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Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'
- f430 6y agoI genuinely believe that this is a case of incompetence willful or not. Who knows, maybe someone at parler knew and never raised the issue because they were disgruntled and actively shot down security measures....kind of like what I did before Basically a startup I worked for 12 years ago were fucking me big time on compensation so I purposefully argued against encrypting the database knowing how shoddy their security was. I didn't allow ANYONE to secure the backend. 4 years later, their database gets leaked and they get "acquired" for an "undisclosed amount" which usually means they sold themselves at a huge discount pending lawsuits. No regrets. They were the single most worst offenders of labor exploitation. Serious human rights violations were going on and I did what I had to do. Take them down with the same incomptence they have shown towards me and others they exploited.
- fukF430Spyders 6y agoYou are wrong for doing that and you should feel bad but you can't. F
- philsnow 6y agoSo report them to the FBI or local equivalent for the "human rights violations", instead of engaging in willful negligence and then fucking bragging on the internet about how brave you were? I doubt there were any "human rights violations", as reporting them seems like a much better (and much easier) way to screw over the people involved than not encrypting the database.
- f430 6y agoWe don't have FBI in Canada Nor do we have any labour watchdogs I'd like to live in a country where developers were protected.
- excannuck 6y agoWe have the Royal Canadian Mounted Police which is the same thing. A federal level police force tasked and empowered with investigating these types of crimes. We also have provincial level human rights courts And we do have labor watchdogs, again, the courts, and in Canada they lean very heavily towards workers in interpreting very strict labor laws. However, Canada is also filled with self-righteous descendants (I mean it culturally) of puritans who take it upon themselves to adjudicate others. That's why I left the GTA, Ontario and Canada as soon as I could. (Quebec excepted. They're cool. Also, not Canada)
- f430 6y agoLook the RCMP isn't going to raid a startup because they find human rights violation going on Sure we got watchdogs but those are meant for blue collar workers with union. > However, Canada is also filled with self-righteous descendants (I mean it culturally) of puritans who take it upon themselves to adjudicate others. I 100% AGREE. When I dated an 18yo everybody flipped and said I was the worst. > (Quebec excepted. They're cool. Also, not Canada) I love Montreal man. It is the Thailand of Canada. When I went there I felt free for the first time in my 30+ years in Canada. Where are you now? I am thinking of moving to Thailand or Japan where people aren't so uppity about dating young women (or men, I respect all orientation)
- excannuck 6y agoYou just admitted to purposely hijacking your employer's product development to harm them. You also admitted to acting in bad faith. You probably just admitted to a crime. Certainly you've opened yourself up to a lawsuit to make the victims of the hack whole. You're looking at some very serious legal trouble.
- f430 6y agoI doubt that.
- shripadk 6y agoSo because you were not compensated properly you decided to screw the users of your company who had nothing to do with you being compensated less. You act like you are some kind of martyr but you are the sole person responsible for the human rights violations of thousands and potentially millions of unsuspecting users who used that service. I hope you can sleep well tonight knowing how you deliberately violated privacy and rights of people unconnected with your compensation issue. If you were treated unfairly you should have resigned. Not fuck the company over.
- f430 6y agoLook, the people who signed up for the service were mostly men looking to cheat on their wives if it makes you feel better. Screw them. Why get married when you are just going to sign up on dating site to look for sugar babies who can't be bothered to put in the work so they sleep with married rich older men. I don't think you realize how corrupt and immoral people are. I took great joy reading through the depraved private messages. It's technically prostitution if you wanna put it that way.
- throwawaycuriou 6y agoYou may be getting thrills out of this disclosure but like sibling comments I recommend you delete these submissions. It is not painting you in a good light.
- dcgoss 6y agoLet me take a guess: you worked at Ashley Madison? Data breach, Canada, cheating, etc. Checks out
- john_mack 6y agosounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach
- Talanes 6y agoAt this point I'd be willing to put money on knowing where you worked, so if you have any worry about being outed for that, well yeah. I do kinda hope you're not just bullshitting though, because those assholes definitely had it coming and this just makes it all the more deliciously vengeful.
