That’s been my life for the past 10 years, you won’t regret it at all.

And leaded gasoline and leaded diesel and leaded aviation fuel and lead pipes in household plumbing. Probably lead in the cigarettes everyone smoked literally everywhere.

Saying they banned VPNs isn’t completely, technically correct I’d guess. If I were another country then VPN’d in to my house, I would probably be fine. A pedantically correct statement would be that they banned known VPN IP ranges, so if you’re attempting to connect while your traffic is routed through one you get blocked.

Oh damn. Yeah fuck that place, glad I left.

Semi-related, I was searching for some hyper specific job related technical cybersecurity stuff a few weeks ago and the first result with the verbatim error message was a reddit post, so i clicked. No dice, loads a reddit branded error page. My employer has their own ARIN number/ASN. As far as i could tell every connection from an IP in one of our blocks was being blocked by reddit. My employer isn’t a faang type tech company, they don’t work in ai, they don’t scrape content for datasets or anything else. I can’t figure out why kind of business would cut off entire swaths of customers from accessing their site during the workday, a prime “take a shit and dick around on the phone” audience. I’ve just made a point to search with stack exchange site dorks since then.

Yeah, the answer here is cancel prime and pirate whatever amazon video content you want. if you absolutely have to have prime for some reason, don’t sign in to amazon video on any of your devices and pirate the stuff you want to watch so at least your not contributing to views or their prime video ad revenue.

Edit - I see in another comment you said you unsubscribed, good on you.

I’m slightly less mad now that I know this has precedent. I’m still fucking furious that the only precedent I’ve heard about is corporations and Trump, since the law should be equally applied regardless of absolute amounts of money and I’m pretty sure that someone living in poverty isn’t going to get the same treatment for a $50k (or whatever is a proportional amount) judgement against them.

That wasn’t what was at stake here. Trump was already found guilty, he wasn’t bonding out of pretrial detention he was having to post bond in order to appeal the ruling, which typically requires the person making the appeal to post a bind to make sure they don’t spend all their money fighting on appeal, just to lose the appeal and not have any money left to pay the original judgement.

So my expectation was that yes, he would have to follow the same court rules as everyone else and put up the bond in order to appeal. While I do think we should get rid of requiring pretrial detention bond, I don’t necessarily see an issue with requiring pre-appeal bond. I don’t know, you don’t want to create a situation where you’re means testing the right to appeal, but you don’t want people to indefinitely delay enforcement of judgement against them or to allow them to spend away their ability to pay the judgement on appeals. Maybe forcing either the entirety of the judgement to be paid into a more traditional escrow account, or a payment plan for the judgement to be accepted and that paid into escrow, before an appeal can be started?

Any way you cut it though, I can’t fault this chuckle fuck for playing the court game but I’m fucking incensed the court is enabling it.

It is part of the deep web, just like Discord or any sites hosted on private companies intranets. Lemmy is not, you can just hit any instance with a web browser and view stuff.

To be completely clear, dark web/net and deep web are two different things. That wiki link you used is describing dark web stuff like tor etc.

detailing that he had been promised 500,000 rubles ($5,418).

Fuck me, this really hammers home that first world privilege. More than that amount of USD hits my checking account each month in my direct wages. This guy knew what would happen to him when he was caught then decided that risking misery in Siberia before being executed was worth less than a month of my take home pay. I mean i get that some level of radicalization is involved here, but still what the fuck.

that’s exactly what i’d expect a dark empath to say. sheathe your knife unless you want to get saddled with karmic debt bro. you’re limited to paying off karmic debt in transactions of no more than 3k eurohms each, and with this dark energy you’d be in karmic debt into the millions.

Hating the British royalty specifically also makes me think British. I’m quite disappointed more people don’t hate monarchy in general though.

I guess in 2024 nobody believes in divine right, and I recognize that the monarchs in the vast majority of countries with active monarchies have only ceremonial power, but i still struggle to understand how people in the Commonwealth realms, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, etc., are cool thinking that some rich fuck is somehow better than them or important in any way just because their ancestor was the last person sitting on the throne when everybody decided they weren’t playing the game anymore.

Is it something where they appreciate the tie to history? Even so why would you want a tie to a history that said your ancestors were intrinsically lesser than just because they didn’t have as much land, as big a sword/army, or as much money to pay off the church?

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.

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.

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.