> Weeks later, China issued new regulations that would essentially bar TikTok from transferring its technology to a foreign buyer without explicit permission from the Chinese government.
> The Chinese regulations helped scuttle the effort by Microsoft, which said the only way it could both protect the privacy of TikTok users in the United States and prevent Beijing from using the app as a venue for disinformation was to take over the computer source code underlying the app, and the algorithms that determine what videos are seen by the 100 million Americans who use it each month.
This makes it clear that China has ties to Oracle management in some form or another, or Oracle wouldn't be the last man standing. This is going to be a shitshow.
Nah, all that Microsoft is trying to imply is that Oracle doesn’t give a shit about security engineering, and that the goofy geopolitical business alone does nothing for users. It’s plausible.
There’s a difference with having a contract with a department and being best buddies with an autocrat wannabe. Who then signs an executive order and invokes national security on very shaky grounds to force a sale.
Still, I’m not saying that the $10B DoD contract and the way they tortured the process to avoid giving it to Amazon did not stink as well. Or that Amazon as a company is fine. There can be more than one festering carcass in a swamp.
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/technology/tiktok-microso...