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Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

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Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#111
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t mind when platforms get rid of spam, child porn, normal porn, doxxing, death threats, ISIS recruitment videos or assassination contracts, then guess what: censorship has value to you, too.

Maybe misogynistic metal and rap music too? Maybe violent music and movies and video games... Why stop, we’re on a roll Very likely the World would be a better place if we only had happy music, happy movies, happy art. No angry art. No angry expression.

So to be clear, you're opposed to platforms removing any of those things? Child pornography and spam should remain up? If someone doxxes you, platforms should just leave it?

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#112
post #25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use a web app? I don’t have the Twitter app installed because the web app does everything I need.

They have a Progressive Web App, which should be able to be loaded up and a home screen shortcut just like any app would. But it's not straight forward for Android (Parler users were trying to explain how to do it to each other with hilarious results), and I believe on Apple it can't be done. There have been called for regulating how Apple and Google protect their app stores after Parler was pulled, but I don't think…

iOS has had PWA support for longer than Android has (or at least "add to home screen", additional configuration via a manifest came much later).

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#113
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Parler did not realize that being aligned with conservatism was grounds for deplatforming. I am sure they will learn as will the whole world.

Fortunately being aligned with conservatism isn't grounds for deplatforming, as can be seen by the literal millions of conservatives on twitter who haven't been deplatformed. It's easy: you have a discussion about your political beliefs without telling the other person you're going to murder them for disagreeing with you.

Seriously. I laugh whenever someone cries about widespread censorship of the right. The most lucrative media career right now is to be an outspoken conservative. There are probably thousands of such pundits/journalists/analysts/bloggers/podcast hosts/commentators on pretty much every medium, and they all seem to be talking non-stop.

Similar to how every mainstream comedian is persecuted and telling "unfiltered" jokes that they supposedly aren't allowed to anymore, and they'll totally get into trouble for it later.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#114
post #65

Parler was, at the end of the day, a somewhat amateurish Twitter clone whose essential growth hack was that they decided to serve as a kind of ban evasion mechanism for Twitter. They had virtually no organic growth of their own, they worked by accepting the banned castoffs from another service and promising not to do any moderation. And then we had a historical incident of political violence perpetrated by the same d…

> Parler was, at the end of the day, a somewhat amateurish Twitter clone whose essential growth hack was that they decided to serve as a kind of ban evasion mechanism for Twitter. The growth hack was to be funded by the Mercer family (Cambridge Analytica, Brexit) to the tune of a few million a year to help promote their agenda.

This is really interesting. Where can I learn more about this?

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#115

I got the sense while crawling data from their API that the engineering quality is poor at Parler. Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps, certain fields were duplicated for no reason (e.g. every object would have an identical "id" and "_id" key), counts of impressions/comments/etc would be the display strings rather than raw numbers (so…

Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps Such a representation naturally avoids the Y2K38 problem, and could go beyond Y10K. It's traditional in Windows and DOS (neither of which have the Y2K38 problem) to store timestamps as a structure of fields. The other things you noted I agree with, however.

Well, assuming they're storing the strings as ASCII, that's 98 bits - the y2k38 problem is for 32 bit integers, so a 64 bit integer would be way, way more than needed for human needs for foreseeable generations.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#116
post #30

In contrast, Gab actually owns their own ASN and announces their own routes[1]. Much harder to deplatform. I'd expect no less from a YC alum! [1] https://bgp.he.net/AS42651

They're only advertising to one peer. It's possible they have other peering arrangements in place they're not advertising to. Or maybe they're single homed. They also only have a single IPv4 /24 from ARIN. No IPv6. Not terribly robust or impressive. I've never used Gab or looked at their infrastructure before. A quick look shows they're behind Cloudflare. No clue where they're actually hosted or what the infra looks…

I know Gab uses this domain registrar and hosting company called Epik but no clue how exactly how much of Gab's infra is handled by Epik.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_(company)

https://www.epik.com

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#117

Also embarrassing: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vqew/the-hacker-who-archiv... > donk_enby had originally intended to grab data only from the day of the Capitol takeover, but found that the poor construction and security of Parler allowed her to capture, essentially, the entire website. That ended up being 56.7 terabytes of data, which included every public post on Parler, 412 million files in all—including 150 m…

> GPS coordinates—unlike most social media sites, Parler does not strip metadata from media its users upload, which, crucially, could be useful for law enforcement

OH SHI-

This is a colossal mess up, on epic proportions.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#118

I got the sense while crawling data from their API that the engineering quality is poor at Parler. Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps, certain fields were duplicated for no reason (e.g. every object would have an identical "id" and "_id" key), counts of impressions/comments/etc would be the display strings rather than raw numbers (so…

Of all the things to criticise Parler's tech folks over, using ISO8601 (minus the non-digit characters) shouldn't be one.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#119
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why the downvotes. This essentially is the same as my take. This is the inevitable result of pushing your brand as "no content moderation" but not actually having any skills or plans on what to do when it eventually caught up with them. Anyone familiar with 4chan knows that some of the earliest content that was banned on the platform include childporn and organizing raids/doxxing. If you read the terms of se…

This is factually false. There was moderation, there were terms of service and they banned appeals to violence from their site. The glee with which so many in tech are celebrating was essentially an attempt at corporate murder, on ideological grounds, is revolting.

You can read Amazon's entire response to their sham lawsuit which debunks every one of these theories.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#120

I got the sense while crawling data from their API that the engineering quality is poor at Parler. Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps, certain fields were duplicated for no reason (e.g. every object would have an identical "id" and "_id" key), counts of impressions/comments/etc would be the display strings rather than raw numbers (so…

Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps Such a representation naturally avoids the Y2K38 problem, and could go beyond Y10K. It's traditional in Windows and DOS (neither of which have the Y2K38 problem) to store timestamps as a structure of fields. The other things you noted I agree with, however.

You can also instantly read them which makes troubleshooting easier. I mean sure, if your shit is too slow maybe switch to less text in release mode but YAGNI.
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