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Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

• api 6y ago
  If I were running something likely to be deplatformed, I would never consider anything but a multi-cloud solution where no single provider is a single point of failure. It's not that hard to do.
  • andomar 6y ago
    If you were refused by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare, what alternatives are there?
    • justapassenger 6y ago
      10 years ago no one was running in cloud. Internet still works outside of big tech data centers.
      • jasonjayr 6y ago
        Sure, but frequently whole netblocks we blocked because spammers or IP ranges hosting + sending content undesired by the larger community. Peering ISPs would frequently drop routes + messages from whole data centers that would blatantly ignore spam complaints, which would force their hand to kick the offending customers off their platforms that caused harm to their other non-offending customers.
    • shiftpgdn 6y ago
      There are thousands of colo centers out there that will take your business. Sure you have to buy the hardware up front but in the long run it'll be less expensive. The scary part would be fiber/backbone providers denying you a connection.
      • drivingmenuts 6y ago
        Ultimately, this will come down to public vs. private rights. If infrastructure, no matter how vital, is privately funded, what rights are there vs infrastructure that is publicly funded. Further complications are infrastructure that is a mix of the two. Personally, I lean toward private infrastructure being able to set their own rules and if it’s public, then the public sets the rules. I am not sure when it gets to be a mix of the two.
        • shiftpgdn 6y ago
          What about peering agreements? What happens when cogent gets de-peered because they host a website accused of thought crimes?
          • drivingmenuts 6y ago
            The same thing that would happen in other situations. If you and I can’t come to terms, we part ways and don’t do business with each other. If one of us is affected because of that, then one of us needs to reconsider how best to remedy or work around that issue.
    • gameswithgo 6y ago
      epik, apparently. at some point too when you notice that everyone thinks you are horrible maybe the problem is you.
      • zarkov99 6y ago
        Yeah, that is a great mental heuristic: the majority is always fair and right. I am sure the Jews thought that back in 1930’s Germany. And the Christians in Rome, the Kolacks in Russia, the intellectuals in Mao's China, the wealthy Cubans when Castro took over and blacks in the US before the civil rights movement.
        • yanderekko 6y ago
          You grant too much. The people who are making these deplatforming decisions do not represent a majority or anything close to it. Perhaps they believe they will when their cultural revolution is complete and the dust has settled, but that has yet to be seen.
          • zarkov99 6y ago
            Unfortunately they do represent an overwhelming majority of the power in this particular domain.
        • klyrs 6y ago
          False equivalence. Freedom to persecute is not equal to freedom from persecution.
          • zarkov99 6y ago
            The equivalence is not in the persecution but on the validity of an heuristic that that dictates you are an asshole if a powerful majority says you are.
      • imwillofficial 6y ago
        I see Facebook getting right on that.
    • nixgeek 6y ago
      Oracle, IBM, Alibaba. On the smaller but still “millions of virtual machines” end of the scale: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode. Still have APIs and can give you instances in minutes. Hetzner and OVH also an option for the scale of infrastructure that Parler appears to require, although their “Dedicated Server” offerings (Bare Metal) often take 24-72 hours to deliver to customers. Or one of a thousand places to rent a rack and “DIY” with hardware from a vendor like Dell, HP, Supermicro, Lenovo, ZT, ... Plenty of examples exist of sites which have spent years or even decades online despite being unpopular or illegal, e.g. The Pirate Bay.
      • stephankoelle 6y ago
        Hetzner has usually 10 minutes for bare metal.
        • nixgeek 6y ago
          In all the years I’ve been using them they’ve never hit 10 minutes for my orders. Usually > 4 hours and < 6 hours though on AX and other “standard specification” boxes. On PX where you can specify NVME and other configuration, more like 2-3 days (particularly if the order was placed on a weekend).
      • joezydeco 6y ago
        Peter from The Pirate Bay recently commented on the Parler situation. TLDR: what a bunch of lightweight crybabies... https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348194329005875203 https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348194329005875203
    • millzlane 6y ago
      Someone should ask Peter Sunde. https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-thinks-parlers-inability-to-stay-online-is-embarrassing https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-th...
    • bhhaskin 6y ago
      If you still want to remain in the cloud? Shell game. Contract another company to setup and run everything on the cloud side and mask the traffic. Hiding the traffic can be as simple as front end proxies into a VPN to AWS. Or even just SSL traffic. AWS or what ever cloud provider would be none the wiser unless they are actively looking inside everyone's boxes. Which I highly doubt they are.
    • ipsocannibal 6y ago
      Pick any country without an extradition treaty with the US and buy rack space there. Parler was easily nuked because its tech was amateur hour not because US cloud providers rule the internet.
