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Parler CEO says he was fired by board

reuters.com

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Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#131

Post by wmf »

dilyevsky wrote: post #122
wmf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proper planning would have been what, coloing hundreds of servers worth millions of dollars as a DR plan? And having no guarantee that the colo provider wouldn't also deplatform them?

How much do you think their aws bill was per month for hundreds of servers? Their traffic bill alone was probably worth it already. Don’t contract this work to ibm or deloitte or something and you’ll be fine

I'm not talking about cost. I'm saying that surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#132

Post by high_density »

jamesponddotco wrote: post #50
klodolph wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a backup plan for getting kicked off AWS, supposedly, but the backup plan terminated their relationship with Parler before AWS did. I can imagine Parler also might have some problems attracting the kind of talent needed to run a site like that.

> They had a backup plan for getting kicked off AWS, supposedly. As the saying goes, "one backup is zero backups."

is this induction, but in opposite direction?

N+1 backup is N backup

1 backup is 0 backup

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#133

Post by mansion7 »

riffic wrote: post #128
skynet-9000 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does deeply believe in and care about free speech (from all parties), I could not be in deeper agreement with you. (for non-native English speakers: I fully agree). Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stun…

> Parler should not have been de-platformed You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP. Otherwise, you can get yeeted.

Twitter uses AWS like Parler did.

We've seen many, many calls to assassinate the previous president stand on Twitter, for years. We've seen actual calls for purges, political violence, and mass execution of Trump supporters on Twitter, also for years. We've seen planning of Antifa rioting, including how to hide oneself from police, raise money for the culprits, destroy property, create flammable materials for the purpose of arson, etc.

This appears to be selective enforcement.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#134

Post by manquer »

lettergram wrote: post #82
pocw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, it's almost like no provider in America is cool with your platform being used to plan an insurrection. Or open calls for violence against and murder of elected officials.

Parler didn’t even have an events section, it was also fairly difficult to discover content and from what I saw very corporate-like (ie moderated well, mundane posts, etc). Twitter or Facebook on the other hand, ive seen people call out to riot and burn down cities. Literally, there was a Facebook event to riot in my town (person who planned it was arrested). It led to millions in damages, and I feared for my life. I…

Apart from the lobbying power of Facebook Twitter size company, it is pretty hard to deplatform them.

On a purely technical level Facebook runs their own infra. They would be hard to deplatform. The only people who are probably capable of doing that is the l3 type service providers. Even there Facebook , google own investments in undersea cables.

Also the size of their deal value to the vendor makes a huge difference. Amazon's revenue impact from parler would not even be a rounding number in their annual report. The impact of loosing fb for many vendors could kill them .

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#135

Post by skynet-9000 »

riffic wrote: post #128
skynet-9000 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does deeply believe in and care about free speech (from all parties), I could not be in deeper agreement with you. (for non-native English speakers: I fully agree). Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stun…

> Parler should not have been de-platformed You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP. Otherwise, you can get yeeted.

> You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP.

AWS AUP: "You may not use.. or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use"

"Offensive"? That word is so vague as to be meaningless.

This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know will offend someone. Et viola: you just killed a company.

It's a lot cheaper and easier (and less likely to involve swat teams) than hiring some sketchy DDoS outfit.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#136

Post by echelon »

pocw wrote: post #54
echelon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you should build for bare metal. It's fine to use k8s and containers, but don't lock yourself into Lambda, SQS, etc. You should be able to spin up anywhere.

That works until your colo provider tells you to take a walk. Your landlord evicts you from warehouse where you host your backup datacenter space, your ISP cuts you off. It's almost like everybody drew the line at openly planning insurrection. Maybe they could have tried not doing that?

You're making a value judgment when my argument is simply about keeping your website alive in the face of powers that wish to control or censor you.

Imagine hypothetically that you have website about the plight of the Uyghurs and Amazon was a Chinese business.

Amazon's behavior revealed they are not above terminating service for businesses. I can imagine a world where they become emboldened and attempt to deny service to parties they don't like.

Perhaps you're hosted on AwS and they make an offer to acquire your business. Can they shut you off or raise your prices if you reject their offer? Can they escape antitrust scrutiny and use this as a strategy to low ball you?

I view the response to Parler as an operational test of the death star.

We have less and less power the larger these giants become.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#137

Post by [deleted] »

riffic wrote: post #128
skynet-9000 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does deeply believe in and care about free speech (from all parties), I could not be in deeper agreement with you. (for non-native English speakers: I fully agree). Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stun…

> Parler should not have been de-platformed You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP. Otherwise, you can get yeeted.

[deleted]

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#138

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

babelfish wrote: post #29
aahortwwy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event. That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.

Most Silicon Valley darlings run disaster recovery exercises simulating setting up a datacenter from scratch in less than 24 hours (not that Parler should be compared to any of these companies, clearly)

I think you're overestimating the ability of many "Silicon Valley darlings" to recover from what happened to Parler. First, at least these days, most Silicon Valley darlings are pretty heavily tied to whatever cloud service that hosts them, so disaster recovery exercises mean spinning up another project in a different AWS availability zone, not moving from AWS to GCP or whatever.

Granted, given Parler's mantra they should have known they would be particularly vulnerable to getting kicked off AWS, but I'm highly skeptical that many Silicon Valley darlings (and I've worked at some) would have been able to spin up something quickly on a completely new hosting platform.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#139

Post by judge2020 »

skynet-9000 wrote: post #135
riffic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parler should not have been de-platformed You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP. Otherwise, you can get yeeted.

> You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP. AWS AUP: "You may not use.. or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use" "Offensive"? That word is so vague as to be meaningless. This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know…

AWS provided multiple times over evidence of violent content that was against their policies and asked Parler to step up moderation, which didn't happen.

AWS arguments:

https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349200096345296897?s=20

> Parler itself has admitted it has a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violates its (minimal) community standards that it had not yet reviewed

https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349203942614335488?s=20

> When I said Amazon cited many vile and violent examples of posts that it flagged for Parler, I meant it. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErlVjN7U0AEr1gt?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErlVjPBVEAEs9sg?format=jpg&name=...

https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349202898459115520?s=20

> Such a requirement also poses a risk to Amazon itself, with posts calling for others to "burn down Amazon delivery trucks" until they "reverse course."

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#140

Post by 22c »

newacct583 wrote: post #112
motohagiography wrote: post #62

Odd dynamic there as unfortunately, standing on principle means getting martyred, and the quote from the former CEO of, “Over the past few months, I’ve met constant resistance to my product vision, my strong belief in free speech and my view of how the Parler site should be managed” is not CEO level strategic. His investors and board hired him to win, not to pick a principled hill to die on. Martyrs are cheap and nob…

> our societies need tools that can survive popular histrionics. Getting owned by some sanctimonious prick at Amazon is not pro level play. Seems like banning communities that led directly to an insurrection in congress should be one of those tools, no? I mean, that part was a bit more than just "histrionics" by "sanctimonious pricks". I know you won't buy this because of the environment that we find ourselves in, bu…

A large amount of insurrection planning was performed in Facebook groups.

If you're going to apply a standard, at least apply it fairly.

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