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Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

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Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#71

Post by grahamburger »

um_ya wrote: post #61
CryptoGhost wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

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/

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#72

Post by manigandham »

joecot wrote: post #25
jakear wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use a web app? I don’t have the Twitter app installed because the web app does everything I need.

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…

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?

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#73

Post by CryptoGhost »

throwbacktictac wrote: post #49
CryptoGhost wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

This sounds like double speak. Can you elaborate?

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.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#74

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

um_ya wrote: post #61
CryptoGhost wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

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.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#75

Post by grahamburger »

zarkov99 wrote: post #45
mike_d wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Let's hope so! The more we diversify our social media consumption as a society the better off we all are. Well, other than Jack and Mark.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#76

Post by zarkov99 »

ggggtez wrote: post #29
newacct583 wrote: post #2

Parler was, at the end of the day, a somewhat amateurish Twitter clone whose essential growth hack was that they decided to serve as a kind of ban evasion mechanism for Twitter. They had virtually no organic growth of their own, they worked by accepting the banned castoffs from another service and promising not to do any moderation. And then we had a historical incident of political violence perpetrated by the same d…

Not sure why the downvotes. This essentially is the same as my take. This is the inevitable result of pushing your brand as "no content moderation" but not actually having any skills or plans on what to do when it eventually caught up with them. 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 se…

This is factually false. There was moderation, there were terms of service and they banned appeals to violence from their site. The glee with which so many in tech are celebrating was essentially an attempt at corporate murder, on ideological grounds, is revolting.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#77

Post by singron »

Meekro wrote: post #43
alphabet9000 wrote: post #38

"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 pee…

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."

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.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#78

Post by userbinator »

formalsystems wrote: post #37

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…

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.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#79

Post by sangnoir »

ggggtez wrote: post #48
m3kw9 wrote: post #27

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

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.

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)

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#80

Post by rodgerd »

zarkov99 wrote: post #45
mike_d wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I was not aware that "Remember the photographs from inside your home while you slept? Yes, that close. You will die a sudden death!", "We are going to fight a civil was on the 20th", "we need to start systematically assassinating #liberal leaders", or "shoot the police that protect these shitbag senators" were conservative political opinions.
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