An anonymous reader shares a report: "Mulan" producer Jason Reed was in Mexico City last March promoting his soon-to-be-released film when he got the call that Walt Disney was postponing its debut due to the coronavirus. What followed was a summer of discussions between Disney, Reed and director Niki Caro as the company wrestled with when and how to release the $200 million live-action remake of its 1998 animated hit. This weekend they'll all get to see if they made the right call. Disney is making "Mulan" available on its Disney+ streaming service for an extra $30 starting Friday. The film now joins others, including Universal's "Trolls World Tour" and Warner Bros.' "Scoob!," in bypassing theaters and going directly to consumers. It's a trend that has many in Hollywood concerned about the future of films in theaters. They might be worrying too much. Without theaters, Disney and other studios would struggle to replace the revenue they have historically gotten from releasing big-budget films first in cinemas, then home video and later TV.

"They understand how important the theater is as a channel for distribution," said Steve Nason, research director at the consulting firm Parks Associates. "They just couldn't wait any longer." Prior to the pandemic, "Mulan" had been scheduled to hit theaters March 27. The company had already held the red-carpet premiere and spent heavily on advertising. But the film was postponed three times before its Disney+ debut was set. Reviews so far are fairly strong. "Disney's spectacular do-over deserves the biggest screen possible," read the headline in Variety. Rotten Tomatoes gives the movie a 79% fresh rating, showing most critics agree. Disney is trying a hybrid approach. It's releasing the film in theaters in Asia, where cinemas have been back open longer and the Asian cast and story are likely to have strong appeal. In the U.S. and Europe, "Mulan" will be online, where Disney+ has already built a sizable subscriber base.

Apple said on Thursday that it will delay until early next year changes to its privacy policy that could reduce ad sales by Facebook and other companies targeting users on iPhones and iPads. From a report: The delay could benefit Facebook, which last week said the changes to the iOS 14 operating system would render one of its mobile advertising tools "so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it." Apple announced new privacy rules in June that were slated to take effect with the launch of its iOS 14 operating system this fall. Among them is a new requirement that advertisers who employ an Apple-provided tracking identifier, or other tools that have a similar function, must now show a pop-up notification asking for tracking permission. Facebook said last week it would quit using the tool that requires a prompt in its own apps but did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Apple said Thursday that developers will still have the option to use the prompt when iOS 14 arrives.

Facebook will stop accepting political advertising in the United States a week before Election Day on Nov. 3, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post on Thursday. From a report: But the social network will continue showing users all political ads that candidates or political action committees buy before that day, and continue to let these groups adjust who they target. Candidates for political office will also still be able to run ads containing lies. In Thursday's announcement, Zuckerberg claimed he was putting in the one-week ban on new ads prior to the election because he was "concerned" about the challenges people could face while voting. "I'm also worried that with our nation so divided and election results potentially taking days or even weeks to be finalized, there could be an increased risk of civil unrest across the country," Zuckerberg said. Social networks are facing increasing pressure to police political advertising on their platforms ahead of the US elections, and some critics have urged tech companies to stop running political ads altogether. Last year, Twitter banned all political advertising from its platform, and Google restricted micro-targeting of political ads on certain products.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Facebook and Google are hollowing out local communities by serving as vectors for misinformation while hobbling local journalism and collecting taxpayer subsidies, a new paper from progressive think tank the American Economic Liberties Project charges. Both companies cite benefits their platforms offer small businesses as a key defense against critiques of their size and power. The paper, dated Aug. 30, is sure to presage further scrutiny of the impact they've had on local communities.

The brief, by Pat Garofalo, the group's director of state and local policy, argues that: Google doesn't do enough to protect against fraud, allowing scammers to get their own numbers and websites listed on Google to the detriment of legitimate businesses. Facebook, by design, boosts shoddy and sensationalist content, crowding out legitimate local news and information, all as it and Google have come to dominate the local advertising market that was long the lifeblood of community journalism. Both have sucked up potentially billions in local taxpayer dollars via tax breaks as well as subsidies and discounts on utilities they've gotten in exchange for building data centers. Garofalo recommends remedies including more antitrust enforcement at the federal and state levels and an end to preferential treatment by states and localities, either voluntarily or under force of law.

"They go by different names: ritual consultants, sacred designers, soul-centered advertisers," reports the New York Times, describing "a new corporate clergy" working as "divinity consultants" and "designing sacred rituals for corporations."