      • kondro 6y ago
        Good luck getting your 100Gbps+ sustained (from their actual requirements) of bandwidth in a non-extradition country to your primary audience in the USA.
        • ipsocannibal 6y ago
          Can you link to that requirements doc? I find it hard to believe that Parler required 100Gbps to run and meet a reasonable SLA. Also you can leverage multiple non-extradition jurisdictions to help offload bandwidth requirements while providing a hot spare cell.
    • xiphias2 6y ago
      Yandex Cloud, Alibaba, CloudSigma, Hetzner....maywhen it comes to US politics, any non-US country allows more free speech than US itself.
    • rvz 6y ago
      Self-hosting was a thing 10 - 15 years ago before the cloud hype and it is still an option today especially for those who have no choice but to do it.
    • bdcravens 6y ago
      Investing in all the infrastructure to build a globally distributed architecture that is resilient? It's almost like we forgot that the web existed before the big cloud vendors. https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/20/facebooks-first-server-cost-85month/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/20/facebooks-first-server-cos...
    • BlackPlot 6y ago
      Digital Ocean, VMware,..
  • zarkov99 6y ago
    Hindsight and all that. Parler has hosted content no worse than Twitter or Facebook or thousands of other sites. Their banning from AWS could not have been reasonably anticipated. It was an unprecedented act of censorship in response to an unprecedented moment in American history. The world will learn and AWS will likely loose a few customers though not enough to change its policies.
    • mschuster91 6y ago
      > Parler has hosted content no worse than Twitter or Facebook or thousands of other sites. I disagree. There were open calls for murder on the platform where Parler was notified by Apple, by Google, by Amazon - and nothing happened. Which is the key thing here. Twitter and Facebook are extremely fast with the ban-hammer, in contrast.
      • imwillofficial 6y ago
        This is not true. Not even close.
        • cbg0 6y ago
          https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/13/22228675/amazon-parler-takedown-violent-threats-moderation-content-free-speech https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/13/22228675/amazon-parler-ta...
        • ogre_codes 6y ago
          Amazon has this documented extensively in their court filings.
      • ogre_codes 6y ago
        > Twitter and Facebook are extremely fast with the ban-hammer, in contrast. Twitter and Facebook have recently grudgingly picked up the ban hammer and use it, often too late or ineffectively. But yes, they will eventually act which is the big difference.
    • ogre_codes 6y ago
  • threatofrain 6y ago
    According to the CEO of Parler, banks and payment vendors, law firms, text and mail services also cancelled on them. This is why Parler also motivates discussion of alternative currency.
    • daniellarusso 6y ago
      What is the product? What do they take payment for?
      • Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
        premium subscriptions, donations, etc
  • BlackPlot 6y ago
    Exactly, it's crucial using multi-clouds because you never know when you will breach any clause of ToS. It's not so difficult to manage multiclouds with management tools as Anthos, Azure Arc, of course I would suggest independent like Openshift or CAST AI which pros would be one cluster
  • kondro 6y ago
    I'm not going to go into all the reasons why a multi-cloud solution probably isn't and why multi-cloud is stupendously difficult (and expensive as you move all that data around) for a scaling business. But in a situation like this, a company that's likely to be deplatformed, is likely to be deplatformed everywhere. I've seen a screenshot recently of Parler's hardware requirements (when searching new vendors) and it's somewhere in the vicinity of 15,000 cores with more than 400Gbps (sustained) of internal and 100Gbps of external bandwidth (from memory). The big cloud providers are the only place you can move to when you have those types of requirements (and are still actively growing).
    • api 6y ago
      That's about 250 bare metal 64-core servers. You can get that elsewhere, and keep in mind per-core performance on bare metal is going to be higher than you get per-core on shared tenant VMs in the cloud (for several reasons). Those bandwidth needs would constrain you only to larger scale bare metal providers though, which would leave you with fewer options. The problem sounds like it would have been database sync between locations, which is a major issue in multi-cloud. Most replicated databases are pretty chatty. You're right though about deplatforming, and the problem is if you are providing a safe haven for a bunch of Nazis like Parler is you are going to be constantly DDOSed. That means you need a lot of DDOS protection, and high end DDOS protection is a significantly smaller market with fewer players than just raw rack-em-and-stack-em hosting.
  • Traubenfuchs 6y ago
    Multicloud? The cool kids call it polynimbus.
• millzlane 6y ago
  It also shows the resiliency of the internet. Parler's ability to build their own failsafe network rests on them. I learned a lot of hard lessons with my first failed startup. One of them was not to rely on another platform for my success. If TPB can do it being enemies of nation states. I think Parler will be just fine.
