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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Unless it’s literally no effort to maintain extensions that use both, a large portion of maintainers will develop what has the largest market share. Sure for uBlock Origin, there’s enough momentum to maintain a v2 version for Firefox, but for a new extension with one developer, it’s unlikely that they’d make two versions.

    Either this backfires, and Firefox ends up having the better extensions using v2 manifest, or new extensions will be developed with the limitations of v3 and Firefox users will have an unnecessarily neutered experience as Chrome users.






  • No need to guess, it’s all outlined in the bill:

    1. ByteDance has 270 days (+90 days at president discretion) to divest of TikTok and sell to an entity not affiliated with an “adversary country” (China, Iran, Russia, N. Korea).
    2. If they don’t sell, hosting providers of TikTok application (servers, storage, app store, etc) will be fined up to $500 times the number of users in the US if they continue to host the application

    So basically, the law will impose a fine of US hosting providers of the app. If the app moves all services overseas to foreign entities, then the app presumably will continue to work even if banned if already installed (plus the website if hosted overseas).

    ISPs and search engines are explicitly exempt from the bill so there is no mechanism to ban connections to TilTok servers or links to TikTok.


  • Say what you will about Apple, they are masters of spinning their shortcomings as groundbreaking achievements. When they refused to unlock the iPhone of the san bernardino terrorist attack, it was framed as an act of preserving user privacy, but brushed over how willing they were to hand over the iCloud backups if the police would have brought the iPhone to a known WiFi network for the backup to be uploaded.


  • No need to guess, it’s all outlined in the bill:

    1. ByteDance has 270 days (+90 days at president discretion) to divest of TikTok and sell to an entity not affiliated with an “adversary country” (China, Iran, Russia, N. Korea).
    2. If they don’t sell, hosting providers of TikTok application (servers, storage, app store, etc) will be fined up to $500 times the number of users in the US if they continue to host the application
    3. ISPs are explicitly excluded from the bill, and not considered data brokers, which is what the restrictions apply to.

    So basically, the law will not require ISPs to block access to TikTok domains and IP addresses. Google search results are also explicitly excluded from the term data broker, and exempt from the restrictions. The only requirement is for app stores to stop hosting the application, so existing installations of the app (after January 2025 assuming ByteDance doesn’t sell) will presumably persist and can be used, even if TikTok is banned.


  • Right they define internet hosting service as:

    (5) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE.—The term “internet hosting service” means a service through which storage and computing resources are provided to an individual or organization for the accommodation and maintenance of 1 or more websites or online services, and which may include file hosting, domain name server hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private server hosting.

    So this would prevent a US organization like AWS, Oracle, etc from hosting the TikTok user data as long as TikTok is owned or a subsidiary of ByteDance or another “foreign adversary”.

    Elsewhere in the text, they exclude “service providers” from restrictions, so it seems like ISPs are not going to block requests to TikTok.