I see a number of people here describing Parler as "unmoderated", but it turns out they do have extensive moderation [1] that they use to ensure ideological conformity in their posts. Then the most active users were paid for their content too [2]. This really makes it more of a propaganda weapon than a free speech platform.
This really is the rule, not the exception. Every time I've deigned to wade into conservative "free-speech" zones I've been booted out for ideological nonconformity.
Agreed, the irony of /r/conservative complaining about censorship or their rights to free speech being restricted while making submitting posts and commenting "flaired users only" (AKA only the users who agree with us and think the same way) is completely lost on them...
Just look at reddit / r / conservative. You have to be proven to be conservative before you can post, yet, they preach about first amendment, freedom of speech and your rights all the time.
You still cannot threaten physical violence. This imaginary prospect that 'free speech' includes threats is stupid. And of course any individual still can block you. It is literally the same as Twitter.
I have a feeling this is spreading a lot. People are becoming puritans.. too much negativity in the world makes one become too tense on what he considers the best solutions maybe.
It's not just conservatives. This is this how the internet works now, and it applies to liberal bubbles too. Maybe it's my rose-tinted glasses, but I don't remember the internet being this bad before social media. You could chat on a forum (that was neither hard left not hard right) and play the devil's advocate if you wished. People forget that the first person they should debate honestly is themselves. Online discussion was a great way to have conversations as the devil's advocate. It was a great way to explore a subject. As long as you argued in good faith, used logic and conceded points when they were fairly won, you could have a long (and possibly fruitless) discussion without getting blocked, banned, threatened or called a Nazi.
Nowadays, liberal isn't "how you act" or "what your values are", is an identity. People identify as liberal: kind, right and "definitely not nazis". If you disagree with them, then you must be evil, right?
I've given up trying to explore contentious issues online. It's impossible to take a different view on a hot topic without getting blocked and reported. You don't even have to take a polar opposite view or get snarky. Sometimes you only have to ask a valid question (now known as a dog-whistle). It doesn't matter if you've got science or logic to back it up.
Someone said it on HN yesterday - the old words are failing us. I no longer recognise this thing that they call "liberal" today. I see it as "woke" - a cult, with dogma, heresies and grand inquisitors.
I made one very earnest and honest libertarian-leaning comment on the Redstate forums before I was banned (this was probably 15 years ago). Well, it was "fun" while it lasted.
> This really makes it more of a propaganda weapon than a free speech platform.
Which is not surprising, given how the term free speech is getting twisted these days. It seems the term is now used more often to whine about others who don't want to disseminate a faction's lies (without comment!) than to actually argue for the free exchange of ideas in good faith.
it's not surprising given that it's Mercer funded who basically make the Koch's look harmless.
People shouldn't be fooled and take this notion of 'free-speech' that is being advocated by these platforms at face value. They're not about genuine free exchange, they're funded by and organised by very well networked organisations who use them to further extremist political causes.
It makes so much sense when you think of Parler as a propaganda network and recruitment tool and not a "free speech" social network which is exactly how I described my experience with it in the mega thread yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25712762
Based on the screenshot you linked to, their "moderation" categories are "spam", "ads", "impersonation", "defamation", "nudity", "pornography", "illegal", "terrorism", "trademark" and "threat".
Can you please explain how they use that to "ensure ideological conformity in their posts"?
Is there a legal reason to have defamation up there? It seems like a pretty funny one to have for a free speech platform - the others are more understandable.
It’s not that what you said is untrue, but those posts are just screenshots of moderation and reward tools, not necessarily ideological conformity tools. It reminds me of quora [1] and some other sites that used to pay too posters as a way of driving site-wide engagement (sort of a way to buy users to get network effects going, like Uber eats offering free deliveries during Covid to get more users)
> It’s not that what you said is untrue, but those posts are just screenshots of moderation and reward tools, not necessarily ideological conformity tools.
What do ideological conformity tools look like to you?
Agreed. Maybe the problem is that everyone uses badly organized and ambiguous Twitter threads as citation sources lately. It’s not a good platform for that, you literally don’t have the character counts to explain something
CEO mentioned on Kara Swisher podcast that he felt he had zero responsibility for the content on this platform. So this moderation is mostly a PR point.
How did you get from knowing about existing of moderation system to conclusion about using it to ensure ideological conformity? I don't see a "Wrong ideology" button on screenshot you've linked to.
You've made an argument that Instagram engages in some form of advancing certain viewpoints. You have not demonstrated that this is extensive and that Instagram enforces ideological conformity or that Instagram actively pays people to engage in said advancement of political agendas.
There appears to be quite a difference between what Instagram does and what Parler does. The two do not appear to be comparable.
Instagram doesn't claim to be a "free speech" platform. You have to only be mildly interested in it to see that it's all about "engagement" Parler explicitly claimed "free speech" as a goal
That claim about the Crime Bill is mostly accurate. The vast, vast, vast, majority of incarceration is the fault of states and not done at a federal level. While the bill was deplorable, it didn't really contribute all that much.
> Stephen Ross Johnson, of Knoxville, Tennessee, a board member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and past president of the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told USA TODAY that it is "over simplistic" to say the 1994 crime bill led to mass incarceration.
> Asked if the bill caused or largely contributed to it, Johnson says: “The bottom line answer to that is no. Was it a link in the chain? Yes. Is it the beginning of the chain? No.”
> Johnson argues that the roots of mass incarceration can be found in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with legislation that created, among other things, the RICO statute, which broadened the scope of federal law as the war on drugs began to take shape.
I'd say I agree with the points in the article over the non-contextual, anonyomous, blanket statement that the crime bill brought ("caused") mass incarceration of Black Americans.
I doubt this. I'm on Parler and frequently see posts (I presume from left leaning folks) trashing the right side (e.g., Trump). Those posts are allowed with no issues. It is true that most opinions are right leaning (some viciously so), but that IMO reflects more on the members than on the moderation policy. Discussions on Twitter have a similar mix (left leaning to rabid Trump bashing), and I honestly don't find any difference in the fervor, except that Parler is right leaning and Twitter is left leaning.
The general tendency these days, fed by narratives from interested parties like the media, is to mash all right leaners (pretty much any one supporting the conservative ideas and opposing the Democrats) as clueless, racist, redneck, neo-Nazis (a bit of hyperbole here, but you see what I mean). Once you think that way (that "they're all nub jobs"), pretty much anything from leaking their user info to shutting them down to throwing them in jail would seem OK. Please, please don't fall into the trap and accept the "all right is nuts" narrative and decide for yourself.