- kodah 6y agoYou have likely confessed to a crime. If not a crime, you have committed a serious software-related ethical violation and should not work in software again.
- f430 6y agoWhat is the bigger crime? Telling people to work 80 hours a week without overtime? Threatening female coworkers with bad reviews if they dont go on a date? Calling me racial slurs and stealing my lunch? I can go on and on my man you weren't there I don't need to work in software, I have others work in it for me.
- kodah 6y agoThose things are repugnant and some of them grossly illegal. This is exactly why we have laws and don't allow people to enact vigilante justice. It didn't take long to figure out that hurt and misguided people act and speak out of vengeance and hurt. Nobody heals, nobody learns. Even more, and what you ironically put on display here, is that you may have dented their pocket book but who you ultimately hurt was the users and your colleagues. Your woefully misguided sense of justice has ensured that the only outcome for everyone is hurt.
- Talanes 6y agoNot to defend the obviously very unmoored gentleman, but if he worked where all hints seem to imply he worked, the company was already using their database to extort users. Edit: Just in case this was unclear though, that would definitely be another datapoint in the "Report this because it will be taken seriously" column. Not advocating vigilante justice, even if I'm pretty sure they were as slimy as he's saying.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ardy42 6y ago> You have likely confessed to a crime. What crime, exactly? I doubt what he did is any kind of crime. Honestly, some PMs would probably do the exact same thing (e.g. focusing on the "customer" by de-prioritizing "tech debt" to work on "higher priority" work). Edit: not to say it wasn't unethical, but the bar for criminal conduct is not the same.
- freebuju 6y agoYou have no honor as a person and as an employee. And even worse, terrible problem solving skills. Did it occur to you the people you thought your fisting could have just replicated the same abuse elsewhere? Why not officially report them so they could have been on the book for these transgressions industry-wide? How was not quitting the shitty job on top of your list here?
- f430 6y agoare you kidding me? Do you think we have rule of law in Canada? Our laws are a joke compared to United States. Who the hell am I going to report to exactly? Who will take it seriously?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sha1337 6y agoYou are right. The law is a joke. Pornhub had videos of teenagers getting raped for months and never took them down until they got back-lashed by social media for it. Is Pornhub still up? Yup. Has anyone been punished for hosting this stuff? Nope. The only way to bring down companies like these without waiting for a grand societal paradigm-shift is to act outside the law unfortunately, because people don't care enough, that's just the sad reality. I'm willing to bet that most of the people that are criticizing you for wanting to date an 18 yo have probably pumped and dumped many girls in their lives themselves. They probably consume porn as well and might have accidentally fapped to rape footage, who knows. I think you're by no means a saint, but they're certainly not better than you. And expressions such as "thauts illigul" don't really say anything about the moral value of your actions.
- gabereiser 6y agoI really hope they find you, prosecute you, and you never work in software again. Thanks for ruining a company for the countless others who were staying there, regardless of your experience, because they believed in what they were doing, and working towards their own personal goals. I don't know the details, but I know if someone did that to a company that I was invested in, I would be devastated. Please go away, never to return. Go be a bartender or some other profession where being an asshole will get you ahead. Leave software to people who still care about ethics and have empathy for customers and coworkers.
- dang 6y agoAttacking another user like this will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. They don't stop applying in cases like this, and we're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true https://hn.algolia.com/?query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang&s...
- gabereiser 6y agoApologies, won’t happen again.
- dang 6y agoAppreciated!
- dang 6y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25771209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25771209 and marked it offtopic.
- bArray 6y agoTo be fair, I think it's a lot easier to think in terms of decentralization when the tech you work with (p2p) is decentralized by design. I imagine Parler to be something that was iteratively worked on, where their most recent challenge has been in scaling their service. I also suspect that they have been working towards returning their initial investment - it was likely accepted that Parler might just be temporary anyway. Regarding the security, it is appalling. Generally the website feels like they have one good dev working in the background - it doesn't feel like an entire team working on this 24/7. It certainly doesn't feel like there is some review process. Hopefully they fix the security before bringing it back online. What seems crazy to me is that Parler have not been able to setup at least one server to provide a static page to explain why they are offline and what the next steps are (from their perspective). At least parler.com points to 127.0.0.1 I guess.
