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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'

#161

Post by f430 »

Exmoor wrote: post #157
f430 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I am convinced this was an inside job. There is simply no way someone can be this incompetent without willful intent.

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

#162

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

sangnoir wrote: post #79
ggggtez wrote: 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)

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.

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

#163

Post by jakelazaroff »

mc32 wrote: post #152
jakelazaroff wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Doxxin…

Free speech absolutism as an ideal doesn't make sense. The whole reason the notion of free speech exists is that people should be able to say things that other people don't like. Saying that we'd be able to have free speech absolutism if only people didn't say or do X is just "X is unacceptable speech" in disguise. If you exclude "bad" speech, freedom of speech is easy!

This thread originated with a comment saying it would be ideologically inconsistent for Pirate Bay's mantra to be "information wants to be free" and still remove schematics for 3D printing guns. My point was that a non-absolutist free speech stance is not inherently contradictory.

I'm not really interested in a full-throated debate about tech giants' moderation policies right now. But since you seem to think the censorship is unilateral and one-sided, I'd invite you to search through Twitter histories and see who was speaking out about FOSTA-SESTA, or Tumblr's NSFW ban. You'll find it was opposed mostly by libertarians and leftists — while the conservatives now wailing about censorship (and, in fairness, corporate liberals) didn't make a peep.

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

#164

Post by kijin »

kevindurb wrote: post #97
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…

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

Elasticsearch, too. In either case, it looks like they're just piping raw backend responses to the API endpoint without removing unnecessary fields.

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

#165

Post by excannuck »

f430 wrote: post #158
philsnow wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have the Royal Canadian Mounted Police which is the same thing. A federal level police force tasked and empowered with investigating these types of crimes. We also have provincial level human rights courts

And we do have labor watchdogs, again, the courts, and in Canada they lean very heavily towards workers in interpreting very strict labor laws.

However, Canada is also filled with self-righteous descendants (I mean it culturally) of puritans who take it upon themselves to adjudicate others.

That's why I left the GTA, Ontario and Canada as soon as I could.

(Quebec excepted. They're cool. Also, not Canada)

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

#166

Post by throwaway3699 »

KLexpat wrote: post #88
outoftheabyss wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gab is #537 highest traffic website in the US, up from #647 yesterday. https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gab.com#section_traffic I agree with you about the political agitation but I would say its becoming less of an issue on Gab. Parler was quite toxic. However, I prefer MSN messenger style chatrooms, so I use Telegram mostly which has now reached 500 million daily active users. These platforms aren't just filled with p…

It used to be that Parler was clean-ish and Gab was "problematic". Interesting that you think this swapped.

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

#167

Post by excannuck »

f430 wrote: 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 just admitted to purposely hijacking your employer's product development to harm them. You also admitted to acting in bad faith.

You probably just admitted to a crime. Certainly you've opened yourself up to a lawsuit to make the victims of the hack whole.

You're looking at some very serious legal trouble.

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

#168

Post by 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."

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

#169

Post by bkilrain »

formalsystems wrote: post #132
uxp100 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 downvo…

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.

But how could they maintain an accurate count? Maybe they were just persisting the user-friendly format alongside the actual count...

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

#170

Post by shripadk »

f430 wrote: 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 because you were not compensated properly you decided to screw the users of your company who had nothing to do with you being compensated less. You act like you are some kind of martyr but you are the sole person responsible for the human rights violations of thousands and potentially millions of unsuspecting users who used that service. I hope you can sleep well tonight knowing how you deliberately violated privacy and rights of people unconnected with your compensation issue. If you were treated unfairly you should have resigned. Not fuck the company over.
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