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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'

#511
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that not all of it was public posts. As an EU citizen, I can request that a company deletes my data. Unless this data dump is being treated as a crime scene or something, then the holders of this data will need some way to comply with these requests. Also, now AWS (or whatever cloud provider it is) is holding content that contains racist and/or illegal content. Are they not effectively now just an…

No, they're not. Holding a static, private archive is not the same thing as hosting a live, public site.

You cannot be more wrong with this claim, you might not had to deal with this privately or professionaly I presume in which case it is understandable. Parler is liable for taking absolutely no precaution with their users data with whom they had a terms & conditions agreement (in short: users agreed to upload their data for a specific purpose)

Now, ripping that _user_ generated data from the website this way without justified (justified = platform user agreement + legitimate interest) purpose or intent or even agreement and storing / distributing / processing it is the epitome of a GDPR transgression and borderline criminal at least in the EU (saying this as a EU citizen). They are liable. I wouldn't touch that dataset with a 10 foot pole. And I would even less brag about it on Twitter, things we do for clout I guess... :)

I have no stake in this thing, it's just to emphasize that statements like this are what get people and businesses in big trouble. Stay safe! Archive only your own data or data you gathered legitimately. Take the rest up with a lawyer or ... read the laws.

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

#512
I personally don't find their ability to remain online that surprising.

The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks were built by people with a passion for building, maintaining and hacking things. People who, even without a solid CS background, would spend hours a day learning new things, developing distributed protocols, evading DNS blocks and hosting their content wherever they could to make it accessible - included the small server in their own garage if needed. And they are used by people who don't mind learning a new protocol or how to use a new client to get the content they want.

I don't see the same amount of passion for technology and hacking among the Parler users, nor its maintainers. Those who believe in conspiracy content are people characterized by a psychological tendency to take shortcuts whenever they can in order to minimize their efforts in learning and understanding new things. So when the first blocker hits they usually can't see alternative solutions, because it's not the way their brains are wired. They always expect somebody else to come up with solutions for them, and they always blame somebody else when the solution won't come. And even if they decided to migrate their content to the dark web or on a Tor network, not many people will follow them - both because they don't have the skills, and because they don't want to acquire those skills. Plus, they'd lose the "viral network effect" that they get when posting click-bait content on public networks, the new censorship-proof network will only attract a small bunch of already radicalized people.

And even if they wanted to hire some smart engineers to do the job for them, we all know that engineers tend to swing on the other opposite of the ideological spectrum. Those who have built systems for escaping REAL authoritarian censorship would rightfully feel disgusted if asked to apply their knowledge to provide a safe harbour for rednecks to vomit their conspiracy-theories-fueled hate.

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

#513
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm fine with all this stuff getting taken down" I understand this on a visceral level, but I wish more people would look beyond that to the implications for communication on the web. This action by Amazon happens to correspond with what I think is right and just on first iteration, but what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with?

> what principle prevents Amazon from arsing some other group that we agree with? Honestly, none. It's their business and they can handle it however they want. What you can do (and this is exactly what Kolmisoppi was suggesting) is build your platform to work without relying on other people's business. I'm happy that companies like Amazon don't want to get associated with people who organized a failed coup. That shou…

>build your platform to work without relying on other people's business

You can't although you can, of course, mitigate.

But are you OK with just a PWA on mobile w/o the Apple or Google stores?

And your platform is ultimately dependent on a network connection, probably CDN, domain registrar, DNS, etc. Those are a pretty high bar to get kicked off but you're not immune.

(And, yes, there are things like Tor and jumping around providers if you have a fairly lightweight web site--like most torrents--but that doesn't help you if yo have a site with many TB of data catering to unsophisticated users.)

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

#514
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

work gave us google drive accounts with "unlimited" capacity

You'll find out what 'unlimited' means in SaaS speak very, very much sooner than you expect if you tried really to utilize it.

Not at 50TB though.

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

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes probably. Wherever it is, that provider is in an interesting legal position by holding this data. Also, I assume there is content from EU citizens in there, and so GDPR violations galore.

So people post it on Parlor themselves, it is publicly available, but it would be illegal to download for me? That does not make much sense.

If you were to scape someone's private messages from Facebook - or their private posts - and then post them online en masse ... that may or may not be illegal in Europe, but it ain't ethically white. Grey at best.

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

#516
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90$ per TB

Is there still no easy straightforward way in $current_year to put an absolute spend cap of say USD 0, USD 5, or USD 10 per month on Amazon.com web services or Google Cloud Platform? I’d think I’d like to prepay a fixed dollar amount like USD 200 IF I anticipate some major event but really this is problematic for students. I just want to use the free tier. Why is this so hard?

It used to be possible to do that with Google App Engine at least.

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free speech is a cultural value and a philosophy it, can apply to anyone and everyone. The first amendment of the US constitution protects the people from politicians and bureaucrats. Just because it’s done by a private party doesn’t mean it’s not censorship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4t6zNZ-b0A

So does that mean if I am hosting a dinner at my home on my own private property and someone starts spewing hate at people I have to let him because it's his free speech? No, I'm kicking that asshole off my property and banning him from returning. It's the same for these tech companies. They are private companies and if you break their ToS for inciting violence or posting illegal shit then they have the right to ban…

This is a very thorny issue and my own personal views don't matter, but the views of others are indeed interesting. I was listening to an episode of The Taylor Report[0] and he was saying that no corporate platform should block speech based on its moral compass. He noted that while Twitter flagged Trump's tweets regarding the Capitol Hill protest as inciting violence, Twitter didn't flag Trump's tweets threatening nuclear violence against Iran and North Korea as incitements to violence.

[0] https://ciut.fm/shows/the-taylor-report/

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone put together an animated heatmap of Parler photo locations along the Mall throughout the day of 1/6: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/kvx88n/oc_...

Looks like this aged poorly https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293

Indeed. Greenwald helped Snowden; he has the chops to see what's going on. To wit, his subsequent tweet:

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald Jan 11

Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?

Zero.

The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start.

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

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AWS can really sting you. I've completely stopped using it for private projects after receiving a $100 bill for something I accidentally provisioned through the command line. Not only is it very easy to spend real money by accident, the web interface makes it incredibly hard to work out what you're spending money on (it took me a long time to even understand what I was paying for, and then longer still to turn it all…

The first thing I do at companies I join is dig through common services and tag all resources in a consistent way(ie. app=web-frontend). Then you can create resource groups and breakdown billing at an ‘application level’ through cost explorer, instead of relying on their default, very general filters. Not perfect, but it gets you 90% of the way towards understanding where your costs are.

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were downloading at 50 Gbps for a while https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348497204940595201 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348440720504401921 Also, auth provider (twilio?) removed Parler as a client so for a short while it was possible to create accounts without a phone number (2FA). https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1348298836930867204 edit: okta, free trial, thanks: https://news.ycombinator.com/…

She is probably liable for that data egress bill. Also, how does some randomer have ten of terabytes of disk lying around?

> some randomer

They're not a randomer, they're a person interested in data dumps.

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