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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'

#361
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CP is one of the very few things where mere possession is illegal. It makes sense that TPB, which is mainly against copyright and IP, would not allow it.

> possession is illegal

AFAIK this is not an absolute, global truth. IANAL, but I do know the stance on CP (e.g. anime, ages of wedding, written-Lolita- etc differ per region. Legal and cultural).

In many countries, possession of certain books is illegal. Possession of blueprints of weapons is illegal and so on.

Point being: banning CP is still a moral choice, made by the operators of the site, not some absolute, global common baseline.

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

#362

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…

It isn't just getting kicked off the platform that you should worry about. You have zero control of long term pricing. Developers sometimes even develop without doing any math on what the services they are using cost in year one. Ask people how often they have already had to go back and rework code and shutdown servers because the bills coming in were out of control. The myth that you can just migrate if costs go cra…

Initially when I saw the EC2 micro prices I was like "wow that's a fraction of a cent" but then you multiply it 750 times in a month like oh...

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is never acceptable I want you to understand what I'm about to say. Understand it in your bones: it is unacceptable to me and to you and it is reprehensible; and beliefs that you hold dear will someday, by someone, be seen as unacceptable and reprehensible. To protect the speech of the reprehensible is to protect your own speech. That's what I would like you to understand. David Goldberger didn't defend the ri…

> To protect the speech of the reprehensible is to protect your own speech. That's what I would like you to understand. Actually, even in the US there are exceptions - namedly when speech is likely to incite crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

Indeed! We weren't talking about the 1st Amendment, but let's go where you lead: speech likely to incite imminent lawless action is illegal. Courts decide if that applies. Someday you might say "Politician Y should be hung by his thumbs". Politician Y and friends try to convince a judge that you thereby incite imminent lawless action. Of course, you were just feeling passionate, and no one reasonable would believe that you meant it. Thankfully, due to strong 1A protections, the case would not proceed.

But if you wrote that on a site hosted on AWS, there is nothing in principle from Amazon taking the platform down. Politician Y calls his buddy Jeff Bezos, and fwoomp! Gone. This should be concerning.

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

#364

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…

Jesus fucking christ i thought it's just some users table but 56.7 terabytes you mofos that's some s3 egress bill!

90$ per TB

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

#365
post #357
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler used AWS and AWS is always happy to serve any request without problems and notify you about it hours later if you decided to create usage alerts.

> and notify you about it hours later if you decided to create usage alerts and bill you at the end of the month. This is the crucial part: AWS will serve whatever is request. It brings them money.

Sorry for OT but what about a simple small time private AWS user like me who uses it for static hosting my blog and stuff.

Does that mean someone could request a lot of files, over and over, to increase my bill? Or is that served by some cache?

Let's say for example I host Mastodon media on S3, about 30G of unique data. Could someone use that to increase the cost of my bill?

I do of course have a budget alert set but I have to react to that alert too.

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

#366

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…

Jesus fucking christ i thought it's just some users table but 56.7 terabytes you mofos that's some s3 egress bill!

I think they’ll avoid paying whatever Amazon charges. And I don’t think Amazon will pursue it either. “How about you just let this lawsuit go and we’ll forget about that massive bill you have to pay?”

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

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, more charitably: your stance on information and freedom simply isn’t absolutist.

Free Speech isn't a thing that applies to Internet companies, only the government and how they must deal with people who wish to speak in public forums. Internet providers and services aren't "public forums" given their infrastructure is not a public space, but a private space they control. Whether or not someone thinks these services are "censoring" things or not isn't a real argument, again for the reason it must b…

"Free Speech" applies to everyone. Claiming it's just a thing for governments is just a massive display of both ignorance and arrogance.

Put bluntly: I don't care if the constitution of some country on another continent decides to only specifically protect people from government censorship. I care about as much as I do about the Chinese or Australian or Tongan legal systems.

Last time I checked HN wasn't an exclusively American community (If I was mistaken about that, I'll be happy to fuck off to somewhere else), so it really annoys me to the extreme when people hear "free speech" and just assume we're talking about USA Law. We're not. We're talking about ethics and what is the right thing to do, not from a regional legal perspective, but from a social and human perspective.

So to all 'Muricans reading this: Nobody cares about the constitution of some undemocratic shithole on the other side of the pond. Get over it.

And to all the reasonable people from the USA: I'm honestly sorry that a few ass-hats are giving you a bad name online. I hope you don't mind that I just had to let off some steam from all the political BS the internet has been shoving in my face as of late.

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

#368

"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…

FYI thepiratebay.org works too. They point to different IPs though. Are different people hosting the same synced software now? I haven't been following developments.

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

#369
post #311

I wonder what the engineering quality and opsec was at facebook, a year or two after the Zuck built it to steal people's cell numbers.

4 years after Facebook allowed the general public to join, the engineers created a PHP transpiler called "HipHop" which in itself, I would suggest, shows competence, engineering talent and a good understanding of PHP - the language that Facebook was at that point written in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP

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

#370
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and notify you about it hours later if you decided to create usage alerts and bill you at the end of the month. This is the crucial part: AWS will serve whatever is request. It brings them money.

Sorry for OT but what about a simple small time private AWS user like me who uses it for static hosting my blog and stuff. Does that mean someone could request a lot of files, over and over, to increase my bill? Or is that served by some cache? Let's say for example I host Mastodon media on S3, about 30G of unique data. Could someone use that to increase the cost of my bill? I do of course have a budget alert set but…

This is always a possibility so you take steps to protect yourself. If it’s a few static assets, put a CDN in front of it. You won’t be charged extra by S3 because the CDN would cache it.

If you’re hosting Mastodon, then I assume you’d take steps to ensure that only an authenticated user can access any data. And that user would also need to be authorised to access only specific data. And that authenticated and authorised user would be rate limited so they couldn’t scrape everything they have access to easily.

If you do all these things, you’ll be fine.

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