- WClayFerguson 6y agoI've been telling developers for years if you build your infrastructure on top of tons of 3rd party services like Google Cloud or AWS then you basically don't own it, and can be shut down any day, against your will. Web companies should build on "Linux" only, as their base platform, so they own everything above that. I was a fan of Parler but building on AWS was a huge mistake, and they should have realized they were "owned" from day one. And to any other CEO/CTO making the same mistake: "Beware, you do not have control over your company."
- aabhay 6y agoIt is increasingly, vanishingly hard to not use the big three cloud services. Mainly because any platform or tool you might use is _also_ hosted on these clouds.
- WClayFerguson 6y agoYou can build on Java + SpringBoot + MySQL + Linux + Docker Compose, then what else do you really need? I mean there's tons of technology stacks to choose from, but people get lazy and take the easy way out rather than learning to scale servers themselves. Get on Linode. It's base on Linux instances. If you build on Linux you are "free" and not "owned"
- onion2k 6y ago... what else do you really need? A proper database. :)
- WClayFerguson 6y agoThere's a lot of DBs to choose from: MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL. What you want to avoid is anything from Amazon or Google ANY other similar service.
- swebs 6y agoIs that supposed to be a dig against MySQL, or did you just miss that in the list?
- newacct583 6y agoParler was, at the end of the day, a somewhat amateurish Twitter clone whose essential growth hack was that they decided to serve as a kind of ban evasion mechanism for Twitter. They had virtually no organic growth of their own, they worked by accepting the banned castoffs from another service and promising not to do any moderation. And then we had a historical incident of political violence perpetrated by the same demographic. Move fast and break things indeed. But "staying online" isn't the Parler goal. Matze wanted to run an internet giant, not keep a seedy right wing reactionary forum alive. I mean, 4chan and 8kun already fill that market. He's just going to pack it up, keep his head down, and try not to get sued (or charged).
- smitty1e 6y agoWe can all come by and ritually kick Parler and its suppoerts when they're down. PUNT #BONK# !BOOT! Bear in mind that, for all the accusations of Hitlerhood by the Adolphology experts, the conservatives aren't the ones nuking anyone's voices. Just keep that in mind as this French Revolution picks up angular momentum.
- toiletfuneral 6y agocope
- ggggtez 6y agoNot sure why the downvotes. This essentially is the same as my take. This is the inevitable result of pushing your brand as "no content moderation" but not actually having any skills or plans on what to do when it eventually caught up with them. Anyone familiar with 4chan knows that some of the earliest content that was banned on the platform include childporn and organizing raids/doxxing. If you read the terms of service, you'll see that content is still banned (even if not uniformly enforced). The fact that parler couldn't muster even 4chan levels of moderation shows you that they really had no comprehension of the content creators they would be courting with their service.
- tmpz22 6y ago
- copperwater69 6y ago>In more recent years, Kolmoisoppi has moved on to fund Njalla, a privacy-centric domain name registration service. One he says was already asked to host Parler, and refused. >“Of course we wouldn't,” Kolmisoppi said. “We're pro human rights, which includes the right to not be killed by extreme right wing terrorists.” Why do I see this embarrassing justification so often? It doesn't make sense to equate speech with violence.
- jere 6y agoYou think it's a mistake to compare death threats to violence? Or a mistake to compare organizing terrorist attacks against the government to violence?
- Reedx 6y agoIt also doesn't make sense because terrorists would obviously be using encrypted channels primarily, not some shabby public plain text forum. And most organization would be on Facebook, with orders of magnitude more users and better tools.
- ggggtez 6y agoYou are simply uninformed. It is well documented that ISIS recruited people through Facebook and Twitter, and even YouTube. Remember: before the terrorists get those encrypted apps, they need to be radicalized first. That step is done on public social networks, where network effects help spread their message to a receptive audience.
- rubyist5eva 6y agoConsidering left-wing riots are organized and streamed, and encouraged on Facebook and Twitter openly - this is a very weak "explanation".