They have degrees from divinity schools. Their business is borrowing from religious tradition to bring spiritual richness to corporate America. In simpler times, divinity schools sent their graduates out to lead congregations or conduct academic research. Now there is a more office-bound calling: the spiritual consultant. Those who have chosen this path have founded agencies — some for-profit, some not — with similar-sounding names: Sacred Design Lab, Ritual Design Lab, Ritualist.

They blend the obscure language of the sacred with the also obscure language of management consulting to provide clients with a range of spiritually inflected services, from architecture to employee training to ritual design. Their larger goal is to soften cruel capitalism, making space for the soul, and to encourage employees to ask if what they are doing is good in a higher sense. Having watched social justice get readily absorbed into corporate culture, they want to see if more American businesses are ready for faith. "We've seen brands enter the political space," said Casper ter Kuile, a co-founder of Sacred Design Lab. Citing a Vice report, he added: "The next white space in advertising and brands is spirituality...."

Ezra Bookman founded Ritualist, which describes itself as "a boutique consultancy transforming companies and communities through the art of ritual," last year in Brooklyn. He has come up with rituals for small firms for events like the successful completion of a project — or, if one fails, a funeral. "How do we help people process the grief when a project fails and help them to move on from it?" Mr. Bookman said. Messages on the start-up's Instagram feed read like a kind of menu for companies who want to buy operational rites a la carte: "A ritual for purchasing your domain name (aka your little plot of virtual land up in the clouds)." "A ritual for when you get the email from LegalZoom that you've been officially registered as an LLC."
The articles notes there are problems when combining the corporate with the religious.

For one thing, "It's hard to exhort workers to give their professional activities transcendental meaning when, at the same time, those workers can be terminated."

iPhone users will have to opt-in to tracking starting with iOS 14. Advertisers are "crying foul," reports the Washington Post: [W]ith Apple under the antitrust spotlight, its privacy move has also been called a power move by an advertising industry that is scrambling to adjust to the changes, expected to be included in iOS 14, the company's latest mobile operating system expected to go live next month... "This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple's updates to iOS14 have forced this decision," Facebook said in a blog post.

Some in the advertising industry see the moves as part privacy, part self-interest on the part of Apple. Apple also offers advertising, and by limiting the amount of data outside marketers collect, Apple's access to the data becomes more valuable. "I think there's probably 30 percent truth in that they're doing it for privacy reasons and it's 70 percent that they're doing it because it's what's good for Apple," said Nick Jordan, founder of Narrative I/O, which helps companies gather data for advertising. "It's a question for regulators and courts whether they should be able to wield the power they do over this ecosystem," he said. "They created it, but can they rule it with an iron fist...?"

Apple says that when customers open apps, they'll be asked whether they'd like to give that specific app permission to track them with something called an "ID for Advertisers," or IDFA. Apple created the IDFA in 2012 to help app developers earn money on iOS. The unique number, assigned to iPhone customers, allows advertisers to track their movements around websites and apps by following that unique identifier... With the new pop-up messages, customers will be forced to make a choice. It is likely that most consumers will opt out of being tracked. Facebook said in a blog post that it would render its off-platform ad network so ineffective that it may not make sense to offer it to developers at all. Facebook said that in testing it had seen a more than 50% drop in revenue as a result of the loss of data from Apple...

"There's been no discussion, no commercial transaction. They're saying this is what we decided is right in the name of privacy and this is what we're going to do," said Stuart Ingis, a partner at the law firm Venable who represents the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an association of advertisers.
"Personally, I don't see the problem here," argues Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy.

The Post notes that Apple runs its own advertising business based on data gathered from its users — but Apple's director of privacy engineering "doesn't consider this data gathering 'tracking'...because Apple collects the data from its own users on its own apps and other services. Facebook and other advertisers, Apple says, gather data on users even when they're not using Facebook."

Facebook has filed lawsuits today in both the US and the UK against MobiBurn, a UK software company that provided advertising tools for mobile app developers. From a report: In particular, MobiBurn provided an advertising software development kit (SDK) that allowed app developers to embed ads inside their applications and monetize user behavior. But in a lawsuit filed today, Facebook claims the SDK contained malicious code that illegally collected the personal data of Facebook users. Facebook said the data was collected when users installed any mobile app that contained the MobiBurn advertising SDK. When this happened, the code would activate and collect a person's name, time zone, email address, and gender. "Security researchers first flagged MobiBurn's behavior to us as part of our data abuse bounty program," said Jessica Romero, Facebook's Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation.

