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

blog.alexgleason.me

61–70 of 141 posts

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

#61
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 wonder how much of this is just the industry maturing/specialising. We don't think it's weird that most people don't mill their own flour when they bake bread, so long as the quality of the flour is good enough we're happy for someone else to do it for us.

In the same way most people/companies don't really need to care what hardware their application runs on, only that it meets some bar of quality/cost that's appropriate for them. If someone else is delivering this then you've removed a small department's worth of overhead/planning from your corporate structure.

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

#62
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it'd be trivial to increase the user's speed to Netflix servers if they've visited Fast.com in the last three minutes or similar?

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 :)

It's indistinguishable from an protocol perspective, not a data analysis perspective. Or to put it more practically, if a large data stream from Netflix lasts more than 10 seconds, it's video.

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

#63
This article is kind of depressing, when did hosting your own server become a lost art?

One of parler’s problems was they didn’t scrub headers which made it very obvious they were using AWS and which AWS services they were using.

AWS is just a bunch of APIs - they could have colo’d their front end or put a bunch of varnish servers in front if it at a colo and nobody would have been the wiser they were using AWS on the backend (assuming their AWS account didn’t have Parler Inc in the payment details). From there getting taken down from one colo would just be an issue of spinning up a front end at another colo. Front that setup with a couple CDNs and now you have layers where you have to coordinate between half a dozen companies to bring the site down completely, meanwhile your data is safe in AWS because nobody knows your using AWS or even if they do it’s hard to pick you out from the millions of other AWS users.

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'

The whole, “they’re faceless greed machines” works both ways, though, doesn’t it? You’ve got to do something pretty universally terrible to have a blood sucking corporation actually turn down your money...

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

#66
post #44

This made me realize that one reason many of us use cloud hosting is that our home internet is lacking, whether through caps or the lack of fiber deployment. It was easy for Congress to railroad the rights of private property owners and cities for 5G but they can’t seem to do it for fiber... Maybe this can get Conservatives to realize that unfettered broadband access lessens the power of the hosts.

The physical network itself evolved away from peer -> peer back to client -> server. With IPv6 I'd hoped we would today be living in a world where I could send my friend the url fe80::1ff:fe23:4567:890a/cat.mov and they could download a video directly from my phone. No matter where my phone happens to be in the world. People could host "micro services" on their personal devices and the whole world could access them. If someone wants to know if I'm free on a date they could connect to my phone's calendar app directly and ask. There are so may possibilities of truly peer to peer applications.

But the network itself prevents this. Bittorrent has to jump though multiple NAT busting hoops to allow two internet users to talk to each other directly. limited IPv4 addresses mean home internet connections have dynamic IP addresses which means no one can realistically host at home. Because no one hosts at home they consume far more than they upload. Because of this the physical network was built with a much higher download bandwidth than upload. It's a vicious cycle that wasn't intentional it just sort of evolved that way.

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

#68

> 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…

Fair point. But I get my electricity, telephone service, water, gas, groceries for entities owned by someone else and I don't have to worry about having any of these services pulled because of what I posted on twitter yesterday. Imagine the phone company telling you that you will no longer recieve service because of something you said on a call.

Some people's livelyhood depend on their google or facebook accounts every bit as much as they depend on telephone service.

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

#69

> 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…

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?

In the US, people can refuse to sell you groceries, and for many people that's pretty impactful. Presumably Amazon also bans people for abuse, but life without Amazon sounds like a huge loss of access.

Under the US Constitution, Christians can also refuse to bake gay cakes, fire gay employees, or evict gay members from positions of leadership.

At the heart of cancellation is the freedom of association; perhaps we should redraw the boundaries on where that freedom begins and ends, but while keeping in mind the balance of affairs.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'

The whole, “they’re faceless greed machines” works both ways, though, doesn’t it? You’ve got to do something pretty universally terrible to have a blood sucking corporation actually turn down your money...

Not really. When a corp has billions in revenue, your $2000 is nothing compared to any possibility of jeopardizing a fraction of their revenue.

Imagine a corp optimizing click through. Any negative news could dampen that and require immediate action.

You have to be perfect or too big to remove.

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