Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down • Hacker News Board

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#441

Post by ashtonkem » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:07 AM UTC

michaelmior wrote: post #105

snoshy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seemed apparent right when the case was filed that Parler didn't have a leg to stand on. It was partly a play for publicity that plays well into their customer demographics, and a dying gasp of trying to seek some kind of injunctive help from the administration, no matter how impossible it seemed. Judging by how weak their infrastructure was in the first place, getting any kind of resilient hosting in place after…

I know effectively zero about Parler's infrastructure, but I would say it's not that uncommon to build a product tied specifically to AWS. What really surprised me though is that it took them days to get even a static homepage up.

Parler appears to have had an inefficient architecture that required an absurd amount of compute power to run compared to their customer base. Apparently they were running one hundred metal instances for their database alone; speculation on Twitter was that they’re struggling to find someone who can give them that much capacity in a hurry.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#442

Post by snoshy » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:08 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #331

snoshy wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because their workloads haven't stabilized at any meaningful threshold. You can only justify the capital expenditure if you know you can amortize it over time. Hard to do for a startup whose existence is being threatened. They are also a political hot potato, and would need the colo provider to agree to take them on and withstand the public pressure, which I doubt most would want.

Their proposed current hardware costs are a tiny capital outlay. Future current hardware costs are a tiny capital outlay. They will pay far more for bandwidth than they ever will for hardware.

I don't necessarily disagree with the hardware capex vs bandwidth tradeoff, but I don't think either of us are aware of their balance sheet to reasonably claim if this is an insurmountable cost for the business today or not. Paying for several thousand servers, getting them up and running, and tuning them isn't exactly a trivial effort... and then you have to deal with bandwidth.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#443

Post by alexeldeib » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #137

mercurialshark wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech attorney here (with no relation to this specific matter). I wouldn't say they don't have a leg to stand on. I think it will prove to be very interesting.

Not an attorney, but I've read all the briefs in the case (you can too at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a... ). Count 1 (antitrust) fails because you need to actually allege a conspiracy, not just say "Twitter is also a customer of AWS!" I mean, I immediately realized it was deficient on their initial brief, because they didn't even back up enough evidence to satisfy their own citations ,…

> Ignoring the very next paragraph that says AWS can terminate with no notice. Their own response to that point in the reply brief was pitiful.

This is the part I don't understand. Did they really think no one would notice it?

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#444

Post by ashtonkem » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

snoshy wrote: post #264

WJW wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are... rather onerous HW requirements. Do you really need 20k cores to run a small-medium size social network? Asking because I have personal running a 40-50 million monthly users file sharing site on less than a tenth of that and most of it was done with Rails (itself not the most minimalist of frameworks).

Yeah, those requirements are quite steep for what Parler does. That being said, it is actually incredibly hard to scale any product that sees a sudden massive influx of users, media attention, and conflict like this. I mean this from a purely technical standpoint. If your customer base is doubling every few weeks, that's simply not enough time to hire more engineers, onboard them, and get their resources focused on o…

At this point, we actually do know how to scale a social media site though, and if you’re making a new one you should anticipate such exponential growth.

It seems they did not set a sufficient foundation for such a possibility, and got caught unprepared.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#445

Post by godmode2019 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

jedimastert wrote: post #440

godmode2019 wrote: post #434

A YouTube lawyer does a pretty good break down of the case. Parlers suit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HFp5E7akgy8 Amazon response: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GB06JtDbtvU

I don't know enough about law to be able to tell if it's being presented with or without a bias, but that intro in the first link did not give me hope

His content is pretty unbiased , sitting on the fence most of the time, the topics however are geared to his audience.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#446

Post by snoshy » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #444

snoshy wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, those requirements are quite steep for what Parler does. That being said, it is actually incredibly hard to scale any product that sees a sudden massive influx of users, media attention, and conflict like this. I mean this from a purely technical standpoint. If your customer base is doubling every few weeks, that's simply not enough time to hire more engineers, onboard them, and get their resources focused on o…

At this point, we actually do know how to scale a social media site though, and if you’re making a new one you should anticipate such exponential growth. It seems they did not set a sufficient foundation for such a possibility, and got caught unprepared.

For sure. I shared this in another comment earlier, but they literally were using a free trial of Okta [1] to secure prod. This is why all of their user data got leaked. Their code was written to fail open, so if Okta didn't respond for some reason to auth requests, access was granted by default.

[1] https://twitter.com/okta/status/1348191370528256002

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#447

Post by 0x445442 » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

thepace wrote: post #414

throwaway45349 wrote: post #5

As much as I don't like Parler's digital death sentence from Silicon Valley, they should've known this was coming and prepared. It doesn't take a genius to know that such a controversial website is going to get dropped, even if it's just because it makes the webhost look bad. Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand an…

Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure and GCP, are now the de-facto operating systems for web apps and services. Section 230 also provides them immunity from the content that gets hosted in those platforms. I find it unfortunate that we are in this situation where the platform providers are also playing the police. They should stick to being a platform and policing side of this should be left to the law enforcement. What w…

Or Verizon starts deciding what voice conversations are allowed on "their" network.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#448

Post by ashtonkem » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:15 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #331

snoshy wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because their workloads haven't stabilized at any meaningful threshold. You can only justify the capital expenditure if you know you can amortize it over time. Hard to do for a startup whose existence is being threatened. They are also a political hot potato, and would need the colo provider to agree to take them on and withstand the public pressure, which I doubt most would want.

Their proposed current hardware costs are a tiny capital outlay. Future current hardware costs are a tiny capital outlay. They will pay far more for bandwidth than they ever will for hardware.

They probably don’t have the personnel who know how to order, provision, and physically manage that kind of hardware. They’re a small startup, and going with AWS means that they probably don’t have any of the necessary skills to do that.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#449

Post by amanaplanacanal » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:16 AM UTC

ben509 wrote: post #424

throwaway45349 wrote: post #5

As much as I don't like Parler's digital death sentence from Silicon Valley, they should've known this was coming and prepared. It doesn't take a genius to know that such a controversial website is going to get dropped, even if it's just because it makes the webhost look bad. Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand an…

The real problem is that Parler sincerely wanted to start a free speech platform, and this is another data point that the idea, while well intentioned, doesn't work. It's a just-world fallacy: because free speech is a good and just thing, a business model predicated on free speech will be successful. The first trouble is that you are opening the doors to all sorts of extremists. Whether they're far left, far right or…

Did they actually want a free speech platform? I thought they were known for booting lefties off the platform.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#450

Post by duskwuff » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

snoshy wrote: post #446

ashtonkem wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, we actually do know how to scale a social media site though, and if you’re making a new one you should anticipate such exponential growth. It seems they did not set a sufficient foundation for such a possibility, and got caught unprepared.

For sure. I shared this in another comment earlier, but they literally were using a free trial of Okta [1] to secure prod. This is why all of their user data got leaked. Their code was written to fail open, so if Okta didn't respond for some reason to auth requests, access was granted by default. [1] https://twitter.com/okta/status/1348191370528256002

My understanding is that that was a myth. The data which was exfiltrated from Parler was retrieved through their mobile API, which allowed for easy enumeration of content and didn't implement some expected access controls (like blocking access to deleted content).