Walmart said it's teaming up with Microsoft in a bid for TikTok. From a report: The retail giant confirmed to CNBC that it's interested in buying the tech company. TikTok is nearing an agreement to sell its U.S., Canadian, Australian and New Zealand operations in a deal that's likely to be in the $20 billion to $30 billion range, sources say. It has not yet chosen a buyer, but could announce the deal in coming days, sources say. With Walmart's confirmation, it joins several others bidding on the tech company, including Oracle. Walmart is pursuing the acquisition at a time when it's trying to better compete with Amazon. It plans to launch a membership program, called Walmart+, soon. The subscription-based service is the retailer's answer to Amazon Prime, which includes original TV shows and movies. In a statement, the big-box retailer said TikTok's integration of e-commerce and advertising "is a clear benefit to creators and users in those markets." It did not say how it would use TikTok or whether it would be part of Walmart+.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Microsoft's acquisition talks with TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance "ballooned" this summer after President Donald Trump intervened, according to a report from The New York Times, citing people familiar with the situation. ByteDance is being forced to sell TikTok's U.S. business by the Trump administration, which says the app's current ties to China make it a national security threat. An executive order signed by Trump on Aug. 6 means a sale must go through before Sept. 15. However, TikTok sued the U.S. government on Monday, alleging it was deprived of due process. The lawsuit could delay the ban, giving TikTok more time to get a better deal for the sale.

When the deal talks began, Microsoft is said to have been reluctant to do any kind of large TikTok acquisition, due in part to the rising tensions between the U.S. and China, according to the Times report. However, a minority stake in the wildly popular video sharing app was viewed positively as it may lead to TikTok ditching Google Cloud, which it currently uses, and signing up to Microsoft Azure, instantly making it one of Microsoft's largest cloud customers. TikTok could also be integrated with Microsoft's $7 billion advertising business. Microsoft issued a statement on Aug. 2 about its pursuit to buy TikTok's U.S. business. However, on Aug, 3, Trump said he'd rather Microsoft, valued at $1.6 trillion, purchase the app that is used by 100 million Americans in its entirety. "I think buying 30% is complicated," Trump told reporters in the Cabinet Room at the White House. There are now several other bidders competing with Microsoft, with the main one being enterprise software firm Oracle. Netflix and Twitter have also been contacted by bankers and investors, but it's not clear if they're interested, according to the Times. In any case, deal talks between the parties have "morphed into a big, messy, political soap opera," according to the report.

Facebook is warning advertisers that they can expect weaker ad performance from iPhone users once iOS 14 comes out next month and is telling them to create second advertiser accounts to contain the disruption. From a report: Many of Facebook's advertising partners rely on Apple's "Identifier for Advertisers" (IDFA) user tracking feature to, for instance, target would-be users by interest and see if they actually clicked on a mobile ad directing them to install a particular app. Changes to IDFA coming with iOS 14 will have a big impact on the marketing strategies for many businesses, and on Facebook's bottom line. In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook says it expects Apple's IDFA changes "will disproportionately affect [Facebook's] Audience Network of advertisers given its heavy dependence on app advertising." Reporter Sam Biddle comments: "What do you think you're saying about your company when things that protect an individual harm your business so drastically that you need to issue a warning?"

Facebook's French subsidiary has agreed to pay more than $118 million in back taxes, including a penalty, after a ten-year audit of its accounts by French tax authorities, the company said on Monday. Reuters reports: France, which is pushing hard to overhaul international tax rules on digital companies such as Facebook, Alphabet's Google, Apple and Amazon, has said the big tech groups pay too little tax in the country where they have significant sales. Current international tax rules legally allow companies to funnel sales generated in local markets in Europe to their regional headquarters. Some of the tech companies, including Facebook, have European or international headquarters based in countries with comparatively low corporate tax rates, such as Ireland.

A Facebook spokesman said French tax authorities carried out an audit on Facebook's accounts over 2009-2018 period, which resulted in an agreement by the subsidiary to pay a total 106 million euros. Facebook's spokesman also said that since 2018 the company had decided to include its advertising sales in France in its annual accounts covering France. As a result, Facebook's total net revenue almost doubled in 2019 from a year earlier to 747 million euros, a copy of Facebook France's 2019 annual accounts, filed with France's companies registry and seen by Reuters, showed. Facebook France, which employs 208 people, refers to the French tax audit report in its 2019 annual accounts, saying it amounted to a tax adjustment of about 105 million euros. This includes a penalty of about 22 million, the annual accounts showed.

