this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
122 points (97.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36624 readers
1814 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

On a technical level, how is TikTok being blocked/banned in the US?

Can I still sideload the app to my phone? Is it only being banned from the two big app stores? Is there a penalty for being found in possession of the software on US soil?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I believe Google and Apple are to be fined if they don't remove the app from their stores.

We don't have the ability to nationally block the domains and IPs, so current users will still be able to access it. So you shouldn't need a VPN.

Android users could side load the app if they want.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

On Android you can download apps (.APK files) from the web, and install them without any app store.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Oh gotcha I've done that before just didn't know the term. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Downloading the APK.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Its a silly term to say installing from any app store that Google doesn't control

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not quite. You don't need any app store at all.
You literally download an APK file from a website or anywhere, then install it directly. Could even be a friend with a thumb drive. Doesn't matter how you get it, it's just a file.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah. Dont do that. Its how you install viruses.

Install through another app store like fdroid. Its the secure way to get APKs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's got nothing to do with what sideloading means.

And the risks are very overblown.
While it's possible, it's extremely rare.

Mostly because the potent target pool is so small. Bigger potentials for bad guys if they trick app stores into approving trojan horse apps, because everyone thinks app stores are safer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Public DNS servers hosted in the US will get notified to delist the domain or direct it to an alternate IP. ISPs will get notified to route IP traffic elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Source this information, because it is almost positively incorrect.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I have personal experience with backbone carriers.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, I do to. We’re not talking about theoretically blocking access to a site nation wide. We’re talking about the TikTok ban, which doesn’t stipulate any sort of network blocking, it’s just a delisting from the app stores.

The government has never required dns providers to remove records for a domain, or required ISPs to null route traffic to IPs. That’s almost certainly a First Amendment issue, and I can only imagine that such an order would be immediately challenged in court.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_States

Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA)

In March 2008, the New York Times reported that a blocklist published by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), an agency established under the Trading with the Enemy Act 1917 and other federal legislation, included websites, so that US companies are prohibited from doing business with those websites and must freeze their assets. The blocklist had the effect that US-based domain name registrars must block those websites. According to the article, eNom, a private domain name registrar and Web hosting company operating in the US, disables domain names that appear on the blocklist.[38] It described eNom's disabling of a European travel agent's web sites advertising travel to Cuba, which appeared on the list.[39] According to the report, the US government claimed that eNom was "legally required" to block the websites under US law, even though the websites were not hosted in the US, were not targeted at US persons, and were legal under foreign law.

As far as null routing IPs, we'll see.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

We won’t see, it’s never happened and isn’t a requirement in the ban bill.

Read the cited article in Wikipedia. https://web.archive.org/web/20170407043030/https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/us/04bar.html eNom didn’t block DNS users from resolving the domains, they were the registrar for the domains. The domain owners were paying eNom to list their records. As soon as the domain owners moved to a different DNS provider, anyone in the US would be able to access the sites again, even users using eNom public dns servers (if they exist idk).

You didn’t cite a case of the US blocking DNS providers from resolving a domain, you cited a case of the US blocking a registrar from doing business with an entity on a blocklist published by OFAC.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

This is not an action that will be initiated by the incoming ban, just fyi.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

To be fair, it wouldn't be every ISP that would reroute, just backbone ones. Their routing tables would filter down to regional and last mile networks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

When have any Tier One providers in the Is done such a thing in the US?