• decasia 6y ago
  The thing is, you're always going to dependent on someone in the mainstream economic world if you want to have a web presence in North America. Even if you run your own servers, you're at the mercy of your hosting provider, your ISP, your DNS registrar, and even browser level things like Google Safe Browsing. Any of these can be major points of failure. So yeah, not using AWS would avoid being dependent on AWS, but you're going to depend on someone. In this sense, inclusion on the internet ultimately has a political dimension. I think that's just how it is — we live in a society with politics. (I'm omitting commentary on Parler in particular because I have no sympathy for them in this or any other case.)
  • millzlane 6y ago
    TBH most "Free speech" platforms will allow anything except fraud, child porn, and calls to violence that violate criminal law. Baring all of that. There are still places online to host whatever you want.
    • decasia 6y ago
      Yeah, I know those services are out there. I thought most of them were physically located outside North America though, is that not true?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • rtkwe 6y ago
        It's mixed and depends a lot on how far they go into the unmoderated depths. Gab and Parler for example are US company while there's 8kun/chan that are overseas and go/went way further into illegal content.
  • redisman 6y ago
    It's pretty baffling how people all of a sudden expect Fortune 500 companies to not act "politically correct" when bad actors are breaking their TOSes. Was there ever a medium backed by a large corporation where you could post calls to violence against politicians without getting booted off?
• lisper 6y ago
  I gotta say, recent events have left me shaken to my core. I thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I started a company dedicated to providing privacy and communications products that were not subject to control by any central authority (that turns out to be very hard!) But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. I always thought that in the end cooler heads would prevail. But we've now done the experiment in a big way and the results seem overwhelmingly negative to me, to the point where they present a credible existential threat to civilization, on a par with climate change. Maybe someone here can talk me down from this new position. But the evidence seems pretty overwhelming to me right now.
  • daniellarusso 6y ago
    I have to concur, it really does make sense to me why both France and Germany ban things on eBay that is ok in the US.
  • ghoward 6y ago
    I wrote about why free speech is still important here: https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicalization/ https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali... . Basically, the problem is not free speech. It's the social media drive for addiction.
    • lisper 6y ago
      But that is exactly the problem: how do you separate the two? Once someone figures out a way to profit from "free speech" the profit motive takes over and infects the whole system. I don't see any way around that without compromising freedom.
      • daniellarusso 6y ago
        Freedom is not absolute and boundless.
      • voodootrucker 6y ago
• mschuster91 6y ago
  I call bollocks on this. Everyone whose business goes against the terms of service of the major three cloud providers (in the case of Parler, serving as a platform for calls to violence and sedition, which are criminal offenses) still has the freedom to go to any of the literally hundreds of "bullet-proof hosting" providers, to rent rack space and a fiber uplink somewhere and to place one's own bare metal hardware there. The only thing Parler lost is the convenience that cloud providers offer, but there's no constitutional right to convenience.
  • mrstone 6y ago
    I completely agree with this - why is freedom of speech even coming up? You couldn't say this stuff in real life on a street corner, why should it be protected online?
    • mschuster91 6y ago
      > why is freedom of speech even coming up? The wider context of the debate is the thing, IMO. Prior to the Internet, exchange of opinions used to be locally restricted - now with the Internet, we have a couple of clashes. The most obvious is that the US model of "free speech" is almost absolute, whereas European societies believe that some forms of speech (esp. calls to violence, Holocaust denial, Nazi imagery) should be banned to protect society and its minorities from the worst. I'm German, given the history of what my ancestors did I'm firmly on the latter camp. The second one, related to that, is that social networks are, for about the first time in human history, truly global, and it's not in the clear at all who should / could claim legal authority over what happens there. When a person denies the Holocaust, Twitter can ban them, they can refuse to do anything or they can place a German-wide ban (per the NetzDG law). On the other side, when a German woman posts a photo of herself topless on Facebook, that is perfectly fine by German law but risks heavy fines for Facebook in the US, so Facebook errs on deleting stuff. And the third and final clash is STBX President Trump: should a private company have the power to take away the capability of a sitting US president to communicate efficiently with his citizens? Should a President (or any other political figure) be allowed to "govern by Tweet" in the first place? Is a call for violence, even for genocide (Iran's Khamenei comes to mind), acceptable simply because its caller is a government leader?
• thefounder 6y ago
  Just make sure you dont use proprietary stuff (e.g Google datastore/firebase etc) and at least you have the chance to go the old fashion way(co-location, smaller hosta etc)
  • redisman 6y ago
    Even then let’s say you have 100TB or more of data. How do you get an offline backup of that? Especially if it’s only a few days warning. I guess having some offline storage backup that gets updated often should be a part of the plan
• hartator 6y ago
  I don’t get all the anti free speech comments here. I rather live in a country with real free speech but no democracy than the reverse. You can’t have democracy without free speech.