Actions speak for themselves. The right isn't a unified block.
There are traditonal conservatives: god, guns, limited government. Mitch McConnell, David French, Mitt Romney, Charlotte Lawson. I fundamentally have different values from these people, but their perspectives are useful, enlightening, and reading their viewpoints causes me to better defend my own, or even occasionally change. They are staunch defenders of individual rights and traditional liberty.
There are libertarians on the right. Rand Paul, Spike Cohen, Justin Amash. These people I share a surprising number of values with, but fundamentally disagree with on the conclusion. Due to an inherent argumentativeness, it's hard to get a good faith debate, but I acknowledge their opinions that the government uses its power poorly, that both political parties are primarily concerned with remaining in power, and so on.
And then there's the group who wear t-shirts with "Camp Auschwitz 2021", "6 million wasn't enough". Signs that say "Q Sent Me". Hats with "Make America Great Again". These people are absolutely racist neo-nazis. These people are pretending to believe that Italians stole the election. There's no true belief here, no fundamentally held tenant other than "my side is better". This is not a small group - a YouGov poll puts it at 18% of Republicans. And this is Parler's user base, self-selected. The reasonable ones are still on Twitter.
A propaganda weapon whose founder was just back from a trip to Russia with his Russian wife and whose parent company was incorporated by Giuliani's firm while he was traveling in Russia... https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1327253991936454663.html
I didn't know Parler before. I'm not American, and I'm definitely not a right-wing supporter. But that's not the same as Youtube/Facebook/Spotify tries to do? Good for ads and supporting their political agenda?
His statements are not backed by any evidence, so I don't know what to make of them. Nonetheless an interesting opinion by someone that has done some great things that certainly tickeled my curiosity, +1
This story truly terrifies me: my team owns my company's sign up page. (I speak for myself and not them, of course).
Sounds like Parler, fearing that their OTP provider might go down, decided to fail-open, ie: if the dependency throws an exception, presume there's something wrong with the dependency and that the code provided is acceptable. It never occurred to them that the dependency could be down permanently, or that malicious actors[0] would be able to realize it and exploit to quickly.
Lesson learned: do not fail open where security matters, where authentication matters. Failing closed prevents new users/customers from signing up, but it protects your existing users/customers.
[0]From a security standpoint, these are malicious actors. I would also probably buy said malicious actors a beer if I met them, accompanied by a high five.
Edit: this is a hypothesis of course. Maybe the bug was somewhere else in the system- it could be in Twilio's provided integration library where the fail-open occurred.
Bingo. They most likely didn’t care. It was all a means to an end. I would be combing this data to see if any active users that were inciting a call to violence are employees or contractors of say: Epoch Times, Members of Congress or their staff, members of law enforcement (especially capital police), select corporations or donors.
> I'd assume that Parler's engineers motivations had more to do with politics than providing a secure platform for protecting dissidents under duress.
If one is to look at the LinkedIn for the tech leadership of Parler it would not be a stretch to say that they are way outside of their depth technologically speaking.
To be fair, it's probably hard for a network like Parler to attract top talent. I mean, they explicitly advertised themselves as the "free speech social network" (i.e. "all hate speech welcome, we won't censor anyone except maybe Trump parody accounts") - would you want to work for such a company, or have it on your resume in the future?
Agreed that the problem looks like 'fail open', but there is the additional possibility that they had no plan for this failure mode at all beyond timing out.
In that context, and with folks with no regard for consequences in charge, an emergency decision to allow everything seems plausible.
That seems the most likely scenario. This was their make or break opportunity. They should have disabled password resets as soon as twillio deplatformed them.
>I would also probably buy said malicious actors a beer if I met them, accompanied by a high five.
You would, would you? Thousands of individuals who by and large wanted to try out a competitor to Facebook ended up getting their personal details downloaded and leaked (and we're talking about very sensitive details here), and you're going to buy a beer for the criminals who did this? I assume before you turn them into the authorities for their 10-20 year sentences?
More speculation on my part: I wonder if rather than a fail-open decision, it’s just how they designed local dev to work and the failure of the provider caused the app to behave as if in local dev mode.
I've seen similar setups to allow testing suites/local/lower environments to allow less restricted access. You have to be sufficiently careful how they work to prevent misconfiguring the real thing which may have happened here
Example:
In production, a load balancer or other proxy handles authentication and passes a signed JWT to the application but running locally the application will take a JWT directly and signature verification is disabled. In this case, the application has multiple checks in place to make sure it's running locally and in production environments it has network policies to only allow traffic from the authentication infrastructure.
I was told that if twitter wouldn't have me I should join Parler. But now I learn you are all cheering for Parler being hacked? I don't understand, should I use Parler or not?
Nah man, I won't criticize too hard. There but for the grace of god goes I, you know?
I've had flakey dependencies. I've thought "maybe fail open is okay in this one case". You're growth hacking your company and you don't want to be held back because a dependency can't handle your scale. And hey, if a few fraudulent accounts get in, we'll just clean them up later. Cost benefit analysis here, right?
But the road to hell is paved with trying to improve user experience.
Of course, they couldn't compete in the competently run micro blogging market because mastodon instances are free and have no ads. Instead they competed with twitter in the incompetently run micro blogging market.
When you own the platform and source code, then you always have a "break window" escape of updating the code. You can also have it fail open only when requests are coming from the internal network, or have a fail-safe authentication mechanism that allows authentication with a super-admin password that can be used "in case of emergencies."
>In a press release announcing the decision, Twilio revealed which services Parler was using. This information allowed hackers to deduct that it was possible to create users and verified accounts without actual verification.
>With this type of access, newly minted users were able to get behind the login box API used for content delivery. That allowed them to see which users had moderator rights and this in turn allowed them to reset passwords of existing users with simple “forgot password” function. Since Twilio no longer authenticated emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts with ease.
So these 'security researchers' are random hackers that illegally gained access to accounts and servers are actively doxxing people and this behaviour's now being praised?
Apart from being illegal, I seem to recall severe backlash against several instances of doxxing in the past, which is exactly what these people have done.
I wonder if people would still be cheering this on if 70TB worth of twitter information had been leaked instead.
Yea, there's no reason 70TB of downloaded data and millions of user accts (with each requiring an additional attack iteration) were needed to prove a security weakness.
Let alone the creation of a coordinated, decentralized network of machines to exploit the attack and maximize data extraction.
