That's not true, distributors of the app are fined. Meaning, very specifically, app stores.
From (2)(a)(1):
> (A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
>
> (B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.
Possession of and providing non-distribution ( / maintenance / update) services to a "Foreign Adversary Controlled Application" are not in any way a part of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". Operative services are specifically and intentionally excluded from the list, to ease the burden of enforcement.
The case is entirely about speech, and the various levels of scrutiny that apply to laws that violate the First Amendment. You should read the decision before commenting on what was argued and decided in said decision.
Facebook / Meta are not controlled by a foreign adversary as designated by the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". Thus they cannot become subject to the distribution restrictions designated by that law.
The core factor in the law is control by a foreign adversary, it's not a law that outlaws data collection.
I know, I was pointing out it's not really about data collection because we allow manipulative practices with our own people. We are our own worst enemy. Meaning government and corporations want that power over our people. They are protecting interests that run counter to the will of the people.
I support any ban on social media platforms because control of the public's data belongs in the hands of individuals.
The law does not care about who financially owns the company, only about designations of control made by the president (along with a 30 day notice).
The law actually skips this step for ByteDance / TikTok and directly adds them to the list of "Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications" along with the enactment of the law.
The argument is that China has a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_share in Bytedance; that despite only owning (on paper) 1% or whatever, they still have effective control over the whole company, if they so desire.
(I don't know if that's true, but it strikes me as plausible)
edit: you can make an analogy to e.g. Meta - Zuckerberg doesn't strictly own a majority, but he does have very strong control because of the particular corporate structure.
The arguments presented to the SCOTUS and the opinion itself are totally contained within the context of the First Amendment. No one is even arguing about anything other than the First Amendment and the exceptions permitted to that amendment.
Well, yes, because that is the only hope TikTok had - to claim it was targeted because of the speech on TikTok, and not because this is a very boring case of regulating commerce, which as said is well established and has lots of precedent. And their expensive lawyers made it happen, when they should have been looking for buyers. And then SCOTUS unanimously said nah.
SCOTUS fully agreed that the law violates the First Amendment as written, it wasn't even a question at any level from the district court on up.
The decision was balanced on strict or intermediate scrutiny. At the distict court level it was observed that the case should probably be decided via intermediate scrutiny, but they upheld the ban under strict scrutiny due to "national security concerns".
The SCOTUS didn't bother with strict scrutiny or national security, and decided that the correct analysis was intermediate scrutiny and that the ban merely needed to serve a compelling government interest (which regulation of applications controlled by foreign adversaries meets).
It's entirely about speech, the only question in the entire case as decided at the district and SCOTUS level was speech. Whether the government should be allowed to violate the 1st Amendment due to compelling interest is everything the case turns on.
Personally, I think using intermediate scrutiny here is wild.
The SCOTUS opinion does not rely on a national security interest to justify itself, merely that the ban is content neutral and thus is subject to intermediate scrutiny.
There weren't any laws passed banning Soviet associated agencies from publishing based on chain of ownership. Nothing to do with SCOTUS.
Read the opinion, the law was upheld on intermediate scrutiny. It doesn't ban based on content, it bans based on the designation of the foreign parent as an adversary. Since it's not a content ban, or rather because it's a content-neutral ban, strict scrutiny does not apply.
Without strict scrutiny, the law merely needs to fulfill a compelling government interest.
The motivation was based on content, so the actual text of the law shouldn't matter. Such acts have been overturned before (see the Muslim ban) based on motivation.
Speech and immigration are completely different areas of the law, there's no useful legal point of comparison in this context.
The motivation is largely irrelevant to the analysis of this case. What matters is what effects the law has and what services it provides the government.
So for example, the law technically doesn't ban TikTok at all, but rather mandates divestiture. However, the timeline wasn't realistic to manage such a divestiture, so the court recognized that the law is effectively a ban. The effect is what matters.
Similarly, the law provides a mechanism for the President to designate any application meeting a set of criteria a "foreign adversary controlled application". The court recognizes that the government has a compelling interest in restricting foreign adversaries from unregulated access to the data of US citizens, and the law services that interest.