- rconti 6y agoIt seems they generally make the effort to explicitly call for nonviolence and the like. I'm sure these "left wing riot" groups you mention crossed the line before, too, and had comments and pages removed. Hell, notice that Parler got away with it, too until they didn't? There's always a line, and sometimes it gets crossed. Pretending like nothing bad ever happens to group X, and everything bad always happens to group Y, and furthermore, insisting their behaviors are equivalent is, let's say, lacking in proof.
- bobsmooth 6y agoParler decided not to buy their own hardware and rent their own rack space. Plenty of other unpopular websites have figured it out.
- ransom1538 6y agoRoad map for hater sites: 1. Fire up servers in Russia. 2. Learn rsync. 3. Profit.
- SteveNuts 6y agoThere are ToS at Colo facilities also, renting rack space isn't foolproof either.
- throwaway2048 6y agoSites like stormfront manage to stay up, despite being way older and arguably more extreme.
- SteveNuts 6y agoIf there's ever a "capitol riot" sized event linked back to those sites, their BCPs will be put to the test as well.
- throwaway2048 6y agoplenty of far right European terrorist attacks have been linked directly to stormfront, including the attack by Anders Breivik.
- walrus01 6y agothere's plenty of big colocation and hosting companies in Russia.
- coolspot 6y agoWhich will not provide you service unless you give them Russian phone number and scan of your Russian passport.
- loraa 6y agoIt comes down to everyone wanting to do what they want and finding collective in that separation. Ultimately it's just cult mentality and that's what humans are like. This is why we war.
- ekianjo 6y ago> Embarrassing The site not being online may be embarrassing from a risk management standpoint, but the app being censored from Apple Store and Google Play Store prevents them from having a meaningful presence ever again anyway.
- DamnYuppie 6y agoThey just gave millions of people a reason to investigate rooting their devices.
- ekianjo 6y agoYou don't need to root your device to install an .apk. It's all about friction. The harder you make it for people to do something, the less people will do it. It's always a very effective strategy.
- jakear 6y agoWhy not just use a web app? I don’t have the Twitter app installed because the web app does everything I need.
- ekianjo 6y agoMost non techies rather use apps in my experience, but I may be wrong.
- joecot 6y agoThey have a Progressive Web App, which should be able to be loaded up and a home screen shortcut just like any app would. But it's not straight forward for Android (Parler users were trying to explain how to do it to each other with hilarious results), and I believe on Apple it can't be done. There have been called for regulating how Apple and Google protect their app stores after Parler was pulled, but I don't think that's the solution. The solution is getting them to integrate PWAs into their ecosystem. They don't want to, because it draws from their app store revenue.
- 6y ago
- m3kw9 6y agoJust by looking at how easily their entire db was downloaded, wouldn’t be surprise they hacked most things together and hardcoded a lot of stuff to work with AWS
- ggggtez 6y agoIf I recall, that wasn't the DB of Parler, but of their wordpress blog. It's still sloppy, but it's not on the same level.
- sangnoir 6y agoIIRC, one of the poor design choices was making their resource URLs (videos, pictures, etc) sequential - this reduces the effort of crawling everything down to a 'for' loop; no need to get the actual "db" for references. As a bonus, those media resources were not stripped of metadata (EXIF data in images was present)
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y agoThere is nothing wrong with this on its own. The real flaw was not stripping the exif data. Although I guess sequential IDs did enable an easier attack on the real flaw.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoAnd if it was indeed 70 TB downloaded and they were serving it off AWS, they're getting at least a $5600 bill as a last fuck you on their way out, just for that single download. If you have enemies on the Internet, having anything on one of the cloud providers that charge an arm and a leg for traffic seems like asking for a financial DDoS.
- saurik 6y ago... like this website? ;P I honestly don't see anything wrong with that design: permissions should be honored--and Parler did something really wrong here that caused people to be able to gain admin status from them--but, past that, if someone wants to download the whole site why not let them?
- Meekro 6y agoIn contrast, Gab actually owns their own ASN and announces their own routes[1]. Much harder to deplatform. I'd expect no less from a YC alum! [1] https://bgp.he.net/AS42651 https://bgp.he.net/AS42651
- trianglem 6y agoBut sad to think that YC spawned someone like him as well.
