Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'
vice.com
vice.com
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vqew/the-hacker-who-archiv...
> donk_enby had originally intended to grab data only from the day of the Capitol takeover, but found that the poor construction and security of Parler allowed her to capture, essentially, the entire website. That ended up being 56.7 terabytes of data, which included every public post on Parler, 412 million files in all—including 150 million photos and more than 1 million videos. Each of these had embedded metadata like date, time and GPS coordinates—unlike most social media sites, Parler does not strip metadata from media its users upload, which, crucially, could be useful for law enforcement and open source investigators.
OH SHI-
This is a colossal mess up, on epic proportions.
Apparently it's called Grey's Law: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Grey%27s%20L...
Wait... Is that a thing? Are there more of these?
That is to say it's a snowclone where the substitutions come from another quote.
I guess quotemanteaus are a special kind of unique snowclone.
You could take "with great power comes great responsibility" and form the snowclone "with great X comes great Y" and then take the quote "the medium is the message" and use those in your snowclone to make the quotemanteau "with a great medium comes a great message"
Hmm... I feel like I should try concoct more of these. They're fun.
Besides that, probably not much. =)
It happens.
This isn’t an app that’s in widespread general use but just so happens to also have a few bad apples using it too. It’s instead almost exclusively used by what would appear to be the most radical wing of the Trump party. Almost every single person using it during that period attended Trump’s speech and/or participated (in some way, shape, or form) in an assault on the Capitol that day.
Are you sure it's not just a heat map of only those videos?
These are location from pictures. Of course almost all pictures are of the riots instead of some boring random street in Washington DC.
Even people who are not part of it will take pictures simply because it is a major event and nowadays, every time something interesting happens, there are people to take pictures. You are probably going to find similar heat maps on more mainstream social networks.
https://www.tommycarstensen.com/terrorism/pQf5uxtLtxH5.mp4
Neglating to remember his president has been in charge for 4 years
The guy coughing at 1m34 too!
Rioter 1: "They just hit that dude"
Rioter 2: "Yeah because he was being a prick"
https://www.tommycarstensen.com/terrorism/4wIDySD7tKxo.mp4
18 seconds
Woman takes of mask to tell camera "It's amazing". Cameraman says "put your mask on I don't want anyone to see you"
Turn off or strip EXIF data -- most sites do anyway -- and this wouldn't happen.
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald Jan 11
Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?
Zero.
The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start.
https://twitter.com/nickmartin/status/1349277932531847174
> Hi Glenn, I'm wondering if you would be willing to delete this tweet and issue a correction both on Twitter and your newsletter since a number of the people arrested last week, including Jacob Chansley and Nicholas Ochs, were active users of Parler. Thanks!
"Authoritarians never believe they're authoritarians, no matter how much censorship, surveillance, jingoism, & imprisonment they demand.
They tell themselves their enemies are so uniquely evil and dangerous - terrorists - that anything done in the name of fighting them is noble."
Showing that people posted videos from the rally at the Monument and then went to the front of the Capitol buildings. Note that many on site participants reported there was no cell or data service at the Capital, so they were not coordinating with Parler, just reporting.
The heat map might generate hypothesis but conclusions that Parler users or demonstrators as a whole did anything other than asserting rights under the 1st amendment do not necessarily follow from the data[1].
[1]https://gist.github.com/kylemcdonald/8fdabd6526924012c1f5afe...
If not them because in you're worried they'd also shut you down than probably BackBlaze.
Could also just buy a bunch of fairly cheap 100 mbit unmetered boxes off OVH/Kimsufi for a total cost probably of ~$300/m.
Do all your transferring from an EC2 instance in the same region and it never needs to waste bandwidth going over the public internet anyway.
ITYM lying around, unless this is a quirk of US English. Sorry to be pedantic!
It is indeed. Very common in colloquial speech around here.
and bill you at the end of the month.
This is the crucial part: AWS will serve whatever is request. It brings them money.
Does that mean someone could request a lot of files, over and over, to increase my bill? Or is that served by some cache?
Let's say for example I host Mastodon media on S3, about 30G of unique data. Could someone use that to increase the cost of my bill?
I do of course have a budget alert set but I have to react to that alert too.
If you’re hosting Mastodon, then I assume you’d take steps to ensure that only an authenticated user can access any data. And that user would also need to be authorised to access only specific data. And that authenticated and authorised user would be rate limited so they couldn’t scrape everything they have access to easily.
If you do all these things, you’ll be fine.
Not only is it very easy to spend real money by accident, the web interface makes it incredibly hard to work out what you're spending money on (it took me a long time to even understand what I was paying for, and then longer still to turn it all off).
Even if you know what you're getting in to, the pricing is very misleading. A few cents an hour adds up if its running 24/7, and its never obvious whether you're in the free tier or not.
If you don't have deep pockets, be very careful with AWS.
It amazes me when I get pushback for that, but it's to be expected inside toxic culture corporations. I'm kinda disgusted with AWS now so I'm looking to re-tool. The dangerous defaults and concern about arbitrary or uncaring TOU enforcement should be an impetus to diversification of service provision.
there are a lot of interesting things that can go wrong.
Once a service account reached the limit, switch to another.
They took action against one organisation that had multiple 10PB+ users but Google really doesn't seem to care that much about the tertiary institutes giving unlimited GDrive accounts to every data hoarder who pretends to enrol.
I saw 6tb hdd's for €114 on my local site, 16tb hdd's for €370.
It's not exactly cheap, but if you're doing it for a serious project like archiving an entire politically relevant social media website, I'm sure you'll have 1-2 thousand eur lying around for a couple of hard disks
https://web.archive.org/web/20210112145206/https://greenwald...
Let's see what comes out of this data dump before getting too sanguine about loss of "free speech".
On this topic, I've seen reports on Twitter and Reddit of people who don't fit Parler's "prescribed worldview" being banned.
Not so free after all.
After all, it's just speech right?
I was just pointing out that Parler is nowhere near as "free" as it claims to be.
I was actually condemning them for not even living up to the standards they claim to profess, in addition to their other issues.
I’d think I’d like to prepay a fixed dollar amount like USD 200 IF I anticipate some major event but really this is problematic for students. I just want to use the free tier. Why is this so hard?
I am glad that my customers and company pays the bills because they can fluctuate very noticeably.
For private use I still host my own server just because the costs are fixed an I know what I am getting.
I forgot to remove NAT Gateway for a few weeks while learning bits and pieces of VPC usage and it ended up costing me 25$... what can you do.
I agree that there is some financial risk to using AWS although my understanding is that they're pretty forgiving of surprise bills--at least the first time.
This taught me to be very very careful with this stuff, and to not bet on Google or Amazon being nice to me when I am bound to mess something up at some point - because with the complexity these services carry, it's no wonder people fall into cost traps all the time.
I also help out a small non-profit newspaper mostly operated by students. We're going to need some storage for an archiving project and there's no way in hell I'm going to use AWS for that.
There’s one in particular I’m thinking of…
I'm really glad she did that. I'm fine with all this stuff getting taken down, but it really needs to be archived somewhere for historical purposes, to help understand this moment.
Given the kind of media and political impact Trump's tweets from @theRealDonaldTrump have been, I really hope they're archived at NARA along with the @POTUS tweets. They're legit historical primary source documents.
I understand this on a visceral level, but I wish more people would look beyond that to the implications for communication on the web. This action by Amazon happens to correspond with what I think is right and just on first iteration, but what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with?
