France is the latest country that is taking steps to ban TikTok from government-managed devices. Stanislas Guerini, the Minister of Public Transformation and Service, and his services issued a succinct statement announcing the move and the reasoning behind this change.

But there’s a twist. Instead of simply banning the social media app, the French government is saying that all recreational apps are now banned from work devices.

“For the past few weeks, several European and international partners have adopted measures to limit or prohibit downloading and installing the TikTok application by their public administrations,” the French government wrote.

For example, the U.S. House of Representatives banned TikTok on lawmakers’ government-issued mobile devices. In Canada, TikTok has also been banned from government devices. The European Commission issued a directive asking all employees to remove TikTok from their work devices as well.

In all those instances, government bodies state that they are concerned about data privacy. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a private Chinese company. They believe that user data could be stored and accessed by the Chinese government.

TikTok has said several times that the company doesn’t share user data with the Chinese government. The company also plans to store data locally. In Europe’s case, TikTok tried to reassure European governments by announcing that multiple data centers will be up and running in Europe in the near future. TikTok plans to migrate all European user data to European data centers over the next couple of years.

In addition to this data sovereignty strategy, TikTok is “reducing employee access to European user data; minimising data flows outside of Europe,” wrote Rich Waterworth, TikTok’s General Manager Operations, Europe.

Of course, it means that governments have to trust TikTok’s word, which doesn’t seem to be the case in France. “After an analysis of the stakes, notably security, the government has decided to prohibit from now on the downloading and installation of recreational applications on professional phones provided to public agents,” the Ministry of Public Transformation and Service announced.

So what is a recreational app exactly? Guerini’s office told the AFP and AP news agencies that some of these apps include TikTok (obviously), but also Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Candy Crush and other games, as well as dating apps.

It sounds like a broad and loose concept and I hope we’ll get some clarification about the exact scope of the recreational category. We’ve reached out to Guerini’s office and will update this article if we get more details.

“Recreational applications do not have sufficient a level of cybersecurity and data protection to be deployed on government equipment. These applications may therefore pose a risk to the data protection of these administrations and their public officials,” the French government wrote.

A message has been sent to all ministries. The inter-ministerial digital administration (DINUM) and the cybersecurity agency (ANSSI) will follow up with more specific instructions about the implementation of the ban.

There will be one notable exception. If you need to install an app to communicate about your administration’s work, you will be able to do do so. In other words, if you are a social media manager, you will be able to install Twitter, Facebook and, yes, TikTok.

Parts of Twitter’s source code were recently leaked online via GitHub, the New York Times reports, but were taken down after the social media platform filed a DMCA request. The request, which GitHub has published online, notes that the leaked information included “proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools.” 

The NYT notes that the source code maybe have been public for several months before being removed — the GitHub profile associated with the DMCA takedown lists a single (non-public) code contribution from early January. The name of the account is listed as “FreeSpeechEnthusiast,” in an apparent reference to Twitter CEO Elon Musk calling himself a “free speech absolutist” in the past.

Proprietary source code is often among a company’s most closely held trade secrets. Making it public risks revealing its software’s vulnerabilities to would-be attackers, and can also give competitors an advantage by being able to see non-public internal workings. Source code has been a common target for hackers in the past, including in attacks on Microsoft, and the Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red. 

As well as asking GitHub to take down the code, Twitter submitted a court filing in California in an attempt to find the person responsible, and to get information on any other GitHub users who may have downloaded the data. Bloomberg reports that the filing asked the court to order GitHub to reveal users’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, emails, social media profiles, and IP addresses.

A spokesperson for GitHub did not respond to questions about whether it would comply with Twitter’s request to supply identifying information, and an email sent to Twitter’s official press address received an auto-generated poop emoji in response. (Twitter’s press office was disbanded shortly after Musk’s acquisition.)

According to the NYT, Twitter executives suspect that an employee who left the company last year may be responsible for the leak. But that doesn’t exactly narrow things down given Musk laid off thousands of the company’s staff shortly after taking control of the social media network. Fears that departing employees might attempt to sabotage the business on their way out have reportedly led Twitter to implement code freezes ahead of layoffs. 

News of the leaked source code comes just days before Twitter will supposedly open source “all code used to recommend tweets” on March 31st. But open-sourcing a recommendation algorithm like this (if it actually goes ahead this time), will likely reveal far less of the company’s proprietary code than the recent leak posted on GitHub. 

Twitter has been through a turbulent time since its acquisition by Musk last year. The Tesla CEO, who paid $44 billion for Twitter last year but now says it’s worth just $20 billion, has been attempting to overhaul the social media network with an intense focus on cost-cutting and building out new revenue opportunities like its paid Twitter Blue subscriptions. But the core reliability of the service appears to have suffered as a result, with several outages and interruptions reported in recent months.

Jack Ma’s whereabouts are making headlines again roughly a year after the billionaire founder of Alibaba disappeared from the public eye.

Bloomberg reported Monday that Ma had chosen to stay abroad despite China’s efforts to restore confidence in entrepreneurs, citing unnamed sources. Within hours, however, news surfaced that Ma actually visited an Alibaba-funded K-12 school in Hangzhou, according to an article published by the school, Yungu.

The Bloomberg article had since been updated to reflect Ma’s appearance in Hangzhou, home to the founder and Alibaba, where he talked about how ChatGPT posed a challenge to education during the school visit.

The renewed attention to Ma’s location comes at a time when China is trying to voice support for the private sector following a years-long crackdown on the tech industry, including shelving the IPO plans of Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba. The movement prompted some founders to move abroad and seek overseas expansion.

The news of Ma also comes as Chinese tech firms are facing unprecedented pressure in the West. Last Thursday, U.S. lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in a congressional hearing that spanned five hours, firing harsh questions that brought to light the irreconcilable differences between the two superpowers. The hearing, as one Chinese founder said to TechCrunch, sent a chill up their spine.

TikTok isn’t the only one running into roadblocks in the U.S. A group of “businesses and individuals” have formed a “Shut Down Shein” campaign to question the business practices of Shein, the Singapore-headquartered fast fashion giant that has risen to global dominance thanks to its data-driven supply chains in China. Shein refuted a report that it faced risks of being shut down in the U.S.