- outoftheabyss 6y agoI set up an account this evening and it’s unusable due to loading times. They’ve added 1.7m in 4 days which may explain it. Be interesting to see how long it takes them to scale
- um_ya 6y agoI've been impressed by Gab
- trianglem 6y agoWhy? Seems like the level of discussion is not all that far away from the level on Parler.
- outoftheabyss 6y agoOr on Twitter, or facebook Curiosity, exchange of views, diversifying the news and information I’m exposed to, follow some people I am interested in hearing from, respect for censorship stance. These are the first that spring to mind
- trianglem 6y agoPromoting fascism is not diversifying views, it’s propagating hate.
- formalsystems 6y agoI got the sense while crawling data from their API that the engineering quality is poor at Parler. Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps, certain fields were duplicated for no reason (e.g. every object would have an identical "id" and "_id" key), counts of impressions/comments/etc would be the display strings rather than raw numbers (so "2k" or "5m"), and various moderation flags were in place like a boolean "sensitive" which was always false, even for posts that had been downvoted significantly.
- paranoidrobot 6y agoOf all the things to criticise Parler's tech folks over, using ISO8601 (minus the non-digit characters) shouldn't be one.
- jhanschoo 6y agoIDK the issue OP saw with using ISO over UNIX timestamps, but one reason why you might want accuracy down to the second for dates is with providing accurate relative time/date across timezones.
- CameronNemo 6y agoIs ISO8601 without punctuation still ISO8601? Most log parsers I have seen would not pick up the Parker format. ex gr https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.date.fromisoformat https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.dat... https://github.com/elastic/logstash/blob/v1.4.2/patterns/grok-patterns#L68 https://github.com/elastic/logstash/blob/v1.4.2/patterns/gro...
- Earwig 6y agoYes... kind of. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601, there is a "basic format" without separators and an "extended format" that includes them for readability. However, a T is still required to separate the date and time in the most recent version of the standard.
- alphabet9000 6y ago"We don't condone gun violence. We believe that the world needs less guns, not more of them. We believe however that these prints will stay on the internets regardless of blocks and censorship, since that's how the internets works. If there's a lunatic out there who wants to print guns to kill people, he or she will do it. With or without TPB. Better to have these prints out in the open internets (TPB) and up for peer review (the comment threads), than semi hidden in the darker parts of the internet." -The Pirate Bay https://thepiratebay10.org/torrent/28522986/Liberator_-_First_3D_Printable_Gun https://thepiratebay10.org/torrent/28522986/Liberator_-_Firs...
- Meekro 6y agoSeems reasonable to me! If your reason for existing is that "information wants to be free" but then you start making exceptions when it conflicts with your politics, people might think your real political philosophy is "pop music wants to be free."
- jakelazaroff 6y agoOr, more charitably: your stance on information and freedom simply isn’t absolutist.
- mc32 6y agoOr more accurately is they agree on the idea of censorship. That censorship has value to them.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoIf you don’t mind when platforms get rid of spam, child porn, normal porn, doxxing, death threats, ISIS recruitment videos or assassination contracts, then guess what: censorship has value to you, too.
- mc32 6y ago
- thinkaboutits 6y agoThe Pirate Bay people are such heroes... for allowing people to download garbage Hollywood movies without paying the 10 dollars required to view them.
- dghughes 6y agoIronic the article is in Vice considering one of its founders (Gavin McInnes) also founded the Proud Boys.
- cookie_monsta 6y agoBut if he left vice 13 years ago citing "creative differences" and founded the PBs eight years after that is it really irony? Or just a simple case for reading between the lines?
- papandada 6y agoI spent some time trying to figure out Gavin McInnes the other day. I had a very hard time separating conviction and sarcasm.
- wyck 6y agoWell he was in a band called Anal Chinook.
- typenil 6y agoWhat's embarrassing is the fact that our industry is so obsessed with censoring wrongthink that it's not enough to drive thought criminals off of mainstream platforms - we have to drive alternative platforms off of their infrastructure.