Like, amazon isn’t actually the basic infrastructure of the internet. You can build web sites and apps without involving them. So why would a law force them to do business with you?
I don't have a solution, but Amazon + Apple + Google coordinating to shut down a platform for communication - even a platform that contains expression that I strongly disagree with, I might add - is a problem that requires a solution
This is what I wish more people understood now rather than later, but at some point everyone will understand that it's a problem
Hint: it's the identical problem to deplatforming BLM or Antifa or Occupy or the Proud Boys or pick anyone you agree with that annoys powerful people. "Having the better politics" will not protect you. "Oh they're just fascists" will not protect your peoples.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/05/twitter-d...
Apple on the other hand is a lot more murky due to their lockdown of app installs. I don't believe they should be made to host things they don't agree with but people should not be prevented form installing whatever software they want on their own hardware.
For the record I am a staunch free speech advocate but fully believe that no-one (no-company either) owes you (the royal you) a place to use your free speech on their property.
Did they actually coordinate [1] or just come to similar conclusions based on similar facts, in the context of the same cultural zeitgeist?
[1] e.g. Bezos, Cook, and Pichai (or subordinates) on a conference call, deciding what to do
The political alignment of many Parler users isn't a secret and if they decide to measure skulls again, I might be in trouble. Still, I don't see them as a relevant threat at all. It is even more ridiculous as the terrorism scare.
However, the actions of SV social media sites and hosts like Amazon censoring unpopular opinions and content outweigh that danger from neo-nazis by magnitudes. These groups have absolutely no political power in the 21st century. They have more influence than a decade ago, but that is mainly due to their ability to reinforce their prosecution narrative and martyrdom.
On the internet there are calls to violence in any political group, even vegans and cat lovers. We ignore that because they aren't relevant. But if you seriously crack down on cat lovers, you might need to expect real violence.
Either there are rules and principles that are valid for everyone or there are none.
Some say people get influenced by far-right propaganda. Far-right groups think in the same way in that they believe everyone not on their side is an "NPC".
I think Dorsey and Zuckerberg handled it relatively well in the grand scheme of things. Their latest ban attempts were over the top though. I know that some people might need help instead of a Twitter account, but that is beside the point. They set the precedent for countries to suppress their opposition and for state propaganda. I think Uganda is one of the latest examples.
That's the difference between merely saying something, and saying something with the likelihood of actually carrying it out.
Parler would still be around if there not been an mob attack on the capitol connected to it (and no legitimate fears of further mob attacks on inauguration day, etc.) If vegans actually started and organized butchering of meat eaters, I'm pretty sure the forums where they planned such things would get shut down quickly.
The reasons are not "they were too much right wing for us". They had multiple reasons, but it is not that long to read.
> On the internet there are calls to violence in any political group, even vegans and cat lovers. We ignore that because they aren't relevant. But if you seriously crack down on cat lovers, you might need to expect real violence.
And vegans and cat lowers do seriously take them down in their forums when those cross the line. And when they discuss cats and food on reddit and reddit deletes accounts of those who threaten violence, the vegans and cat lowers are happily continue to discuss cats and food.
This is bad analogy.
I do believe some level of internet serving access is a public utility. But i doubt that level is cloud hosting.
Parler had people discussing murdering Congresspeople and didn't do anything about it. No matter which faction of "what level of free speech is acceptable" one subscribes, this is never acceptable and it is no wonder that Parler got booted off.
I want you to understand what I'm about to say. Understand it in your bones: it is unacceptable to me and to you and it is reprehensible; and beliefs that you hold dear will someday, by someone, be seen as unacceptable and reprehensible. To protect the speech of the reprehensible is to protect your own speech. That's what I would like you to understand.
David Goldberger didn't defend the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie because he is a Nazi, but to defend his (and all of our) rights.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/sk...
The people who planned actual murders and crimes must be caught and punished. But if "planning and executing crimes" is the standard by which platforms should be shut down, then Facebook also should be shut down.
Actually, even in the US there are exceptions - namedly when speech is likely to incite crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
But if you wrote that on a site hosted on AWS, there is nothing in principle from Amazon taking the platform down. Politician Y calls his buddy Jeff Bezos, and fwoomp! Gone. This should be concerning.
The 1st Amendment (and its European equivalents) usually only bind the government, not private entities.
There is nothing per se preventing you (or Parler) to build their own datacenter or use another hoster - there is no "human right" to be able to use AWS. However, what still remains is that every company has the right to refuse service to an entity that is suspected of criminal activity - and the onus is on Parler to prove they will not serve as a planning platform for criminals.
Why should it be concerning at all? There are a few thousand other hosting providers they can go to.
The slightly stronger argument seems to be that the people making these death threats on Parler should not have been banned from Twitter/FB in the first place. FB/Twitter have far less competition and most of their value is in the network effects they've established.
The tech giants should absolutely be broken up/more heavily regulated, but I think there are much better examples of why than Parler.
That's not a strong argument at all. Spouting death threats gets you arrested if you do it in public (and someone records it or calls the cops), so it should also lead to a time-limited or permanent ban from social networks.
Social networks are not a free-for-all zone.
I don't think it's a strong argument either, I just think it's slightly stronger than the one people are trying to use for why AWS should be forced to host Parler.
> Spouting death threats gets you arrested if you do it in public (and someone records it or calls the cops), so it should also lead to a time-limited or permanent ban from social networks.
The argument from people coming out against the moderation of these threats seems to be that FB/Twitter etc. should only remove this content after receiving some sort of court order/government mandate to do so, that they shouldn't "play cop" as it were. Personally this seems like a pretty stupid take.
> Social networks are not a free-for-all zone.
Some people are arguing that the should be, that they should be treated as the equivalent of a modern town square. I don't necessarily agree with this take, but I can see why people might think that way.
A modern town square isn't a free-for-all zone either. Try to go and shout "fuck <n-word>" or raise the arm to the Nazi salute in an area where people of color live and you'll be lucky to escape with a minor beating.
Town squares are a form of societal self-preservation too - unruly elements get dealt with, either by the people themselves or by the police.
It seems more likely that we've learned that if I said that quote -- and then I personally tried to hang the politician by his thumbs and got caught because I'm a cartoonish moron. Then, when charged with attempting to hang the politician, I said "I was just joking" even though I had some hanging equipment and I was in a giant mob full of other people all chanting to hang the politician and many of us had guns and anyway I also broke into a locked building to do the hanging -- and then it came out that large swaths of the content on the same site was people making those kinds of threats, and then it came out that the site operators didn't care to remove the threats because they had a moral opposition to moderation, and then it came out that AWS had contacted the site owners many times to implore them to remove other illegal content, and then the site operators, rather than removing the content, gave press interviews where they boasted how they were invincible and didn't care if AWS took them down... then it's probable that AWS would take the content down. And this doesn't concern me at all. Lock me up, in this hypothetical, and lock up the people who enabled me.
I ran a legacy website that once got spammed. My host contacted me because one of the spam things was an ad for a website hosting stolen credit card numbers. They gave me 24 hours to take down the content. This isn't because they're censoring math and they're using their monopoly power to prevent numbers from being posted, it's because stolen credit card numbers, provided for the purposes of credit card fraud, are illegal and they didn't want to do business with me if I wasn't willing to remove the content.
And I also don't see a further problem with using the posture of the site operators + the site itself to make a judgment call about whether the content in question is an aberration or intentional. If someone posted a magnet link of pirated content in Hacker News, I wouldn't presume per se that Hacker News was a piracy website because I can facially see that the site is general purpose, and also because I can see that the site has a general moderation policy that signals it is willing to comply with legal requests. But that doesn't mean that ThePirateBay can credibly argue in court "We had no idea our site was used for piracy, and if you ban us, you have to ban Google, because they crawled us."