Nintendo has targeted the developer of an open-source Switch payload injector with a cease and desist notice (PDF). Faced with copyright infringement threats, the DragonInjector developer decided to shut the project down. While he doesn't agree with the allegations, an expensive legal battle is not an option. TorrentFreak reports: DragonInjector is a small piece of hardware that fits in the Switch game card slot. It allows users to install and load custom firmware on their console. While it's not advertised as a pirate tool, with third-party code it can be used to play pirated games on older Switch models. A few days ago, DragonInjector's developer formally announced the end of the project. In a message on Discord, a Nintendo cease-and-desist order is cited as the main reason. MatinatorX doesn't agree with the gaming company's copyright infringement claims but he doesn't want to fight them either.

"While I don't believe the project was or is unlawful in any way, I do not have the resources to go to court to prove that for a hobby, especially considering the project netted a loss of a few thousand dollars overall," he writes. The cease-and-desist notice was sent by Nintendo's Canadian lawyers a few weeks ago. It accuses the developer of copyright infringement by advertising and selling the DragonInjector. According to the notice, this breaks the Switch's technical protection measures. "Your unlawful manufacture, advertisement, distribution, offering for sale and sale of the DragonInjector via the Dragon Injector Website infringes our client's rights," the lawyers write.

The developer was urged to immediately stop any infringing activities. If not, Nintendo reserves the right to take further action, the notice warns, adding that the company previously won $12 million CAD in damages in a 'similar' case. The threat comes with a list of additional requests. Among other things, MatinatorX must hand over all related accounting, including the number of devices sold as well as any profits that were made. The report notes that while Dragoninjector.com is gone, the developer registered Draconicmods.com to sell a custom Switch kickstand and other legitimate accessories.

Unity Software, a San Francisco-based company known for its popular video game engine, has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "U." An interesting point it raised in its filing: In particular, operating system platform providers or application stores such as Apple or Google may change their technical requirements or policies in a manner that adversely impacts the way in which we or our customers collect, use and share data from end-user devices. Restrictions in our ability to collect and use data as desired could negatively impact our Operate Solutions as well as our resource planning and feature development planning for our software. Similarly, at any time, these platform providers or application stores can change their policies on how our customers or we operate on their platform or in their application stores by, for example, applying content moderation for applications and advertising or imposing technical or code requirements. Actions by operating system platform providers or application stores such as Apple or Google may affect the manner in which we or our customers collect, use and share data from end-user devices. In June 2020, Apple announced plans to require applications using its mobile operating system, iOS, to affirmatively (on an opt-in basis) obtain an end-user's permission to "track them across apps or websites owned by other companies" or access their device's advertising identifier for advertising and advertising measurement purposes, as well as other restrictions. We expect that Apple may implement these changes as early as fall of 2020.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this week, an advertising agency emerged with a video bragging about an ad-campaign concept: We'll invade gaming-filled Twitch chat rooms and post ads for your brand for cheap. The attached video was exactly the kind of cringe you might expect from "brand engages with video game culture," with edgy yet inoffensive quotes, footage of fake games, and digitally altered voices. But what looked like a fake ad concept has turned out to be very real -- and after examining how Twitch works, the whole thing looks like a possible FTC violation.

The ad campaign, run by the Ogilvy agency on behalf of Burger King, relied on a common Twitch trope of donating to game-streaming hosts. "Affiliate" Twitch users are eligible to receive cash from viewers, either in the form of flat-rate subscriptions or variable one-time donations, and hosts often encourage this by adding text-to-voice automation to the process. So if you pay a certain amount, a voice will read your statement out loud -- and hosts usually retroactively react to weird and offensive statements made by these systems instead of pre-screening them. (They're busy playing a game, after all.) Ogilvy's promotion revolved around the low cost of entry for these text-to-voice prompts. Their ads, written to promote a fast-food chain, were attached to specific dollar amounts. One example, as explained by Twitch streamer Ross "RubberNinja" O'Donovan (not to be confused with that other Ninja), went as follows: "I just donated $5 to tell you that you can spend $5 and get [a combined meal on our app]. It seems like a twisted strategy." O'Donovan went on to post his disdain for American fast food and compared it to what he ate when he lived in Australia, which prompted Ogilvy's "THE_KING_OF_STREAM" account to donate another $5 and make a joke about Australian food. Ogilvy had described the ad campaign as run by a "bot," implying automation, but O'Donovan's example implies some form of human control and curation in terms of reacting to Twitch host pushback.