The law represents a restriction on freedom of expression, TikTok is banned, but the law also represents a compelling government interest. To determine the winner of these two motivations, the court has established various thresholds a law must overcome. The relevant threshold in this case was determined to be Intermediate Scrutiny, and a compelling government interest is sufficient to overcome intermediate scrutiny.
> The motivation is largely irrelevant to the analysis of this case. What matters is what effects the law has and what services it provides the government.
> From a strict point of view, they've released new editions of these books.
And this is clearly a semantically worthless distinction from the point of view of the archive.
When different editions have different content, archiving those differences in that content may matter (arguably not for simple typographical corrections, printing errors, etc). When different ISBNs have identical content, it is totally irrelevant to the goals of the archive.
This is addressed somewhat in the "The critical window of shadow libraries" post
> Until now, the only options to shrink the total size of our collection has been through more aggressive compression, or deduplication. However, to get significant enough savings, both are too lossy for our taste. Heavy compression of photos can make text barely readable. And deduplication requires high confidence of books being exactly the same, which is often too inaccurate, especially if the contents are the same but the scans are made on different occasions.
Worthless semantics in the context of the mission of the project.
What you've described is that the archived content can be mapped to multiple ISBNs. It's clear the only element of concern here is the content itself. The failure to preserve a particular binding or printer's choice of typeface is irrelevant.
Failing to recognize this requires an almost malicious level of pedantry
A successful archival of one of those ISBNs will light up; four of those ISBNs remain dark. Yet they have that content archived. It means that lighting up the entire grid is not necessary to achieve their goal.
Indeed a bigger problem is that it’s much harder to know which areas of the grid are never going to light up because the ISBN has not been used.
Lighting up the entire grid is still the goal, you're describing the problem of ensuring the right set of squares is illuminated for each piece of archived content. One is a problem of archiving the content, the other is a problem of bookkeeping.
>Worthless semantics in the context of the mission of the project.
Hardly worthless... often times, the edition of the book matters as much as the title. Steven King wrote two books named The Stand, and one isn't anything like the other. He pulled a Lucas pretty early on.
He's hardly the only author to ever do this. But it's not just authors either. Editors, collectors, translators all make their mark, and give you works that though they might be slightly different to you, the differences actually matter to the rest of us. It's not that you're ignorant that offends me, it's the arrogance about a subject you seem to know so little about that makes it difficult to tolerate.
There is no pedantry here, just a desire to actually preserve books and to organize them.
> Steven King wrote two books named The Stand, and one isn't anything like the other
Then those two texts would map to different ISBNS, or perhaps each maps to multiple different ISBNs, it doesn't matter. That some texts exist with the same title but different content is similarly irrelevant.
The content is all that matters. Two different bodies of content, two different entries in the archive. Each entry may map to one or more ISBN numbers.
> the differences actually matter to the rest of us
The only differences that matter are what matters to the archive that made the blog post. Your concerns are for entirely different things, which is fine, but don't say the OP's concerns or initiatives are impossible or ill-suited based on a criteria you're projecting onto them.
I cannot think of a single non-business oriented user who needs MS365
Trivial personal users moved to free alternatives ages ago, business users are either using organizational licenses or are small-business users who aren't using family plans to begin with.
I'm mystified by who the affected audience is of this.
At university the school gave away Office for free to all students and we still all used Google Docs. Google ate Word's lunch by making the 99.99% experience waaay better.
> Google ate Word's lunch by making the 99.99% experience waaay better.
That is fascinating to me
I have never used MS 365, but due to work have extensively used Google docs
It is awful. I am continually amazed at how awful it is
Astoundingly the most awful part is searching my docs. Compared to a directory tree of MD docs, it is simply dreadful. Oh Google, how the mighty have fallen!
I use Google Docs and Office, and I guarantee outside whichever bubble you and the OP live in, millions of "trivial personal users" around the world also use Office, therefore didn't "move to free alternatives".
M365 Personal or Family can actually have a place as cost-effective cloud storage that 'just works' for consumers that don't care to go down the self hosting rabbit hole. It happens to include an office apps suite, but even without that it's extremely price competitive with other consumer-focused cloud storage. For $6-7/month you get 1TB of online storage, or for $8.25-10/month you get up to 6TB. Their competition (Apple, Google, Dropbox) pretty much all start at $10/mo for 2TB, possibly with paying for a year in advance.