Planning an executing crimes is the standard by which those doing so should be shut down. Ideally, by the actor as close as possible and able to do so with minimal collateral damage.
But a second-order platform that determines a first-order platform is systematically incapable or unwilling to do that does not act improperly in cutting service to the first order platform .
That's fine by me tbh
Note, the reason why it is illegal goes back to preventing protesters from hanging up their banners / messages. An act to legally silence opponents.
By that criterion we should immediately close down Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, ...
I mean, AWS basically took their business under false pretences. AWS wasn't trying to provide them a service, it was trying to kill their company.
Same for Facebook and Twitter.
Parler, however, did nothing even as people went and publicly called out criminal acts happening on the platform.
I will dig a little deeper to support archive.org[1] this year. I'd love to run a mirror.
Honestly, none. It's their business and they can handle it however they want.
What you can do (and this is exactly what Kolmisoppi was suggesting) is build your platform to work without relying on other people's business.
I'm happy that companies like Amazon don't want to get associated with people who organized a failed coup. That should be the bare minimum. But there is no law which forces you to be hosted on Amazon if you want to be on the Internet. You can self-host. You can buy/rent servers in another country, where what you are doing doesn't have direct consequences which might lead people to want to get away from you. Use the blockchain, use torrent, develop your own P2P protocol. Those people just got locked out from the easy way, something they should have expected to happen (and plan for) since day one.
POTUS has the biggest bully pulpit in the world. whitehouse.gov, daily press briefing, C-SPAN, etc.
No third party should serve as alternate bully pulpit, allowing a democratically elected leader to speak directly to their audience, bypassing the fourth estate.
I'm not saying Twitter was right to shut down POTUS. I'm saying never should have hosted POTUS in the first place. Further, no leader should be allowed to speak as a private individual.
If Twitter wants to feature POTUS, then let Twitter attend the daily presser along with all the other reporters and journalists.
Everyone is responsible for allowing this undemocratic violation of norms. Social medias are just the one that profited most.
You can't although you can, of course, mitigate.
But are you OK with just a PWA on mobile w/o the Apple or Google stores?
And your platform is ultimately dependent on a network connection, probably CDN, domain registrar, DNS, etc. Those are a pretty high bar to get kicked off but you're not immune.
(And, yes, there are things like Tor and jumping around providers if you have a fairly lightweight web site--like most torrents--but that doesn't help you if yo have a site with many TB of data catering to unsophisticated users.)
This makes people talk about how they think it should work, not just how it works right now, which I think is exactly what is needed.
Personally I found Amazons response to Parler convincing: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/gov.u...
The question is, why should a company in Amazons situation be unable to turn off that service? As in, your question assumes that Amazon turned off Parler out of nowhere for no reason other then "we dont like them". It assumes they did not had documented reasons, documented attempts to convince Parler to comply to TOS etc.
Otherwise said, contract.
> I understand this on a visceral level, but I wish more people would look beyond that to the implications for communication on the web. This action by Amazon happens to correspond with what I think is right and just on first iteration, but what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with?
It's kind of predictable but still disappointing that this was the part of my comment people chose to discuss with a 43-comment thread. It was the least novel and interesting idea in it.
But to your point, there's a lot more "looking beyond" than just that. There also needs to be a lot more looking beyond rather limited fundamentalist views of free speech, which tend to abrogate other fundamental rights and be so short-sighted that they actually bring discredit to the values they try to protect.
The principle of Amazon not wanting to piss off all of their customers and several government organisations. If you're this tentative about something you explicitly agree is just, then clearly you (and millions of others) are going to react pretty harshly to Amazon unilaterally deciding, e.g., that all mentions of Belgium should get scrubbed from the platform.
I mean, it is the rudest word in the universe.
Anyhow, if your image shows recognizable landmarks with shadows, then it will be feasible to recover the exact point of view and the time of acquisition.
With what level of accuracy? Are you claiming you can confidently assert 2020-12-21 15:12 over, say, 2020-12-22 15:15 via shadows
Not at all. By visual inspection you can see whether it's the morning or the afternoon (if you know the orientation of the landmarks). I guess by image processing you could get a precision of +- 1h maybe?
https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348497204940595201
https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348440720504401921
Also, auth provider (twilio?) removed Parler as a client so for a short while it was possible to create accounts without a phone number (2FA).
https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348298836930867204
edit: okta, free trial, thanks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25774943
It was a free trial of Okta that they were using for their entire userbase.
https://twitter.com/okta/status/1348191370528256002?ref_src=...
Also, how does some randomer have ten of terabytes of disk lying around?
Also, I assume there is content from EU citizens in there, and so GDPR violations galore.
As an EU citizen, I can request that a company deletes my data. Unless this data dump is being treated as a crime scene or something, then the holders of this data will need some way to comply with these requests.
Also, now AWS (or whatever cloud provider it is) is holding content that contains racist and/or illegal content. Are they not effectively now just another Parler?
Now, ripping that _user_ generated data from the website this way without justified (justified = platform user agreement + legitimate interest) purpose or intent or even agreement and storing / distributing / processing it is the epitome of a GDPR transgression and borderline criminal at least in the EU (saying this as a EU citizen). They are liable. I wouldn't touch that dataset with a 10 foot pole. And I would even less brag about it on Twitter, things we do for clout I guess... :)
I have no stake in this thing, it's just to emphasize that statements like this are what get people and businesses in big trouble. Stay safe! Archive only your own data or data you gathered legitimately. Take the rest up with a lawyer or ... read the laws.
The GDPR talks about "data controllers", and citizens have the right to demand such controller remove their personal data. A "data controller" in this context means you knowingly possess the data and are in the position to make decisions about it. You're not a data controller, tho, if e.g. you run some service that allows users to upload data, without your involvement and direction and also do not decide how to use such data. E.g. amazon would not be liable if people put a data dumb in their cloud (unless amazon used the data themselves, instead of just storing/hosting the data at the behest of their customers).
Even before the GDPR there have been related laws and court cases, like the case that culminated in the "right to be forgotten" based on a decision by the European Court of Justice, which may well come into play here. I also remember a case in Germany, where a women allowed her partner to take intimate pictures of her, then after the relationship ended had a court order him to destroy the material (not a revenge porn case, there was no allegation he ever shared any of those pictures), meaning it's not always about what's public.
I don't know how California's mini-GDPR compares.
Then of course there is still the avenue of copyright law if the stuff is put online. Just because a parler user gave parler the permission to distribute a certain piece of content doesn't mean that everybody else has the same permission. I'm pretty sure Parler didn't make people assign them the copyright (which isn't even possible in some jurisdictions), therefore the people who posted on parler still retain the rights to their content. They can therefore use the DMCA or other similar jurisdictions around the world to demand takedowns.
I don’t think this relates to GDPR though. There are some exemptions for personal use which I think there are arguments this could fall into (IANAL). But my opinion is this isn’t in the spirit of GDPR.
There are many other laws that are broad enough in most countries to cover gray area scraping sadly. CFAA in the US for example. This sounds similar to the AT&T weev case.
https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior
If so it's distributed among many volunteers.
But the data still has to end up somewhere... Archive.org?
Grab status: https://tracker.archiveteam.org/parler/
and will be hosted by archive.org
10TB fits on one desktop drive, it's completely pedestrian
Others, like me, have home NAS's which have 10-20TiB, and they're usually close to full.