In a Thursday report, Kotaku's Nathan Grayson went sniffing around to discover many other examples of Ogilvy's ads playing out on real Twitch channels over the course of the week -- and the Kotaku report quoted pretty much all of those hosts decrying this practice. [...] More crucially for Ogilvy and Burger King, however, is the matter of how those ads appeared: as sneaky "fan" declarations in chat rooms. Though the campaign was largely run by the aforementioned "THE_KING_OF_STREAM" account and appeared as such in Twitch chat rooms, it wasn't in any way represented by Twitch as a sponsor's account, nor were the posts labeled as "#ad" or other clear markings. As O'Donovan and other streamers have made clear, that kind of transparency would have gotten such chat statements instantly deleted or modded for violating individual channel rules. While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has clear guidance about "deceptive" online advertising, and it demands that channel hosts comply with FTC guidance to make sure sponsored statements are easily identified, Ogilvy may have slipped through the FTC's current guidance cracks.

Amazon today announced an upcoming hiring spree set to bring 3,500 jobs to a half-dozen U.S. cities. The news is, of course, particularly notable amid a pandemic that has cause many industries to freeze hiring, while unemployment claims have soared across the country. It also finds the company doing that hiring in cities -- many of which have seen citizens looking to move to less densely populated areas. From a report While many businesses have suffered the knock-on effects of COVID-19-related lockdowns, however, Amazon has found continued success. The company's massive e-commerce platform has been deemed an essential service and its AWS platform has taken on an outsized role as the push for businesses to go all online has further accelerated. The new jobs are "corporate and tech" per the company's description, across a number of divisions, including AWS, Alexa, Amazon Advertising, Amazon Fashion, OpsTech and Amazon Fresh. The list of cities includes Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York Phoenix and San Diego, accounting for around 900,000 square feet of office space in all.

American's National Security Agency (NSA) "has shared new guidance with U.S. military and intelligence personnel, suggesting they take additional precautions to safeguard their location data," reports Engadget. "The agency argues the information devices and apps collect can pose a national security threat."

Ars Technica reports: The National Security Agency is recommending that some government workers and people generally concerned about privacy turn off find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth whenever those services are not needed, as well as limit location data usage by apps. "Location data can be extremely valuable and must be protected," an advisory stated. "It can reveal details about the number of users in a location, user and supply movements, daily routines (user and organizational), and can expose otherwise unknown associations between users and locations."

NSA officials acknowledged that geolocation functions are enabled by design and are essential to mobile communications. The officials also admit that the recommended safeguards are impractical for most users. Mapping, location tracking of lost or stolen phones, automatically connecting to Wi-Fi networks, and fitness trackers and apps are just a few of the things that require fine-grained locations to work at all. But these features come at a cost. Adversaries may be able to tap into location data that app developers, advertising services, and other third parties receive from apps and then store in massive databases. Adversaries may also subscribe to services such as those offered by Securus and LocationSmart, two services that The New York Times and KrebsOnSecurity documented, respectively. Both companies either tracked or sold locations of customers collected by the cell towers of major cellular carriers.

Not only did LocationSmart leak this data to anyone who knew a simple trick for exploiting a common class of website bug, but a Vice reporter was able to obtain the real-time location of a phone by paying $300 to a different service. The New York Times also published this sobering feature outlining services that use mobile location data to track the histories of millions of people over extended periods.

The advisory also warns that tracking often happens even when cellular service is turned off, since both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can also track locations and beam them to third parties connected to the Internet or with a sensor that's within radio range.
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares some of the agency's other recommendations:

• Enter airplane mode when not using the device
• Minimize web browsing on your device and do not allow browsers to access location services
• Use an anonymous VPN
• Minimize location information stored in the cloud

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Several companies offering phone-spying apps -- known as "stalkerware" -- are still advertising in Google search results, despite the search giant's ban that took effect today, TechCrunch has found. These controversial apps are often pitched to help parents snoop on their child's calls, messages, apps and other private data under the guise of helping to protect against online predators. But some repurpose these apps to spy on their spouses -- often without their permission. It's a problem that the wider tech industry has worked to tackle. Security firms and antivirus makers are working to combat the rise of stalkerware, and federal authorities have taken action when app makers have violated the law.