- throwaway894345 6y agoObviously Parler didn't consider censorship as part of their threat model, while TPB necessarily had to. Moreover, I'm pretty sure TPB has gone down here and there, probably for weeks at a time. I don't think Parler's problems threat model is that bad; just maybe don't depend on companies that are liable to peer pressure. In the worst case you just get hosting from someone who isn't going to dump you because of social pressure (even going out of country if you must).
- INTPenis 6y agoTPB had a much greater threat to them. They were even threatened by domain registrars. How could you say TPB didn't consider censorship? What is a DMCA takedown if not censorship?
- Kbelicius 6y ago> How could you say TPB didn't consider censorship? They didn't say that. They say in the first sentence that TPB had to consider censorship
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jrochkind1 6y agoAlso embarrassing: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vqew/the-hacker-who-archived-parler-explains-how-she-did-it-and-what-comes-next https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vqew/the-hacker-who-archiv... > donk_enby had originally intended to grab data only from the day of the Capitol takeover, but found that the poor construction and security of Parler allowed her to capture, essentially, the entire website. That ended up being 56.7 terabytes of data, which included every public post on Parler, 412 million files in all—including 150 million photos and more than 1 million videos. Each of these had embedded metadata like date, time and GPS coordinates—unlike most social media sites, Parler does not strip metadata from media its users upload, which, crucially, could be useful for law enforcement and open source investigators.
- f430 6y ago> GPS coordinates—unlike most social media sites, Parler does not strip metadata from media its users upload, which, crucially, could be useful for law enforcement OH SHI- This is a colossal mess up, on epic proportions.
- dvdbloc 6y agoA mess up if you intended to protect your users...
- slg 6y agoDue to the people involved, Parler is almost certainly not a honeypot setup by the FBI, CIA, or some other government organization. However some of the details that have leaked out over the last week made me wonder how little of the site would have changed if that was the intended purpose.
- andy1973 6y agoThis article is not less toxic as it claims Parler was.
- hbag 6y agoI think what's (only just) more embarrasing is the fact they didn't strip GPS metadata from uploaded photos, like everyone else has been doing for the past... fifteen or so years?
- threesmegiste 6y agoPerfect game from tech companies. They put you on a stramge position. To be against censorship you have to defend trump. Yes you should defend him. Because censorship is more important than Trump. But tech companies know that you couldnt judge properly. Never again talk about censor. You all close your eyes when free speech killed.
- redisman 6y agoWhy even have a TOS if you won’t enforce it? If you sign a contract you can’t cry that you got banned for repeatedly breaking it and when asked not to, you did it again.
- kylegill 6y agoOf all the interesting points brought up by this article, my favorite part was the link to the Pirate Bay's launch of a submarine to host its servers. ...dated April 1.
- hoseja 6y agoI wonder what the engineering quality and opsec was at facebook, a year or two after the Zuck built it to steal people's cell numbers.
- mrvenkman 6y ago4 years after Facebook allowed the general public to join, the engineers created a PHP transpiler called "HipHop" which in itself, I would suggest, shows competence, engineering talent and a good understanding of PHP - the language that Facebook was at that point written in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
- throwaway4good 6y agoBut Parler is not built by pirates and street kids. It is built by establishment republicans with billionaire backing. They are not used to be thrown out on the street.
- fourlayers 6y agoAt leats he admits it. First step towards a better world.
- Grustaf 6y agoI suppose one advantage Pirate Bay had was that they set out doing something illegal, whereas Parler probably didn't even consider the possibility that they would have to fight to stay online. Apple has tightened the rules around forums lately, I don't think they required moderation when Parler started. The other thing is of course that Pirate Bay was started by hard core computer nerds, not business people.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoTPB also has the advantage of age. Their last decade has been quite stable but back in the day they would regularly go down and people would make all sorts of witty comments questioning the competence of the operators. It took them a lot of work to get where they are and they also had/have a different scaling curve than a social network.
- Izkata 6y agoDon't forget the raid. On a hunch one of the admins was able to make a copy of the entire database and bring it back online shortly afterwards; if he had not, they'd've had to revive it with no content, and it probably would have died out / been overtaken by some other one.