Fewer people, but a non-zero amount, hoard data, they have 20-100TiB or even more, full on homelabs.
If you're a person collecting datadumps or running rainbow tables, you probably have such a unit. It's not even that expensive really, you can get a 24TiB Pegasus Thunderbolt raid array for <1,000 USD
They're not a randomer, they're a person interested in data dumps.
Including old desktops and a couple of random external HDDs, I could probably hit 8-10TB easily.
And it's not like it's hard to get more. If I hit a montherlode and I need keep it, it's a 20 minute drive to Target / Best Buy / Walmart for a drive or three. Not as cheap as bulk orders off of Newegg but cost-effective enough to store these dumps.
The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks were built by people with a passion for building, maintaining and hacking things. People who, even without a solid CS background, would spend hours a day learning new things, developing distributed protocols, evading DNS blocks and hosting their content wherever they could to make it accessible - included the small server in their own garage if needed. And they are used by people who don't mind learning a new protocol or how to use a new client to get the content they want.
I don't see the same amount of passion for technology and hacking among the Parler users, nor its maintainers. Those who believe in conspiracy content are people characterized by a psychological tendency to take shortcuts whenever they can in order to minimize their efforts in learning and understanding new things. So when the first blocker hits they usually can't see alternative solutions, because it's not the way their brains are wired. They always expect somebody else to come up with solutions for them, and they always blame somebody else when the solution won't come. And even if they decided to migrate their content to the dark web or on a Tor network, not many people will follow them - both because they don't have the skills, and because they don't want to acquire those skills. Plus, they'd lose the "viral network effect" that they get when posting click-bait content on public networks, the new censorship-proof network will only attract a small bunch of already radicalized people.
And even if they wanted to hire some smart engineers to do the job for them, we all know that engineers tend to swing on the other opposite of the ideological spectrum. Those who have built systems for escaping REAL authoritarian censorship would rightfully feel disgusted if asked to apply their knowledge to provide a safe harbour for rednecks to vomit their conspiracy-theories-fueled hate.
Also by people who know that what they were doing was straight-up illegal in a lot of countries, and grey-area in a lot of others. So this was a real risk.
Parler on the other hand, at its core was just a social network, and if you look at the founders/owners, they have a very disconnected interpretation of "free speech", so they were clearly thinking nothing bad could happen.
I dont think it is that simple. I remember reading finding that smart highly intelligent people are more attracted to conspiracy theories. The complexity of those theories and details those rely on attract them.
Also, I may be wrong here, but I remember reading that Parler was funded by some pretty rich people. If that is true, they should be able to pay for tech know how.
The only ones that seem to believe in them are those clearly unhinged (McAfee comes straight to mind although his seems self serving too).
This is different than "intelligence." It's more about effort and rigor in thinking. It's the quality of the thought, and the willingness to question your own assumptions. And a willingness to recognize the limits of your own knowledge and understanding.
If that's true, and if indeed conservatives are much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overlo... in conspiracy theories), then the opposite of what you state may indeed be true
Keep un mind that before a conspiracy theory turns into the perverse mind-twist of a complex theory like QAnon it ALWAYS start simple, and always simpler than reality actually looks like. It can always summarized with "those guys want to harm you, so don't even bother to look further, the explanation is easy": pure and total amygdala stimulation. Then, when they are contradicted by evidence, they put up more and more complex twists to mitigate the arise of cognitive dissonance in its followers ("I know that it looks like things don't make much sense, but you know, you have to follow the crumbs, or keep in mind that Trump is talking to you in Morse code" etc.)
I'm not sure this is true. This seems to imply that nations which have copyright law are imposing authoritarian censorship on their citizens. This doesn't seem to be a pervasive idea, at least in the US.
There are proponents of information freedom who oppose copyright law. It's not clear to me that this group would oppose Parler, and in fact many I've spoken to believe they should be free to exist without censorship.
But - I am not sure they want to be associated with Parler either, out of concern for their reputation.
This is exactly the point of most anti-copyright parties.
The founder's motto was literally "Hack the planet"...
Indeed, that's not to be compared with TPB enthusiast's taste for hack and passion for CS things, but don't underestimate "right wing" techies...
Do we all really know that? Some very good technical people don't have particularly strong political views or keep them separate from their job. Example: lots of ordinary devs helped build porn sites.
The Children of Pornhub https://nyti.ms/33DMObR
An Uplifting Update, on the Terrible World of Pornhub https://nyti.ms/2W1aB1b
Such a representation naturally avoids the Y2K38 problem, and could go beyond Y10K. It's traditional in Windows and DOS (neither of which have the Y2K38 problem) to store timestamps as a structure of fields.
The other things you noted I agree with, however.
Plus, it's unambiguously human readable, for users, bystanders, platform developers, everyone. There's a useful usability principle in there.
I could see the argument for representing impressions as a string (especially if it's updated asynchronously and denormalized like that). The major downside is localization.
Apparently the records were strictly sequential, which I don’t believe is true for Mongo which IIRC includes the node ID in part of it.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.dat...
https://github.com/elastic/logstash/blob/v1.4.2/patterns/gro...
Please, everyone, use a single format at all times in your systems. I don't really care what it is, though I'm fond of `2021-01-14T06:28:08Z` because it's unambiguous. But don't just say "use ISO 8601", it's far too vague and you'll inevitably have variations.
* `2021-W02` means the second (ISO) week of 2021. Perfectly valid and used in a lot of planning.
* `--01-14` - I'm assuming this is a recurring date: every 14 Jan for every year
* `--1013` - at 1PM every 10th of the month? Guessing here
I believe ISO 8601 is a ISO codification of a DIN standard, and based on other standards processes I'm guessing some German manufacturing companies were the only ones who bothered showing up, so their internal software practices were encoded into the spec because no-one else cared..
Often the biggest entity will end up accidentally forcing their practices, sometimes sub-optimal, to entire organizations, simply by having the manpower to show up to meetings.
(`--01-14` is Jan 14 in any year, the last dash is "optional").
The "duration" (`P`) and "repetition" (`R`) syntax is also pretty wild.
-The Pirate Bay
https://thepiratebay10.org/torrent/28522986/Liberator_-_Firs...
Why stop, we’re on a roll
Very likely the World would be a better place if we only had happy music, happy movies, happy art. No angry art. No angry expression.
Simple expressions are different.
Look, I wish the world were pure and good. That no one had ill intent. But we know that we cannot have good things because a very small fraction of a percentage are bad people.
I don’t like having very bad people destroying freedom for everyone else.
I believe people have a right to express unpopular even odious opinions as long as there is no threat to body and life.
Unfortunately online media like Twitter give people psychological distance as well as augment the audience for kooks.
I’m resigned to believing there is no solution to this dilemma because psychopaths will ruin it for honest but brutal dissenters as well as run of the mill dissenters.
Piratebay exists largely to circumvent the law. They therefore can't really use the law as a guideline for what to censor. They have to make active choices of what illegal content is allowed and what isn't.
Discussions like this are frustrating, because one side frames it as though they're defending free speech from the insidious censors — except it's painfully obvious that if you push them enough, they'll admit that yes, there is some speech they're fine getting rid of. It takes a ton of effort to get back to that baseline, and the actual conversation about acceptable speech never happens.
Because if you don't support literal free speech absolutism — with child porn, spam, et al. — then you have to draw a line somewhere. By definition. And we can debate where that line should be drawn, but the debate is still between people who agree on the principle that some speech is unacceptable. Not between Team Freedom and Team Censorship.
