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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'

#621
post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm not sure this is tru…

>This seems to imply that nations which have copyright law are imposing authoritarian censorship on their citizens. This is exactly the point of most anti-copyright parties.

I see no contradiction.

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

#622
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbf, I don't think Parler ever saw itself as extremist. Obviously it was used by extremists, but as I've seen mentioned in other threads lately: When you create an alternative platform from the mainstream, the people who join it are either idealists, or are the people who were banned from the mainstream platforms. And if you don't have the resources to moderate those extremists (or foolishly choose not to), the extre…

"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0] [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neu…

Took me a while to get around to reading & finishing this, but this is a phenomenal article that could have exactly predicted what happened with Parler, and describes the current polarization in the US far better than I could. Thank you for sharing

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

#623
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

The claim I'm making is "they are not, in fact, 'just another Parler.'" You are pointing out many correct things about their potential liability and problems with holding that data! However, those things are, at most, a subset of the problems with Parler and at worst disjoint problems from Parler's problems. I stand by the argument of "a static, private data archive is not the same as a live, public web service." I did not make the argument of "there are no problems with the static, private data archive."

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

#624
post #320
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... like this website? ;P I honestly don't see anything wrong with that design: permissions should be honored--and Parler did something really wrong here that caused people to be able to gain admin status from them--but, past that, if someone wants to download the whole site why not let them?

This website doesn't do private messages an such. Every comment and post is public. However, on social networks where you do have that function, a user might have a legit reason to want a video to be private. When you have media that is private, if the numbering is sequential, it is easy to figure out what you can't see vs what doesn't exist. Using random IDs means that someone looking from the outside cannot reliabl…

Knowing how much data is private isn't a useful quantity? If it were per-user I would agree. Honestly, even knowing "a private video was posted at such and such time" for a website like Twitter isn't a big deal (and this is good, because Twitter also uses an auto-increment key for all of their posts, or at least used to until not that long ago if somehow they recently stopped).

(FWIW, Facebook actually used auto-increment keys for a long long time for their users. I don't remember when they stopped, but before they did they went through a long period of manual ID range allocation.)

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

#625
post #624
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This website doesn't do private messages an such. Every comment and post is public. However, on social networks where you do have that function, a user might have a legit reason to want a video to be private. When you have media that is private, if the numbering is sequential, it is easy to figure out what you can't see vs what doesn't exist. Using random IDs means that someone looking from the outside cannot reliabl…

Knowing how much data is private isn't a useful quantity? If it were per-user I would agree. Honestly, even knowing "a private video was posted at such and such time" for a website like Twitter isn't a big deal (and this is good, because Twitter also uses an auto-increment key for all of their posts, or at least used to until not that long ago if somehow they recently stopped). (FWIW, Facebook actually used auto-incr…

Twitter uses Snowflakes, simialr to FB and other services. They scale better than manual ID range allocation and don't entirely behave like auto-increment. The big part is that it can contain gaps. So there is no way to tell if an ID doesn't exist because you lack access or because it was skipped over.

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

#626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux doesn't help here. You can have your own servers, but then ISP can shut you down and Mastercard and Visa will ban you from the online economy at will ...

Linux is much better than relying on proprietary services. Nobody said Linux solves all the other problems in the world. lol.

I don't know what do you mean really, what do you think Amazon uses for their clouds, Windows 95?

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

#627
post #555

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…

> 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 I dont think it is that simple. I remember reading finding that smart highly intelligent people are more attracted to conspiracy theories. The complexity of those theories and details those rely on attract them. A…

A study recently published on Scientific American seems to prove that left-leaning people tend to have more gray matter in the pre-frontal cortex (i.e. the area of the brain involved in complex planning, understanding of new things and pattern detection), wwhile right-leaning people tend to have more gray matter in the amygdala (the area of the brain responsible for spotting potential danger and refuse something new if it may pose a risk to survival): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-....

If that's true, and if indeed conservatives are much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overlo... in conspiracy theories), then the opposite of what you state may indeed be true

Keep un mind that before a conspiracy theory turns into the perverse mind-twist of a complex theory like QAnon it ALWAYS start simple, and always simpler than reality actually looks like. It can always summarized with "those guys want to harm you, so don't even bother to look further, the explanation is easy": pure and total amygdala stimulation. Then, when they are contradicted by evidence, they put up more and more complex twists to mitigate the arise of cognitive dissonance in its followers ("I know that it looks like things don't make much sense, but you know, you have to follow the crumbs, or keep in mind that Trump is talking to you in Morse code" etc.)

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

#628
post #331
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that the single peer is a concern. Maybe they have others that are hidden for now, like you said? I don't think they need more than a few IP addresses since most of their hardware could sit on a private network with only a single load balancer visible from the Internet. Also, a small ASN doesn't really need IPv6 compatibility to function, and won't for many years to come. Since they're still using Cloudf…

Ideally, for redundancy, you'd run in more than one datacenter. That's hard to do with only one /24; most networks won't take BGP advertisements more specific than /24, so you can't easily run half your ips at each DC. Maybe HE allows it for transit customers, but it makes the routing messier. They could be doing anycast, but that's pretty sophisticated. They could also only advertise the /24 from one DC at a time, b…

You can still have redundancy. Basically active + backup config, where the other datacenter takes over and announces the /24 if the active goes down. They could certainly be utilizing "oob" IP connectivity to coordinate failover instead of using their own IP space.

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

#629
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "far-right" I think you mean "moderate conservative."

If by "moderate conservative" you mean the type of people who also fund a site like Breitbart. I think we're pretty safe in calling them "far-right".

I'm sorry if this comes across sounding harsh, as I don't know you at all, but your comment sounds like the opinion of someone in a lefty filter bubble.

Where I'm from, "far-left" and "far-right" means "people who think violence is a legitimate means to enact their ideology."

So that includes Nazis, the KKK, and communist revolutionaries. It does not include Rebecca Mercer or Breitbart.

Check out this data: [1]. Breitbart is only a smidge more conservative than Fox News, and Fox News is the #1 watched cable news channel in the country. That is called "mainstream." Presumably, the "far-right" would be "far" beyond the mainstream.

[1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2...

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

#630
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "far-right" I think you mean "moderate conservative."

The Mercers??! Rebecca Mercer?

Ok, so to you, it seems obvious and accepted that Rebecca Mercer is far-right.

However, traditionally, the terms "far-right" and "far-left" have been reserved for people who believe violent government coup is a legitimate means to an end.

And lately, people have taken to calling more moderate conservatives "far-right" and "nazis" as a way to delegitimize their opinions, and make them sound beyond-the-pale.

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