Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers • Hacker News Board

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#21

Post by nixgeek » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

stephankoelle wrote: post #13

nixgeek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle, IBM, Alibaba. On the smaller but still “millions of virtual machines” end of the scale: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode. Still have APIs and can give you instances in minutes. Hetzner and OVH also an option for the scale of infrastructure that Parler appears to require, although their “Dedicated Server” offerings (Bare Metal) often take 24-72 hours to deliver to customers. Or one of a thousand places to rent a ra…

Hetzner has usually 10 minutes for bare metal.

In all the years I’ve been using them they’ve never hit 10 minutes for my orders. Usually > 4 hours and On PX where you can specify NVME and other configuration, more like 2-3 days (particularly if the order was placed on a weekend).

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#22

Post by imwillofficial » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #18

zarkov99 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindsight and all that. Parler has hosted content no worse than Twitter or Facebook or thousands of other sites. Their banning from AWS could not have been reasonably anticipated. It was an unprecedented act of censorship in response to an unprecedented moment in American history. The world will learn and AWS will likely loose a few customers though not enough to change its policies.

> Parler has hosted content no worse than Twitter or Facebook or thousands of other sites. I disagree. There were open calls for murder on the platform where Parler was notified by Apple, by Google, by Amazon - and nothing happened . Which is the key thing here. Twitter and Facebook are extremely fast with the ban-hammer, in contrast.

This is not true. Not even close.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#23

Post by lisper » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

ghoward wrote: post #17

lisper wrote: post #11

I gotta say, recent events have left me shaken to my core. I thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I started a company dedicated to providing privacy and communications products that were not subject to control by any central authority (that turns out to be very hard!) But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. I…

I wrote about why free speech is still important here: https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali... . Basically, the problem is not free speech. It's the social media drive for addiction.

But that is exactly the problem: how do you separate the two? Once someone figures out a way to profit from "free speech" the profit motive takes over and infects the whole system. I don't see any way around that without compromising freedom.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#24

Post by decasia » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

millzlane wrote: post #14

decasia wrote: post #10

The thing is, you're always going to dependent on someone in the mainstream economic world if you want to have a web presence in North America. Even if you run your own servers, you're at the mercy of your hosting provider, your ISP, your DNS registrar, and even browser level things like Google Safe Browsing. Any of these can be major points of failure. So yeah, not using AWS would avoid being dependent on AWS, but y…

TBH most "Free speech" platforms will allow anything except fraud, child porn, and calls to violence that violate criminal law. Baring all of that. There are still places online to host whatever you want.

Yeah, I know those services are out there. I thought most of them were physically located outside North America though, is that not true?

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#25

Post by zarkov99 » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

gameswithgo wrote: post #7

andomar wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were refused by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare, what alternatives are there?

epik, apparently. at some point too when you notice that everyone thinks you are horrible maybe the problem is you.

Yeah, that is a great mental heuristic: the majority is always fair and right. I am sure the Jews thought that back in 1930’s Germany. And the Christians in Rome, the Kolacks in Russia, the intellectuals in Mao's China, the wealthy Cubans when Castro took over and blacks in the US before the civil rights movement.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#26

Post by mschuster91 » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

I call bollocks on this. Everyone whose business goes against the terms of service of the major three cloud providers (in the case of Parler, serving as a platform for calls to violence and sedition, which are criminal offenses) still has the freedom to go to any of the literally hundreds of "bullet-proof hosting" providers, to rent rack space and a fiber uplink somewhere and to place one's own bare metal hardware there.

The only thing Parler lost is the convenience that cloud providers offer, but there's no constitutional right to convenience.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#27

Post by Nursie » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:30 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #11

I gotta say, recent events have left me shaken to my core. I thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I started a company dedicated to providing privacy and communications products that were not subject to control by any central authority (that turns out to be very hard!) But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. I…

I'm afraid I have to concur - in the face of mass communication, the marketplace of ideas that underpins free-speech idealism has failed.

Better ideas do not push out worse ones. And no, I'm not even talking about political viewpoints here - we see ideas based on fantasy, utter unreality, repeatedly winning substantial support and spreading amongst people.

Conversely whenever platforms do allow totally 'free' speech, we see that they degenerate into hives of hate and moderate voices tend to leave entirely.

I don't know what the answer is, but just having public forums made to allow everything, and screeching about free speech when they take a stand, is demonstrably not working.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#28

Post by imwillofficial » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

gameswithgo wrote: post #7

andomar wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were refused by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare, what alternatives are there?

epik, apparently. at some point too when you notice that everyone thinks you are horrible maybe the problem is you.

I see Facebook getting right on that.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#29

Post by daniellarusso » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #23

ghoward wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote about why free speech is still important here: https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali... . Basically, the problem is not free speech. It's the social media drive for addiction.

But that is exactly the problem: how do you separate the two? Once someone figures out a way to profit from "free speech" the profit motive takes over and infects the whole system. I don't see any way around that without compromising freedom.

Freedom is not absolute and boundless.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#30

Post by j_walter » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

gameswithgo wrote: post #7

andomar wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were refused by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare, what alternatives are there?

epik, apparently. at some point too when you notice that everyone thinks you are horrible maybe the problem is you.

Not everyone thinks they are horrible, and for the many that do they are relying on the media saying that they played a part in the Capitol riots. I haven't actually seen any data showing what was posted on Parler or what evidence was used to justify shutting them down.

Don't forget...just because everyone thinks something is good, doesn't mean that everyone isn't wrong. Hitler was Time magazine's man of the year...less than a year before he started WW2.