That said, unilateral one-sided censorship is not okay. It's like Red Scare Hollywood.
My point a few rungs up was that there are many other forms of expression that are notoriously violent and misogynistic but don't get flagged by these same companies. I'm not saying I want that but I'm pointing out insistencies. Doxxing is another. It's very inconsistent how that is handled.
This thread originated with a comment saying it would be ideologically inconsistent for Pirate Bay's mantra to be "information wants to be free" and still remove schematics for 3D printing guns. My point was that a non-absolutist free speech stance is not inherently contradictory.
I'm not really interested in a full-throated debate about tech giants' moderation policies right now. But since you seem to think the censorship is unilateral and one-sided, I'd invite you to search through Twitter histories and see who was speaking out about FOSTA-SESTA, or Tumblr's NSFW ban. You'll find it was opposed mostly by libertarians and leftists — while the conservatives now wailing about censorship (and, in fairness, corporate liberals) didn't make a peep.
I'm very skeptical of the benefits of free speech. I don't think the arguments along the lines of free speech promoting truth or being beneficial to political discourse or allowing 'bad ideas' in the open to be 'disinfected' with debate are valid. But I'm even more skeptical of the state, and I do not trust it to use evidence-based methodologies. I've completely lost all faith in the whole political spectrum, particularly the left-anarchists who promote governmental and corporate censorship.
Twitter allows porn, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook do not
Newspaper comment sections will often moderate the word "fuck", while Facebook, YouTube and other will not
There are hundreds of dials you can tune in terms of moderation to adjust to fit the community you want to build. Apparently the Facebook moderation guide is 300+ pages long.
Parler isn't a "free speech platform" - they pretty much have a ban on porn. You'll find that most other "free speech" platforms also have hard limits (usually _stricter_ than what Twitter allow).
Try going onto thedonald and post one of the photos of Trump with Epstein, or Parler with porn, or Gab and curse Jesus[0] in a reply and see what happens
They're not free speech platforms, they're _their_ speech platforms. They have built the ultimate safe spaces for some of the worst online communities.
[0] Gab's own ToS refers to their discretion in removing content and a "God given right" https://gab.com/about/tos
Internet providers and services aren't "public forums" given their infrastructure is not a public space, but a private space they control. Whether or not someone thinks these services are "censoring" things or not isn't a real argument, again for the reason it must be a ruling authority that violates law by removing a person's speech from a given area or location, which then is censorship.
A company can't censor someone who is on their platform given the platform is owned, not ruled.
Just because it’s done by a private party doesn’t mean it’s not censorship.
It's the same for these tech companies. They are private companies and if you break their ToS for inciting violence or posting illegal shit then they have the right to ban you. You have freedom of speech, not freedom of consequences.
Note I said internet service not a subscription to a social media service. Your internet provider may decline to provide you with email, hell the may even decline you to provide with you with DNS, but they sure as well can't refuse to route your packets or accept incoming connections.
Apple and Google were within their rights to cut off access to the App store, but Amazon were in the wrong because they are an infrastructure company. At the very least they were obliged to allow Parler enough time to transfer to new providers.
On the other hand, there are a thousand different cloud providers; surely at least one would have taken Parler on as a customer. And even failing that, it’s much easier for Parler to run their own servers than it is for me to run my own power plant.
All of us here in the US are entitled and reserve the right to do business with whom we want as long as it doesn't violate discrimination laws, which focus on race, religion and things like that - not opinion about whether there are lizard people ruling the government or that an election was "stolen" because a few people made up some good stories about it but there is no actual proof that can be viewed in person...at all.
When those oligopolies act in concert or along the same ideological lines what options do you have?
E.g. the authorities can seize cash from you as has happened to store owners who went to deposit it at the bank. If every bank refuses to serve you which you claim to be their right, then why do you have laws which to criminalize cash holdings if that forces you to withdraw your cash from them and hold it in the street or at your home?
One cannot criminalize large cash holdings arising from cash payments which is okay with many people while at the same time giving banks the right to deny service.
Well, if that "private property home" is the only place where people in your surroundings can get something to eat; and if that someone "spew at others" but says something vile quietly to his friends, so that only people actively listening in on the conversation hear it, then - maybe you should not be able to police what that person says.
AFAIK this is not an absolute, global truth. IANAL, but I do know the stance on CP (e.g. anime, ages of wedding, written-Lolita- etc differ per region. Legal and cultural).
In many countries, possession of certain books is illegal. Possession of blueprints of weapons is illegal and so on.
Point being: banning CP is still a moral choice, made by the operators of the site, not some absolute, global common baseline.
This might be a bit of a naive view on things, considering how some forms of content will always find ways of spreading, but it's still a very strong point to argue that it's different from content like 3D-printable pistol schematics.
The hard difference is: With CP, harm is done in the process of creating the material. With most other things, harm could potentially be done as a result of the content.
It's similar with the "war on drugs" or when you want to evaluate the morality of your sneakers and clothes. Should possession of the drugs be illegal because people were harmed in their production (by e.g. drug cartels), should possession of the clothes be illegal because they were produced with child labour? I don't think so.
Edit: To make this clear, I merely replied again to clarify the difference not because I think there is a huge disagreement. This is obviously an unpleasant and contentious topic and I very much hope I don't come across as a CP apologist - I'm not, for the other reason I've mentioned.
My point is: There's a clear distinction between material that inherently causes harm in its creation and content that may lead to harm in some way.
Your extension to drugs or clothing only partially makes sense, as those can be produced without causing harm to or exploiting anybody. I view it as more similar to (knowingly) buying stolen goods.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gab.com#section_traffic
I agree with you about the political agitation but I would say its becoming less of an issue on Gab. Parler was quite toxic. However, I prefer MSN messenger style chatrooms, so I use Telegram mostly which has now reached 500 million daily active users.
These platforms aren't just filled with people banned from facebook anymore, and will become less political as time goes on
When they open up digital marketing on a platform thats less saturated, that will be the real test though. If Gab can do digital marketing decently corporations will start paying them money and stop criticising them so openly.
"if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches."
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
I feel like one of the defects in most of our discourse these days (from any position, on any subject) is an almost complete disregard for trying to understand opposing views (and even a lack of concern that ones assumptions about the opposition might not be entirely correct).
Curiosity, exchange of views, diversifying the news and information I’m exposed to, follow some people I am interested in hearing from, respect for censorship stance. These are the first that spring to mind
I've never used Gab or looked at their infrastructure before. A quick look shows they're behind Cloudflare. No clue where they're actually hosted or what the infra looks like but I wouldn't be surprised if they just snatched up this /24 "because they could" and are just sitting on it.
I doubt this is where their backend actually is. Single homed isn't a great idea in the first place and if HE pulls the plug they're lights out until they can get new peering arrangements in place - which usually isn't a quick process in the best of times.
I don't think they need more than a few IP addresses since most of their hardware could sit on a private network with only a single load balancer visible from the Internet. Also, a small ASN doesn't really need IPv6 compatibility to function, and won't for many years to come.
Since they're still using Cloudflare, it looks like multiple layers of defense. When Cloudflare eventually bans them, people will realize that it was only pointing to their own ASN and no one knows which datacenter it's in. The single peer with HE doesn't actually mean they're in an HE datacenter.
A single peer and a single IPv4 /24 (to me, at least) kind of tells the story of "Hey this might come in handy, costs a couple hundred dollars, and is just a couple of applications to fill out. Might as well." as opposed to something that's actually running in production.
