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Comment by radicalriddler | Hacker News Reader

I wonder who they're hosting with now? Interesting that it wasn't reported. I'd assume the hosting company would want to shout it out that they "support free speech" or something like that.

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Epik. But I wouldn't necessarily count on them to stay there. Epik hosts thedonald.win, and recently told that site it needs to get its content under control or it will be kicked off [1], so there are limits to what Epik is willing to host.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808529

> Epik.

It looks like Parler transferred their domain name to Epik (as a registrar), but are not currently using them for hosting.

As recently as a few days ago, Epik explicitly stated that they have no plans to host Parler (https://mynorthwest.com/2461882/sammamish-epik-parler/). That said, since the site is behind "ddos-guard.net," it's difficult to tell who their actual host is.

Little bit of history on DDoS-Guard:

- https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/ddos-guard/ (VanwaTech relationship) - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/15/8kun-8cha... (End of VanwaTech relationship)

Quick check... yeah, doesn't look like 8kun is using DDoS-Guard any more.

I saw a couple articles or so that said Epik was hosting it, but it is possible that those authors just saw that Epik was the registrar and confused that with being the host.

Based on what I saw on Parler during an admittedly limited review of it, I don’t think they have to worry very much, if actual content is the issue that got them killed in the first place. I didn’t see much of the “scary” content that some people claim was on there. There were more links to positive news about Trump and conservatives in general than you would find on a site like Twitter, but I would certainly hope that isn’t the kind of thing that will get you destroyed overnight by the world’s largest companies, even in the current anti-conservative environment. I have seen far worse things on Reddit, from both sides of the aisle - and last time I checked, Reddit was still online.

It appears to me that these companies colluded to kill Parler not because of widespread horrible content (because it simply wasn’t there), but rather because they wanted to strangle any chance of Trump being able to communicate on any form of social media until after Biden takes office. As an added “bonus,” they probably also prevented millions of people from jumping ship from Twitter to Parler, because after this week far fewer people will even care about the situation.

I had a {troll} account on there - so I was there everyday. I disagree with your assessment and certainly saw posts calling for violence with essentially every comment on the post supporting it.

When you first signup you get connected for a few big names like Hannity, and the content is like what you'd see on Fox News (or really, News Max to be honest). Once you get past that layer it quickly spirals.

Regarding reddit...they did take down /r/The_Donald (and prob others, don't know off the top of my head)

If you go into the darkest corners of any of these platforms, including Facebook, you’ll see objectionable content from extremists. But when I went on there, I just poked around, as an average user would. As you point out, there was a fair amount of news and commentary from well-known conservative networks and personalities. While the general rule holds true - if you go looking for trouble, you’ll find it - most people wouldn’t go searching to connect with extremists and wouldn’t find the “quickly spiraling” content you describe. I’m sure it was there, as it is on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook (in much larger numbers). But I would argue that they were no worse than the others.

...disagree. If you click on the comments on the well known conservative personalities that Parler sends you by default as an "average user', it's all right there. There's no need to search.

How much call for violence do you see in the comment section on reddit's default frontpage as an "average user"?

There are plenty of calls to violence even on the front pages. But those calls to violence are always against "bad people", so it's like "good hatred".

FWIW you can get a feel for the content right now - I can only assume Parker’s content is on par with thedonald.win, which is still up. Right now there is few literal calls to violence, but racism, conspiracy theories, and extremist views are the majority of the content.

Prior to the deplatforming that content likely was.. more violent.

I can only assume Parker’s content is on par with thedonald.win

I have never frequented either of them, and don't really have any desire to. I basically checked out Parler because CNN told me not to. But relative to Twitter and Reddit, it seemed pretty tame to me.

According to one analysis[1], it's anything but tame. The word cloud[2] kind of says it all.

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/politics/a-very-disturbin...

[2] https://imageproxy.themaven.net/https%3A%2F%2Fimages.saymedi...

They have a problem with thedonald but host thedailystormer and bitchute? lol

What company provides connectivity to Epik?

It looks like the website is proxied via a DDoS protection company called DDOS-GUARD https://gwhois.org/190.115.31.151

It looks like the website is being served from an Ubuntu server running nginx/1.18.0 https://parler.com/404

Possibly the same outfit that hosts Gab: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ad7dp/parler-finds-refuge-w...

I thought Gab was hosted on its own infrastructure, but used epik as its registrar.

I think Torba was gloating about it as one point.

Yes, Epik is just the registrar for Gab. They use Cloudflare as a DDoS/frontend, and have their own ASN, which is supposedly where everything is really hosted (https://bgp.he.net/AS42651).