  • NationalPark 6y ago
    Sigh. I am unbelievably tired of people setting this up as "pro free speech" vs "anti free speech". It's inflammatory (who proudly calls themselves "anti-free speech"? It's bad faith just to say that. Anyway.) and it's misleading. Most critically, almost everyone fundamentally agrees that censorship is a good thing, in principle. Even the most extreme "free speech" oriented websites remove spam, illegal pornography, and deliberate impersonation. Therefore, we both agree with the proposition that sometimes website operators should exercise their discretion and remove content. We are now discussing what should be in the set of things it is acceptable to remove and what is not. But we are not having a disagreement about the concept of censorship. Another thing to think about: Is a website operator that uses their discretion to remove content not, by that action, exercising their free speech? Would you have the government require website operators to host content they don't want to host? Because that is definitely a First Amendment violation.
    • MichaelRazum 6y ago
      I think the discussion shouldn't be about what should be censorship but rather who decides it. So if you put, lets say illegal pornography, on your page, then there is a law that forbids it. Especially in a good system the person who posted it gets prosecuted. On the other hand if companies act like judge and low, it can lead to bad things I think.
      • jeromegv 6y ago
        Inciting violence and overthrowing a government is already as illegal as child pornography is. Would you rather have all child pornography kept online up until a judge has declared that person guilty?
• peter303 6y ago
  Parler says they will return by by February. There is too much financial opportunity for large niche ideologies. They will miss the inauguration drama as the deplatformers intended. I wonder what alternative stack Parler will use.
• voodootrucker 6y ago
  Wow, why did this fall off the front page? There's no way it wasn't being upvoted sufficiently watching the flurry of initial comments... Was this discussion blocked? And if so, is there a particular policy it violated? This discussion seems extremely important right now. @dang can you elaborate?
  • Pilfer 6y ago
    Looks like it triggered the flamewar detector. This usually happens if a post has more comments than votes, and the post did not reach the minimum threshold (40 points).
    • voodootrucker 6y ago
      Thanks, I never realized that existed.
  • dang 6y ago
    We can't answer questions we don't see, and the only reliable way to get a message to us is hn@ycombinator.com. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I only saw this one randomly. Pilfer got it right. I've turned the penalty off now.
• jtdev 6y ago
  I fail to see how pushing the most extreme speech into the shadows improves anything...
• aaccount 6y ago
  Also the sorry state of tech skills in tech companies
• evantahler 6y ago
  I would like to see a new class of “social libel” laws - whereby knowing telling lies as truth in a public forum were punishable. Is this a civil or criminal offense?
  • breckenedge 6y ago
    It’s still plain ole libel or defamation. Musk was sued for defamation on Twitter not too long ago.
  • lixtra 6y ago
    Which politician would pass such a law? Only the one that has very tight control over the judges that execute it.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• imglorp 6y ago
  We're also at the point now where you have to ask which cloud is deplatforming a site. (edit, and their state alignment) Case in point, Russia is now routing Parler traffic. https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/1351227537985318929?s=20 https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/1351227537985318929?s=... https://twitter.com/dtemkin/status/1351240721261584385?s=20 https://twitter.com/dtemkin/status/1351240721261584385?s=20 (edit)
  • cheeze 6y ago
    Doesn't look like traffic is being routed through Russia, as the first tweet implies. They are using DDOS-Guard, which routes over Telia. In my (US) traceroute, traffic never leaves the states
    • tbodt 6y ago
      That tweet is not accurate, but DDOS-Guard is a Russian firm according to https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/01/hamas-may-be-threat-to-8chan-qanon-online/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/01/hamas-may-be-threat-to-8...
• AzzieElbab 6y ago
  I have no doubt in my mind that the violence would have been much worse had Trump won, and while I am happy we bid the bullet, I can’t help wondering how tech and media would have responded.
• cccc4all 6y ago
  This should give pause to every companies using only the cloud, especially from single cloud company. It is single point of failure and it's under someone else's control. Are they comfortable giving that kind of power to another company? Maybe a competitor?
• dfgdghdf 6y ago
  Here's how I might open a debate with right-leaning people about freedom of speech. If you sell a product, but make false claims about that product, then you are committing fraud. You have harmed someone (financially) with your speech, and contract laws rightly overrule freedom of speech here. So, if you believe in contract law, which is essential for free markets, then you must believe in limitations on speech... the question then is simply where to draw the line.