Curious as to how you would define this as doxxing? The information contained in this "hack" is just an archival of all publicly-posted information on Parler, it is comparable to someone archiving my LinkedIn page and calling it doxxing.
In other words, the media really is as liberal as is claimed by some?
How does that change things? The article calls them security researchers. In the title! Isn't that an example of something that HN is tacitly acknowledging to be true by leaving the title alone?
> Would it be any better if it was sent to Wikileaks and published there?
Not really. If they had sent it to a journalistic organisation à la the Panama Papers, where e.g. curious peoples’ government IDs could be stripped and criminal activity highlighted, that would have be been different.
I can think of one benefit of going through Wikileaks (or WaPo): there would be a review by experts of what is legal/responsible to share, redacting for example driver's license uploads.
Parler was ground zero for the community that announced and executed the attack on the capitol. Thought leaders there were routinely evoking, imagining, and outright calling for violence, and the crowd was a feedback loop. Fundamentally the Parler community existed to provide a platform for people who had been already banned from Twitter. Frankly the peaceful use of the site was mostly incidental.
I think there's a real argument that this data is in the public interest.
I generally agree that information from here related to the attack is in the public interest. But this is going to also reveal people who had no part of it. I don't think it's fair to justify revealing innocent peoples data.
I read that photos of drivers licenses and other "official" cards were leaked. I believe these were used for proving who you were on the app. I'm not sure if these were publicly shared, or shared with admins who then verified the user.
AFAIK, they have not publicly released any data dumps from this (yet? Maybe they're planing to).
If I were sitting on a dataset like this, I'd probably try to share it with the authorities like the FBI and selected journalists who I feel would behave responsibly.
Sorry but no 'security researcher' is supposed to be gathering such a massive dataset in the first place. The moment you use a vulnerability to download any private information, even as proof of concept, you are on very thin ice - both legally and (in my view) ethically.
If I were twitter user @donk_enby I would be very worried about an imminent visit by law enforcement.
A more obvious criterion would be that there's no implication the people who compromised Parler actually do any kind of research on computer security. The article indicates this was a script-kiddie level vulnerability.
On the other hand if an actual researcher leaks data they're still a researcher; they might be a bad person, but that's orthogonal.
Where are the comments about how awful it is for people's private messages to be leaked? Or is this okay because the media told me these guys are the bad guys.
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.
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 considering the propaganda win this is for extremist groups domestically and autocratic regimes internationally. Could this be a slippery slope? Sure, but it's not as slippery as the other side of the slope which goes right off a cliff.
There is still plenty of time/space to have debates about how to move forward from here with moderation and privacy on social networks, but for now we are in the middle of an insurrection that needs to be put down.
Also, should another attack take place couldn't platforms knowingly providing services to the capitol attackers find themselves liable for providing material support for terrorists? If I were managing risk at AWS that definitely be a major concern.
My POV, if we wouldn't have a problem doing it to ISIS after an attack on our Capitol, then we shouldn't have problem doing the same to QAnon and these "patriots".
I create a Parler account myself out of curiosity's sake. The platform had basically no moderation, and was rife with open calls to violence. It was absolutely serving as a recruitment & coordination site for domestic terrorism.
And now information about your account has been leaked, and will be lumped in with more nefarious accounts. I have a feeling that a significant number of people have similarly made accounts out of curiosity. I've had my parents and some less technically inclined friends recently ask me what Parler is because it's been in the news. These aren't people that fall under the alt-right categorization in the slightest, and they're also not people who would think to use fake information if they were signing up for something to see what it is like.
Even if the platform had terrible and dangerous content on it, we should avoid assuming that everybody on it supported that content, and we shouldn't celebrate their personal information being leaked.
And now there are folks right here in this thread who will assume the absolute worst about you and try to ruin your life. I wish you the best of luck in surviving this. This is why it's not reasonable to paint every account there as that of a terrorist.
Then you should be worried because your employer and family may discover that you were a member of Parler. The "I was just curious" defence might not be as convincing as you think.
The ramifications of this will absolutely set a record for the future as the inevitable reverse will happen.
People are forgetting that if they're ok with this sort of behavior now, it'll be difficult for them to argue-against or prevent the same behavior when their opposites are in control.
I think it’s actually a part of the plan. When the opposite party gains power in 4 years and does the same thing, you get to call them tyrants then, too. Clearly no one cares about being hypocritical anymore. All that matters is winning the media outrage battle of the moment.
>The ramifications of this will absolutely set a record for the future as the inevitable reverse will happen.
Will happen? Try has happened. Partisan hacking has been a thing for a decade. Remember the DNC emails? Remember weev?
>People are forgetting that if they're ok with this sort of behavior now
What does it matter if I'm okay with it? Nobody consulted me before breaking into Parler. In fact, they didn't take my opinion into account at all. Sure, grey-hats are somewhat motivated by public opinion, but even Mitch McConnell gave a floor speech on Wednesday angry enough to incite a few keyboard taps.
>it'll be difficult for them to argue-against or prevent the same behavior
Because American politics consistently punishes hypocrisy, right?
Under the assumption people are remotely ingenuous I'd agree, but in recent years I think that ship has sailed. The means always justify the ends, and ideological consistency is apparently chalked up to a loser's game.
>People are forgetting that if they're ok with this sort of behavior now, it'll be difficult for them to argue-against or prevent the same behavior when their opposites are in control.
I'd argue the opposite: As the rank rhetorical hypocrisy on BLM-related protests vs. Trump protests shows, the marketplace of ideas has broken down and all that really matters is power. We're only a couple steps away from tech/media being able to dictate that we've always been at war with Eastasia, with a horde of willing partisans being eager to punish any sort of dissent on the matter. Being hypocritical is unimportant if you have the ability to mess with the lives of those who are too vocal in pointing out whatever hypocrisy. Most people are perfectly rational in not being willing to risk cancellation by speaking up.
Just call everyone a terrorist and absolve your soul of any uneasiness you have with this. Surely this hyperbole hasn't been used in recent history to push authoritarian and unethical measures by state and private actors paving a golden road to hell.
Well what is your suggested response? I think the lack of calling out terrorism and fascism in this country have already resulted four years of "pushing authoritarian and unethical measures" by the US executive.
...these people are the authoritarians. They want to usher in some sort of bizarre "law and order" where they define what those things mean. They were literally beating police offers and saying "we're on your side" at the same time.
The amount of victimization through projection currently taking place is kind of shocking. I don't know of a single person that has been called a Terrorist for anything other than calling for violence against others. Why self-proclaimed "peaceful" conservatives continue to lump themselves in with white-supremacists and domestic terrorists is beyond me.
