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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

#111

Post by im3w1l »

probably_wrong wrote: post #110
im3w1l wrote: post #106

I'm picking up a weird sentiment from these articles about parler. Something like... shoving someone so they fall and break their teeth, and then trying to blame them and saying, "it's your own fault for having such poor balance". A coping strategy for guilt? I just meant to harm you a little bit ?

I think your analogy breaks because it represents the people "shoving" Parler and the people talking about this afterwards as one, which is not the case. A better analogy would be: Parler likes to hang out with the school bully, even though everyone told them not to. One day, the bully shoved Parker and it broke it's teeth. Should the bully's conduct have been allowed? Almost certainly not, and that's a problem. But…

They are not the same people, but are they defending "their side"?

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

#112

Post by rualca »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #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 th…

> AWS is just a bunch of APIs

This is a gross oversimplification of what AWS is. For starters, no one pays for AWS for the APIs. People do pay AWS for the on-demand infrastructure, and the global network of datacenters, which makes it trivial to setup a highly-availiable web application distributed globally. AWS allows you to put your highly-availablr global application together by click-click-clicking on dashboards, run AWS-specific infrastructure-as-code scripts, or run third-party scripts like Pulumi. In the process, APIs don't play any role in the decision process.

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

#113

Post by rualca »

nacs wrote: post #74
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #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 th…

Yep, the amount of incompetence in Parler's case is just mind-boggling. Their failure to make it cloud agnostic being 1 (even though they claimed before they went down that their app could run without AWS without issue). Their failure to be incapable (still) to get it running again on non-cloud hardware.. And of course their inability to, as you suggest, move the frontend routing to a CDN/Cloudflare/DDosguard type se…

> Yep, the amount of incompetence in Parler's case is just mind-boggling.

Parler's case has zero to do with incompetence, and it boggles the mind of how suddenly putting together web apps with bare metal servers is somehow depicted as normal or usual or basic competency skills. It isn't. At all.

The majority of the world's web apps are hosted by one of the four major cloud providers. AWS alone hosts about 1/3 of the world's websites. The only reason anyone ever had to move away from AWS ever was due to their high prices, and even then the decision was always to move to another major player.

Hell, whenever I point out that there are bare ones cloud service providers which are far cheaper.than AWS, such as Hetzner, I'm faced with at best an industrial dose of skepticism.

Let's face it: up until now there wasn't any reason at all to even consider hosting your startup app on a non-major cloud provider. At all. In fact, it's tremendously hard to argue using anything beyond them. You need scale on-demand, high-availability, and reliability. You do not get any of that by even picking most of the non-major cloud providers, let alone running bare metal servers.

Post-facto accusations of incompetence are not justifiable, specially when criticising the undisputed go-to rule that driver over half of the world's websites.

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #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 th…

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by devwastaken »

"I'm eager to give big social media sites like Facebook and Twitter a run for their money."

Hosting servers isn't the hard part, and it isnt the same as running a social media platform. This blog is riddled with neivete and a misuse of the word "fear" to get clicks. Don't even get me started on trying to use the "they didn't come for me" quote when relating to online posts. Government != Private companies

If you want to compete you will require moderation, period. Illigal and disturbing content will have to be removed and sectioned off from your users. Or do really you want the average user seeing a trending video of gore and targeted harassment of people? Even 4chan moderates.

You will have to serve hundreds of petabytes of image and video data - you will have to use cloudflare or some other cache mechanism like everybody else. Cloudflare was the reason 4chan was kept alive btw.

You need lawyers on retainer that understand law pertaining to your business. If not then you're left open to civil liabilities anyone can exploit.

You need money. You will require algorithms for promotion of content which requires user tracking which requires databases that contains peoples habitual information.

You've now created facebook and twitter or you're running on investor money. Eventually you will have to sell out your users.

People forget that the "big social media" all came from the same small places when it was a lot harder to do ( do you know how much more expensive bandwidth used to be?). The difference is they got popular and smelled the money. It takes a very special community to not do the same.

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

#116

Post by devwastaken »

kevan wrote: post #42
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…

Make a dark web[1] site? Basically make it impossible to link what you're doing to who your infra providers/internet connections are. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_web

Tor is secure, but not absolutely anonymous. If the entry relay and exit node are controlled by the same party then they know where you came from and where you're going.

Given anyone can do such nodes and it's relatively inexpensive to get gigabit lines nowadays - it's no doubt a good number of the nodes are owned by various three letter agencies.

Bandwidth isn't expensive on taxpayer dollars, but it is expensive for individuals.

Also because a lot of relays go outside the U.S. the metadata can be collected and stored at will.

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

#117

Post by probably_wrong »

im3w1l wrote: post #111
probably_wrong wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your analogy breaks because it represents the people "shoving" Parler and the people talking about this afterwards as one, which is not the case. A better analogy would be: Parler likes to hang out with the school bully, even though everyone told them not to. One day, the bully shoved Parker and it broke it's teeth. Should the bully's conduct have been allowed? Almost certainly not, and that's a problem. But…

They are not the same people, but are they defending "their side"?

I don't think people are defending Amazon's side. Instead they are (somewhat reluctantly) admiting that what Amazon did is legal, which is not the same.

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

#118

Post by devwastaken »

Balgair wrote: post #75
542458 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched my personal website to a Raspberry Pi 4 in my basement a while ago, with cloudflare caching and roll-your-own DDNS - I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how easy the whole thing was to do (although my requirements are far from exotic).

Any good resources to share?

Not the poster but I assume an easy setup is simply ubuntu server, nginx, get a domain and put it on cloudflare free plan, setup a script that updates your home IP to cloudflare dns records. Then do letsencrypt for the https cert, setup automatic renewal, and you're probably good.

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

#119

Post by tpetry »

whatthesmack wrote: post #86
wging wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS publishes which IPs it owns, so scrubbing headers is not enough for secrecy. (Not that doing something that relies on secrecy is a smart plan for a business, anyway.) https://isitonaws.com/

I think you can bring your own public IP assignments to AWS. Wouldn't that do the trick? I mean, there's always tracerouting, I suppose.

You can‘t transfer single ips to aws, only complete networks. And then this networks is limited to a single region.

So it sounds easy, but is only usefull for companies with multiple networks. But even then i guess aws is publishing that they handle your networks.

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

#120

Post by helsinkiandrew »

rbanffy wrote: post #32
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #14

I’m not sure running their own hardware and relying on an ISP or colocationg at a datacentre would help Parler compared with renting services/VMs from someone like Amazon. Just about all ISP have terms and conditions that prohibit use that they find offensive. Data Foundry, mentioned in the article, acceptable use policy is below and I’m sure could be used to kick out Parler https://www.datafoundry.com/legal/aup

It's possible to hide one's presence from the datacenter by a shell company and a CDN.

Ultimately you can't hide IP addresses - an app or website will be making requests to or served from an IP address, which is physically traceable to the IP/data center.

Then either a subpoena or publicity against the ISP will force them to do disclose who the customer is and/or remove them.

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