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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

I would have been unsurprised if the US government hadn't already forced them to host with Oracle a year or two ago supposedly to prevent exactly this from happening.

Is Larry Ellison a Chinese spy? He would probably have to either be complicit or criminally negligent to allow this to happen given he was given the contract precisely for this reason.

I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

And US insistence that "dumb" 5g aerials already vetted by national security agencies had to be banned (along with kit that was absolutely a legitimate risk) because they could potentially possibly harbor listening devices maybe.

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Hosting with oracle doesn’t change a thing. Just because the data would be on US servers don’t stop the data from being accessible from outside of the region.

And is it really that hard to imagine a world where a hostile and ambitious nation would seek to leverage a technology platform to listen to sensitive conversations? The US has done it in the past and you better believe China will be doing it too.

>Hosting with oracle doesn’t change a thing

So when the US government made a song and dance 18 months ago about why it was absolutely critical that it be done to protect against exactly this threat you think they were lying or staggeringly incompetent?

And this time they're totally not?

It's better than not hosting the data in friendly or neutral turf, but you're trusting a U.S. company (Oracle) to somehow some way mitigate Chinese surveillance and algorithmic manipulation.

Erecting an industrial complex dedicated to a poorly-defined and probably impossible anti-China mission on a Chinese-controlled platform, run by entities that salivate at Chinese $$$, doesn't seem like the best idea.

I thought it was a pretty dumb measure.

What do you mean "this time"? I just see a personal lawsuit?

But if the government did say the chinese government still has access, I don't think there would be much reason to disbelieve them. If the government claims there is a problem, and then a (possibly halfassed) attempt to fix it happens, and then the government claims the problem still exists... there is some credibility lost on the "fixing" front but the "problem exists" front is likely still credible. Especially if the different parts of that saga are coming from different parts of the government.

Forcing ByteDance to host the data in the US, on Oracle's servers or anyone else's, doesn't mean a lot if there are a bunch of people in China with the login to those servers. Who has access to the data and the various administrative controls over it are more important than where it physically resides.

ByteDance has claimed that their US operations were administratively firewalled from their Chinese ones, and then it's been repeatedly shown not to be the case. At this point they have lost all credibility about their ability to 'firewall' or internally control access to user data, probably because they (or certain parts of the company) don't really want to.

> I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

Bloomberg, not WSJ.

I would have been unsurprised if the US government hadn't already forced them to host with Oracle a year or two ago supposedly to prevent exactly this from happening.

The allegations are from 2017-18 when the guy was fired. The migration of user data was last year, but it is not like they are disconnected from China

I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

It was a 2018 Bloomberg story. Bloomberg still refuses to admit they were wrong, and doubled down in 2021. That no "tiny chips" have turned up yet should be near definitive proof that story was bogus.

The article is talking about the Chinese govt.

> I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked

Unless there is hard proof of anything I always assume news like these is the usual suspects warmongering.

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