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jrochkind1
neuronexmachina
Someone put together an animated heatmap of Parler photo locations along the Mall throughout the day of 1/6: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/kvx88n/oc_...
henrikschroder
Even better, here are the videos along with their locations:
iso1631
That's hilarious. Some trumpian complaining about furniture in offices while people are homeless on the streets
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"
no-s
>>Someone put together an animated heatmap of Parler photo locations along the Mall throughout the day of 1/6
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...
feralimal
That graphic is interesting to me, as it illustrates what the view is like at the 3-letter-agencies control centers, who have been slurping up our data for years.
blaser-waffle
Debatable; this is low hanging fruit.
Turn off or strip EXIF data -- most sites do anyway -- and this wouldn't happen.
stouset
What I find astonishing is that—at least according to that heat map—it appears that bordering on 100% of the people using Parler in DC that day we’re part of the riot / coup / insurrection.
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.
GuB-42
> What I find astonishing is that—at least according to that heat map—it appears that bordering on 100% of the people using Parler in DC that day we’re part of the riot / coup / insurrection.
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.
AnthonyMouse
> at least according to that heat map—it appears that bordering on 100% of the people using Parler in DC that day we’re part of the riot / coup / insurrection.
Are you sure it's not just a heat map of only those videos?
Fnoord
OPSEC 101: blend in, don't look suspicious. By banning these communities from the regular media (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, ...), they need to gather via "anything goes" path where 'freedom of speech' protects their hate speech, such as bulletproof hosting. Which is expensive, and of which all traffic to/from is suspicious by default. Its essentially akin to Bitcoin mixing, or avoiding Monero.
gabereiser
This was exactly my take away from the heat map. If that's all the GPS coords from video taken on Parler that day than it looks to be exclusively used by those supporting/participating/sharing the riot on the US Capital.
collinmanderson
Some people stayed just outside of the capital and didn't necessarily do anything wrong.
cozzyd
I mean, look how DC voted in the last election.
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raverbashing
Looks like this aged poorly https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293
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xupybd
Wow this is a powerful way to word it.
"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."
BrandonMarc
Indeed. Greenwald helped Snowden; he has the chops to see what's going on. To wit, his subsequent tweet:
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.
philshem
They were downloading at 50 Gbps for a while
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
alborzb
Just a note here, it wasn't Twilio.
It was a free trial of Okta that they were using for their entire userbase.
https://twitter.com/okta/status/1348191370528256002?ref_src=...
chefkoch
How cheap can you be to run your whole site on a trial and fail open if it doesn't work anymore?
secondcoming
She is probably liable for that data egress bill.
Also, how does some randomer have ten of terabytes of disk lying around?
ClumsyPilot
Have you ever been to r/Datahoarder or r/Homelab?
10TB fits on one desktop drive, it's completely pedestrian
gerikson
Wasn't this an ArchiveTeam Warrior project?
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?
DanBC
> some randomer
They're not a randomer, they're a person interested in data dumps.
blaser-waffle
I'm not a huge data fiend but I've got maybe ~3-4 2TB drives in my house: a Synology NAS + a spare drive.
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.
asiando
Given the speed I’m guessing it was towards S3 so there’s plenty of terabytes.
Nextgrid
Maybe the data compresses well and/or a lot of it is redundant (so instead of storing it raw you store it in a database and use relationships to link related pieces of data)?
joshxyz
Jesus fucking christ i thought it's just some users table but 56.7 terabytes you mofos that's some s3 egress bill!
qiqitori
I kind of doubt I'd pay my AWS bill if AWS banned me.
nindalf
I think they’ll avoid paying whatever Amazon charges. And I don’t think Amazon will pursue it either. “How about you just let this lawsuit go and we’ll forget about that massive bill you have to pay?”
scaryclam
Considering Amazon built a replacement for mongodb to essentially give them the finger, I'd say it could go either way. If AWS feels like it's worth setting a precident, they may well fight tooth and nail to make them payup.
aljarry
90$ per TB
minot
Is there still no easy straightforward way in $current_year to put an absolute spend cap of say USD 0, USD 5, or USD 10 per month on Amazon.com web services or Google Cloud Platform?