You can pretend that people are being persecuted for being a Republican but 30 seconds of fact checking will disprove that. In fact the only ones calling for violence against Republicans are those very same white supremacists and domestic terrorists because it seems that anyone that doesn't align with Donald Trump is somehow not a conservative. Mike Pence isn't a Republican? Really? I can't think of a politician much further right, and somehow he's no longer acceptable.
If your political belief system is "whatever Trump thinks this week" then maybe it's time to re-evaluate what you really stand for.
What I love about this comment is how politically ambiguous it is. You cant tell which “side” it’s arguing for which is exactly the point - the same argument can be used by both sides. That’s what makes it so dangerous.
Since it's WARC and is going to end up on archive.org (archive.org is going to host it, but a different org 'archive team' are the ones who downloaded it), twitter isn't going to stop it from being posted since it's just going to show up as a link to web.archive.org. Arguably this isn't 'hacked data' since it's stuff that was wget'd and no security measure circumvention took place.
Why did you include that “the media told me” part? It dramatically weakens your argument. If you think you’re right and are arguing in good faith, why add this throwaway strawman to imply that everybody who disagrees with you must be brainwashed by the media and not thinking for themselves?
Remember to blame the media, right. It helps flood the zone with misleading accusations. Racist fascists attacking a democratic institution while calling for blood are objectively bad guys. Full stop. If any of their private messages were used in planning and execution of that crime that is evidence on which they should be charged. That evidence will mostly be made public in the course of a trial. Everything else just delete.
I do feel terrible for those people. Parler needs to be held civilly liable for what they've done.
The real crime here is that Parler was collecting sensitive information above and beyond what most social providers were asking for and still made shoddy security decisions.
Within 20m of this post being made, this <7d account is complaining about other people not complaining about the leak of private messages, without actually complaining about that specific problem.
I don't think it's fair to lump everyone into a pile like that. I agree with the decision of tech companies not to host Parler and disagree with leaking its contents. The comments section on any forum is made of a variety of people with a variety of views. You shouldn't be looking at a web forum for consistency.
You can pretty easily see for yourself they are THE bad guys. There are calls for violence and white supremacist rhetoric ever way you turn. You really have to try hard to find the non horrible parts of that site.
You're slightly wrong by stressing "THE". They are SOME of the bad guys. Those weren't the only racially charged and violent riots that happened this year.
It's amazing isn't it? Principles, ethics.. all talk for a lot of people, situations like these show it. Watch them spin it as a good thing for humanity as a whole. Amazing.
This was also a bad thing to do, since, presumably - some of it was intended to be private or hidden.
It will be interesting to see what the results of the content are. There have been many arguments implying that parler was "pretty normal". We can now empirically find out.
As others have noted, this is also a lesson in design and code priorities.
Was about to ask the same thing. My, how the story changes when it's on the other foot. This type of thing is exactly why we can't have noce things. Regardless of how you feel about the people in question, the fact is you've got people on the side of throwing even more fuel 9n the fire for stoking divisiveness and chaos. The sheer fraction of HN posters who show no apparent awareness of this is a bit offputting.
most of us are trying to reflect on whether this is 'private messages' or 'evidence of crimes'
I doubt anyone on HN would take seriously any other service turning over evidence of a crime to authorities because its 'private messages'. We might not like that it is there policy but we damn well would know it is their policy and not use services where it is technically possible to plan crimes?
Why is it awful? If something you say isn't end-to-end encrypted you should assume it could be made public. I wouldn't be upset if PMs from Twitter or FB were leaked either.
Ermm, people who are trying to violently and undemocratically install an authoritarian government while using slogans like “6 million was not enough” are literally nazis.
You’re gonna have to find another hyperbolically bad thing to accuse your opponents of fear mongering about.
I'm surprised to see how many people can not think for themselves but follow what media is telling them. I hope I don't do that myself but try to understand the matter and follow principles rather than sides.
What I'm surprised the most is that with these complex and not obvious questions (at least to me) people without any shadow of a doubt are certain that it is right for big tech to censor Trump, shut down parler and take political sides like it happened.
Maybe Trump is bad but at least i want to see his stupidity or his wrongdoing rather than other people to chew the news and feed me like im an infant.
To me these questions require philosophical debates and dialogue (even with myself) to understand f it is right for a company to impose their political worldview on their clients - I don't feel it is right.
But if others take these positions very easily, to me that is an indication that they got these ideas from somebody else rather than thought them through.
The find the whole narrative of dehumanising Trump supporters to be sick.
The memory of all the pathological mob like violence that occurred during the BLM movement which occurred worldwide should still be fresh in all of our memories. If only the actors who incited that violence were held to this same standard.
I arrived at that conclusion all on my own. Something a disappointingly large portion of Trump supporters seem to be unable to do. And last I checked, the truth is that conservative media is a much larger slice of "the media" than it would have you believe, I mean, except when it touts its ratings to anyone who will listen.
Yes it is. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment. [1]
> Say unimaginably hateful shit, see how fast it takes to get punched in the mouth. Simple as that.
This is incredibly dangerous and short-sighted. I can tell you've likely never been in a fight, or very, very few.
People who think this way need to be very fucking careful with their rhetoric here, because while they think they might be the Billy Badass who'll set the world 'right', there's a lot of other Billy Badasses out there who might just jerk a knot in their ass, either temporarily or permanently.
You might want to take a more reasonable approach and figure out why someone feels the way they feel first.
No. These guys ARE the bad guys. Not "because the media said so". They are objectively the bad guys.
Parler's members are the rejects that couldn't survive on mainstream platforms due to their poor conduct. That userbase just planned and executed an attempt at insurrection against the US government.
The market overwhelmingly has agreed that Parler violated ethical standards egregiously enough that severing business ties is appropriate.
I fail to see the importance of these people's privacy in the wake of recent events. I also fail to have sympathy for people who trusted this hacked-together Twitter clone with their personal information.
Leaking this information sends a clear message: Extremism and violence are intolerable, and every possible means is at our disposal to fight back against it. That includes exposing violent extremists to the light of day.
> I fail to see the importance of these people's privacy in the wake of recent events. I also fail to have sympathy for people who trusted this hacked-together Twitter clone with their personal information.
Then I fail to have any sympathy and solidarity with you. You're just another violent extremist in my eyes, and the enemy of my enemy is not my friend by a long shot.
