They were an agency / consultancy. So much digital work in Australia is done by consultancies (deloitte etc). The idea is they go to tender for each project to utilise the mechanism of competition for efficiency, but in reality the tenders usually go to the incumbent who over charges them.
A consultancy (maybe funded by Cuban) will get this work that 18f was doing and in 2-3 years they will be grossly overcharging and this move will be for nought.
No. But they could ban American companies from providing services directly to that French publisher (e.g., a US company couldn't print books for or sell paper to that French publisher). However, a US law could not stop me from legally reading a copy I owned, or from selling or giving that copy to someone else within the US...
The First Amendment case would be much clearer if this was actually about banning access to TikTok (it's not: TikTok self-blocked US users, Amazon/Oracle shut off servers, and app stores stopped distributing to US users). TikTok could choose to operate their service (like many other Chinese companies) using only non-US infra and without relying on American companies to distribute their app; indeed, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, hosted entirely from Chinese servers, continued to work just fine.
This case is also a reminder of why the iOS App Store is so bad for rights: at least on Android, you could sideload a 'banned' app; Google can comply with the law and US users can still download TikTok. On iOS, you don't have that option.
Using such restraints on foreign trade to censor publications is a very transparent end run around 1A.
It is a big sign that we live in a police state that the courts are willing to be politicized to the point that they are willing to ignore this obvious trampling upon the human rights of both the app publisher and the app’s users.
Also, iOS users can go buy a tablet or phone that can sideload. Also, tiktok.com is a thing that works on everything.
This isn't an "end run around 1A" - the law doesn't target any speech or content at all. TikTok can keep operating with all the same content, they just need to separate from Chinese ownership first. If this was about censorship, why include that option?
This isn't about censoring content, it's about preventing ByteDance from collecting personal data from 170M Americans that Chinese law requires them to hand over to their government.
It's not end run around 1A. 1A is a law protecting the people (and their various forms of organization) of the United States. Congress has every right to regulate or ban foreign entities of any kind for any reason from operating in the United States.
The rights enumerated by the constitution are human rights (“endowed by their creator”) and are not specific to americans.
Furthermore, the 1A is a restriction on the government and isn’t related to whether or not someone is a citizen.
There are lots of things congress is prohibited from doing under the constitution, including against foreign entities. Congress can’t ban a foreign religion operating in the US, for example.
So not "rights enumerated by the constitution." Which is why the degree to which the First Amendment provides protection does turn on legal status with America [1].
Oh please. TikTok isn't a publication. The individual creators on TikTok have not been censored; they've merely been told that TikTok is not permitted to operate in the US, and that they will have to post their creations -- unedited, unaltered -- on other services. And those other services exist, and have wide reach, so it's not like saying "sure, you can continue to create, but your audience is now 5% the size it was before".
> Also, tiktok.com is a thing that works on everything.
Sounds like you're arguing against yourself. TikTok hasn't actually been banned.
You are significantly overestimating the level of recordkeeping by random sellers of used and/or ultra-cheap phones. Manufacturers, major retailers, and carriers may keep this information, but bodegas and street vendors certainly do not.
This is certainly approaching murder investigation levels of effort by law enforcement, but I don't think it's ridiculous to imagine a POS system being used that keeps transaction records for a year or two.
Let's be realistic. Porn, the subject of this discussion, is not illegal in the US; this is about age verification laws that apply to the website operators, who then self-block users from particular states. No one is going after Cloudflare for this information as there is no crime committed by the user.
Given Cloudflare's logging policy (https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns...) and data disclosure practices, the only way US authorities would get anything worthwhile is if they had a specific individual target and a valid legal process. Cloudflare, like most of the big tech companies, is actually very good on this front; they have robust processes and are transparent (https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/slt3lc6tev37/Q1INAiyBub...) about the limited cases in which they do hand over any user data.
(I don't work at Cloudflare, but do work on these issues for another big US tech company.)
I don't think this subthread is about the US, but just as a sidenote on the US, Project 2025 directly calls for porn to be made illegal and for attacking Internet providers and companies like Cloudflare that enable its access (https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FOR...):
> Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender
ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot
inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual
liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its
purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product
is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should
be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed
as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that
facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Even in a Conservative-majority court this kind of ban would likely be ruled unconstitutional very quickly, but we should be clear when talking about this kind of thing where it is that a substantial number of Conservative foundations would like to go (https://www.project2025.org/about/advisory-board/). There is a non-trivial Conservative movement to to ban porn.
Let’s be realistic - this is not about age verification but about restricting people from their rights to view a particular type of content because of how one religion feels about it. The age verification is just the smoke screen the Republicans use to take away your freedoms.
Sorry to hear. As someone who works for a non-Google Big Tech company, you will get nowhere on this trying to work with Google (or any other Big Tech) support.
If you believe your mom (and anyone using her account) definitely did not violate the T&Cs, the only thing that might realistically get a response is either [1] a personal contact who trusts you at Google escalating internally for re-review; or [2] reaching out to your state AG / consumer protection office.
That said, there's usually a very high bar for fully disabling accounts like this — either repeated violations or very severe violations (like child sexual abuse or terrorism). Might be good to figure out what the granddaughter has been up to...
The granddaughter could be under 13 or something like that. Kids under 13 aren’t allowed to make YouTube videos, I’m not sure what happens if they catch an account being used by someone under that age.
Yes, ad-supported social apps collect a ton of data. But the Apple privacy widget list is just a catch-all since people can post anything and Meta uses post content for ad targeting.
Have you gone through Apple's onboarding flow recently? The process of creating an Apple ID and setting up an iPhone is pretty similar, and has similar click-wrap terms to allow endless data use, including [1], [2], [3], [4], and [5].
Apple has done a very good job of marketing privacy. But they engage in pretty much all of the same practices they call others out for.
Also, Threads didn't launch in Europe because of DMA data separation requirements between products. It has nothing to do with the invasiveness of the data collected per se as is implied here [6].
I think this is just a standard API access prompt. The GitHub Next page clearly indicates it is (C) GitHub Inc and the blog post makes GitHub's control clear.
No one — and I mean no one — should profit from the provision of what should be core government services, like tax filing or health care.