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?
a012
This is the proof to why I strip all metadata AND filename (esp. photos from camera include timestamp in filename) before uploading it to share one social medias.
enriquto
Camera vendors are perfectly capable of storing a lot of metadata in the jpeg encoded image itself, in an steganographic way. If you want to really be sure, crop your image to a position that is not multiple of 8 on any direction, then scale it by a factor very close to 1, add some noise, and re-compress it again. Some steganography is yet robust to that, but only the really fancy stuff.
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.
prionassembly
Use image pool to train a GAN, publish the GAN images instead of the real ones.
Ntrails
> 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
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imtringued
The problem with that idea is that there would have to be a stenography standard and then it becomes easy to defeat.
blntechie
iOS now have an option to do this natively. But I find it bit convoluted. My go to app for stripping out metadata from photos is Exif Viewer.
Fnoord
My camera apps never include GPS coordinates to begin with (which is enough stripping for me, but then again I'm not part of Qanon and all that).
MivLives
I'm curious where someone just gets 56.7 tb of storage that quickly.
bawolff
Im more curious how someone pulls down 56 terabytes in a very short period of time without sysadmins at parler noticing. I'm surprised they didn't unintentionally DoS them.
foepys
Parler used AWS and AWS is always happy to serve any request without problems and notify you about it hours later if you decided to create usage alerts.
undefined
j2bax
I believe the person that pulled it down is a digital archivist. I’m sure she has plenty of storage laying around for such occasions.
polar
> laying around
ITYM lying around, unless this is a quirk of US English. Sorry to be pedantic!
adwww
Presumably just another s3 bucket?
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.
ikiris
You can get that in 5 drives from best buy these days. Not exactly a huge leap for cloud storage.
jamesponddotco
I got two 90 TB servers that I pay a small amount of peanuts per month at Hetzner to server as backup servers. As long as you stay away from the cloud, storage is dirty cheap.
ckdarby
AWS.
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.
azeirah
Modern hdd's store up to 18tb.
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
mickotron
Crowdsourced. The crawling and downloading was able to be coordinated and performed by a bunch of people at the same time.
flukus
All the content was hosted on s3 and you just needed the URL's, security by obscurity.
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ardy42
> The Hacker Who Archived Parler Explains How She Did It (and What Comes Next)
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.
rendall
> "I'm fine with all this stuff getting taken down"
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?
frollo
> what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with?
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.
pelliphant
In my opinion the internet was already seriously flawed.
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.
watwut
> what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with
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.
sellyme
> what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with?
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.
ardy42
>> "I'm fine with all this stuff getting taken down"
> 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.
kennywinker
The only principal that protects that kind of group is that we agree with it. It’s not much, but it’s something.
mschuster91
> but what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with?
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.
2Gkashmiri
What exactly is the feed Amazon was getting from Parker from that much stuff? Like it needed just as much bandwidth if not more and dedicated boxes for software to run on. It wasnt cheap, or was it?
jon-wood
I don't have a good source on this, but I saw $300,000/month bandied about social media the other week.
blacklight
I personally don't find their ability to remain online that surprising.
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.
johnmaguire
> 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.
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.
HeadsUpHigh
>This seems to imply that nations which have copyright law are imposing authoritarian censorship on their citizens.
This is exactly the point of most anti-copyright parties.
johnmaguire2013
I see no contradiction.
koffiezet
> The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks were built by people with a passion for building
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.
citizenpaul
disconnected interpretation of "free speech"
Oh yeah whats that comrad?
LadyCailin
That saying “hey, let’s violently overthrow the government” isn’t a class of protected speech.
hodgesrm
> 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.