While there is more autonomy with your own ASN and the resulting infrastructure there's also the obvious and required information leakage that comes as a result. Compared to being able to hide everything behind billions of essentially ephemeral addresses inside of a Cloudflare, AWS, etc at best (worst?) they've got a maximum of 256 easily discovered static IP addresses that Anonymous or any other DDoSer can readily point their bots at to obliterate.
I'm not familiar with DDoS mitigation equipment or products that HE has in place but I doubt they'd be able to as smoothly or economically absorb some of the large targeted attacks we've seen pointed at Google, AWS, Cloudflare, etc.
If Gab does decide to start multi-homing they would then need to coordinate DDoS mitigation across multiple providers and/or utilize some of the products from companies that specialize in layer 3+ DDoS scrubbing and clean return. This is all because anyone can just go grab all of their current IPs from the latest route announcement and bury them in anything from layer 3 to 7.
It gets very complicated and very expensive very quickly compared to how fast, cheap, and easy hiding your HTTPS stuff behind a CDN is. That's why everyone just does that.
If they're using their own ASN which transit providers they have and which datacenters they're in doesn't matter - all of their routes would be publicly announced and any reasonably competent attacker would configure their tool to pull the most recent route announcements from any number of looking glasses and update the bots. The internet will do what it does and happily route the legitimate and illegitimate traffic to any number of providers and datacenters worldwide.
At their (apparent) size and scale using their own IPs and their own ASN (both under their own corporate name) completely defeats the purpose of using a CDN, load balancer, DDoS mitigation service, etc and just doesn't make any sense.
To your point: on the modern Internet if you're banned from Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, and Azure (maybe a few others) even IF you can get hosted somehow/somewhere your next concern is going to be a DDoS. From what I know anyone large enough to handle a modern day DDoS probably won't do business with you either -or- will happily forward you a massive (six figures, easily) per-incident invoice and then probably give you the boot anyway.
I don't have any personal experience hosting controversial web properties but there are some HUGE technical, social, and political differences between The Pirate Bay and Gab, Parler, etc that the article fails to address.
EDIT: Above I describe receiving a per-attack invoice with DDoS mitigation companies. That's not actually how it works. I could get into it further but those costs are a rough ballpark.
They could be doing anycast, but that's pretty sophisticated. They could also only advertise the /24 from one DC at a time, but that's error prone. Or maybe advertise from both and forward to the live DC over a private link/VPN.
I do see in Octoberish, they were peering with a second network, and they have second network in their IRR records. Could just be so they can use one of the DDoS filter companies that advertises your netblock, and sends you clean traffic. Can't do that (easily) if you get IPs from your transit provider and it's not a service they support.
Epik runs a wide variety of hate filled content purveyors. Wouldn't be a horribly difficult thing to advertise their routes on BGP and black hole their asses.
I remember this happening by accident to Cox Cable.
And sadly Andrew Torba was kicked out of YC because of his politics (however YC tries to spin it).
Parler just didn’t care.
I figured it out. Pirate Bay figured it out. Any company that genuinely cares about eliminating SPOFs has figured it out.
Over this last week, I've talked to people who have un-ironically argued that companies should not be allowed to moderate content... even if that content is illegal!
It's like a whole section of the population is just learning for the first time that the internet is real life and it's not the wild-west it was in the 90s.
I don't think they would care if Facebook and Twitter were each 1/10 the size of what they are today -- they'd still be billionaires and the companies would still be mind-boggling huge. They only care that the companies are much larger than competitors.
>Dorsey underscored in his tweets a need for a new “open decentralized standard for social media”.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/13/trump-twi...
> Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.
Similar to how every mainstream comedian is persecuted and telling "unfiltered" jokes that they supposedly aren't allowed to anymore, and they'll totally get into trouble for it later.
All well known recent deplatforming cases were done on a flimsy grounds for off-platform activities. They are very hard to defend.
This is an intellectually dishonest take at best. I won't speculate on the other end of the spectrum.
I for one am disgusted at how servile about censorship readers of HN have been lately just because it was their percieved enemy who was being attacked, without understanding that this will be applied to $notenemy later. I've frequently complained about the state of "too many MBAs and not enough hackers" here but fuck the last few months really brought that out. Starting to wish I knew if there is a hn where the more anti-authoritarian types hung out.
What’s that?
sudo apt install postfix
Configure DMARC and SPF and you’re fine.
What does this even mean? Text has to be stored in some physical location, or set of locations.
Your comment is short sighted and shows a possibly too eager willingness to accept the media and big tech narrative at completely face value. What if you are wrong?
At one point saying “We shouldn’t own slaves”, or “the Indian has rights to the land they live on”, or “women should be allowed to vote”, or “no taxation without representation” were all insurrectionist comments.
How do you propose we only stop “the wrong” insurrections? We should probably ask you first.
Uh, I don't know what you think "insurrectionist" means, but those are definitely not what it means. Actually, one of those comments was actually the law of the land at the time, as adjudicated by the Supreme Court--it was merely a popular politician who said that the Supreme Court had no actual power to enforce its will against him and did it anyways.
In the interest of pedantry, it's worth pointing out that the anti-slavery comments weren't the ones made by the insurrectionists, and even in the states that seceded, the unwillingness of Northerners to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act was arguably the more pressing threat, since it is highly unlikely that the federal government would have been enable to effect mandatory abolition on unwilling states but removing any codes enforcing the return of runaway slaves would have been well within its remit. That said, there was one notable abolitionist who provides half the cases in US history of people tried for treason against an individual state.
If he wasn't cynically cashing in, then he's not a very deep thinker either.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/27/parlers-f...
They literally welcomed pro-saudi comment farms to their service as well:
“The nationalist movement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has made it known that big tech is censoring them at rates we have never experienced in the United States,” Parler wrote in a post on its own account on the site. “Let us welcome them as we all fight for our rights together.”
Reminder: Saudi crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, ordered the assassination of a US journalist not that long ago. So, in a sense, Parler is really the social network of choice for dictators and extremists.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-saudi-politics/un...
https://www.reuters.com/article/parler-funding-mercer/social...
That said I don't know much about these particular people.
AOC could be considered fairly 'far left' she's not exactly a radical.
To the OP's point, I think Parler was trying to legit be an alternative where they didn't have Jack Dorsey in charge, but I'm doubtful if they were actually looking for the holocaust denying crowd.
I suggest probably their comfort zone would have been 'Fox News'.
However, traditionally, the terms "far-right" and "far-left" have been reserved for people who believe violent government coup is a legitimate means to an end.
And lately, people have taken to calling more moderate conservatives "far-right" and "nazis" as a way to delegitimize their opinions, and make them sound beyond-the-pale.
Where I'm from, "far-left" and "far-right" means "people who think violence is a legitimate means to enact their ideology."
So that includes Nazis, the KKK, and communist revolutionaries. It does not include Rebecca Mercer or Breitbart.
Check out this data: [1]. Breitbart is only a smidge more conservative than Fox News, and Fox News is the #1 watched cable news channel in the country. That is called "mainstream." Presumably, the "far-right" would be "far" beyond the mainstream.
[1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2...
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
I don't want to have to think about the political beliefs of a CEO before deciding to use a service.
That just shows how dangerous the "if you're not against us, you're with us" mentality can be.
GoDaddy kicked off AR15.com with no reason at all, they were fine with the content... until the moment they weren’t.
The problem has always been a TOS that is selectively and interpretively enforced. It’s just popular this week.