  • lliamander 6y ago
    There are principled exceptions to freedom of speech that are generally easy to identify and agree upon. I think there may be reasonable concerns about Parler's willingness or ability to police illegal speech online, but the stated reason for deplatforming is a farce. They reference things like the capitol riot, but if I recall correctly the actual storming of the capitol was planned (to the extent that it was a planned affair) one FaceBook. There's lots of things shared on FaceBook and Twitter that are bad (and even illegal) but they don't get the boot from their service providers - and Twitter is an Amazon customer as well! And the fact that Twitter is a big Amazon customer should not be ignored. It could be that Amazon's motivation was primarily political, but protecting the interests of one of their largest customers should not be ignored. But regardless, the real key here is that Amazon blatantly violated their contract. No company bets their business on a hosting service that does not provide protection against spontaneous cancellation of service. Even if Amazon wins the lawsuit, the message to all to all of their customers will be "we can turn you off at any time and for any reason". Expect to see a lot of migrations to other providers if that happens.
  • grecy 6y ago
    Your example is an interesting one, because I think it just shows there are consequences for certain types of speech, but that speech is still very much possible. Kind of like how I can park without feeding the meter, and the "consequences" are just tickets. At no point can my license be revoked if I always pay all the tickets. So getting back to your analogy, if I use speech to make false claims about a product I will get a hefty fine, but there is nothing physically stopping me from doing exactly the same thing tomorrow. The speech isn't actually prohibited or "denied" anymore than me parking illegal is, there are just consequences if I choose to do it.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• trident5000 6y ago
  It was a great reminder of why I will never use Apple Icloud or OneDrive, etc.
• mcguire 6y ago
  Playing the devil's advocate here: is this really "exceptional power"? Before the Internet, fringe, extremist political movements had essentially the same options as every other minor interest group: local groups, physical, mailed newsletters, maybe magazines, booths at whatever kind of group meetings, and maybe news media coverage. All of those options still exist. So the modern state of things hasn't removed anything. Since the age of the Internet, cloud providers have the same power as any other hosting provider: Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, whatever; they all have acceptable use policies that will get you taken down if you don't obey them. Outside of those, colocation and network providers seem a bit more willing to tolerate things, but they can still cut you off, just like they (sometimes) did in the good old days. And you can still go full-on backbone peer, if you can afford it, which these political groups certainly can. The bottom line is, you have your old options and you can still host yourself. You have options in between, but if they decide you aren't playing nice, they can hurt you. The only thing "exceptional" here is the nature and vocality of the groups in question.
  • rossdavidh 6y ago
    Well, before the internet, the analogous groups were the TV networks. Those networks were, for sure, likely to ban any of these groups, or if they did put a microphone in front of them, they edited the interview to make sure they looked bad. But nobody tried to claim, that the three major TV networks did not have exceptional power. Of course they did.
  • alexfromapex 6y ago
    > All of those options still exist. Not really, not during the pandemic in locked down areas. Also, tech plays a much bigger role today than it did in the heyday of Geocities et al. Combine it with the willingness of other tech forms of censorship like Facebook banning groups and organizing events and Visa banning financial transactions and you have total censorship.
  • 015a 6y ago
    I agree; but there are a few worrying trends that we need to keep an eye on with respect to this: * IPv4 space. IPv4 addresses are increasingly expensive. In a perfect world we'd just get rid of them, but instead, we live in a world where Amazon owns roughly $3B worth of them. They're critical to serving web content; what happens when centralized corporate mega-powers are the only ones who can afford them, or own them? * Email reputation. Its basically a boys club; if you don't send your emails through a reputable provider, with their acceptable use policies which generally reach far beyond "are you sending spam", you're likely to be spam-listed by the recipients mailbox, of which there are roughly four providers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL). * "Post-email" customer communication channels. Companies increasingly talk to customers over iMessage, FBM, Telegram, etc. These are all closed loops; piss off Apple and you lose that channel. A truly open, federated 1:1 chat solution is necessary. Unaware of any options here; Signal feels like we're getting there, but its not federated. Gaining market adoption is a whole other problem, but stomping on your privacy and freedom tends to be a big motivator. * Domain registration. I don't think this is a huge threat vector for market freedom, given how many registrars there are and how lax IANA's rules are. Lets keep it that way. * ARM. There's no way to just go purchase an ARM chip and host a server in your closet; no one is selling them. Amazon and Apple have their proprietary ones they aren't sharing. If the industry moves more toward ARM, to where hosting on x86 becomes intolerable due to software support (I expect it will, but on a timespan of decades), this is a big threat vector for increasing centralization into the mega-corp clouds. Definitely need an "Intel for ARM" (AMD? Nvidia? Uh, Intel?)
• foolinaround 6y ago
  There is now a new risk that needs to be mitigated by the business, that of its business being taken down for any reason at all - subject to the whims of a changing culture, and possibly even outside of the laws of the land one is in. This will hopefully make folks think through the entire supply chain including cloud and SaaS providers. AWS was always like renting an apartment, or even, a fully furnished apartment. At some point, you want your own house and land... I hope that there will be a new impetus to replace the above with colocated servers that are just being managed, and by services that are sold for a period of time, and hosted by the applications themselves. k8s might hopefully be used to build a more resilient infrastructure that can take these systemic shocks. There could be good business for a new class of sub-contractors who would have templates to automate this for their clients.
