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Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

blog.alexgleason.me

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Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#51

Post by ClumsyPilot »

TechnoTimeStop wrote: post #35
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power supply and water are utilities. Mobile connectivity and internet are not. Groceries are not. Someone else's speech isn't a protected class, except for speech due to religion. Discrimination based on things that aren't a property of being in a protected class is legal for any non-utility. Personally I'd say that internet service providers should be utilities and regulated as such, but currently they aren't so th…

Authenticity plays a huge role here. Why do we let shit by the metric ton over the firewall attack free liberties and social discourse online? China literally has payed 3 million + people for years to do this, that's two agents for every social group in the free world. Most of the bullshit our western democracies have experienced in the last years online should be archived and studied for the crimes our Russian Chine…

I don't like how it's fashionable to point finger at China/Russia for every possible issue.

We literally have registered political parties in the west that do the exact same thing and the matter was proven in a court of law (Leave EU). They have faced no material consequences.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#52

Post by muststopmyths »

ping_pong wrote: post #31
rhencke wrote: post #4

I grew up in an era where running your own servers was just generally accepted practice. It's been fascinating watching how dramatically that viewpoint has shifted over the years to the point where it is now a novel idea to do so.

I worked at a startup that managed its own bare metal. It was very hard and time consuming. And when things went down it was on you. You needed a really good datacenter partner to make sure that they were on top of things and could drop things at a moment's notice. But you don't know how responsive they will be until you're actually experiencing an outage. The level of convenience that cloud providers give is just or…

I have worked for companies in the past with horrible datacenter partners (one of them did not know that one of the two switches they routed our traffic through was completely dead), so I definitely agree with you on that.

On the flip side, I wonder how much better the support from a cloud provider is if it's an isolated problem and not something that's setting twitter aflame.

If it takes a cloud provider in the order of hours to get me back online, I could probably get the same sort of service from one of the better colos/hosting providers, especially if they were local and I had the ability to make a call to get support.

There are other conveniences to cloud providers of course, but I think I if I could find highly skilled ops people and pay them well, I would run my own servers every time. For the kind of games I've worked on, the money/CPU cost of cloud is ludicrous.

The trick these days is even finding high-level ops people who aren't already working 3-400k jobs for AWS/Azure/GCP

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#53

Post by ClumsyPilot »

TameAntelope wrote: post #38
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it freedom of speech to cut off your power supply and running water if I don't like your face? What about mobile connectivity and internet? Can we refuse to sell you groceries? Can you live without 'using other people's stuff' except like a hermit in a cave?

You can’t live in a society without using other people’s stuff (practically, I’m sure we could come up with examples of ownership concepts being challenged). But living in a society means not upsetting people so badly that they won’t sell you groceries. There’s tons of ways to do that while retaining your ability to speak what’s on your mind, you just have to be thoughtful about how your words effect others, even if…

That argument works if by "upsetting people" we mean actual real people with normal psychology.

But it falls apart when 'people' are multinationals and "upsetting them" means their PR department gets a funny idea. In that case we need a contract that provides more protection than 'we can remove you at any time for any reason'

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#54

Post by swebs »

TameAntelope wrote: post #12

> freedom minded > tech oligarchs ...here we go. I really struggle to understand how some folks didn’t realize they were using other people’s things until recently. Maybe the fact that they weren’t physically in a space was hiding the proverbial threshold crossing activity that takes place a dozen or so times as you travel to twitter.com. It is free speech to kick someone off your platform. Freedom minded individuals…

"There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer"

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#55

Post by sjg007 »

spijdar wrote: post #18
endisneigh wrote: post #8

Does there exist a de-platform proof way of hosting something on the internet? Even if you host your own server on your own premises they could forbid you from using the location, shut off your electricity, etc. Is it possible to host a website entirely on bittorrent? I suppose there's also IPFS but I'm not entirely familiar. Maybe once solar is cheap enough you could launch some sort of array of powered drones into…

"They" in that case would typically be the government (assuming you own your property), which at least in the US would have to (at least nominally) follow more regulations and protocols for restricting your speech, while a private business doesn't really have those same obligations. I'm not sure how ISPs fit into this though, and to what extent they can say "we don't like the content you're serving" and cut your net.…

Even if you had a data center other peers could refuse to peer with you, remove you from DNS etc...

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#56

Post by rvz »

swebs wrote: post #17
endisneigh wrote: post #8

Does there exist a de-platform proof way of hosting something on the internet? Even if you host your own server on your own premises they could forbid you from using the location, shut off your electricity, etc. Is it possible to host a website entirely on bittorrent? I suppose there's also IPFS but I'm not entirely familiar. Maybe once solar is cheap enough you could launch some sort of array of powered drones into…

4chan has survived the wannabe-stasi deplatform mob all these years simply by hosting the servers in the admin's basement.

Like 4chan, Gab also survived the de-platforming witch hunt and are self-hosting almost everything.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#57

Post by njharman »

TameAntelope wrote: post #12

> freedom minded > tech oligarchs ...here we go. I really struggle to understand how some folks didn’t realize they were using other people’s things until recently. Maybe the fact that they weren’t physically in a space was hiding the proverbial threshold crossing activity that takes place a dozen or so times as you travel to twitter.com. It is free speech to kick someone off your platform. Freedom minded individuals…

Rtfa. It says and agrees with the exact straw man you are invoking.

Namely run on your own stuff and not on someone else's platform.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#58

Post by njharman »

wwww4all wrote: post #43
TameAntelope wrote: post #12

> freedom minded > tech oligarchs ...here we go. I really struggle to understand how some folks didn’t realize they were using other people’s things until recently. Maybe the fact that they weren’t physically in a space was hiding the proverbial threshold crossing activity that takes place a dozen or so times as you travel to twitter.com. It is free speech to kick someone off your platform. Freedom minded individuals…

Does Twitter have right to kick someone out for being gay or being Asian or for belonging to some LGBT group? According to your logic, Twitter can do that.

They can. But won't.

Why allowing (socially as in bad PR) any censorship is bad.

Otherwise you get where we are at. What the mainstream deems bad is silenced. What transient outrage seems bad is silenced. What authorities convince the masses is scary gets silenced. Any voice that platform doesn't like and isnt popular enogh gets silenced.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#59

Post by nyx_ »

Lammy wrote: post #24
542458 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to TLS, Netflix and Fast are indistinguishable. All your ISP knows is the IP address you’re talking to. They’d only know that you visited Fast in particular if you were using your ISP’s DNS, which you shouldn’t be using anyways :)

Personally I trust my ISP DNS a hell of a lot more than Google/Cloudflare. Why would I want to give them even more data about me?

I've had ISP DNS servers that redirect NXDOMAIN responses to spammy "search" pages full of sponsored crap and banner ads.

There's always OpenNIC, DNS.watch, or Quad9 if you're after something that isn't operated by a creepy megacorp.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#60

Post by spijdar »

sjg007 wrote: post #55
spijdar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They" in that case would typically be the government (assuming you own your property), which at least in the US would have to (at least nominally) follow more regulations and protocols for restricting your speech, while a private business doesn't really have those same obligations. I'm not sure how ISPs fit into this though, and to what extent they can say "we don't like the content you're serving" and cut your net.…

Even if you had a data center other peers could refuse to peer with you, remove you from DNS etc...

Yeah, it kinda ties back to the question of under what circumstance can an ISP cut you off.

You could at least get around DNS level stuff with a P2P application layer. But if you're cut off at the routing level by everyone then yeah, no go...

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