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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'

#151

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…

Of all the things to criticise Parler's tech folks over, using ISO8601 (minus the non-digit characters) shouldn't be one.

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.

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

#152
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we have legal and moral obligations when there are immediate dangers and harm. 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 e…

That's absolutely a fair position to take. But you have to realize that it's moving the goalposts from your original one, which was that anything short of free speech absolutism is "censorship". 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…

Absolutist free speech is the _ideal_, but we don't live in an ideal world. There are bad people.

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.

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

#153
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been impressed by Gab

Why? Seems like the level of discussion is not all that far away from the level on Parler.

Or on Twitter, or facebook

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

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

#154
post #144

I genuinely believe that this is a case of incompetence willful or not. Who knows, maybe someone at parler knew and never raised the issue because they were disgruntled and actively shot down security measures....kind of like what I did before Basically a startup I worked for 12 years ago were fucking me big time on compensation so I purposefully argued against encrypting the database knowing how shoddy their securit…

So report them to the FBI or local equivalent for the "human rights violations", instead of engaging in willful negligence and then fucking bragging on the internet about how brave you were?

I doubt there were any "human rights violations", as reporting them seems like a much better (and much easier) way to screw over the people involved than not encrypting the database.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

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

#156
To be fair, I think it's a lot easier to think in terms of decentralization when the tech you work with (p2p) is decentralized by design.

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.

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

#157
post #117

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 m…

> 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 OH SHI- This is a colossal mess up, on epic proportions.

Indeed. The level of security failure was pretty incredible. They named media serially (So, pics/1.jpg, pics/2.jpg, etc.) and did not have any validation that you were allowed to access what you were grabbing so it was literally as easy as possible to grab everything. Oh, and did I mention that private messages were also fully accessible?

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

#158
post #144

I genuinely believe that this is a case of incompetence willful or not. Who knows, maybe someone at parler knew and never raised the issue because they were disgruntled and actively shot down security measures....kind of like what I did before Basically a startup I worked for 12 years ago were fucking me big time on compensation so I purposefully argued against encrypting the database knowing how shoddy their securit…

So report them to the FBI or local equivalent for the "human rights violations", instead of engaging in willful negligence and then fucking bragging on the internet about how brave you were? I doubt there were any "human rights violations", as reporting them seems like a much better (and much easier) way to screw over the people involved than not encrypting the database.

We don't have FBI in Canada

Nor do we have any labour watchdogs

I'd like to live in a country where developers were protected.

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

#159
post #144

I genuinely believe that this is a case of incompetence willful or not. Who knows, maybe someone at parler knew and never raised the issue because they were disgruntled and actively shot down security measures....kind of like what I did before Basically a startup I worked for 12 years ago were fucking me big time on compensation so I purposefully argued against encrypting the database knowing how shoddy their securit…

You are wrong for doing that and you should feel bad but you can't. F

cmon now this is unecessary. do you have $200,000 CAD or not?

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

#160

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…

Of all the things to criticise Parler's tech folks over, using ISO8601 (minus the non-digit characters) shouldn't be one.

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...

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