A First Amendment group sued Texas Governor Greg Abbott and others on Thursday over the state’s TikTok ban on official devices, arguing the prohibition – which extends to public universities – is unconstitutional and impedes academic freedom.
A First Amendment group sued Texas Governor Greg Abbott and others on Thursday over the state’s TikTok ban on official devices, arguing the prohibition – which extends to public universities – is unconstitutional and impedes academic freedom.
Should create a process allowing them to set up a test environment as a digital equivalent of a biological weapons research lab (just not as leaky as that one in Wuhan) and play with the CCP spyware from there.
I think the lawsuit is absurd, but the University professor in question did apply for an exemption for herself and her students in the classroom, and she was denied without review because the ban is absolute.
Fwiw I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to simply use personal devices for such research. But the argument that the ban goes too far doesn’t seem completely unreasonable in this narrow use case.
I’d like to see TikTok banned from all devices across the US (personal or otherwise) but I don’t make the rules. It’s among the worst of a bad bunch of applications and under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. To me, that sets it apart from the ones owned by US-based companies because at least those companies can get dragged into court for doing something wrong or grossly negligent. It’s not as easy to go after a Chinese company, particularly if (/when) the instruction to collect data comes from their government.
My other concerns are too tin-foil-hat to bring up here which should say something given what I wrote above. Short version is that none of them can be trusted but that goes double (at least) for anything connected to the CCP.
Oh jeez, people are still doing lab leak conspiracy theories? Maybe someday we’ll have evidence of that and the years of conspiracies will finally pay off.
It’s not something I’d stake my life on but if I were to place it in a range from “aliens visit Earth to butt-probe rednecks” to “OJ murdered Ron and Nicole”, it’d be much closer to the OJ end. More information is needed.