  • lliamander 6y ago
    This threat is already mitigated by service contracts. AWS pretty obviously broke contract here, and will almost certain suffer legal consequences for that. Why they thought they could get away with it is unclear, but their rebuttle to Parler's claims is pretty weak.
    • cm2187 6y ago
      But critical infrastructure is built on AWS. I don't understand how any CEO of any large company would be comfortable with the risk of getting the rug pulled underneath all of its critical systems given that this is just what happened. I think the reputational damage is, or at least should, be much greater than any Parler litigation.
      • ogre_codes 6y ago
        > I don't understand how any CEO of any large company would be comfortable with the risk of getting the rug pulled underneath all of its critical systems given that this is just what happened. If you are trying to make a case that Amazon arbitrarily pulls the plug on customers, Parler should not be your poster child. Amazon gave them 7 weeks of advance notice that their content was in violation of their agreement. Then they only severed the agreement once criminal activities were tied to the platforms content. CEO's aren't going to bat an eye at this any more than they are concerned that YouTube removed copyrighted content.
• elhudy 6y ago
  I helped migrate a major CPG company to AWS. Only, they changed their mind, migrating most of their data to GCP instead, as they saw Amazon as a competitor. Turns out this was an excellent decision.
• smsm42 6y ago
  That is the most depressing part for me - how easily American society is scared into giving up their freedom ideals. Turns out they don't have to be threatened with overwhelming force. They don't need to be threatened with death, starvation or torture. They don't need to be threatened by economic ruin or untold suffering. No, the richest and most safe civilization ever existed on the face of the planet is ready to give up on freedom because of TV picture and a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) and it's time to panic now - and poof, all noble ideals fly out of the window. It doesn't take nukes, it doesn't take Russians or Chinese, it doesn't take death and destruction - it takes Facebook, Twitter and CNN. I am still dumbfounded about how easy it was.
  • frostburg 6y ago
    They're (correctly) scared because they've seen how many of them would support the insurrection.
    • babesh 6y ago
      I am far more scared of you and what you would support.
      • stolen_biscuit 6y ago
        Perhaps you are not in the population of people that would be put in harms way if the people who stormed the capitol were successful?
        • smsm42 6y ago
          Successful in what? Stealing Pelosi's podium? Yes, she'd have to order a new one. And a new laptop. And probably fix some windows That's terrible, but what "population of people" do you mean here, beyond folks that need to clean up that shit (and who have my wholehearted compassion, it must have sucked)?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• stolen_biscuit 6y ago
  A portion of your citizens were called to storm your nations capital by a President who refuses to accept the results of a democratic election. The very foundation of your democracy has been eroded. Do not pretend the people who are frightened of these actions are overreacting. Democracy is a fragile thing, and you have a portion of your population who attempted to take a hammer to it. Don't pretend this is a narrative presented by the elite, I don't listen to your news, I don't read the opinions of your celebrities and newscasters, I watched the videos, I saw the discourse. I am not from your nation, and only have what I have seen from the people who were there and the videos they willingly uploaded to the internet, and the unedited footage of the speeches and the words of your president. Your nation is in severe distress.
  • mistermann 6y ago
    Can you articulate a plausible (does not rely on significant speculation or hypotheticals) series of events at the Capitol incident that could have resulted in democracy being legitimately lost in America? I am unable to come up with one.
    • ceejayoz 6y ago
      People were similarly dismissive of the Nazis after the Beer Hall Putsch. Aside: Asking for a hypothetical that doesn’t involve hypotheticals seems… off.
      • mistermann 6y ago
        > Aside: Asking for a hypothetical that doesn’t involve hypotheticals seems… off. Comments like this on a computer programming forum, where one would expect logic (and an understanding of the importance of dependencies) to prevail, also seems "off". I wonder, what might explain this apparent paradox, and the substantial quantities of it that can be found right here on HN? Does academia have any prior knowledge and study into this general phenomenon? Which domain would we search within to find answers to questions like this?
    • enraged_camel 6y ago
• apple_innocent 6y ago
  "In 2010, DNA sequencing company Complete Genomics said that "an interruption of services by Amazon Web Services, on whom we rely to deliver finished genomic data to our customers, would result in our customers not receiving their data on time." Gaming company Zynga warned about how its AWS foundation could quickly vanish when it filed the prospectus for its initial public offering in 2011. "AWS may terminate the agreement without cause by providing 180 days prior written notice, and may terminate the agreement with 30 days prior written notice for cause, including any material default or breach of the agreement by us that we do not cure within the 30-day period," Zynga said. AWS can even terminate or suspend its agreement with a customer immediately under certain circumstances as it did in 2010 with Wikileaks, pointing to violations of AWS' terms of service." Wonder if they can cancel their government contracts so easily. When people debate the merits of "on-prem" versus AWS on HN they rarely focus on the contract terms.