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.
blacklight
As a dev I feel that building a platform to share conspiracy-fueled hate is way more immoral and damaging than building a platform to host porn content. At least porn doesn't harm anybody - except maybe your hand :)
bootlooped
Did you read the recent NY Times pieces on PornHub?
The Children of Pornhub https://nyti.ms/33DMObR
An Uplifting Update, on the Terrible World of Pornhub https://nyti.ms/2W1aB1b
watwut
> 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
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.
jmcqk6
There is definitely a correlation between lazy thinking and believing in conspiracy theories. Mainly because conspiracy theories do not lend themselves to rigorous inquiry, almost by definition.
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.
DaedPsyker
I'd be interested on information on that and how it was performed. Ive found that many of successful people who talk about conspiracies tend to be self serving. Like that Texas lawyer that brought a case of election fraud, likely to catch attention of Trump to pardon him due to his own legal problems. Others as a scaremongering technique to influence politics.
The only ones that seem to believe in them are those clearly unhinged (McAfee comes straight to mind although his seems self serving too).
blacklight
A study recently published on Scientific American seems to prove that left-leaning people tend to have more gray matter in the pre-frontal cortex (i.e. the area of the brain involved in complex planning, understanding of new things and pattern detection), wwhile right-leaning people tend to have more gray matter in the amygdala (the area of the brain responsible for spotting potential danger and refuse something new if it may pose a risk to survival): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-....
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.)
Psype
There is no political profile for CS engineers.
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...
pelagicAustral
top kek
formalsystems
I got the sense while crawling data from their API that the engineering quality is poor at Parler. Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps, certain fields were duplicated for no reason (e.g. every object would have an identical "id" and "_id" key), counts of impressions/comments/etc would be the display strings rather than raw numbers (so "2k" or "5m"), and various moderation flags were in place like a boolean "sensitive" which was always false, even for posts that had been downvoted significantly.
userbinator
Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps
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.
CoolGuySteve
If they're using a javascript 53bit int representation for the seconds (or an int64_t cast down to a javascript big int) then it's a Y142711K problem, by which point the Imperium of Mankind will hopefully have settled on a more robust format.
wmil
The tech-priests will have lost the ability to fix it.
freeone3000
That's how we ended up with the 2038 problem!
toyg
I expect Slaanesh and friends will manage to sabotage that somehow.
Quarrelsome
You can also instantly read them which makes troubleshooting easier. I mean sure, if your shit is too slow maybe switch to less text in release mode but YAGNI.
3np
Well, assuming they're storing the strings as ASCII, that's 98 bits - the y2k38 problem is for 32 bit integers, so a 64 bit integer would be way, way more than needed for human needs for foreseeable generations.
swerwath
Doesn't seem to me like Parler will have to worry about Y2K38...
throwawayboise
A timestamp is a timestamp. It isn't a date. If you need a date, use a proper date/time data type.
gerikson
All timestamps have to start somewhere. If you want to avoid DST changes and leap seconds, you can use MJD, TAI or GPS time instead of UTC, but you might as well format it nicely so that you can see roughly at what (civil) date something happened.
mixmastamyk
ISO 8601 is a good one.
formalsystems
Nice that makes sense. I was unaware and found it strange when I plugged it into JavaScript's Date constructor and got an "Invalid Date" error.
BrandonMarc
This.
Plus, it's unambiguously human readable, for users, bystanders, platform developers, everyone. There's a useful usability principle in there.
paranoidrobot
Of all the things to criticise Parler's tech folks over, using ISO8601 (minus the non-digit characters) shouldn't be one.
CameronNemo
Is ISO8601 without punctuation still ISO8601? Most log parsers I have seen would not pick up the Parker format. ex gr
https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.dat...
https://github.com/elastic/logstash/blob/v1.4.2/patterns/gro...
