Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing' • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by ashtonkem » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:29 AM UTC

developer2 wrote: post #192

kijin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep, that's an indication of Elasticsearch being used (and not transforming documents to a standard representation that strips such fields).

It seems like they basically just exposed a lot of data directly, as apparently most of their APIs didn’t enforce any authentication or hide records that had been soft deleted.

Apparently the records were strictly sequential, which I don’t believe is true for Mongo which IIRC includes the node ID in part of it.

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

#212

Post by KMag » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #133

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.

Due to the people involved, Parler is almost certainly not a honeypot setup by the FBI, CIA, or some other government organization. However some of the details that have leaked out over the last week made me wonder how little of the site would have changed if that was the intended purpose.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

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

#213

Post by Talanes » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

f430 wrote: post #184

shripadk wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 priva…

Look, the people who signed up for the service were mostly men looking to cheat on their wives if it makes you feel better. Screw them. Why get married when you are just going to sign up on dating site to look for sugar babies who can't be bothered to put in the work so they sleep with married rich older men. I don't think you realize how corrupt and immoral people are. I took great joy reading through the depraved p…

At this point I'd be willing to put money on knowing where you worked, so if you have any worry about being outed for that, well yeah.

I do kinda hope you're not just bullshitting though, because those assholes definitely had it coming and this just makes it all the more deliciously vengeful.

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

#214

Post by Talanes » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

kodah wrote: post #204

f430 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the bigger crime? Telling people to work 80 hours a week without overtime? Threatening female coworkers with bad reviews if they dont go on a date? Calling me racial slurs and stealing my lunch? I can go on and on my man you weren't there I don't need to work in software, I have others work in it for me.

Those things are repugnant and some of them grossly illegal. This is exactly why we have laws and don't allow people to enact vigilante justice. It didn't take long to figure out that hurt and misguided people act and speak out of vengeance and hurt. Nobody heals, nobody learns. Even more, and what you ironically put on display here, is that you may have dented their pocket book but who you ultimately hurt was the us…

Not to defend the obviously very unmoored gentleman, but if he worked where all hints seem to imply he worked, the company was already using their database to extort users.

Edit: Just in case this was unclear though, that would definitely be another datapoint in the "Report this because it will be taken seriously" column. Not advocating vigilante justice, even if I'm pretty sure they were as slimy as he's saying.

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

#215

Post by wp381640 » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:36 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #108

jakelazaroff wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t mind when platforms get rid of spam, child porn, normal porn, doxxing, death threats, ISIS recruitment videos or assassination contracts, then guess what: censorship has value to you, too.

Maybe misogynistic metal and rap music too? Maybe violent music and movies and video games... Why stop, we’re on a roll Very likely the World would be a better place if we only had happy music, happy movies, happy art. No angry art. No angry expression.

Platforms set the policies to fit the communities they want to build.

Twitter allows porn, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook do not

Newspaper comment sections will often moderate the word "fuck", while Facebook, YouTube and other will not

There are hundreds of dials you can tune in terms of moderation to adjust to fit the community you want to build. Apparently the Facebook moderation guide is 300+ pages long.

Parler isn't a "free speech platform" - they pretty much have a ban on porn. You'll find that most other "free speech" platforms also have hard limits (usually _stricter_ than what Twitter allow).

Try going onto thedonald and post one of the photos of Trump with Epstein, or Parler with porn, or Gab and curse Jesus[0] in a reply and see what happens

They're not free speech platforms, they're _their_ speech platforms. They have built the ultimate safe spaces for some of the worst online communities.

[0] Gab's own ToS refers to their discretion in removing content and a "God given right" https://gab.com/about/tos

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

#216

Post by SteveNuts » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:40 AM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #10

SteveNuts wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sites like stormfront manage to stay up, despite being way older and arguably more extreme.

If there's ever a "capitol riot" sized event linked back to those sites, their BCPs will be put to the test as well.

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

#217

Post by MivLives » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:50 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #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 m…

I'm curious where someone just gets 56.7 tb of storage that quickly.

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

#218

Post by throwawayboise » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:51 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #78

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.

A timestamp is a timestamp. It isn't a date. If you need a date, use a proper date/time data type.

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

#219

Post by stevesarmpit » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:51 AM UTC

Meekro wrote: post #30

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! [1] https://bgp.he.net/AS42651

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.

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

#220

Post by 2Gkashmiri » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:52 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #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 m…

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?