  • gabereiser 6y ago
    I led cloud transformations at a Fortune 500 and we did make sure to look over contracts and have business agreements in place. YMMV though as we had some weight behind our needs as a government contract would. If you just sign up with a credit card I’m sure it’s different as mentioned however, a lot has changed since 2010. They were warned repeatedly and ignored it.
    • apple_innocent 6y ago
      Did you have any "disaster recovery" plans in place, what you would do if the cloud failed. I think looking at this issue with the example of "Parler" may be missing the point. The issue worth debating is surely not whether Amazon made the right decision. Of course they did. The issue worth discussing is who gets to make this decision in light of what the decision implies. Due to how much businesses are choosing[1] to rely on companies like Google and Amazon as service providers, these "tech" companies can easily kill other businesses by denying service, without violating any laws in the process. These "tech" company middlemen are generally not treated like utilities under existing laws but the question is whether they are being treated as such by customers, the public. 1. Perhaps not so much consciously choosing as being persuaded by tech company salespeople and, IMHO, biased "media coverage" (=hype).
• 0goel0 6y ago
  Electric utility can shut off your data centers power if you don't pay the bills or break the contract. Same for your ISP.
• twistedpair 6y ago
  The concentration of your eggs into one basket is the biggest issue I see here. If your business email, SCM, DNS, CDN, storage, backups, compute, CI/CD, data warehouse/BI, desktop compute... all come from one company (e.g. AWS, MS, or GCP), then you can lose *everything* in a flick of the pen. When you do risk assessments (e.g. SOC 2), you rank all your venders by risk, and answer "what could I do if I lost vendor X?" These are things a business is supposed to do, which is why many intentionally have more than one vendor for the same service, run hybrid cloud, etc when the answer to that question is "close my business."
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• digitalsushi 6y ago
  "Multi-cloud HA" could be a hot resume item for 2021.
• atlgator 6y ago
  I will definitely reconsider recommending AWS to my clients in the future. They are interchangeable at this point for mainstream use.
  • nova22033 6y ago
    I'm not trying to bait you or be snarky but how would you word it? Don't use AWS because of what they did to parler? What if the client comes back with "What is parler?".or googles parler?
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• nova22033 6y ago
  how many businesses are really going to think "Using AWS makes sense for us but we're not going to use AWS because of what happened to parler?"
• arielm 6y ago
  I think the reliance on a single provider is as important of an issue as it is who the provider is and the way they make decisions.
• pfdietz 6y ago
  This is not a matter of power of cloud providers. This is cloud providers covering their butts so they don't get charged with a felony. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383
• ineedasername 6y ago
  I'm not sure exactly where the line should be drawn, but there seems to be a spectrum ranging from "private property" on one side and "utility" on the other. Where property owners can decide what their property is used for, and utilities are "common carriers". In this spectrum, Twitter seems more towards private property, while AWS seems more.like a utility. The law hasn't caught up to addressing the changes of the last decade in this respect, but I think we're about to see it happen, either legislatively or in the courts.
  • barbacoa 6y ago
    Even with private property those lines aren't so clear. I have a sidewalk and utility lines that run across my private property. I don't exactly have the ability tell people they cant walk on my sidewalk or cut-off those power lines even though it's my property.
• bradgranath 6y ago
  No, it shows how incredibly stupid Parler was. The Commercial Internet hasn't ever been a free place. Welcome to the real world.
• ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  It's no more powerful than a TV channel cancelling a show or a newspaper not running ads anymore. Host your own hardware, it's not that hard. If you care about free speech so much don't go cheap on infrastructure next time.
• nfgrep 6y ago
  Its a shame that parlor was the one to be made an example of. Makes it too easy to think “well good riddance” without considering its implications.
• owlbynight 6y ago
  I've been on the Internet since before it had pictures. Hosts have always had this power. It's not new. It's not free speech. You pay for a service, you adhere to their rules. You break their rules, you get booted. This argument is a dog whistle defense of terrorism.
  • mensetmanusman 6y ago
    Not according to a growing number of EU leaders. If you think the internet from the 90s compares like anything we have today, you are wrong. FB is actively being used to plan genocide in Myanmar, when will Apple ban them?
    • owlbynight 6y ago
      When they decide it's in their best interest to do so. Perhaps lead a vocal protest against Facebook, spread it far enough, and if it gains enough traction maybe Facebook themselves will do it. They could do it at any point and be well within their rights. Same with Apple. I think that the overarching issue that many are missing is that our corporations are acting as our representative bodies -- we're speaking with our money as consumers -- because our political bodies are corrupt and no longer representing us directly.
