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The Hacker Who Archived Parler Explains How She Did It (and What Comes Next)
- metabagel 6y agoIt's important to note that she only scraped what was publicly available. Otherwise, she might face prosecution. As the article says, Parler didn't strip metadata from images and such. It's a forensic treasure trove.
- cecja 6y agoBut because of the amateur dev squad at parler she got deleted and private messages/videos/voice messages as well.
- bloat 6y agoIt sounds like they worked out the URL format, which included a sequentially increasing id for each post, and then started pulling URLs starting at 0.
- samizdis 6y ago> A key reason for her success: Parler’s site was a mess. Its public API used no authentication. When users deleted their posts, the site failed to remove the content and instead only added a delete flag to it. Oh, and each post carried a numerical ID that was incremented from the ID of the most recently published one. From the Arstechnica article: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parlers-amateur-coding-could-come-back-to-haunt-capitol-hill-rioters/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parle... As discussed on this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747395
- awb 6y ago> each post carried a numerical ID that was incremented from the ID of the most recently published one Sounds like a Rails scaffold. Any details on the tech stack they were using?