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

#181

Post by jariel » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

ardy42 wrote: post #93

millzlane wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think free speech ends at specific threats or calls to violence. Call me the n word all you want. But if you threaten my life you should be stopped. Either by the police or by me. I think free speech is necessary, but not free speech to harass or threaten violence. Free speech including the vile and negative won't make the world a better place. Arguing against the bad ideas will. But I do not think it's the burden…

> I think free speech ends at specific threats or calls to violence. Call me the n word all you want. But if you threaten my life you should be stopped. Either by the police or by me. Then what about lies? The real problem of the last few years is that really blatant lies have been remarkably successful in the "marketplace of ideas" and quite hard to effectively argue against (if you disagree, try using facts and rea…

'Threats of violence'

'Threats of coordinated violence'

'Satire with violence'

Are all part of a type of information wherein we can make rules and try to apply them fairly.

Saying 'Twitter allowed this but not that' is besides the point - it illustrates that Twitter is either inconsistent or hypocritical or both ... but it doesn't abnegate the notion that policies can be crudely made to work.

If you straight up threatened to murder someone on Twitter, they'll take it down.

The problem of 'mass mistruth' is much more complicated, because of course, making the stupid claim that 'the COVID vaccines kill 50% of it's recipients' probably would normally be within the realm of protected speech - but when 100% of Americans are subject to such lies, 25% of them refuse to take the vaccine, and 5% of them want to get violent an overthrow the CDC & murder Fauci because he's 'killing children' - well it becomes a problem.

One key thing to understand that nobody here in HN wants to contemplate is that the 'commons' is utterly not a clearing house of information wherein the truth rises to the top. This is totally the opposite. The commons is an arena of populism where we plebes act on instinct and emotion, we chose the information we want to hear, we buy into the lies of groups and ideologues.

The truth is almost irrelevant, because it can only ever be contemplated in the context of legitimate authority, which is why we 'mostly trust' the CDC, Homeland Security, our Judicial system etc. etc..

'Coordinating Violence' is a problem that can be dealt with in all but the eyes of those wanting 'absolute free speech'.

But 'Lies and Misinformation' we must understand is actually a serious problem, and worse, there's no clear path to how we can solve this.

There's no doubt we don't want corporations, and not 'Tim Cook' making these decisions, probably not individual bureaucrats or ideological politicians ... we're all going to have to work hard to find something that works and that is fairly transparent and fair. FYI Apple doesn't want the headache of deciding who speaks and not - they just want to make money and not get into risky scenarios.

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

#182

Post by eznzt » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #114

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…

> 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. One hard truth: it would have been enough to look at European laws made after WWII, and adopt them in the US as well in the first place.

"In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

Is this really what you want?

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

#183

Post by drivingmenuts » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #119

drivingmenuts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, this will come down to public vs. private rights. If infrastructure, no matter how vital, is privately funded, what rights are there vs infrastructure that is publicly funded. Further complications are infrastructure that is a mix of the two. Personally, I lean toward private infrastructure being able to set their own rules and if it’s public, then the public sets the rules. I am not sure when it gets to…

What about peering agreements? What happens when cogent gets de-peered because they host a website accused of thought crimes?

The same thing that would happen in other situations. If you and I can’t come to terms, we part ways and don’t do business with each other. If one of us is affected because of that, then one of us needs to reconsider how best to remedy or work around that issue.

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

#184

Post by cccc4all » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

travisporter wrote: post #164

cccc4all wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always question everything you are told, especially by central authorities, mainstream popular media, etc. Seek out information from variety of sources and discern the truth from fiction. What you may think is evidence may be completely opposite of what it actually is. Especially any narratives that are pushed to convince people to voluntarily give up privacy and freedoms. Just look at all the regular people going ar…

What makes central authorities and mainstream popular media inherently more suspicious? I disagree that having worked on tech projects would help you spot propaganda. It is illogical to assume you're an expert on the stock market just because you know how to code. (There's a fallacy name for this one which is escaping me)

First, high frequency trading is using code to gain alpha in stock market trading. Tech expertise is more important than reading balance sheets in this arena. It may be illogical, but it works and are used by many high profile Wall Street firms.