I've always been amazed at how hackers can exfiltrate so much data with no one even batting an eye. Doing the math, the pure data cost to Parler was $7,700
According to reports, their monthly AWS spend (prior to today, obviously) was ~300k (or 3.6M/year).
7.7k is not really a noticeable increase, and any alarms that did trigger would likely have been attributed to increased user growth and platform load.
That is if someone was even seeing a billing alarm alerting with every other issue that was going on.
I've seen more than one company that had a cloud spend policy that boiled down to: "if you spend a lot, the finance guy is gonna send you a snarky email a week later"
Totally not surprised they didn't catch a 7.7k spike in real time
This so much. Are they not using dashboards? This amount of traffic should have triggered multiple alarms. Makes me think their devs just stopped caring.
While I understand that Twilio is probably not at fault for the actual leak, I'm curious if they gave Parler some time to migrate/shift before cutting them off from their services.
It's easy not to care since Parler is the "bad guy" here, but I do think that Internet infrastructure companies need to give a reasonable heads-up before pulling the rug under business customers.
Whereas AWS can plausibly claim that they don't want to host illegal content, what can Twilio say for themselves here? From Twilios perspective, providing Twilio's core product to Parler isn't any different than serving them to other platforms. They have no responsibility or liability. The lack of moderation on Parler is irrelevant when Twilio isn't involved with moving that data.
For a Saas platform to abruptly cut-up a contract, immediately breaking the authentication mechanism for the site on the other end of the contract, which directly results in a serious data breach for thousands of users (the majority of which have done nothing wrong), because your employees and leadership don't like their politics, doesn't sound like something that a publicly traded company should engage in.
edit: especially once it became obvious that AWS was going to bring the site down just a few hours later. They had a clear route to make their ideological stand and cause no damage by merely waiting 12 hours more.
If there's a drunk guy trying to start fights in your restaurant, you boot him out the door immediately for being a safety hazard and overall reflecting poorly on your business. I don't think any reasonable patrons will see that and think "Wow, they just kicked that guy out because they didn't like what he was saying, it could happen to me too, better get out of here".
It's a similar (digital) situation here. Parler is (was?) actively refusing to moderate their platform to prevent a literal insurrection.
You don't actually have to fail open. That was a decision on parlers' end, they could have decided to fail closed just the same. A service outage on Twilio would have had the same effect.
If we had a responsible administration we'd probably be seeing takedown requests from DHS over national security grounds. This isn't just a speech issue, it's safety. There's a void of government guidance on how to deal with this in a measured way, so deplatforming is the easiest and safest option. They can't force Parler to moderate their content and they can't let themselves be party to fomenting insurrection.
> especially once it became obvious that AWS was going to bring the site down just a few hours later. They had a clear route to make their ideological stand and cause no damage by merely waiting 12 hours more.
AWS cutting them off probably made it even more urgent. Like the pr department likely wouldn't be happy with the company supporting parlor til the very end...
Twilio is far from the top of Parler’s infrastructure problems, to be fair.
The issue is that a “reasonable” heads up here is literally years long for some of these products, especially AWS. It’s hard for these companies to show bad clients the door in a way that isn’t disruptive.
So realistically, does that mean like 10 devs running a social network with 5-10 million users?
I imagine its pretty ceazy there right now after getting booted off AWS, google just banned u off play store, so cant use them, i assume they cant use microsoft because theyll ban them there as well, it would be cool to see if they are able to get things up and running again. (Ive never used Parler but i assume its just like a simple Facebook type webpage/apps)
What I don't understand is: if you're going to host something like Parler, knowing that it is extremely controversial, why wouldn't you host it yourselves? The money they would have saved over using AWS (at the scale quoted in the previous comments) could have paid for the servers and the people to manage them. I suppose the deplatformers would have just gone after whatever data center they used, though, or if they'd have setup shop in their garage, then the ISP they used. It's turtles all the way down. My point is that I can't wrap my head around the fact that everyone is just assumed to use a cloud provider now, and the act of racking your own servers and managing your own proxies and firewalls seems to be a dead art.
Probably same reason everyone else uses cloud services. They're just way easier, faster and cheaper if you don't have the engineering capacity in-house. I'm sure they're pivoting to self-hosting right now, but it could easily be 2 months of frantic work to get back online with a system that can only handle a fraction of the traffic. And I'm sure they get hit with DDoS attacks 8 days a week.
I totally agree with you. I run the data science department at a corporation and we do most things on our laptops (I have a mobile workstation) or on our in-house server. Most data science teams seem to be moving to cloud. We've saved a lot of money and awkward conversations with accounting about why we're using so much computing power for so many hours a day. I don't bat an eye at running something overnight that has a high chance of failing.
Back to the topic at hand, Parler dedicated itself to being a place where people could say alt-right things. How did they not price in the risk of getting booted by AWS? Even estimating a 5% chance should have convinced them to self-host.
Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell. Cloud is also expensive, but in return you get the ability to not need to think about hardware anymore. Prior to last week they probably assumed that AWS et. al. wouldn't have just suddenly cut them off, so they didn't factor in that risk except as a distant possibility. Up until a week ago we all were scared of FAATG's power after all and people were still talking about breaking them up.
They were a startup at heart, and what dev with access to millions of dollars will be interested in running some enterprise VM solution over the shiny toys you get by using AWS or GCP?
Aside from it being sad that supporting free speech is controversial, if we assume good faith in the founders' statements then the controversy is simply the way the media has highlighted a section of the user base. Have you been on there? I haven't but I've been around long enough not to rely on the media for accurate representations of groups on the internet (or much else, to be honest.)
yea it sounds like a reasonable IT person at Parler would suggest preparing for getting booted off these big tools (aws, twilio, etc.) considering Parler sounds like exactly the type of product that would get kicked off these services.
One of the founders of pirate bay had a tweetstorm recently where he was like, i get that aws kicked u guys off, but like, u guys cant get a homepage up and running? I agree with this guy.
parlor was founded with politics in mind, maybe they are ok with shutting down their community because in a way that serves their political goals, sounds like parlor and aws are already suing eachother, i dont doubt uber-conservative users will find an alternative platform to use in the coming weeks.
I was thinking about it this morning. They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation.
Not defending, just observing. It's interesting from a business/development perspective when it comes to rapid scale and team size.
> They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation.
Maybe, but I would wager that there are a lot of tech people who sympathize explicitly with the people that Parler is trying to attract, and an even larger contingent who would work there under the auspices of protecting what they believe is the right to free speech, etc.