Earwig
Yes... kind of. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601, there is a "basic format" without separators and an "extended format" that includes them for readability. However, a T is still required to separate the date and time in the most recent version of the standard.
jhanschoo
IDK the issue OP saw with using ISO over UNIX timestamps, but one reason why you might want accuracy down to the second for dates is with providing accurate relative time/date across timezones.
uxp100
I think the display strings thing is because exact number of impressions etc is slightly sensitive information. The whole site was "gamed" from the start, but providing exact vote counts makes it easier for other people to game. I guess. Don't really know, but I do believe that the numbers given by reddit, for example, are exact, but fake. Fuzzed a bit. HN also hides some of this, or behaves misleadingly, your downvotes don't always count, I think.
formalsystems
They would display numbers less than 1000 as-is, and only start adding the "k" and "m" prefix after the 4-digit and 7-digit threshold was crossed.
bkilrain
But how could they maintain an accurate count? Maybe they were just persisting the user-friendly format alongside the actual count...
undefined
kevindurb
If I remember correctly mongo stores the id in “_id” and has a getter for “id” so maybe they just iterated all the keys of the model when they stringified their output
kijin
Elasticsearch, too. In either case, it looks like they're just piping raw backend responses to the API endpoint without removing unnecessary fields.
developer2
Yep, that's an indication of Elasticsearch being used (and not transforming documents to a standard representation that strips such fields).
johnrob
One big advantage of using string representations of dates is avoiding misunderstood timezone calculations that may or may not occur at various layers of the backend stack. The downside of course is storage space.
latch
I think most JSON libraries encode dates in something that's closer to what Parler is doing than when you think is correct (e.g, using ISO 8601 or something)
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.
alphabet9000
"We don't condone gun violence. We believe that the world needs less guns, not more of them. We believe however that these prints will stay on the internets regardless of blocks and censorship, since that's how the internets works. If there's a lunatic out there who wants to print guns to kill people, he or she will do it. With or without TPB. Better to have these prints out in the open internets (TPB) and up for peer review (the comment threads), than semi hidden in the darker parts of the internet."
-The Pirate Bay
https://thepiratebay10.org/torrent/28522986/Liberator_-_Firs...
Meekro
Seems reasonable to me! If your reason for existing is that "information wants to be free" but then you start making exceptions when it conflicts with your politics, people might think your real political philosophy is "pop music wants to be free."
singron
TPB never supported absolute free speech. I can't find it now, but they used to have a section of their site where they posted responses to media company lawyers, and they basically said they wouldn't take down anything except child porn. I'm not sure if the rules have changed in the years since.
userbinator
CP is one of the very few things where mere possession is illegal. It makes sense that TPB, which is mainly against copyright and IP, would not allow it.
jakelazaroff
Or, more charitably: your stance on information and freedom simply isn’t absolutist.
mc32
Or more accurately is they agree on the idea of censorship. That censorship has value to them.
stevesarmpit
Free Speech isn't a thing that applies to Internet companies, only the government and how they must deal with people who wish to speak in public forums.
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.
INTPenis
FYI thepiratebay.org works too. They point to different IPs though. Are different people hosting the same synced software now? I haven't been following developments.
Rebelgecko
I'm surprised TPB hasn't been hit with the same legal problems as codeisfreespeech.com, DefDist, etc
undefined
dionian
good for them. civil rights must be defended
asdff
I wonder if that torrent is a honeypot
Meekro
In contrast, Gab actually owns their own ASN and announces their own routes[1]. Much harder to deplatform. I'd expect no less from a YC alum!
kkielhofner
They're only advertising to one peer. It's possible they have other peering arrangements in place they're not advertising to. Or maybe they're single homed. They also only have a single IPv4 /24 from ARIN. No IPv6. Not terribly robust or impressive.
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.
Meekro
You're right that the single peer is a concern. Maybe they have others that are hidden for now, like you said?
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.
toast0
Ideally, for redundancy, you'd run in more than one datacenter. That's hard to do with only one /24; most networks won't take BGP advertisements more specific than /24, so you can't easily run half your ips at each DC. Maybe HE allows it for transit customers, but it makes the routing messier.