Most people working in tech have sense of awareness, that things are not quite what they seem. That's why there are so many people in tech heavily involved in decentralization, crypto, etc.

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

#185

Post by jariel » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

millzlane wrote: post #55

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do when people simply want to spew emotional tirades and mindlessly copy memes, and won't argue in good or any faith? What is that worth really?

You bring up a good point. I don't engage with folks like that. I assume they're already indoctrinated or an influencer from outside of the country or a troll. If I'm feeling empathetic I might try to appeal to the human in them. Edit: If you're asking me as if I were the host of the free speech platform. I guess I would allow everything except anything that violated criminal law. And would keep a law firm on retaine…

It doesn't matter who you engage with.

If 10% of Americans are convinced that QAnon is behind the scenes running the show, and they believe that, and act on it in a variety of ways, then it's a huge problem.

I suggest with the election, COVID and QAnon together we are probably already feeling the results of mass misinformation.

It's an ugly problem because none of us really want to suppress people for saying something not technically true. I mean, who doesn't like a good alien conspiracy theory? Until it gets out of hand ...

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

#186

Post by jimmydorry » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

redisman wrote: post #132

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…

It's pretty baffling how people all of a sudden expect Fortune 500 companies to not act "politically correct" when bad actors are breaking their TOSes. Was there ever a medium backed by a large corporation where you could post calls to violence against politicians without getting booted off?

Twitter, Facebook, Youtube come to mind. The two that immediately come to mind would be Kathy Griffin holding Trump's severed head and Eminem shooting a Trump look-a-like. Neither were deplatformed for these graphic depictions / calls to violence, and one even reposted the offensive media in November.

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

#187

Post by alwayseasy » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

jimmygrapes wrote: post #180

alwayseasy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst-case scenario is the end of democracy in the USA in the next 15 years. If one side stays convinced the elections were fraudulent and Trump is a victim , it will cause a permanent shift in how Americans see their own democratic elections. Historically, since democracy has existed, that vacuum is always filled by an authoritarian leader.

I find it odd that most of this could have been prevented if just one judge had said "you know what, you have a lot of notarized affidavits, and a reasonable claim to harm considering you lost the election by conventional wisdom, and you can't legally access any further data to prove your case unless we enter a discovery stage, so, sure, let's play this out and be done with it." I also find it odd that none of the la…

Or maybe the legal team lied to the public and were truthful to the 50 different judges?

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

#188

Post by api » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

kondro wrote: post #125

api wrote: post #2

If I were running something likely to be deplatformed, I would never consider anything but a multi-cloud solution where no single provider is a single point of failure. It's not that hard to do.

I'm not going to go into all the reasons why a multi-cloud solution probably isn't and why multi-cloud is stupendously difficult (and expensive as you move all that data around) for a scaling business. But in a situation like this, a company that's likely to be deplatformed, is likely to be deplatformed everywhere . I've seen a screenshot recently of Parler's hardware requirements (when searching new vendors) and it'…

That's about 250 bare metal 64-core servers. You can get that elsewhere, and keep in mind per-core performance on bare metal is going to be higher than you get per-core on shared tenant VMs in the cloud (for several reasons). Those bandwidth needs would constrain you only to larger scale bare metal providers though, which would leave you with fewer options.

The problem sounds like it would have been database sync between locations, which is a major issue in multi-cloud. Most replicated databases are pretty chatty.

You're right though about deplatforming, and the problem is if you are providing a safe haven for a bunch of Nazis like Parler is you are going to be constantly DDOSed. That means you need a lot of DDOS protection, and high end DDOS protection is a significantly smaller market with fewer players than just raw rack-em-and-stack-em hosting.

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

#189

Post by fatsdomino001 » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:48 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…

What is the evidence that is convincing you that "we've now done the experiment [of free speech] in a big way and the results seem overwhelmingly negative"?

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

#190

Post by Analemma_ » Mon, Jan 18, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

bluescrn wrote: post #156

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…

Is the speech really the problem, or the echo chambers within which it is spoken? The marketplace of ideas can't really function if people are only ever presented with a carefully tailored safe/comfortable subset of ideas.

But what’s the solution then? “We are going to forcibly expose you to speech you’d rather not see, for the greater good” is no less dystopian than just banning people.