- holografix 6y agoCounter point: Parler was intentionally set up badly in order to certainly be breached in the near future.
- LarvaFX 6y agoOh dear, people here are already infected by this "I choose my reality" bullshit.
- DigitalSea 6y agoPerhaps the most embarrassing thing about Parler besides the fact it was deplatformed so easily is that it was built on WordPress. And don't get me wrong, I love and use WordPress often, but to build such a large social media platform on-top of it? That just reeks of amateur.
- abductee_hg 6y agoword.
- idownvoted 6y agoIn 1932‘s Third Reich Language: „German Smuggler thinks minorities‘s inability to escape discrimination is embarrassing“
- LatteLazy 6y agoThere is a part of me that thinks this was always Parlers aim (or at least an acceptable outcome). The whole point of parler was to cry about censorship while engaging in censorship. Now it's been shut down, all the more reason to cry...
- poxwole 6y agoChad PirateBay vs Virgin Parler
- blacklight 6y agoI personally don't find their ability to remain online that surprising. The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks were built by people with a passion for building, maintaining and hacking things. People who, even without a solid CS background, would spend hours a day learning new things, developing distributed protocols, evading DNS blocks and hosting their content wherever they could to make it accessible - included the small server in their own garage if needed. And they are used by people who don't mind learning a new protocol or how to use a new client to get the content they want. I don't see the same amount of passion for technology and hacking among the Parler users, nor its maintainers. Those who believe in conspiracy content are people characterized by a psychological tendency to take shortcuts whenever they can in order to minimize their efforts in learning and understanding new things. So when the first blocker hits they usually can't see alternative solutions, because it's not the way their brains are wired. They always expect somebody else to come up with solutions for them, and they always blame somebody else when the solution won't come. And even if they decided to migrate their content to the dark web or on a Tor network, not many people will follow them - both because they don't have the skills, and because they don't want to acquire those skills. Plus, they'd lose the "viral network effect" that they get when posting click-bait content on public networks, the new censorship-proof network will only attract a small bunch of already radicalized people. And even if they wanted to hire some smart engineers to do the job for them, we all know that engineers tend to swing on the other opposite of the ideological spectrum. Those who have built systems for escaping REAL authoritarian censorship would rightfully feel disgusted if asked to apply their knowledge to provide a safe harbour for rednecks to vomit their conspiracy-theories-fueled hate.
- koffiezet 6y ago> The Pirate Bay and other torrent networks were built by people with a passion for building Also by people who know that what they were doing was straight-up illegal in a lot of countries, and grey-area in a lot of others. So this was a real risk. Parler on the other hand, at its core was just a social network, and if you look at the founders/owners, they have a very disconnected interpretation of "free speech", so they were clearly thinking nothing bad could happen.
- SergeAx 6y agoUnpopular opinion: it is not bad, it is just normal average modern startup attitude. Let's put everything into cloud, use Spanner or Aurora for data, Firebase for user mgmt, throw together bunch of lambdas and voila, we are in business. And I am not being judgemental, because this approach is working 95 times of 100, and most of startups are dying anyway before they hit the wall of vendor lock.
- stevewodil 6y agoIt is not universally bad for all companies. It does however show their incompetence when they try to build an alt-right platform by hosting it on AWS and distributing it on Google's and Apple's app stores. Either way, I think it's for the best that they are technically inept.
- alwdgxzubpxnzcy 6y agoI think the difference is that Pirate Bay was bootstrapped whereas Parler had significant financial backing. With all that money "why not" throw it on AWS. There is also the point that Parler wasn't doing anything illegal so they didn't expect to be shut down even though they should have.
- anewguy9000 6y agoTBP has been down all week (everything showing 0 seeds). sup with dat?
- permo-w 6y ago>As one of the original co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi knows a little something about keeping controversial services online. Kolmisoppi and his colleagues spent decades battling a global coalition of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies intent on wiping the file sharing website from the face of the internet. Unsuccessfully. This implies that he was unsuccessful. As we all know, he was not