> I don't want to have to think about the political beliefs of a CEO before deciding to use a service.
ffs no joke! I was embarrassed for what Expensify did, and if my company used that service we would have dropped them in a hot second. IDK why “we’ll stfu and do our job” isn’t the default anymore.
Are you saying that staying silent is the answer once you have people organizing to take down the government? How will your business operate once the government is down?
There has to have some limits somewhere. Yes we don't want everything to be political but obviously, there is a line somewhere, wouldn't you agree?
I think its possible to think of a world where dc simply goes on vacation and the rest of the country is just fine.
Let's dispatch with the second one first. Even if you bulldozed the entire city of DC and everyone who works there was permanently relocated to the North Pole by Santa Claus to make toys for little children forever, there would still be a government because there is a constitutional process for electing or hiring some other people to do it.
So what should platforms do about this? That's too narrow a question. It's what should society do about this? Step one, arrest the people breaking the law. Violence and calls for violence are illegal. At which point it's not clear that we even need a step two, because then the relevant people are in jail.
I know the US has the biggest prison population in the world, but you can't keep these people in prison for life. They will be released from jail at some point and start spreading their ideology again.
I hate to pull a godwin, but "let's throw the insurrectionists in jail and that's the end of that" hasn't worked out well historically. Let's just hope none of them writes a book while doing their time.
I think murdering a police officer is a capital offense. You don't get back out of jail after that one.
But even for the people committing less violence than that, and who in turn eventually get released, they only stay released if they stay non-violent. Otherwise they're right back to jail.
> I hate to pull a godwin, but "let's throw the insurrectionists in jail and that's the end of that" hasn't worked out well historically. Let's just hope none of them writes a book while doing their time.
So now we're abandoning even the premise of free speech?
If people are engaged in violence you put them in jail. If people are non-violently saying dumb things and you don't agree with them, you say your thing too.
I am of the opinion that we should prevent violent insurrection rather than waiting for it to happen and then responding with jail time.
> So now we're abandoning even the premise of free speech?
Where did I say that? I'm not saying we should prevent all book publishing, but you do understand what historical precedence I was referring to right?
> If people are engaged in violence you put them in jail. If people are non-violently saying dumb things and you don't agree with them, you say your thing too.
If the dumb thing they're saying is that all politicians are satan worshipers and pedophiles, then it doesn't matter what "thing" I have to say to them.
Responding with jail time is how you prevent it, through deterrence.
> I'm not saying we should prevent all book publishing, but you do understand what historical precedence I was referring to right?
Presumably the unconstitutional Son of Sam laws?
> If the dumb thing they're saying is that all politicians are satan worshipers and pedophiles, then it doesn't matter what "thing" I have to say to them.
I disagree. There are still things you can say and do to black pill the crazies.
Now, sometimes the only thing you can do to convince them is to do something, because just saying "no you're wrong" isn't much of an argument. Whereas, say, arresting and prosecuting everyone involved with Jeffrey Epstein would satisfy a lot more people that there isn't a vast international conspiracy of pedophile Satanist cannibals, as compared to the presumably truer situation in which a lot of powerful people were involved a major statutory rape and prostitution debacle and yet thus far have escaped prosecution.
I am not, I am referring to a historical example where a bunch of insurrectionists were thrown in jail and it was not an effective deterrent.
> Whereas, say, arresting and prosecuting everyone involved with Jeffrey Epstein would satisfy a lot more people
You really think that arresting and prosecuting Trump, among others, would satisfy the people who stormed the capitol to keep him in power?
Which is true but its also important to not jump the gun so people can give coherent arguments for/against currents events.
Take Amazon for example, there is significant internal pressure to run the company based on a specific set of (for lack of a better word) progressive values but at the same time there is also a big part of the company that is customer focused and puts themselves in their shoes to try and deliver results and the politics of the day is just noise to them. Who will win in a few years time ? Can't say and the future is still unwritten.
No, not no reason at all: "In response to content complaints on the ar15.com website, our team investigated and discovered content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence. As a result, we informed the site yesterday that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another registrar, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy told the Washington Examiner.
FWIW, ar15.com is hosted on AWS. GoDaddy was just the domain registrar. I gather ar15.com was temporarily removed from the GTLD name servers because they didn't move to a new registrar quickly enough.
I can only imagine how many of these emails per day Cloudflare's support team is deleting.
They planned poorly, that’s their fault.
1. Fire up servers in Russia.
2. Learn rsync.
3. Profit.
Facebook and Twitter couldn't exist on AWS, unless Amazon chooses to enforce their rules very selectively. There is a ton of hate speech on Facebook, which is not censored, moderated and which clearly violate all sort of rule. Much of it is due to the language of the users not necessarily being English, or another major language. However, regardless of the language, the content can still easily be in violation of an AWS terms of service (and often Facebooks own).
If Facebook had been an AWS, Azure or GCP customer, they would have been shutdown long ago... Well they wouldn't, because the rules wouldn't really apply to them. I honestly don't care about Parler, Amazon has every right to shut of their service, they decide what customers they want on their platform. What I do care about, is that terms of service, rules for allowed speech is applied fairly and equally.
How could you say TPB didn't consider censorship? What is a DMCA takedown if not censorship?
They didn't say that. They say in the first sentence that TPB had to consider censorship
Apple has tightened the rules around forums lately, I don't think they required moderation when Parler started.
The other thing is of course that Pirate Bay was started by hard core computer nerds, not business people.
It's still sloppy, but it's not on the same level.
If you have enemies on the Internet, having anything on one of the cloud providers that charge an arm and a leg for traffic seems like asking for a financial DDoS.
When you have media that is private, if the numbering is sequential, it is easy to figure out what you can't see vs what doesn't exist. Using random IDs means that someone looking from the outside cannot reliably figure out how much content is hosted and check for private data on that service.
A secondary issue is that having an auto-increment in your database is a recipe for having really slow HA options and you can't scale hard either because it's fundamentally hard to sync auto-increments between multiple nodes that don't leave gaps in the ID namespace or are really slow.
(FWIW, Facebook actually used auto-increment keys for a long long time for their users. I don't remember when they stopped, but before they did they went through a long period of manual ID range allocation.)
The site not being online may be embarrassing from a risk management standpoint, but the app being censored from Apple Store and Google Play Store prevents them from having a meaningful presence ever again anyway.
There have been called for regulating how Apple and Google protect their app stores after Parler was pulled, but I don't think that's the solution. The solution is getting them to integrate PWAs into their ecosystem. They don't want to, because it draws from their app store revenue.
You're incorrect.
How are you going to do that without regulation?
I mean, don't get me wrong, I get that there are issues with corporate monopoly control of communication. And there are some things that will only work well as an app, not as a web page. But... parler really isn't one of them? Oh no we have to go to a bookmark in a browser instead of having an app or even an icon on a homepage... seems like a weird complaint when they are also saying access to parler is so vitally important. What's the big deal? I mostly access facebook and twitter this way on my android phone already.
The problem doesn't just exist for dedicated Parler die-hards. The problem exists for Parler trying to become a compelling platform at all among everyone else. And that problem exists for all Parler users including all the would-be users and all people trying to develop a following on Parler.
> Oh no we have to go to a bookmark in a browser instead of having an app or even an icon on a homepage
Sure, not a problem for Parler die-hards. Massive shortcoming for everyone else. iOS users can't even receive notifications from a website. Parler's target audience isn't just the people willing to jump through hoops. If you're someone trying to create content on Parler, your target audience isn't just people willing to remember to check their mobile browser every once in a while when every other app (incl Twitter) gives them real notifications.
