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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'

#391
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the proof to why I strip all metadata AND filename (esp. photos from camera include timestamp in filename) before uploading it to share one social medias.

iOS now have an option to do this natively. But I find it bit convoluted. My go to app for stripping out metadata from photos is Exif Viewer.

My camera apps never include GPS coordinates to begin with (which is enough stripping for me, but then again I'm not part of Qanon and all that).

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

#392
post #303

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…

This is the proof to why I strip all metadata AND filename (esp. photos from camera include timestamp in filename) before uploading it to share one social medias.

Camera vendors are perfectly capable of storing a lot of metadata in the jpeg encoded image itself, in an steganographic way. If you want to really be sure, crop your image to a position that is not multiple of 8 on any direction, then scale it by a factor very close to 1, add some noise, and re-compress it again. Some steganography is yet robust to that, but only the really fancy stuff.

Anyhow, if your image shows recognizable landmarks with shadows, then it will be feasible to recover the exact point of view and the time of acquisition.

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> 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.

Why should it be concerning at all? There are a few thousand other hosting providers they can go to.

The slightly stronger argument seems to be that the people making these death threats on Parler should not have been banned from Twitter/FB in the first place. FB/Twitter have far less competition and most of their value is in the network effects they've established.

The tech giants should absolutely be broken up/more heavily regulated, but I think there are much better examples of why than Parler.

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

#394
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISO 8601 is pretty absurd when you actually read it. `2021-W02` and `--01-14` are valid, as is `--1013` (quick! guess what that means! and beware that `-1013` is valid too!) Please, everyone, use a single format at all times in your systems. I don't really care what it is, though I'm fond of `2021-01-14T06:28:08Z` because it's unambiguous. But don't just say "use ISO 8601", it's far too vague and you'll inevitably ha…

Without having read the spec... * `2021-W02` means the second (ISO) week of 2021. Perfectly valid and used in a lot of planning. * `--01-14` - I'm assuming this is a recurring date: every 14 Jan for every year * `--1013` - at 1PM every 10th of the month? Guessing here I believe ISO 8601 is a ISO codification of a DIN standard, and based on other standards processes I'm guessing some German manufacturing companies wer…

That is such a common problem when standardizing, I've started to force my clients to have at least one person of each entity in project teams.

Often the biggest entity will end up accidentally forcing their practices, sometimes sub-optimal, to entire organizations, simply by having the manpower to show up to meetings.

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

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Is that what we've learned here?

It seems more likely that we've learned that if I said that quote -- and then I personally tried to hang the politician by his thumbs and got caught because I'm a cartoonish moron. Then, when charged with attempting to hang the politician, I said "I was just joking" even though I had some hanging equipment and I was in a giant mob full of other people all chanting to hang the politician and many of us had guns and anyway I also broke into a locked building to do the hanging -- and then it came out that large swaths of the content on the same site was people making those kinds of threats, and then it came out that the site operators didn't care to remove the threats because they had a moral opposition to moderation, and then it came out that AWS had contacted the site owners many times to implore them to remove other illegal content, and then the site operators, rather than removing the content, gave press interviews where they boasted how they were invincible and didn't care if AWS took them down... then it's probable that AWS would take the content down. And this doesn't concern me at all. Lock me up, in this hypothetical, and lock up the people who enabled me.

I ran a legacy website that once got spammed. My host contacted me because one of the spam things was an ad for a website hosting stolen credit card numbers. They gave me 24 hours to take down the content. This isn't because they're censoring math and they're using their monopoly power to prevent numbers from being posted, it's because stolen credit card numbers, provided for the purposes of credit card fraud, are illegal and they didn't want to do business with me if I wasn't willing to remove the content.

And I also don't see a further problem with using the posture of the site operators + the site itself to make a judgment call about whether the content in question is an aberration or intentional. If someone posted a magnet link of pirated content in Hacker News, I wouldn't presume per se that Hacker News was a piracy website because I can facially see that the site is general purpose, and also because I can see that the site has a general moderation policy that signals it is willing to comply with legal requests. But that doesn't mean that ThePirateBay can credibly argue in court "We had no idea our site was used for piracy, and if you ban us, you have to ban Google, because they crawled us."

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

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linode and Digital Ocean docs also are leagues ahead of AWS. They cover a lot of stuff. I didn’t even know what fail2ban was when one of my VPS’s got hacked. Went through all their docs, they cover a lot and really helped me understand how much I didn’t know while at the same time providing guides on getting up to speed. AWS won’t tell you about those things because they sell you security, so you remain a dumbass abo…

If you are doing ssh config properly, then you don’t need fail2ban or its ilk.

Fail2ban protects more services running on a server than just SSH.

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

#397
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

work gave us google drive accounts with "unlimited" capacity

except you can only upload 750GB a day without somewhat workarounds

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there were some principle or value that would somehow... allow us to express opinions even if others - even powerful people, or even the majority of people - disagreed with us. Some kind of inalienable right. Hmm. It is a mystery.

You can express opinions all you want, but you’re going to have to do a lot of work in order to justify compelling someone to do business with you after you say something they don’t like. Like, amazon isn’t actually the basic infrastructure of the internet. You can build web sites and apps without involving them. So why would a law force them to do business with you?

I try not to do business with companies that censor on political grounds. I don't like politics being banned in a professional context, but I slowly see no other solution.

The political alignment of many Parler users isn't a secret and if they decide to measure skulls again, I might be in trouble. Still, I don't see them as a relevant threat at all. It is even more ridiculous as the terrorism scare.

However, the actions of SV social media sites and hosts like Amazon censoring unpopular opinions and content outweigh that danger from neo-nazis by magnitudes. These groups have absolutely no political power in the 21st century. They have more influence than a decade ago, but that is mainly due to their ability to reinforce their prosecution narrative and martyrdom.

On the internet there are calls to violence in any political group, even vegans and cat lovers. We ignore that because they aren't relevant. But if you seriously crack down on cat lovers, you might need to expect real violence.

Either there are rules and principles that are valid for everyone or there are none.

Some say people get influenced by far-right propaganda. Far-right groups think in the same way in that they believe everyone not on their side is an "NPC".

I think Dorsey and Zuckerberg handled it relatively well in the grand scheme of things. Their latest ban attempts were over the top though. I know that some people might need help instead of a Twitter account, but that is beside the point. They set the precedent for countries to suppress their opposition and for state propaganda. I think Uganda is one of the latest examples.

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

#400
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe the person that pulled it down is a digital archivist. I’m sure she has plenty of storage laying around for such occasions.

Presumably just another s3 bucket?

Do all your transferring from an EC2 instance in the same region and it never needs to waste bandwidth going over the public internet anyway.

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