The business plans are a different matter, but can make sense particularly if you're actually paying salary/wages for someone to maintain and support a self-hosted alternative.
Sure but what do you actually use office for in your day to day home life?
I stopped paying for it in like 2010. I haven't needed to make a formatted document since college, and I graduated in 2006. Google sheets is quite good enough for my random spreadsheet usage.
I use Excel to run my life. I have PTO calculators, workout and nutrition spreadsheets, and tons of financial spreadsheets with predictions, records, what-ifs, etc. How much did I spend on prescription eyewear in 2007? I can tell you. I've been using Excel since either the late 80s or very very early 90s so it is very familiar to me.
I use Word to draft and submit board reports for two non-profit boards I am on. One, has followed the same format, except for typeface updates, since 1951. You can take the very first vice president's report from 70+ years ago, set mine next to it, and they look practically identical (except for the typeface). Using the Word template someone made 20-ish years ago is very handy. I assume that is when they eliminated the secretary's position whose job it was to type up the reports for all of the old men, which I am one of now. I fill it out, hit save, email a copy to the rest of the board, show up with two printed copies, and put one in the binder that has every monthly VP's report since July 1951 and use the second as a reference for when I give my verbal report. Easy peasy no cloud bullshit.
I am a volunteer watershed steward, a fire prevention educator, and a member of an amateur radio and an astrophotography club. I give presentations 1-4 times per year for all of those and all of them are done in powerpoint. Again, no cloud bullshit. My presentations are on my laptops and don't rely on hopping on someone's wifi or tethering to my phone in a cinderblock building with no service anyways.
Even onenote is fantastic but I think that's free. I'm using it right now to plan a trip with 8 other people. When in-country with no, or poor, cell service the local notebook will be synced and ready for reference. No cloud bullshit.
In my sector of the business world in the US, every corporation pays for Office 365 for their employees. I don't know a single corporation that uses Google Docs.
Everywhere I've worked has been Google Docs. Usually there is a process on the side that if you really, truly, need MS office specifically they can get you a copy, mostly for people in certain parts of finance who do specifically insist on Excel, but Google Docs has been the standard for like a decade now.
Yep, our company uses Google Docs/Sheets. If someone wants an MS Office application, they have to prove that Google Docs/Sheets can't do what they need. So most of use Google and it's fine. I even like somethings in Sheets better than Excel (and vice versa).
I vaguely remember that Corel WordPerfect Office, which includes the previously separate Quattro Pro spreadsheet application, has features that specific'ly target law professionals.
My use case: for 100$/year, I can provide my family and my parents plenty of reliable cloud storage for their documents and pictures. With office suite thrown in as added bonus. I know of no other alternative that would provide equivalent of 6x1TB for such a low price.
I was also of that opinion for a while, but took the decision to move all things to a dedicated backup service instead. The lock-in with onedrive is palpable. So I swallowed the pill, downloaded all our files (very slowly...) and backed them up properly instead, with a service that will send me a hard drive with my files upon request.
I'm curious, what did you select, and how is the UX? With OneDrive, it looks like any other folder in your windows/mac computer, and the built in gallery of the Samsung phones my family uses will transparently sync to OneDrive. Other apps on Android can also "directly" access OneDrive files, but that sadly needs support from the app. And it all is available for access online via browser.
My main goal is to prevent data loss if a device is ever stolen / fails beyond repair. And being able to tell your non-technical family members to "put important documents within this folder" / "log in here if you need access outside your normal devices" is low enough of a barrier so that they actually do it.
UK Colleges and schools use MS, so students don't have much choice.
Some UK government stuff appears to be MS only, which really is awful. Of course it's Microsoft's "open" formats; so you can use FOSS alternatives but MS will screw up the formatting.
From (2)(a)(1):
> (A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
>
> (B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.
Possession of and providing non-distribution ( / maintenance / update) services to a "Foreign Adversary Controlled Application" are not in any way a part of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". Operative services are specifically and intentionally excluded from the list, to ease the burden of enforcement.
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