You're saying that these obstacles either don't matter or they're inconsequential as long as your product is good, and you're sorely mistaken. You don't want to be lacking a notification system as a fledgling social media platform. Just consider how every time someone receives a "X replied to you" notification and returns to the app, how that enriches the entire platform.
HN seems to have done fine without it :)
ps. please don't tell me that I am too dumb to find out how to turn them on.
The site actually getting shut down entirely is of course a lot more significant, I see much more of a point there. It's complaining about "oh no it's just so hard to access it via a web browser instead of an app" that seems ridiculous to me -- if you are organizing against the system -- and it's pretty clear to me that's what parler was doing; I am opposed to the politics they were doing it from, but not to organizing against the system -- you should expect and prepare for attempts to suppress. If "oh no we have to access in a web browser instead of an app" is all you get, you are doing great.
One word: Regulation. Easy to regulate Big Tech through laws. But incoming administration in US isn't going to take it seriously given that Big Tech did exactly what they wanted.
But they can be easily tamed if other countries do it. If European Union, UK and India regulate Big Tech their dominance is over. They don't have any presence in China anyways. US is no longer that hot a market for online and ecommerce (even though monetarily US dominates as of now but that won't be the case the next decade).
You are making the extraordinary claim, so you are the one that needs to provide evidence.
No browser vendor has blocked any sites in the way you are describing. Not Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE. At best, you'll get a warning when you are about to hit a malware site, but that's about it. You can click right past it.
So no, what you are saying is ridiculous, and you should really feel uniformed and silly for suggesting it was likely.
Chrome and Safari both use Google's "Safe Browsing Database" which outright blocks phishing scam sites. How long until this is expanded to "hate sites" because they "aren't safe"?
Right, like OnlyFans has no meaningful presence
This doesn't work out the same for social media. Doubly so because a social media platform benefits from integrations like notifications which are missing from iOS Safari.
Web companies should build on "Linux" only, as their base platform, so they own everything above that. I was a fan of Parler but building on AWS was a huge mistake, and they should have realized they were "owned" from day one.
And to any other CEO/CTO making the same mistake: "Beware, you do not have control over your company."
I mean there's tons of technology stacks to choose from, but people get lazy and take the easy way out rather than learning to scale servers themselves.
Get on Linode. It's base on Linux instances. If you build on Linux you are "free" and not "owned"
A proper database.
:)
AWS won’t tell you about those things because they sell you security, so you remain a dumbass about those things indefinitely.
It's not that hard.
In my experience most developers just inherit the infrastructure and even the base project from someone else. They've never stood up a server or configure anything from scratch so they have no idea what they're doing.
tl/dr: building on AWS and building on Linux are not mutually exclusive. One represents hardware the other software.
When I say don't use "AWS" I should've been more clear I'm talking about their proprietary stuff. Basically you should be able to run on a plain Linux as your base.
This means that they can only be run on that provider.
They can be faster to develop, at the risk of not being able to move later.
Getting S3 reliability or availablity is lot harder ofcourse, but most apps don't need that.
But not only is that very hard to do, it basically negates the premise of AWS in general. There are also lots of areas that you can’t do this, such as IAM and network rules, so you have to build an abstraction on top of it that’ll work with open source tools on a separate host.
The rest of it? I think I understand why some systems need/want it, but no thanks.
At the scale $EMPLOYER works at, AWS built in services are key. Things like DynamoDB global tables are extremely hard to run on your own, and things similar to AuroraDB and Kinesis can be run on your own but they take up a lot of personnel hours better spent focusing on product. We could probably eliminate those services and self-run, but it would be an extremely unwise usage of company time and money.
But we also run services in multiple continents with the need to handle clients doing silly things like getting into airplanes and flying into another continent. Your situation might not benefit as much from AWS specific services, so YMMV.
Unless $EMPLOYER was Parler ...
...dated April 1.
And I am not being judgemental, because this approach is working 95 times of 100, and most of startups are dying anyway before they hit the wall of vendor lock.
Either way, I think it's for the best that they are technically inept.
I imagine Parler to be something that was iteratively worked on, where their most recent challenge has been in scaling their service. I also suspect that they have been working towards returning their initial investment - it was likely accepted that Parler might just be temporary anyway.
Regarding the security, it is appalling. Generally the website feels like they have one good dev working in the background - it doesn't feel like an entire team working on this 24/7. It certainly doesn't feel like there is some review process. Hopefully they fix the security before bringing it back online.
What seems crazy to me is that Parler have not been able to setup at least one server to provide a static page to explain why they are offline and what the next steps are (from their perspective). At least parler.com points to 127.0.0.1 I guess.
This implies that he was unsuccessful. As we all know, he was not
They are not used to be thrown out on the street.
And then we had a historical incident of political violence perpetrated by the same demographic. Move fast and break things indeed.
But "staying online" isn't the Parler goal. Matze wanted to run an internet giant, not keep a seedy right wing reactionary forum alive. I mean, 4chan and 8kun already fill that market.
He's just going to pack it up, keep his head down, and try not to get sued (or charged).
Anyone familiar with 4chan knows that some of the earliest content that was banned on the platform include childporn and organizing raids/doxxing. If you read the terms of service, you'll see that content is still banned (even if not uniformly enforced).
The fact that parler couldn't muster even 4chan levels of moderation shows you that they really had no comprehension of the content creators they would be courting with their service.
You can read the comments on any given CNN article, and see racist statements. Should CNN reporters be barred from attending press conferences?
See court filings - https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...
Or for specific sections, see https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/134916216569825280...
Why not? It's not like Valve owns the computers of their customers. They're in clear violation of the Windows terms of service. If you violate the ToS, then Microsoft has every right to remove you from their operating system and Valve is in turn free to migrate to a different OS.
So, it's not "factually false". At best, it's up for a court of law to decide who is telling the truth.
But considering that it's trivial to show messages from Lin Wood, among others at the capital protests messages on parler calling for "appeals to violence" exactly in contradiction to your suggestion that there isn't... Well your argument doesn't appear supported by the facts.
Lin Wood, the president's election lawyer[1] LITERALLY called for VP Pence to be executed the week before the riot. This was shared everywhere on the internet, was shared right there on Parler like tens of thousands of times, and AFAIK was still up and unmoderated when the site was shut down.
Parler's moderation was a community-run thing. Effectively, popular users could say anything they liked.
There was no meaningful moderation at all.
[1] Or whatever. The relationships were totally muddled, but nonetheless this guy was a big thought leader among the Kraken set.
The growth hack was to be funded by the Mercer family (Cambridge Analytica, Brexit) to the tune of a few million a year to help promote their agenda.
You can read about the Mercers winding up Cambridge Analytica, which they funded: https://apnews.com/article/64280ae1f30c44eb8b82049f6875dddd
Likewise their involvement with Brietbart: https://www.dw.com/en/who-are-the-mercers-the-wealthy-backer...
As far as the "millions" figure, that's come out of claims that their AWS bill was in the region of $300k per month.
„German Smuggler thinks minorities‘s inability to escape discrimination is embarrassing“
>“Of course we wouldn't,” Kolmisoppi said. “We're pro human rights, which includes the right to not be killed by extreme right wing terrorists.”
Why do I see this embarrassing justification so often? It doesn't make sense to equate speech with violence.
It is well documented that ISIS recruited people through Facebook and Twitter, and even YouTube.
Remember: before the terrorists get those encrypted apps, they need to be radicalized first. That step is done on public social networks, where network effects help spread their message to a receptive audience.