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70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

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Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per Wikipedia, the count of active users was 4M. And that's about right for the community of active "MAGA head" republicans in question. A lot of the horror and cognitive dissonance of this moment is that the mob the President aimed at Congress on Wednesday was not a weird or fringe group. They were just his fans. Look at the crowd, along with the armored people smashing windows and beating cops were smiling grandpar…

And a lot of insincere attempts to address extremism look like "censoring Republicans".

Republicans have a perfectly good voice on conventional social media.

No one's censoring people on social media for quoting William F. Buckley, but for actively planning and encouraging a violent insurrection.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#322
post #283
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because WikiLeaks is very diligent in scrubbing sensitive private information from leaks.

Didn't WikiLeaks publish the decryption key for the Manning leaks and all the unredacted messages got into the wild?

IIRC, that was the Guardian, who was provided the key in trust in order to help publish the data.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#323
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if it the data was government / private sector data, not citizen messages

What exactly the difference between "private sector data" and "citizen messages"? Wikileaks published a ton of data from personal sources. Famously, the Podesta leak was from a private account and absolutely contained personal communication (about, again famously, a favored pizza joint).

I think where most people would reasonably draw the line is in the level of political power a person has over matters which impact the public interest. While I personally disagree with the leaking of Podesta's emails, the amount of political power and relevance he has makes him somewhat of a public figure. He is not in anyway comparable to your average person.

I do see a public good in providing this data to law enforcement, so that they can obtain evidence to build a case against the people who were involved. I however can not see any public good in potentially exposing random people to identity theft and criminal harassment for simply registering an account on a website.

While people could make the argument that the site has culpability for what happened so this data must be exposed, to hold that position in good faith you would then also have to say that a leak of Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube users is also justifiable. Seeing as those platforms have held worse calls for violence than any other platforms.

Parler isn't a website where all the users who register are guilty of espousing harmful rhetoric. I would agree that there are some websites that exist like Stormfront where that would definitely be the case, but ultimately Parler is simply an alternative social media site with more lax moderation than Twitter. That lax moderation unfortunately will attract a large number of bad actors who have been banned from other sites. However this still doesn't change that this site isn't anything but a social media site with a different philosophical opinion on how moderated speech on their platform should be. Which means a lot of innocent people with no political power will be harmed.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikileaks leaked John Podesta's emails, including such criminal activity as his recipe for risotto.

And that was widely criticized as improper behavior. Parler is not good, but stealing and publishing this information is also not traditionally ethical.

At this point, we've become so polarized that good and bad as abstract principles are irrelevant. What's good is what's bad for the "other side".

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#325
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not gonna lie: I find it very difficult to be upset by this when the site was a haven for people who want to mass executions for people like me. For me, the world is a little more complex than "privacy at all costs." It's hard to decide where to draw the line.

Talk about hyperbole. In no way did even 1% of the population on Parler want mass executions for people like you.

I don't know what people think, we can't read their minds. All I know is if you wanted to find people who want mass executions in the US, Parler would be a safe place to find them, based on what we do know about them.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#326
post #22

When I read that the FBI was asking for help in identifying people at the capital on January 6th I didn’t think someone would actually help.

If you think that's funny, someone made a post asking for people's names, locations and list of crimes so that they could be pardoned and people obliged. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/10/social-medi...

The low hanging fruit of social engineering.

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impressions is that everyone whinging about privacy with regards to giving seditionists and terrorists a space to coordinate and share misinformation after the biggest attack on the US since 9/11 are just being contrarian or are absolutist to a fault in their libertarian ideals (which I mostly share). People minimizing this attack and not treating it like a legitimate 9/11 scale crisis for the US are not consideri…

> the biggest attack on the US since 9/11 This is an absolutely disgusting and disgraceful thing to say.

If the statement is false, it should be easy to come up with a counter-example...?

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#328
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising amount of insecure code in the wild; and naive engineers who are willingly ignorant in their security practices. I'd assume that Parler's engineers motivations had more to do with politics than providing a secure platform for protecting dissidents under duress. (Or, if we look at the history of a recent major war, the mediocre engineers working for the other side thought they were the good guys.)

>and naive engineers who are willingly ignorant in their security practices. Fairly sure we could replace algorithm and data structure whiteboard interviews with security interviews and we'd all be better off

I'm all in favor of getting rid of the leetcode interviews, but it's not an either-or one, coding competency is still the primary concern, security a secondary one.

And I don't think an individual developer would have prevented this; this is an issue with the general security and monitoring policies at Parler. I mean how could they create millions of admin accounts and extract 70 TB of data without any alarm bells, flood control and circuit breakers engaging?

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#329
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally download Reddit and Twitter archives anytime you want.

No, you can't. There are private tweets, profiles, DMs and deleted messages/posts/tweets and for sure the profile data. This isn't a scrape of the site using a regular account, this is cracking admin accounts, creating their own admin accounts and using it to scrape private accounts, DMs, user information, and deleted content.

https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/parler-grab

The details in the post are generally false - nowhere in this grabber (which is what was used to download the 70TB (or 56tb based on the tracker[0]) are admin credentials used to bypass access controls. There were no ACLs on the video and picture files, so anyone could wget them without issue.

0: https://tracker.archiveteam.org/parler/

Re: 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers

#330
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re referring to world war 2, axis engineers were in no way “mediocre”.

Systems can be complicated and even the smallest detail can be dangerously revealing to a scrutinizing eye. "Allied intelligence noticed each captured tank had a unique serial number. With careful observation, the Allies were able to determine the serial numbers had a pattern denoting the order of tank production. Using this data, the Allies created a mathematical model to determine the rate of German tank production…

Nice, I hadn't heard that one. I did hear that they always ended encoded messages with "heil hitler", giving the decoders a solid lead and verification that the key used was correct.

On that note, using UUIDs would be more 'secure' than auto incremented numbers, wouldn't it? I don't like how much space they take up in my URLs though.

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