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.
kkielhofner
Disclaimer: I haven't worked with IP transit in five years so this could very well be dated.
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.
weare138
I know Gab uses this domain registrar and hosting company called Epik but no clue how exactly how much of Gab's infra is handled by Epik.
outoftheabyss
I set up an account this evening and it’s unusable due to loading times. They’ve added 1.7m in 4 days which may explain it. Be interesting to see how long it takes them to scale
um_ya
I've been impressed by Gab
outoftheabyss
What puts me off Gab and Parler is that the vast majority are those alienated or banned from other platforms for the same reason, for the most part they all think the same way and the topic of conversation is almost exclusively political. Gab has some interesting groups which slightly mitigates this.
trianglem
Why? Seems like the level of discussion is not all that far away from the level on Parler.
gadders
They had to do that because they got kicked off of everywhere else.
And sadly Andrew Torba was kicked out of YC because of his politics (however YC tries to spin it).
stevesarmpit
No big deal to run your own ASN, especially when your provider only has two companies advertising upstream. Both of those companies are providing Epik their network.
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.
thinkaboutits
The powers that be are now trying to “deplatform” Gab through their landlord... Crazy.
At least in the Soviet Union, or in China today, people were less hypocritical about censorship.
It’s my core political belief: you can believe in anything, but own that belief. Don’t use weasel arguments like “but it’s not censorship because it’s not the government”.
trianglem
But sad to think that YC spawned someone like him as well.
bobsmooth
Parler decided not to buy their own hardware and rent their own rack space. Plenty of other unpopular websites have figured it out.
CryptoGhost
You don't even need to do that. The actual key to running an extremist / subversive / hate / unpopular website is NOT connecting the site to any in-person activities. As long as your website is just some text floating out there in the network there is a lot of wiggle room. Sure, companies like Google or WordPress will ban you if they don't like you, but you can still get service from Cloudflare, major web hosts, or domain registration without jumping through a bunch of hoops.
idrios
Tbf, I don't think Parler ever saw itself as extremist. Obviously it was used by extremists, but as I've seen mentioned in other threads lately: When you create an alternative platform from the mainstream, the people who join it are either idealists, or are the people who were banned from the mainstream platforms. And if you don't have the resources to moderate those extremists (or foolishly choose not to), the extremists take over.
koyote
I do not know if it was the original intention of the founders, but you can't ignore that the people who are/were funding it are influential far-right figures.
ggggtez
The CEO literally was personally banning anyone who posted anything left-wing, and yet claims that he's for "free speech". It's laughable.
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...
_peeley
"The moral of the story is: 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. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0]
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
ashtonkem
Or pick a host that that doesn’t care. They exist both in America and abroad. If Gab and 8kun can stay up, so can Parler.
They planned poorly, that’s their fault.
p1mrx
> As long as your website is just some text floating out there in the network there is a lot of wiggle room.
What does this even mean? Text has to be stored in some physical location, or set of locations.
rconti
I think what parent meant was not to say "arrive at this location at this time and do this criminal thing", but I could be reading it wrong.
markdown
I read it as, if it's just text and all anon, there's always wiggle room. Once you start allowing video and photo uploads, and real names, then your liability increases exponentially.
mikeshank
I think he's referencing Flash
um_ya
I appreciate businesses like Cloudflare that stay neutral and just provide their service.
I don't want to have to think about the political beliefs of a CEO before deciding to use a service.
grahamburger
Not expressing an opinion on this either way, but I wouldn't say they're completely neutral: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Meekro
Cloudflare has been quite neutral for now, but there are communities of people who daily devote themselves to harassing everyone from Cloudflare's support team to the mayor of Sammamish, WA (where Epik, one of Gab's webhosts, is headquartered) to try to get Gab deplatformed[1].
I can only imagine how many of these emails per day Cloudflare's support team is deleting.