The nameservers point to Epik, so at least the DNS is run by them. The actual host is behind ddos-guard, so they may/may not be hosting the data with them or another provider.

As Epik seems to focus on shared hosting, and LAMP stack style applications and parler was using a proprietary DB in the last offering, they might reasonably have the actual hosting somewhere else.

Edit: Typo

A proprietary DB? Do you know which one? I saw a tweet that I thought said they were using Postgres. Just curious.

Scylla Enterprise [0] [1], which is a Cassandra-compatible NoSQL database, though I think that they were probably using the DynamoDB API shim to talk to it. The non-enterprise version is open source, but fewer features.

[0] https://www.scylladb.com/product/scylla-enterprise/

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/1/14/it-could-be-neve...

A DNS record lookup points to ddos-guard.net which provides both hosting and DDOS protection (like cloudflare) and is based in the Netherlands.

I don't think they care much about Parler or free speech for that matter. They might not care much beyond the likely big hosting bill they are being paid. Free market at work, nothing to see here.

Looks like Russia to me (Rostov-on-Don). Where are you seeing the Netherlands?

344019, г. Ростов-на-Дону, ул. Максима Горького, д. 276, этаж 5, офис 11.

from https://ddos-guard.net/ru/info/contacts

ARIN Reverse Whois ties the IP block to LACNIC, out of ... *edit not Belize, when I checked Montevideo Uruguay

They're hosted by DDOS-GUARD CORP in Belize: https://www.nslookup.io/dns-records/parler.com

A company owned by two Russian “businessmen.”

Well, if hosting Snowden makes the Russkis righteous, then hosting Parler must be fine, too. It seems that Americans who speak against narratives find friends there? Ironic, to say the very least.

If Snowden is to be believed --and I personally think he is-- he was transiting through Russia to South America after fleeing Hong Kong and we all remember the forced landing of the official plane of the President of Bolivia. That seems very different than the coziness of certain Americans and what appear to be members of the Putin regime.

Just pointing out that snowden's passport was cancelled on 20130622 and that he flew out of hk on 20130623. It's not an unreasonable speculation that he planned to wind up in Russia, putting on a convincing show in the process.

A better hypothesis would be that Russia was one of the only countries that would accept an arrival with a cancelled passport (and could provide a reasonable degree of protection against rendition by US agents).

I don't believe it is possible to fly from HK to South America without passing through the US or New Zealand, whereas Snowden probably could have travelled from Russia to Cuba if Putin didn't find it politically advantageous to keep him as a trophy.

Yes, your hypothesis is a better fit, and makes fewer assumptions. Perhaps the arrangements with Russia were made hurriedly while Snowden was hiding in HK, days prior to departing, as some reports suggest.

However, Snowden had been stealing classified intel premeditatively for a long period of time, and had contact with actors who had the knowledge and contacts to plan such a ruse in advance. Given his high intelligence and exacting personality, haphazardly leaking to the press from HK prior to obtaining asylum seems to be out of character.

I do believe strongly that Snowden would have told elaborate, pre-fabricated lies, if it were to his benefit.

> haphazardly leaking to the press from HK prior to obtaining asylum seems to be out of character.

His original plan, supposedly[1], was to remain in HK and fight extradition to the US. It wouldn't have taken the US government long to notice he was missing from his job and had travelled to Hong Kong without approval, so it was not particularly haphazard for him to start sharing his story openly as soon as he was in HK.

> had contact with actors who had the knowledge and contacts to plan such a ruse in advance.

It's not clear how the deal with Russia was brokered, but it's possible that the Beijing government didn't want to sour relations with the US by letting him stay in HK, as reported by the New York Times[2]:

> “Behind the door there was definitely some coordination between Hong Kong and Beijing,” said Jin Canrong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.

That also makes sense of the ridiculous story about HK rejecting the US arrest warrant request due to the US getting Snowden's name wrong.[3]

Having to arrange travel, on short notice, from HK to a country that could preserve Snowden's safety from US capture, and meet with approval from Beijing, would severely limit his options, even if there were no other concerns, and it is possible that assurances were given to Snowden about the possibility of onward travel, which were later broken. It would certainly have been unwise for Snowden to publicly call out that he had been tricked and betrayed by Putin. Instead, he claims that the US cancelled his passport to deliberately trap him in Moscow, so they could portray him as a Russian spy[4], which also seems to match what we know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Hong_Kong

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/world/asia/china-said-to-...

[3] https://www.news.com.au/technology/hong-kong-says-us-documen...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Russia

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