One of the biggest actions to date came last month when Google announced an updated ads policy, effectively banning companies from advertising phone-snooping apps "with the express purpose of tracking or monitoring another person or their activities without their authorization." Google gave these companies until August 11 to remove these ads. But TechCrunch found seven companies known to provide stalkerware -- including FlexiSpy, mSpy, WebWatcher and KidsGuard -- were still advertising in Google search results after the ban took effect. Google did not say explicitly say if the stalkerware apps violated its policy, but told TechCrunch that it removed ads for WebWatcher. Despite the deadline, Google said that enforcement is not always immediate. "We recently updated our policies to prohibit ads promoting spyware for partner surveillance while still allowing ads for technology that helps parents monitor their underage children," said a Google spokesperson. "To prevent deceitful actors who try to disguise the product's intent and evade our enforcement, we look at several signals like the ad text, creative and landing page, among others, for policy compliance. When we find that an ad or advertiser is violating our policies, we take immediate action."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: TikTok skirted a privacy safeguard in Google's Android operating system to collect unique identifiers from millions of mobile devices, data that allows the app to track users online without allowing them to opt out, a Wall Street Journal analysis has found. The tactic, which experts in mobile-phone security said was concealed through an unusual added layer of encryption, appears to have violated Google policies limiting how apps track people and wasn't disclosed to TikTok users. TikTok ended the practice in November, the Journal's testing showed.

The identifiers collected by TikTok, called MAC addresses, are most commonly used for advertising purposes. The White House has said it is worried that users' data could be obtained by the Chinese government and used to build detailed dossiers on individuals for blackmail or espionage. In a statement, a spokesperson said the company is "committed to protecting the privacy and safety of the TikTok community. Like our peers, we constantly update our app to keep up with evolving security challenges." The company said "the current version of TikTok does not collect MAC addresses."

An anonymous reader quotes long-time technology pundit Robert Cringely: Forty-five days from now, we're told, President Trump will shut down TikTok and WeChat. TikTok, maybe, but WeChat? Impossible...

Trump has a chance of taking down TikTok, the short form video sharing site, because that service is dependent on advertising. He can force the app out of U.S. app stores (though not out of foreign ones) and he can cut off the flow of ad dollars... at least those dollars that flow through American pockets. But there are workarounds, I'm sure, even for TikTok and 45 days is a lot of time to come up with them. So maybe the service will be sold to Microsoft or maybe not. In either case I'm sure TikTok will survive in some form.

WeChat, on the other hand, will thrive.

WeChat, if you haven't used it, is the mobile operating system for China. It's an app platform in its own right that is used for communication, entertainment, and commerce. Imagine Facebook, LinkedIn, PayPal, Venmo, Skype, Uber, Gmail and eBay all in a single application. That's WeChat. It's even a third-party application platform, so while U.S. banks operate on the Internet, Chinese banks operate on WeChat. Shutting WeChat down in the U.S. would be a huge blow to WeChat's parent company, TenCent, and a huge blow to the Chinese diaspora. Except it won't work.

To defeat President Trump, all WeChat users need is a Virtual Private Network and any WeChat users already in the U.S. already have a VPN to defeat the much more formidable Great Firewall of China.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to ban dealings with ByteDance, owner of video-sharing sensation TikTok, appears to codify what his administration has already been warning. A second edict targeting messaging app WeChat and its parent, Tencent, seems weirdly overdue. The executive orders issued by the White House go beyond stopping average Americans from becoming unwitting spies for the Communist Party through their postings and data. The implications could hurt not only the Chinese targets, but the U.S. companies they work with, including Apple and Alphabet's Google.

Though TikTok and WeChat have been getting all the recent attention, the orders state that American companies cannot work with ByteDance or Tencent (though an unnamed U.S. official later stated that Tencent transactions were still OK). That clarification notwithstanding, the wording of the orders does imply that regardless of intention such bans could extend further, to include Americans advertising on dozens of products offered by either Chinese company, or to selling them cloud-storage services, or perhaps the most nuclear option: distributing their apps, even within China. [...] Even though Chinese smartphone brands dominate their domestic market, iOS and Android remain the dominant platforms and Apple and Google cover almost the entire global ecosystem with their respective app stores. If they can't do business with ByteDance, for example, even after a TikTok spin off, then the Beijing company might be unable to distribute its own apps, even within China.