SV_BubbleTime
This entire comment thread can be asterisked with “for now”.
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.
thinkaboutits
Cloudflare maybe (although they did ban a few websites for wrongthink in the past) but domains can be cancelled more easily and even censored by governments (requiring ISPs to do DNS blacklists; that’s how France censors various websites).
throwbacktictac
This sounds like double speak. Can you elaborate?
germinalphrase
Anyone can say whatever they want on the Internet, but if your violence words become violent deeds you’re at risk of being dropped. So - don’t be violent.
cstejerean
I think basically don’t use your platform to plan an insurrection and you should be fine. As soon as you start being used as the platform where violence is being organized all bets are off.
CryptoGhost
You must decouple in person interactions from site content. So you can have a site filled with philosophy, historical analysis, generalized activism tips, technical information, etc but not a site that directly facilitates in person meetups or calls to action or plans real world activities.
bpodgursky
My guess is they won't struggle too much to get the site itself back online (they at least claim it was "bare metal", so charitably just containers), but replacing the email service providers and other authentication / SaaSy bits will be a challenge.
tjpnz
I'm curious about how they'll handle SMS. I once worked for a place that self hosted a message gateway by co-locating a bunch of cellphones alongside their servers. It worked but probably wouldn't scale for their purposes. Our setup also assumed that customers were in the same country as the servers.
coolspot
Email service providers?
What’s that?
sudo apt install postfix
Configure DMARC and SPF and you’re fine.
bpodgursky
Yes, it's as easy as those two commands, unless you want people to actually receive your emails.
SteveNuts
There are ToS at Colo facilities also, renting rack space isn't foolproof either.
mike_d
For a few thousand dollars a month I operate my own servers in n>1 physical locations with different companies and different transit providers.
I figured it out. Pirate Bay figured it out. Any company that genuinely cares about eliminating SPOFs has figured it out.
zarkov99
Perhaps Parler did not realize that being aligned with conservatism was grounds for deplatforming. I am sure they will learn as will the whole world.
madeofpalk
Again, plenty of other unpopular websites have figured it out.
Parler just didn’t care.
that_guy_iain
https://prq.se/?p=colo Famous for starting the pirate bay, they're still in action and pretty much specifically provide freedom of speech hosting. I think it plays in the game the Parler investors wanted to play that they got shutdown and can't get back online. Fuels the "we've been censored" angle.
walrus01
there's plenty of big colocation and hosting companies in Russia.
coolspot
Which will not provide you service unless you give them Russian phone number and scan of your Russian passport.
throwaway2048
Sites like stormfront manage to stay up, despite being way older and arguably more extreme.
SteveNuts
If there's ever a "capitol riot" sized event linked back to those sites, their BCPs will be put to the test as well.
ransom1538
Road map for hater sites:
1. Fire up servers in Russia.
2. Learn rsync.
3. Profit.
mrweasel
If you do social media, of any kind, you can't really rely to heavily on cloud providers. I know, Snapshot is a massive Google customer, but that means that they need to be rather careful.
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.
throwaway894345
Obviously Parler didn't consider censorship as part of their threat model, while TPB necessarily had to. Moreover, I'm pretty sure TPB has gone down here and there, probably for weeks at a time. I don't think Parler's problems threat model is that bad; just maybe don't depend on companies that are liable to peer pressure. In the worst case you just get hosting from someone who isn't going to dump you because of social pressure (even going out of country if you must).
INTPenis
TPB had a much greater threat to them. They were even threatened by domain registrars.
How could you say TPB didn't consider censorship? What is a DMCA takedown if not censorship?
Kbelicius
> How could you say TPB didn't consider censorship?
They didn't say that. They say in the first sentence that TPB had to consider censorship
Grustaf
I suppose one advantage Pirate Bay had was that they set out doing something illegal, whereas Parler probably didn't even consider the possibility that they would have to fight to stay online.
