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Parler decided not to buy their own hardware and rent their own rack space. Plenty of other unpopular websites have figured it out.
by bobsmooth 6y ago
Parler 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.
- edoceo 6y agoParler was backed by very deep pockets with existing international connections. They could afford to purchase the necessary Russian friends to make this happen.
- that_guy_iain 6y agoThe CEO is married to a Russian so that isn't a problem.
- madeofpalk 6y agoAgain, plenty of other unpopular websites have figured it out. Parler just didn’t care.
- mike_d 6y agoFor a few thousand dollars a month I operate my own servers in n>1 physical locations with different companies and different transit providers. I figured it out. Pirate Bay figured it out. Any company that genuinely cares about eliminating SPOFs has figured it out.
- zarkov99 6y agoPerhaps Parler did not realize that being aligned with conservatism was grounds for deplatforming. I am sure they will learn as will the whole world.
- ggggtez 6y agoI'm not sure I like the world where conservatives are making bed-fellows with pedophiles and ISIS. Over this last week, I've talked to people who have un-ironically argued that companies should not be allowed to moderate content... even if that content is illegal! It's like a whole section of the population is just learning for the first time that the internet is real life and it's not the wild-west it was in the 90s.
- grahamburger 6y agoLet's hope so! The more we diversify our social media consumption as a society the better off we all are. Well, other than Jack and Mark.
- szhu 6y agoHonestly, I think they'd be happier too. They'd have less money and power, sure, but they'd also get less death threats, and a lot of the world (including world leaders) would hate them a little less. I don't think they would care if Facebook and Twitter were each 1/10 the size of what they are today -- they'd still be billionaires and the companies would still be mind-boggling huge. They only care that the companies are much larger than competitors.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoI didn't read Dorsey's actual tweets, but here's what the Guardian said about them: >Dorsey underscored in his tweets a need for a new “open decentralized standard for social media”. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/13/trump-twitter-ban-jack-dorsey-chief-executive https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/13/trump-twi...
- that_guy_iain 6y agohttps://prq.se/?p=colo https://prq.se/?p=colo Famous for starting the pirate bay, they're still in action and pretty much specifically provide freedom of speech hosting. I think it plays in the game the Parler investors wanted to play that they got shutdown and can't get back online. Fuels the "we've been censored" angle.
- bpodgursky 6y agoMy guess is they won't struggle too much to get the site itself back online (they at least claim it was "bare metal", so charitably just containers), but replacing the email service providers and other authentication / SaaSy bits will be a challenge.
- coolspot 6y agoEmail service providers? What’s that? sudo apt install postfix Configure DMARC and SPF and you’re fine.
- bpodgursky 6y agoYes, it's as easy as those two commands, unless you want people to actually receive your emails.
- manquer 6y agoIt is not that simple yes, however it is not too hard, especially if you are mostly only sending to registered users. It is lot harder to setup a dc and get ISPs to peer with you than setup the app itself.
- jeofken 6y agoDo you have some resource to share on this simple set up?
- manquer 6y agoThere are one or two projects like postal[1] or mailbox[2] that make it much easier than it was before. [1] https://github.com/postalhq/postal https://github.com/postalhq/postal [2] https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox
- tjpnz 6y agoI'm curious about how they'll handle SMS. I once worked for a place that self hosted a message gateway by co-locating a bunch of cellphones alongside their servers. It worked but probably wouldn't scale for their purposes. Our setup also assumed that customers were in the same country as the servers.
- CryptoGhost 6y agoYou don't even need to do that. The actual key to running an extremist / subversive / hate / unpopular website is NOT connecting the site to any in-person activities. As long as your website is just some text floating out there in the network there is a lot of wiggle room. Sure, companies like Google or WordPress will ban you if they don't like you, but you can still get service from Cloudflare, major web hosts, or domain registration without jumping through a bunch of hoops.
- p1mrx 6y ago> As long as your website is just some text floating out there in the network there is a lot of wiggle room. What does this even mean? Text has to be stored in some physical location, or set of locations.
- markdown 6y agoI read it as, if it's just text and all anon, there's always wiggle room. Once you start allowing video and photo uploads, and real names, then your liability increases exponentially.
- rconti 6y agoI think what parent meant was not to say "arrive at this location at this time and do this criminal thing", but I could be reading it wrong.
- mikeshank 6y agoI think he's referencing Flash
- thinkaboutits 6y agoCloudflare maybe (although they did ban a few websites for wrongthink in the past) but domains can be cancelled more easily and even censored by governments (requiring ISPs to do DNS blacklists; that’s how France censors various websites).
- throwbacktictac 6y agoThis sounds like double speak. Can you elaborate?
- mrweasel 6y agoIf you do social media, of any kind, you can't really rely to heavily on cloud providers. I know, Snapshot is a massive Google customer, but that means that they need to be rather careful. Facebook and Twitter couldn't exist on AWS, unless Amazon chooses to enforce their rules very selectively. There is a ton of hate speech on Facebook, which is not censored, moderated and which clearly violate all sort of rule. Much of it is due to the language of the users not necessarily being English, or another major language. However, regardless of the language, the content can still easily be in violation of an AWS terms of service (and often Facebooks own). If Facebook had been an AWS, Azure or GCP customer, they would have been shutdown long ago... Well they wouldn't, because the rules wouldn't really apply to them. I honestly don't care about Parler, Amazon has every right to shut of their service, they decide what customers they want on their platform. What I do care about, is that terms of service, rules for allowed speech is applied fairly and equally.