Setting aside moral qualms for a moment, the engineering problems they're having right now are probably one-in-a-career problems, so it would be interesting work, without a doubt.
> They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation.
Parler established itself as a "free speech" social network platform. Part of its objective, based on that principle, was minimal or no moderation. Ironically, of course, they banned many people who came in with left-wing views. Which means they actually worked to create the extremist bubble that is now causing them problems with others.
Do you need to have many technical staff if you are renting your infrastructure? The scaling part probably is mostly handled by AWS so most of the the people there are working on product development, which shouldn’t require that many people since it’s just another social media software.
I would guess that they spend quite a bit of resources on content moderation tools development as this is the bespoke part of their business.
Readit News
[1] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506 [2] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1346565749977051136
Tolerance is a peace treaty: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...
Nowadays, liberal isn't "how you act" or "what your values are", is an identity. People identify as liberal: kind, right and "definitely not nazis". If you disagree with them, then you must be evil, right?
I've given up trying to explore contentious issues online. It's impossible to take a different view on a hot topic without getting blocked and reported. You don't even have to take a polar opposite view or get snarky. Sometimes you only have to ask a valid question (now known as a dog-whistle). It doesn't matter if you've got science or logic to back it up.
Someone said it on HN yesterday - the old words are failing us. I no longer recognise this thing that they call "liberal" today. I see it as "woke" - a cult, with dogma, heresies and grand inquisitors.
Which is not surprising, given how the term free speech is getting twisted these days. It seems the term is now used more often to whine about others who don't want to disseminate a faction's lies (without comment!) than to actually argue for the free exchange of ideas in good faith.
People shouldn't be fooled and take this notion of 'free-speech' that is being advocated by these platforms at face value. They're not about genuine free exchange, they're funded by and organised by very well networked organisations who use them to further extremist political causes.
Whereas the Kochs want to be in charge of government, the Mercers want to eliminate government.
Can you please explain how they use that to "ensure ideological conformity in their posts"?
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18742484
What do ideological conformity tools look like to you?
Am I missing something? What are you referring to exactly? The mod tools screenshot doesn't support that assertion.
For clarity I don't support changing 230.
It both:
a. pays popular users
b. Puts warnings on political issues, like statements that Biden's crime bill contributed to mass incarceration [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/ben_awareness/status/1339293381625864195
There appears to be quite a difference between what Instagram does and what Parler does. The two do not appear to be comparable.
https://twitter.com/johnfpfaff/status/1128369019164200960?la...
I assume that point was an extension of OP's comment of: "that they use to ensure ideological conformity in their posts."
For those interested, here is a link to the USA Today article from the screenshot evaluating whether "the crime bill brought mass incarceration to Black Americans": https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/03/fac...
> Stephen Ross Johnson, of Knoxville, Tennessee, a board member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and past president of the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told USA TODAY that it is "over simplistic" to say the 1994 crime bill led to mass incarceration.
> Asked if the bill caused or largely contributed to it, Johnson says: “The bottom line answer to that is no. Was it a link in the chain? Yes. Is it the beginning of the chain? No.”
> Johnson argues that the roots of mass incarceration can be found in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with legislation that created, among other things, the RICO statute, which broadened the scope of federal law as the war on drugs began to take shape.
I'd say I agree with the points in the article over the non-contextual, anonyomous, blanket statement that the crime bill brought ("caused") mass incarceration of Black Americans.
Source?
The general tendency these days, fed by narratives from interested parties like the media, is to mash all right leaners (pretty much any one supporting the conservative ideas and opposing the Democrats) as clueless, racist, redneck, neo-Nazis (a bit of hyperbole here, but you see what I mean). Once you think that way (that "they're all nub jobs"), pretty much anything from leaking their user info to shutting them down to throwing them in jail would seem OK. Please, please don't fall into the trap and accept the "all right is nuts" narrative and decide for yourself.
There are traditonal conservatives: god, guns, limited government. Mitch McConnell, David French, Mitt Romney, Charlotte Lawson. I fundamentally have different values from these people, but their perspectives are useful, enlightening, and reading their viewpoints causes me to better defend my own, or even occasionally change. They are staunch defenders of individual rights and traditional liberty.
There are libertarians on the right. Rand Paul, Spike Cohen, Justin Amash. These people I share a surprising number of values with, but fundamentally disagree with on the conclusion. Due to an inherent argumentativeness, it's hard to get a good faith debate, but I acknowledge their opinions that the government uses its power poorly, that both political parties are primarily concerned with remaining in power, and so on.
And then there's the group who wear t-shirts with "Camp Auschwitz 2021", "6 million wasn't enough". Signs that say "Q Sent Me". Hats with "Make America Great Again". These people are absolutely racist neo-nazis. These people are pretending to believe that Italians stole the election. There's no true belief here, no fundamentally held tenant other than "my side is better". This is not a small group - a YouGov poll puts it at 18% of Republicans. And this is Parler's user base, self-selected. The reasonable ones are still on Twitter.
And a social media company paying the users that create the most content? Dastardly!
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References:
- https://medium.com/swlh/youtube-algorithm-rigged-breadtube-e...
- https://theindustryobserver.thebrag.com/spotify-joe-rogan/
EDIT:
Wow: So many down-votes in less than a minute, without any comment.
interesting opinion from Glenn Greenwald:
"Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?
Zero.
The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start."
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293
Sounds like Parler, fearing that their OTP provider might go down, decided to fail-open, ie: if the dependency throws an exception, presume there's something wrong with the dependency and that the code provided is acceptable. It never occurred to them that the dependency could be down permanently, or that malicious actors[0] would be able to realize it and exploit to quickly.
Lesson learned: do not fail open where security matters, where authentication matters. Failing closed prevents new users/customers from signing up, but it protects your existing users/customers.
[0]From a security standpoint, these are malicious actors. I would also probably buy said malicious actors a beer if I met them, accompanied by a high five.
Edit: this is a hypothesis of course. Maybe the bug was somewhere else in the system- it could be in Twilio's provided integration library where the fail-open occurred.
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.)
Fairly sure we could replace algorithm and data structure whiteboard interviews with security interviews and we'd all be better off
If one is to look at the LinkedIn for the tech leadership of Parler it would not be a stretch to say that they are way outside of their depth technologically speaking.
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In that context, and with folks with no regard for consequences in charge, an emergency decision to allow everything seems plausible.