  • gfodor 6y ago
    Maybe, for a moment, consider that if a lot of smart people are disagreeing with you, and you see the situation as trivially obvious and those disagreeing as having hidden, evil motives, perhaps you should reconsider your perspective.
    • tjr225 6y ago
      Yeah or maybe there are a lot of fascist assholes out there.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
• jimsmart 6y ago
  Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of contract law combined with acceptable use policies, IMO. #unpopularopinion
  • jimsmart 6y ago
    I might have been downvoted for my views, but I note that Parler's preliminary injunction has been dismissed — of course the judge understands contract law and Amazon's AUP much better than the HN downvoters. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/judge-rejects-parler-claim-that-amazon-must-reinstate-web-hosting-service/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/judge-rejects-pa...
• twirlock 6y ago
  Anyone who doesn't perceive the problem by now is likely a poor engineer.
• timoth3y 6y ago
  Is this really new? It certainly feels new, but I don't think it is. There are two issues here. 1) You should be very careful about having your business too dependent on a single supplier or partner. You need to have a backup plan in case that relationship goes bad. That is undeniably true, good advice for all startups, and it has always been true. 2) The more specific case of Parler? Again it feels new, but I don't think it is. There has never been a time in modern history when if all the leading companies in an industry decided your company was too odious to do business with, you would be able to continue to do business. I'm not saying this is the ideal situation or that we should not discuss how it could be improved, but this is not really anything new.
  • blisterpeanuts 6y ago
    A corollary to #1 might be to structure your apps and data to be as portable as possible, e.g. use MariaDB or PostGreSQL rather than an AWS-specific dbms, maintain your own backups, etc. Such portability can pay off in other ways as well. Example: a competitor to Amazon in the retail space told us they would not buy our IoT product with an AWS back end, so we had to port it to an alternative cloud provider. This probably won't scale well when you get to a level of hundreds of millions of unique users, though.
    • timoth3y 6y ago
      Absolutely, but you need to be very deliberate and careful in doing that. It's hard to pull off in practice. AWS, just like MS in the 90s, gives you access to a lot of amazing tools that make it very easy to "accidentally" lock yourself into their platform.
• typenil 6y ago
  Thank God Jeff Bezos is protecting us from these vile terrorists. We need to take down Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The insurrectionists were customers and bafflingly, these companies don't moderate their texts or phone calls whatsoever.
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• zerotolerance 6y ago
  Oh please. If it weren't tech, then it'd be the ISPs, telcoms, etc. And don't forget the ridiculous platform power of the banking, financial, and payments industry. This would have gone down similarly on bare metal in a colo because... Trump and Co rolled out SESTA and FOSTA, along with several other content provider protections that make content like Parlor a liability for deeper platforms. Don't for a second think that they were kicked off because the companies somehow objected to providing the service. They only object to taking liability for providing services to an unmoderated communication platform.
• mplewis 6y ago
  No, it shows the exceptional power of the US Government to impose consequences on people who make it easy for other people to organize a rebellion. What is with these baby logic takes hitting the front page over the last few weeks?
• nautilus12 6y ago
  I'm just going to come out and say it. Isn't everyone a bit more nervous about the precedent set by amazon after the parler deplatform. Regardless of how horrible the things were said there, aren't there companies out there kind of wondering if AWS is a risk now?
• snow_mac 6y ago
  Seeing the people storm the capital and decide that Trump actually won, trying to force him to retain his office sealed the deal for me. I'm now against the second amendment. Not the school shootings, not the movie theaters; I've shot and handled many guns, but seeing this total disconnect from reality shows me that Americans cannot responsibly handle the option to elect somebody, accept the results either way, let alone carry a firearm. The whole notion of it takes just one good gun owner is total garbage. This is the law and order crowd, this is the crowd of "Just one good guy with a gun". Total garbage. Trump lost. Get over it.
  • rubycon22 6y ago
    This is a bad take. What if the "coup" was successful? You wouldn't want to have guns on your side? The second amendment works both ways.
• stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I don't think so. Sure they'll be down a couple of weeks but most likely back up soon if I were betting money. It shows that "if you build your site to a specific platform" that you might be fucking yourself over. However if you stick to OSS core software you'll be okay. Yeah yeah I know some sites can't afford to be down for a couple weeks but I'm willing to bet vast majority of businesses would be ok. I'm sure parler will be back soon with all the hate and putridness that it always had.
• mro_name 6y ago
  ceterum censeo – in extremo, there's a single provider that won't let you down (but maybe messes up). So if you really care about that, you need to host yourself. At least a mirror. Ideally do indieweb.org/POSSE.