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.
throwaway0a5e
TPB also has the advantage of age. Their last decade has been quite stable but back in the day they would regularly go down and people would make all sorts of witty comments questioning the competence of the operators. It took them a lot of work to get where they are and they also had/have a different scaling curve than a social network.
Izkata
Don't forget the raid. On a hunch one of the admins was able to make a copy of the entire database and bring it back online shortly afterwards; if he had not, they'd've had to revive it with no content, and it probably would have died out / been overtaken by some other one.
m3kw9
Just by looking at how easily their entire db was downloaded, wouldn’t be surprise they hacked most things together and hardcoded a lot of stuff to work with AWS
ggggtez
If I recall, that wasn't the DB of Parler, but of their wordpress blog.
It's still sloppy, but it's not on the same level.
sangnoir
IIRC, one of the poor design choices was making their resource URLs (videos, pictures, etc) sequential - this reduces the effort of crawling everything down to a 'for' loop; no need to get the actual "db" for references. As a bonus, those media resources were not stripped of metadata (EXIF data in images was present)
tgsovlerkhgsel
And if it was indeed 70 TB downloaded and they were serving it off AWS, they're getting at least a $5600 bill as a last fuck you on their way out, just for that single download.
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.
saurik
... like this website? ;P I honestly don't see anything wrong with that design: permissions should be honored--and Parler did something really wrong here that caused people to be able to gain admin status from them--but, past that, if someone wants to download the whole site why not let them?
SulfurHexaFluri
There is nothing wrong with this on its own. The real flaw was not stripping the exif data. Although I guess sequential IDs did enable an easier attack on the real flaw.
ekianjo
> Embarrassing
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.
peteretep
> but the app being censored from Apple Store and Google Play Store prevents them from having a meaningful presence ever again anyway
Right, like OnlyFans has no meaningful presence
hombre_fatal
People are already conditioned to need a web browser to view adult content, and if you are an adult content platform, your competitors are also missing from app store as well.
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.
peteretep
Perhaps. I’ve been using Twitter and FB exclusively via iOS Safari for a year or two and I’m not sure I’m missing anything important
root_axis
That's like saying PC gamers are conditioned to using windows. They're not "conditioned" to anything, people go where the thing they want is.
jakear
Why not just use a web app? I don’t have the Twitter app installed because the web app does everything I need.
joecot
They have a Progressive Web App, which should be able to be loaded up and a home screen shortcut just like any app would. But it's not straight forward for Android (Parler users were trying to explain how to do it to each other with hilarious results), and I believe on Apple it can't be done.
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.
jrochkind1
If parler users believe it is important to them and to society as they say... what's the problem with just opening up a web browser and going to parler.com anyway? That's too big a burden for something so vitally important to it's users?
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.
tmpxgdqrcKFuG
You just Open Safari, go to your web page you want, click the share icon, and "Add to Home Screen" for iOS.
jackvalentine
> I believe on Apple it can't be done
You're incorrect.
vizual
> They don't want to, because it draws from their app store revenue.
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).
lights0123
iOS has had PWA support for longer than Android has (or at least "add to home screen", additional configuration via a manifest came much later).
manigandham
The solution is to get trillion-dollar companies to do something they don’t want to?
How are you going to do that without regulation?
ekianjo
Most non techies rather use apps in my experience, but I may be wrong.
middleclick
Not having an app does not mean that the mobile interface doesn't work.
DamnYuppie
They just gave millions of people a reason to investigate rooting their devices.
ekianjo
You don't need to root your device to install an .apk. It's all about friction. The harder you make it for people to do something, the less people will do it. It's always a very effective strategy.
WClayFerguson
I've been telling developers for years if you build your infrastructure on top of tons of 3rd party services like Google Cloud or AWS then you basically don't own it, and can be shut down any day, against your will.