You would, would you? Thousands of individuals who by and large wanted to try out a competitor to Facebook ended up getting their personal details downloaded and leaked (and we're talking about very sensitive details here), and you're going to buy a beer for the criminals who did this? I assume before you turn them into the authorities for their 10-20 year sentences?
That is a very, very generous take. And if that's all users were doing then their data being breached is regrettable but not world ending.
Example: In production, a load balancer or other proxy handles authentication and passes a signed JWT to the application but running locally the application will take a JWT directly and signature verification is disabled. In this case, the application has multiple checks in place to make sure it's running locally and in production environments it has network policies to only allow traffic from the authentication infrastructure.
I've had flakey dependencies. I've thought "maybe fail open is okay in this one case". You're growth hacking your company and you don't want to be held back because a dependency can't handle your scale. And hey, if a few fraudulent accounts get in, we'll just clean them up later. Cost benefit analysis here, right?
But the road to hell is paved with trying to improve user experience.
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Everything has/should have a "break window" escape, and yes, that's a security weakness, but I don't see many alternatives to that.
>With this type of access, newly minted users were able to get behind the login box API used for content delivery. That allowed them to see which users had moderator rights and this in turn allowed them to reset passwords of existing users with simple “forgot password” function. Since Twilio no longer authenticated emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts with ease.
So these 'security researchers' are random hackers that illegally gained access to accounts and servers are actively doxxing people and this behaviour's now being praised?
Apart from being illegal, I seem to recall severe backlash against several instances of doxxing in the past, which is exactly what these people have done.
I wonder if people would still be cheering this on if 70TB worth of twitter information had been leaked instead.
Let alone the creation of a coordinated, decentralized network of machines to exploit the attack and maximize data extraction.
"Security Researchers"
The doublespeak is getting maddening.
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Also, it's hard to tell from the article, but it seems like there's phone.numbers and id involved as well.
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How does that change things? The article calls them security researchers. In the title! Isn't that an example of something that HN is tacitly acknowledging to be true by leaving the title alone?
[0] trial by ordeal
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Not really. If they had sent it to a journalistic organisation à la the Panama Papers, where e.g. curious peoples’ government IDs could be stripped and criminal activity highlighted, that would have be been different.
I think there's a real argument that this data is in the public interest.
> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?
> Zero.
> The planning was largely done on Facebook.
[0] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293?s=...
edit: bad formatting
Edit: I suppose not.
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If I were sitting on a dataset like this, I'd probably try to share it with the authorities like the FBI and selected journalists who I feel would behave responsibly.
If I were twitter user @donk_enby I would be very worried about an imminent visit by law enforcement.
On the other hand if an actual researcher leaks data they're still a researcher; they might be a bad person, but that's orthogonal.
I would disagree. To me at least, the difference between researcher and hacker is what you do with the knowledge you have.
I still think it's wrong to leak the data.
Many of these people use twitter and gmail too - does that justify a leak from those services? If not, why not?
There were and are legal means for law enforcement to access that data if they need to.
People minimizing this attack and not treating it like a legitimate 9/11 scale crisis for the US are not considering the propaganda win this is for extremist groups domestically and autocratic regimes internationally. Could this be a slippery slope? Sure, but it's not as slippery as the other side of the slope which goes right off a cliff.
There is still plenty of time/space to have debates about how to move forward from here with moderation and privacy on social networks, but for now we are in the middle of an insurrection that needs to be put down.
Also, should another attack take place couldn't platforms knowingly providing services to the capitol attackers find themselves liable for providing material support for terrorists? If I were managing risk at AWS that definitely be a major concern.
My POV, if we wouldn't have a problem doing it to ISIS after an attack on our Capitol, then we shouldn't have problem doing the same to QAnon and these "patriots".
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I create a Parler account myself out of curiosity's sake. The platform had basically no moderation, and was rife with open calls to violence. It was absolutely serving as a recruitment & coordination site for domestic terrorism.
Even if the platform had terrible and dangerous content on it, we should avoid assuming that everybody on it supported that content, and we shouldn't celebrate their personal information being leaked.
People are forgetting that if they're ok with this sort of behavior now, it'll be difficult for them to argue-against or prevent the same behavior when their opposites are in control.
Will happen? Try has happened. Partisan hacking has been a thing for a decade. Remember the DNC emails? Remember weev?
>People are forgetting that if they're ok with this sort of behavior now
What does it matter if I'm okay with it? Nobody consulted me before breaking into Parler. In fact, they didn't take my opinion into account at all. Sure, grey-hats are somewhat motivated by public opinion, but even Mitch McConnell gave a floor speech on Wednesday angry enough to incite a few keyboard taps.
>it'll be difficult for them to argue-against or prevent the same behavior
Because American politics consistently punishes hypocrisy, right?
I'd argue the opposite: As the rank rhetorical hypocrisy on BLM-related protests vs. Trump protests shows, the marketplace of ideas has broken down and all that really matters is power. We're only a couple steps away from tech/media being able to dictate that we've always been at war with Eastasia, with a horde of willing partisans being eager to punish any sort of dissent on the matter. Being hypocritical is unimportant if you have the ability to mess with the lives of those who are too vocal in pointing out whatever hypocrisy. Most people are perfectly rational in not being willing to risk cancellation by speaking up.
Please tell me how rooting out seditionists is a bad thing.
You can pretend that people are being persecuted for being a Republican but 30 seconds of fact checking will disprove that. In fact the only ones calling for violence against Republicans are those very same white supremacists and domestic terrorists because it seems that anyone that doesn't align with Donald Trump is somehow not a conservative. Mike Pence isn't a Republican? Really? I can't think of a politician much further right, and somehow he's no longer acceptable.
If your political belief system is "whatever Trump thinks this week" then maybe it's time to re-evaluate what you really stand for.
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Right???
Honestly, the speculative and proactive accusations of hypocrisy are getting really tiresome. I wish people would stop.
The real crime here is that Parler was collecting sensitive information above and beyond what most social providers were asking for and still made shoddy security decisions.
and what do you think they are?
This was also a bad thing to do, since, presumably - some of it was intended to be private or hidden.
It will be interesting to see what the results of the content are. There have been many arguments implying that parler was "pretty normal". We can now empirically find out.
As others have noted, this is also a lesson in design and code priorities.
They sacked the capitol and cheered it on (yes, almost exclusively as far as the people on Parler are concerned).
They are indeed the bad guys.
I doubt anyone on HN would take seriously any other service turning over evidence of a crime to authorities because its 'private messages'. We might not like that it is there policy but we damn well would know it is their policy and not use services where it is technically possible to plan crimes?
https://www.ipsos.com/en/american-reaction-pro-trump-mob-ass...
