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Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a s…

>attempt to... install an illegitimate government I keep seeing this claim, and it's quite a substantial claim, but I don't see equally substantial evidence to support it. I see evidence of disgruntled LARP'ers forming an angry mob and causing more trouble than anyone would want, but I don't see evidence of an armed rebellion in a sustained firefight or siege, with all the explosions, rubble, chaos, and loss of life…

They literally erected gallows on the grounds of the capitol, they literally marched through the building chanting "hang Mike Pence". The entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy is that Donald Trump is preparing to destroy the deep state and retain power. Spend more than a few minutes browsing around Gab (you can just look at the top posts) and you'll see explicit references to overthrowing the government.

You can absolutely argue that this was a laughable attempt to install an illegitimate government and you can absolutely argue that they have no chance of succeeding, but you can't argue it isn't the intent -- it's the entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy. The laughable nature of their attempt doesn't disprove the intent.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, parlor wasn't even doing a "good enough job". It wasn't doing _anything_. It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy. There really is nothing contentious here, unless you feel that if you know that a group is organizing in your platform with the intent of staging a coup then you're in your right to just let them go about it.

I had an account there for about six months before it went offline. It wasn't a particularly interesting or compelling website. Most people viewed posts of affiliates; there were some memes but most of it was just conservative talking points. The average post being "this person or movement is a jerk because..." I personally never witnessed any violent discussion on Parler. Again, the website was less compelling than…

> I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC.

I am very curious for an example of an AOC tweet that you considered a violent statement.

I am thinking you must have a very different definition of "violent statement" than I do, and I'm curious to learn more about it by example. Because I read a lot of AOC, and have never seen anything I would remotely consider a violent statement. But you may consider things differently, what exactly "violence" means, let alone in a statement, is to some extent not entirely set in stone, I agree.

Can you provide an example (or three) of a violent statement from AOC you have personally witnessed, as you say?

She is a real person, it seems only fair to provide an example when making such an accusation.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#893

All I’m going to say is that I’m all for free speech and setting fair rules for everyone to play by (ie regulation), but looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles this is beyond simple free speech. I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech but there are clear threats being made on the platform. If Parler doesn’t want to do any content regula…

> I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host. If an author's content is so toxic that advertisers wo…

Parler was paying Amazon for hosting. Amazon wasn't doing it for free and hoping for ad revenue.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#894
post #321

I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this t…

BLM caused the deaths of over 80 people and nobody deplatformed Facebook or Twitter. This is obviously about the belief that republicans are not human.

I think you're setting an egregiously false equivalence here. BLM didn't openly plan to kill 80 people on Facebook. And if the right-wingers had merely planned to have protests and some crimes happened to be committed at those protests, Parler wouldn't be shut down now.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#895
post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds very reasonable up until attempting to identify what, objectively, is the bar to set business policy. Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar. Context which "everyone knows" is a political question - a highly political question. If AWS happens to have a s…

Maybe it was the part where he directed an angry mob to the steps of the Capitol building?

I just don't understand the double standards.

What about the antifa/blm mobs that swept the country these last few months?

As a matter of principle, they would have to ban them as well.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#896
post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best mitigation is to involve as few 3rd parties as possible. Find more obscure allies in the space who are not motivated (controlled) by public perception and political gains. Consider building your own tools and technologies to replace 3rd parties. For instance, the load balancing and DDOS protection products sold by Cloudflare are not the effects of some ancient mystical artifact that we could never hope to emulat…

I have no reason to believe that Parler has the means to build infrastructure for DDOS mitigation that compares in any way to Cloudflare. If you're not a multihomed AS, you can't even begin to offer what Cloudflare offers. > But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better. Where's the cutoff? Lay your own fiber to your own datacenters? At some point economy dictates that you rent…

Sometimes the trick isn't so much about the technology, but about the regulatory environment and your agility within it. The Pirate Bay is still online, so getting around this kind of thing isn't entirely unprecedented.

Something to consider on the tech front would be Starlink. What happens when the orbital layer is independent of terrestrial backhaul under ideal routing conditions? Consider the implications of a datacenter that is in space or located at a geographic location that is incredibly difficult to access. Just a decent desktop PC hooked up to a 100mbps pipe can serve a lot of traffic if the application is built properly (i.e. text-only).

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#897
post #321

I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this t…

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a s…

>For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.

There's a bakery somewhere that wasn't controversial until they were. In this day and age you can become the subject of a national controversy overnight.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#898
post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group. > Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content). Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a s…

Fuck off with that bullshit

Breaking the site guidelines like this will get you banned here. No more of this please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#899
Threads are currently paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it) so you need to click More at the bottom of the thread to get to the rest of the comments—or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726453&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726453&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726453&p=4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25726453&p=5

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#900

Who decided that Twitter does a "good enough job" at moderation? The platform was used to organize riots all summer, unchecked. I can find MAGA insurrectionists talking about violence with a simple search right now. Was Parler shut down simply because they don't moderate at all? Signal doesn't moderate at all, either. Because they can't. It's by design. Why don't we go after Signal? Out of sight, out of mind? Is that…

Is Signal even using AWS?
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