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."
jcriddle4
It isn't just getting kicked off the platform that you should worry about. You have zero control of long term pricing. Developers sometimes even develop without doing any math on what the services they are using cost in year one. Ask people how often they have already had to go back and rework code and shutdown servers because the bills coming in were out of control. The myth that you can just migrate if costs go crazy is completely nuts.
jcun4128
Initially when I saw the EC2 micro prices I was like "wow that's a fraction of a cent" but then you multiply it 750 times in a month like oh...
aabhay
It is increasingly, vanishingly hard to not use the big three cloud services. Mainly because any platform or tool you might use is _also_ hosted on these clouds.
WClayFerguson
You can build on Java + SpringBoot + MySQL + Linux + Docker Compose, then what else do you really need?
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"
runawaybottle
Linode and Digital Ocean docs also are leagues ahead of AWS. They cover a lot of stuff. I didn’t even know what fail2ban was when one of my VPS’s got hacked. Went through all their docs, they cover a lot and really helped me understand how much I didn’t know while at the same time providing guides on getting up to speed.
AWS won’t tell you about those things because they sell you security, so you remain a dumbass about those things indefinitely.
onion2k
... what else do you really need?
A proper database.
:)
cptskippy
Most everything I develop is in .NET and will run comfortably in Nginx, IIS, or an Azure App Service Resource.
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.
DarkWiiPlayer
I've been telling people for ages that, even if they want to use a pre-built solution, they should at least set up the base systems a few times to get a better felling for them and.
cblconfederate
that logic is a vicious cycle
bitcoinmoney
Why can’t they just backup regularly and redeploy somewhere? Isn’t it as easy as backing up a DB and restoring?
ashtonkem
If you restrict yourself to only the set of AWS functionality that is common to all hosting providers, you can do 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.
PaulDavisThe1st
Premise of AWS for me: reasonably priced (not cheap!) linux VM, close to the backbone, essentially total control of the VM, easy provisioning of new disk storage when required (i.e. EC2 with a smidgeon of EBS)
The rest of it? I think I understand why some systems need/want it, but no thanks.
jpollock
When you build on top of "linux", yes. However, many cloud services are built on top of S3 or App Engine or other proprietary services.
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.
manquer
S3 is not that hard to replace. There are plenty of services like backblaze which provide S3 Api. You can spin up your own service with something like minio.
Getting S3 reliability or availablity is lot harder ofcourse, but most apps don't need that.
jacquesm
They don't even need their own backups anymore.
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nathias
Linux doesn't help here. You can have your own servers, but then ISP can shut you down and Mastercard and Visa will ban you from the online economy at will ...
lapphi
If Silk Road (and its spawn) manage to stay online until the government shuts them down then these more-legal companies can surely find a way.
nathias
Sure if your users can use crypto and tor you can stay open for a few years... but that isn't the same problem.
WClayFerguson
Linux is much better than relying on proprietary services. Nobody said Linux solves all the other problems in the world. lol.
nathias
I don't know what do you mean really, what do you think Amazon uses for their clouds, Windows 95?
gameswithgo
according to parler they did what you suggest
WClayFerguson
Parler used AWS. I suggested avoid AWS. What am I missing. I might be missing something.
margaretdouglas
AWS is a suite of services. One of those is EC2, which is just virtual servers hosted by Amazon/AWS. A virtual server is no different than a physical server from the perspective of the guest operating system, regardless of if it is Linux or not. Linux is just the software running on the server, it has nothing to do with ownership. The only way "running on AWS" is problematic is if you tied yourself to their non-generic services like ECS or Beanstalk.
tl/dr: building on AWS and building on Linux are not mutually exclusive. One represents hardware the other software.
hoseja
I wonder what the engineering quality and opsec was at facebook, a year or two after the Zuck built it to steal people's cell numbers.
mrvenkman
4 years after Facebook allowed the general public to join, the engineers created a PHP transpiler called "HipHop" which in itself, I would suggest, shows competence, engineering talent and a good understanding of PHP - the language that Facebook was at that point written in.
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Also embarrassing:
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.