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

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

#701

Post by erichocean »

snowwrestler wrote: post #656
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…

People have to understand that this is what free speech actually looks like. Some people want to say some things, and other people don’t want to say them, so the latter choose not to help the former. In this case, the people running Amazon decided not to help the people running Parler anymore. And it is decentralized. No central authority told Amazon to drop Parler; Amazon decided on their own. I think a lot of young…

> And it is decentralized. No central authority told Amazon to drop Parler; Amazon decided on their own.

Actually, Amazon didn't decide on their own—which is why none of us are surprised by their "decision". It was made for them, somewhere else. But where? By who? How?

You'd think on a site supposedly interested in computer science that people would be aware that distributed consensus is a thing. You don't need a literal monarch (or a conspiracy—same thing), there are many ways to achieve consensus in a distributed fashion that are extremely robust.

In fact, distributed consensus (as everyone here already knows) is substantially more robust overall. (Cockroach is more robust than Postgres, etc.) With a monarch, you can simply replace them—it's no harder than swapping in a new CEO. But with distributed consensus, the entire apparatus has to be torn down simultaneously. Yikes!

So ask yourself, what institutions are involved in forming consensus in the US today? Are they government, private, or both? Are they democratic or oligarchic? Etc. We know it can be done, the only question is: where are the nodes? How do they communicate? What's the protocol used? Etc.

The US today runs a distributed consensus algorithm that made Amazon's decision about Parler for them, i.e. the values and decisions made by that consensus filter down to supposedly "independent" businesses like Amazon, who implement them. And if Amazon disobeys that consensus, everyone else in the system (especially the press) will gang up on them until they do….

tl;dr There's nothing independent about what Amazon did, distributed political decision making in the US decided their actions for them.

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

#702

Post by grecy »

paxys wrote: post #691
noncoml wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suggestion that governments shouldn't rely on third-parties for their infra, didn't go down well with HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25639520

For a valid reason. The government isn't a tech company or an infrastructure provider. You wouldn't ask the government to build their own roads or bridges, so like everything else software and services need to be contracted out as well. Of course that doesn't mean they should use AWS by default, but asking every single government agency to build their own data centers and CDNs is foolish.

> You wouldn't ask the government to build their own roads or bridges

Bad analogy, because we're not talking about the building of bridges (software), we're talking about where they are built.

In your example, the government surely wouldn't pay to have a bridge built on private property where access could be rescinded immediately if the land owner was so inclined.

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

#703

Post by Karunamon »

tw04 wrote: post #677
imgabe wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some members of the mob were actively looking to kill the people who were 2nd and 3rd in line for the presidency. Let's not pretend that there was zero danger to democracy. Do you realize that numerous times throughout history people have successfully killed the actual president and it didn't end democracy? What these people did was a serious crime and it should absolutely be prosecuted to the full extent of the la…

>Do you realize that numerous times throughout history people have successfully killed the actual president and it didn't end democracy? How many times in the history of the US, has the president asked his supporters to bring violence against his political opponents? >What these people did was a serious crime and it should absolutely be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but no it was never going to destroy th…

>the president asked his supporters to bring violence against his political opponents

This did not happen. Trump asked his supporters to march on the capitol, and then when shit got out of hand, he asked them to go home. Anything else regarding his words is a "reading between the lines" that's going to involve a lot of loaded, partisan-biased, and worst of all unfalsifiable claims.

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

#704

Post by [deleted] »

mistermann wrote: post #604
jacquesm wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy is a master troll, check his comment history. That's his whole shtick, and then he'll respond with wall-after-wall of text.

I notice you are never able to defend your confident, evidence-free assertions Mr. Jaquesm, with anything other than rhetoric and insults. If I am so dumb, and you are so smart, why do you never humiliate me? Or, you could even embarrass me right now, at least for fun. Go find our last interaction, and post a link to it right here underneath my comment. I have nothing to hide whatsoever, if I was a dummy in our past…

[deleted]

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

#705

Post by mcguire »

neartheplain wrote: post #251
mcguire wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" She held “seminars” in which she presented her view that Muhammad was indeed a child molester. Dominant Islamic traditions hold that Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, was 6 at the time of their marriage and 9 at its consummation. Muhammad was in his early 50s. The Austrian woman repeated these claims, and the Austrian court ruled that she had to pay 480 euros or spend 60 days in the slammer. The ECHR ruled that Austria…

There should be nothing illegal about “attacking” a religion with words, all the moreso if those words are factually accurate.

Going out of your way to piss other people off is a poor idea.

You may feel that it should be legal (at least until it affects you). Other people may feel otherwise.

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

#706

Post by lostlogin »

tjr225 wrote: post #557
Lucasoato wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your idea is honorable, but do governments have the know-how to do it? It's not only about costs and responsibility, I don't think this could be feasible in most countries, maybe only in China and US.

If they paid better, sure they could. That would require more taxes though.

Would it though?

Compare other hard problems and how they have been handled. Healthcare comes to mind immediately.

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

#707

Post by JamesBarney »

sjwright wrote: post #574
rayiner wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve got one of the most educated populations in the world. Europe is only recently catching up to is in e.g. the percentage of people with college degrees.

College degrees are not a relevant metric. What percentage of the population are being taught fundamental critical thinking skills? How many are taught how to evaluate the quality of data and the quality of sources? How many people have a good grounding of statistics? Or civics? Or logical fallacies? How many people can describe the scientific method? I don't have many vivid memories of my primary school education bu…

Very few people are being taught this anywhere. Even M.D.s (some of the most intelligent and educated among us) have so little statistical knowledge they can barely reason about novel type 1 versus type 2 errors.

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

#708

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #691
noncoml wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suggestion that governments shouldn't rely on third-parties for their infra, didn't go down well with HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25639520

For a valid reason. The government isn't a tech company or an infrastructure provider. You wouldn't ask the government to build their own roads or bridges, so like everything else software and services need to be contracted out as well. Of course that doesn't mean they should use AWS by default, but asking every single government agency to build their own data centers and CDNs is foolish.

[deleted]

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

#709

Post by zerotolerance »

Oh please. If it weren't tech, then it'd be the ISPs, telcoms, etc. And don't forget the ridiculous platform power of the banking, financial, and payments industry. This would have gone down similarly on bare metal in a colo because... Trump and Co rolled out SESTA and FOSTA, along with several other content provider protections that make content like Parlor a liability for deeper platforms. Don't for a second think that they were kicked off because the companies somehow objected to providing the service. They only object to taking liability for providing services to an unmoderated communication platform.

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

#710

Post by nyolfen »

XorNot wrote: post #627
smichel17 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we get some number or range for "lots of"? I imagine those words mean wildly different things (1-2 orders of magnitude) to different people.

I mean pipe bombs were found at both political party headquarters, so how many bombs is enough to be serious?

puerto rican nationalists stormed the capitol and shot congressmen in 1954; leftists literally bombed the senate chamber in 1983; we somehow managed to persist without restricting civil liberties both times. have you ever even heard of these events? i would wager most of us haven't. this time though, they had a 10,000 page anti-terror bill waiting in the wings and ready to push through, a dark reminder of the patriot act and the post-9/11 expansion of the security state. and just like telecoms and media companies after 9/11, the corporations line up to kiss the ring.
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