Live data from Hacker News

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

vice.com

91–100 of 640 posts

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

#91
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.

That just shows how dangerous the "if you're not against us, you're with us" mentality can be.

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

#92
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.

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

#93

>In more recent years, Kolmoisoppi has moved on to fund Njalla, a privacy-centric domain name registration service. One he says was already asked to host Parler, and refused. >“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 v…

[deleted]

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ToS at Colo facilities also, renting rack space isn't foolproof either.

there's plenty of big colocation and hosting companies in Russia.

Which will not provide you service unless you give them Russian phone number and scan of your Russian passport.

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

#96
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

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

#97

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…

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

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

#98

Parler decided not to buy their own hardware and rent their own rack space. Plenty of other unpopular websites have figured it out.

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.

Email service providers?

What’s that?

sudo apt install postfix

Configure DMARC and SPF and you’re fine.

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

#99
post #12

> 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.

> 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

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.

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

#100

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…

and w/ everyone moving to gab and them seeming to have their ducks more in order in terms of scaling/moderation, i think unless he really wants to die on the hill to preserve whatever was going on w/ parler, they will just drop it lol.
Post reply on HN