You’re gonna have to find another hyperbolically bad thing to accuse your opponents of fear mongering about.
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What I'm surprised the most is that with these complex and not obvious questions (at least to me) people without any shadow of a doubt are certain that it is right for big tech to censor Trump, shut down parler and take political sides like it happened.
Maybe Trump is bad but at least i want to see his stupidity or his wrongdoing rather than other people to chew the news and feed me like im an infant.
To me these questions require philosophical debates and dialogue (even with myself) to understand f it is right for a company to impose their political worldview on their clients - I don't feel it is right.
But if others take these positions very easily, to me that is an indication that they got these ideas from somebody else rather than thought them through.
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The memory of all the pathological mob like violence that occurred during the BLM movement which occurred worldwide should still be fresh in all of our memories. If only the actors who incited that violence were held to this same standard.
If I label him a terrorist, that doesn't mean I label all Trump followers terrorists.
Stop thinking so black and white. It's that way of thinking that lead to all of this.
And I find you comparing BLM movement to Trump's supporters "election fraud" bullshit to be absolutely sickening.
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Hate speech is not protected. Plotting and committing treason against the United States government is not protected.
Say unimaginably hateful shit, see how fast it takes to get punched in the mouth. Simple as that.
Yes it is. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment. [1]
> Say unimaginably hateful shit, see how fast it takes to get punched in the mouth. Simple as that.
This is incredibly dangerous and short-sighted. I can tell you've likely never been in a fight, or very, very few.
People who think this way need to be very fucking careful with their rhetoric here, because while they think they might be the Billy Badass who'll set the world 'right', there's a lot of other Billy Badasses out there who might just jerk a knot in their ass, either temporarily or permanently.
You might want to take a more reasonable approach and figure out why someone feels the way they feel first.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
Parler's members are the rejects that couldn't survive on mainstream platforms due to their poor conduct. That userbase just planned and executed an attempt at insurrection against the US government.
The market overwhelmingly has agreed that Parler violated ethical standards egregiously enough that severing business ties is appropriate.
I fail to see the importance of these people's privacy in the wake of recent events. I also fail to have sympathy for people who trusted this hacked-together Twitter clone with their personal information.
Leaking this information sends a clear message: Extremism and violence are intolerable, and every possible means is at our disposal to fight back against it. That includes exposing violent extremists to the light of day.
Then I fail to have any sympathy and solidarity with you. You're just another violent extremist in my eyes, and the enemy of my enemy is not my friend by a long shot.
(($0.15/GB10) + ($0.11/GB 40) + ($0.09/GB20)) 1000 => $7,700
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-data-transfer-prices-re...
Even the Chase Bank hack had an astronomical amount of data that didn't appear to set off any alarms.
7.7k is not really a noticeable increase, and any alarms that did trigger would likely have been attributed to increased user growth and platform load.
That is if someone was even seeing a billing alarm alerting with every other issue that was going on.
Totally not surprised they didn't catch a 7.7k spike in real time
It's easy not to care since Parler is the "bad guy" here, but I do think that Internet infrastructure companies need to give a reasonable heads-up before pulling the rug under business customers.
Whereas AWS can plausibly claim that they don't want to host illegal content, what can Twilio say for themselves here? From Twilios perspective, providing Twilio's core product to Parler isn't any different than serving them to other platforms. They have no responsibility or liability. The lack of moderation on Parler is irrelevant when Twilio isn't involved with moving that data.
For a Saas platform to abruptly cut-up a contract, immediately breaking the authentication mechanism for the site on the other end of the contract, which directly results in a serious data breach for thousands of users (the majority of which have done nothing wrong), because your employees and leadership don't like their politics, doesn't sound like something that a publicly traded company should engage in.
edit: especially once it became obvious that AWS was going to bring the site down just a few hours later. They had a clear route to make their ideological stand and cause no damage by merely waiting 12 hours more.
It's a similar (digital) situation here. Parler is (was?) actively refusing to moderate their platform to prevent a literal insurrection.
AWS cutting them off probably made it even more urgent. Like the pr department likely wouldn't be happy with the company supporting parlor til the very end...
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The issue is that a “reasonable” heads up here is literally years long for some of these products, especially AWS. It’s hard for these companies to show bad clients the door in a way that isn’t disruptive.
So realistically, does that mean like 10 devs running a social network with 5-10 million users?
I imagine its pretty ceazy there right now after getting booted off AWS, google just banned u off play store, so cant use them, i assume they cant use microsoft because theyll ban them there as well, it would be cool to see if they are able to get things up and running again. (Ive never used Parler but i assume its just like a simple Facebook type webpage/apps)
Back to the topic at hand, Parler dedicated itself to being a place where people could say alt-right things. How did they not price in the risk of getting booted by AWS? Even estimating a 5% chance should have convinced them to self-host.
Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell. Cloud is also expensive, but in return you get the ability to not need to think about hardware anymore. Prior to last week they probably assumed that AWS et. al. wouldn't have just suddenly cut them off, so they didn't factor in that risk except as a distant possibility. Up until a week ago we all were scared of FAATG's power after all and people were still talking about breaking them up.
Aside from it being sad that supporting free speech is controversial, if we assume good faith in the founders' statements then the controversy is simply the way the media has highlighted a section of the user base. Have you been on there? I haven't but I've been around long enough not to rely on the media for accurate representations of groups on the internet (or much else, to be honest.)
One of the founders of pirate bay had a tweetstorm recently where he was like, i get that aws kicked u guys off, but like, u guys cant get a homepage up and running? I agree with this guy.
parlor was founded with politics in mind, maybe they are ok with shutting down their community because in a way that serves their political goals, sounds like parlor and aws are already suing eachother, i dont doubt uber-conservative users will find an alternative platform to use in the coming weeks.
Not defending, just observing. It's interesting from a business/development perspective when it comes to rapid scale and team size.
Maybe, but I would wager that there are a lot of tech people who sympathize explicitly with the people that Parler is trying to attract, and an even larger contingent who would work there under the auspices of protecting what they believe is the right to free speech, etc.
Parler established itself as a "free speech" social network platform. Part of its objective, based on that principle, was minimal or no moderation. Ironically, of course, they banned many people who came in with left-wing views. Which means they actually worked to create the extremist bubble that is now causing them problems with others.
I would guess that they spend quite a bit of resources on content moderation tools development as this is the bespoke part of their business.