Mr President? Donald?! Any chance you can actually decide if Oracle can buy us or do we have to leave?
- Reference: 1605081673
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/11/tiktok_wheres_donald/
- Source link:
The made-in-China social network on Tuesday filed with the with the US Court of Appeals to [1]request [PDF] for an extension of its negotiations with the US government ahead of the Wednesday November 12th deadline on which the service will not be allowed to operate in the USA.
Which is just a wee bit farcical given that the Trump administration declared TikTok a national security threat but was willing to let it keep operating in the USA if it could find local buyers and operators and satisfy the government it had put in place security schemes that prevented data reaching China.
Oracle, Walmart and other investors duly put up their hands and plenty of cash to buy TikTok. The USA’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was given the job of making sure the deal was to the government’s liking.
But TikTok says it hasn’t heard from CFIUS in weeks.
In a widely-shared statement TikTok said: “In the nearly two months since the President gave his preliminary approval to our proposal to satisfy those concerns, we have offered detailed solutions to finalize that agreement – but have received no substantive feedback on our extensive data privacy and security framework.”
The statement says that TikTok therefore had no choice but to file for the extension, because not doing so would imperil the very sale that the government insisted must take place.
Even if CFIUS signs off on the deal, China is yet to do likewise under new laws that prohibit export of AI-infused technologies like the algorithm that makes TikTok hum. It is unclear if Beijing will approve the deal, as while it desires the soft-power win of a Chinese app enjoying success in the West it could find myriad reasons to prohibit the sale, among them making TikTok a problem for the incoming Biden administration to solve as part of its planned reset of Sino-American relations. ®
Get our [2]Tech Resources
[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/11/11/tiktok_appeal_for_extension.pdf
[2] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
All too busy
Calling the fraud hot line to worry about such issues
Tik tok vs Sing Sing
Voters were supposed to vote Trump in unifying hatred of the Chinese whipped up my maestro hate merchant Trump and his troop of Fox News show clowns. Now he's lost the election, the trade war makes no sense, the China-hate is pointless, and his focus will be domestic hate targets.
Mitch McConnells wife, Elaine Chao, is Chinese, so you can't really make them the domestic hate figure. He can't scream "the Chinese conspired with Democrats, kill them all" when his primary enabler is married to a Chinese woman who'll give him an earful.
TikTok and the courts should probably just postpone decisions till he's gone.
Plus his followers seem to be sock puppets, you might notice the "army" Trump Jr said he had 300,000 signed up, yet they failed to materialize. They're not real people. Sock puppets cannot form militias outside of twitter. St Petersberg trolls cannot all fly in the way they fly into Twitter storms. Eric Trump seems to be using automated tweet software, he's not even phoning it in, his "vote" tweet was set to appear on the wrong Tuesday!
e.g. Steve Bannon got caught running a bunch of propaganda sock puppets:
https://gizmodo.com/steve-bannon-caught-running-a-network-of-misinformation-1845633004
Dean Brown, Trump Republican candidate, running a fake "as a gay black man" twitter account. He will be running a lot more fake accounts, not just the single fake black sock puppet account:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/republican-dean-browning-gay/
Facebook took down 10 fake networks of sock puppet accounts from Turning Point USA:
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-fake-accounts-linked-to-turning-point-usa-2020-10
Billionaires pay Turning Point to deceive their millions of followers into voting for Trump. "Ha ha" think the billionaires, "we are so clever to fool these suckers with disingenuous lies". But Turning Point's followers are not real, they're Facebook sock puppet accounts, the suckers here were the people paying Turning Point for sockpuppet likes.
Sock Puppets for Trump!
It's a sad joke, we're at the "denial" state now, Trump is in denial about his election loss, we'll get to the "bargaining" state later when he's selling out his coup backers to prosecutors in exchange for immunity. When you're chatting to Trump about your coup plans, best to take recordings of the conversation, and offer them to prosecutors and do your own immunity deal. That goes double for you Pompeo.
No time for TikTok when you're facing Sing Sing.
Same old question
Security risk - why?
Ok forget it. Evidence never counted for much anyway.
Don't forget...
Trump doesn't need evidence, he just knows when there's fraud* / a security risk* / space aliens* / etc to deal with.
* circle as appropriate
Just goes to show that Trump never really cared about national security anyway. He just saw that as an opportunity for one of his business buddies in the US to make some money. Probably Zuck since he was probably expecting him to help win the election again.
Just like he was reportedly furious when US telco's started to announce they would be replacing Huawei kit with Nokia and other non US hardware. The whole Huawei thing had little to do with national security and everything to do with US business interests. Of course the funniest thing about the whole thing was when Trump suggested that telcos could replace Huawei with Apple kit. Seemingly unaware that Apple don't actually manufacture any such thing.
Larry's in a rush
Getting worried that all that expensive sucking up to Trump isn't going to get him what he thought he'd paid for. Yet to realise that Trump is not in the mood to do favours for anyone else anymore, as he has nothing to gain from them. And is too busy denying to himself that he lost bigly to focus on anything else.
Guess those government Oracle contracts might not be so lucrative over the next four years. What a shame.
I suspect Mr Trump may be holding off on a decision, due to the possibility of a Tik Tok channel being his main source of income in the near future.
Though more shuffle than dance.