they getting? A licence to use TikTok in the US or the whole kit and kaboodle including the servers in China?
The big thing they are getting is a license in the US to a massive music library thats used in the overlays in the tictoks ...
probably transferable to other products in a limitted way too.
thats likely a license to print money.
I would expect them to use TikTok to continue to keep adding more useless features to the already next to useless Teams.
Microsoft are simply incapable of doing almost anything properly now and this obsession with trying to push Social Media into the work environment is horrible.
Maybe it is because I am an old fart but we have so many different ways of "collaborating" it is almost impossible to have any consistency. Teams, is full of "Teams" that you have been added to (whether you are interested or not" and then you have an endless stream of crap constantly spewing forth.
And maybe they could do some do something useful like detect you have Teams installed before opening the fucking web page when you click on a link in an outlook email or not have the "call quality" message.
Trump told reporters that he intended to ban the app and prevent its sale to a US company for reasons he did not fully explain.
Trump told reporters that he intended to ban the app and prevent its sale to a US company for reasons he "could" not fully explain.
Just another case of Uncle Donnie getting mad and taking his ball and going home...
The post goes on to mention that if Microsoft were to buy TikTok it would conduct “a complete security review”, implement “world-class security, privacy, and digital safety protections”
I'd just like to give a shout out to Windows 10's non-opt-outable1 telemetry!
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1: it can be disabled with 'hacks'. There are no set of simple toggles to disable telemetry that can be used by the average user. It's all intenionally burried under mountains of non-approved manual regedits (unless using 3rd-party apps or scripts like ShutUp10).
Exactly, their acquisition history is littered with failure, and even things doing ok like LinkedIn are underperforming hugely. LinkedIn could have transformed the job market, instead it's a barely-alive job advert site with a Facebook Wall clone for shameless self-promotion.
"shameless self-promotion" is all there is left to get noticed with these days. It's hard to stand out any more amongst all the other BS and 'noise'.
I may be old and grouchy, but my rep is based on making things work, as designed and then as necessary if the original design doesn't cut it for whatever reason(s) - at small, large and national scale. It makes me a pain in the arse for some people*, but the majority of the end users are happy.
Trump is in a childish strop with tik-tok after some of its users trolled him. https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/08/01/is-this-the-real-reason-why-trump-wants-to-ban-tiktok/#1502db664aed
It's got nothing to do with security. He just wants to ban it to get his revenge (just like China bans Winnie the pooh, and Kim J-U and his fantastical PR, these dictator-types are very insecure)
Just like the Huawei ban that he said he'd lift if China gave him a good trade deal.
He's throwing a Ballmer "I want Google dead" tantrum (and we all know how that went) as part of the US wetting itself at China's progress in technology.
It was never anything to do with trade. The energy the US spent on attacking Huawei was 100 times more than they spent attacking China's exports.
and especially with the latest poll results and TikTok being used by 100M traitors oops voters.
No idea what MS are up to - apart from the obvious tired idea of buying a company that has an interesting and popular product, and then running it into the ground with “enhancements” and “innovations” that make it utterly unusable - but Trump really is a cockwomble of the highest order. He wants to ban tiktok because it’s slurping the private details of good ol’ God-fearing AMERICANS (never understood why one is supposed to be afraid of ones chosen deity, but I digress). And he might well be correct in his assessment - I don’t know - but at the same time he (in fact the US gov in general) couldn’t give a gnats bollock about googlies, faecesbook etc etc doing exactly the same thing and selling the details of good ol’ God-fearing AMERICANS to the highest bidder.
What a messed up “free” country they have there
"What a messed up “free” country they have there"
It's not a free country, as either in beer or in speech. Everything there is paid for, be it paid in dollars (for healthcare, fast food or influence) or paid in freedom (so to appear to be part of the Great American Dream and not end up shovelling burgers or living in cardboard). Not that our corner of the universe is yugely or bigly better.
‘Appreciates President Trump’s personal involvement’. Ha! Crawler. WTF has it REALLY got to do with him? Dodgy TikTok app, or not, this is probably another case of ol' Trumpy boy leaning on a company or using some sort of not-so-subtle blackmail, sticking his obnoxious nose into somebody's business to gain a bit of political advantage and further his nasty little scheme to become the great orange fascist dictator of America.
The bizarre part of this is that the US Gov is *directly* interfering in the operations of a private IT company. That's exactly what the US Gov objects to other governments doing.
Just the hypothetical notion that the Chinese Gov might, in the future, interfere in Huawei is enough to ban Huawei. Trump then dos exactly that with Microsoft (and Google, and ARM, etc.). Trump tells US IT companies what to do, and they do it.
The US claims they are banning TIkTok on US national security grounds because the data is all sent back to servers in China where they could be accessed by the Chinese authorities. But considering the app is mainly teenagers lip syncing and dancing to pop song I fail to see how that is a national security concern?
It once again the orange one using a Chinese based company in his own personal war on China who he currently blames for the corona virus which has caused his approval rating to get hammered in the polls because he handled it soooo badly from the beginning.
As for MS buying Tiktok I am sure they will go well, I mean Microsoft are well know for improving platforms they purchase and making them much better. Just look at how well they have done after purchasing Nokia and Skype :D
Nobody was suggesting that it was the brain dead content of TikTok videos that was of interest to the CCP. Having malware installed on millions of powerful mobile computers with cameras, microphones and wireless network access on the other hand is the sort of thing "intelligence" agencies a just few years ago could hardly of dreamed about.
Trump only wants to ban TikTok because a large group of people claim to have used the app to arrange to request tickets for the Tulsa rally and not turn up. Whether or not this is actually the reason why a million tickets were requested but only a few rednecks turned up, Trump thinks it is so wants his revenge.
This has nothing to do with the user data, everyone already spies on and sells the same data to anyone with enough cash.
This is about who controls the recommendation engine and what gets nudged to the top. The orange lump thinks if MS owns Tick Tock, they will bury Sara Coopers entries mocking the lump.
== DUMP THE LUMP 2020 ==
So they sell the American arm due to be forced with a threat of a ban so they want to get some money for it. However, now what would happen? If MS buy it they now have all the code and tech and can check if its secure (any backdoors will be religiously removed before the sale so won't show anything). But they now have their own US tiktok? That is in competition with China? Or not because it won't be available in China?