6 ms·

Pro-Trump social media app hacked on launch day as half million sign up

50 points by shivbhatt 5y ago

EccentricBunny 5y ago
It looks like they didn't learn from what happened to Gab. I will never understand why they don't use a mastodon or pleroma instance instead of trying to maintain yet another centralized social media platform.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  Do you mean Parler? I think Gab is a Mastodon fork.
  - input_sh 5y ago
    Funny you should mention that, but it's both. Both got hacked. Gab's was a result of a patch they've made on top of Mastodon. Since Mastodon's license required them to share the code, here's a commit that introduced it (https://github.com/d0nk/gab-social/commit/fb3b7545705153022c24bb072fbdb3925b8cbfeb#diff-065f2e5f4a7d47f5d3f93f4de1899416b95aee7809dc6d0d8074c8650c63378f https://github.com/d0nk/gab-social/commit/fb3b7545705153022c...). They've since "fixed" the problem by sharing just an archive of the code, and password protecting it with "JesusChristIsKingTrumpWonTheElection"). I find it quite hilarious.
    - the_snooze 5y ago
      >"JesusChristIsKingTrumpWonTheElection" Very un-Christian of them to be spreading straight up lies.
      - umanwizard 5y ago
        Well, presumably they genuinely believe it to be true.
    - kyrra 5y ago
      What was wrong with that change that allowed them to get hacked? Edit, can I guess that this isn't how to do proper sql parameterized input? > s.account_id = #{@id} I don't know ruby at all...
      - rsynnott 5y ago
        Something along the lines of "https://thewebsite.com/the_url?max_id=); https://thewebsite.com/the_url?max_id=); DROP TABLE orange_face_paint ; [.. make the remainder valid sql here]" I would think. Essentially, it allows user-provided input to do anything; it's the most trivial form of SQL injection vulnerability.
therobot24 5y ago
surprise pikachu -- technology associated with highly polarizing individual is targeted for any cyber exploits
hsn915 5y ago
> "The problem was detected and sealed in a matter of minutes, and all the intruder was able to accomplish was to change a few user names," Miller said in an emailed statement to Reuters. Maybe this is a publicity stunt? I would never have heard about this site otherwise. Trump is (was?) good at this: feeding the media exactly what they want so they write about him. This is too good a bait to ignore. "lulz trump's social network got pwned on launch day! what a lozer lul"
- throwanem 5y ago
  Judging by what I've heard of some of their source code that got leaked, I don't feel like it really taxes parsimony to suspect they genuinely did get popped.
  - hsn915 5y ago
    What source code leak?
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      They had source maps on and you could browse through all sorts of fun bits like client-side password encryption. https://twitter.com/adgodev/status/1410667547335217169 https://twitter.com/adgodev/status/1410667547335217169
- ticviking 5y ago
  I was wondering something very similar. There's a way where he deeply believes that any press is good press and is willing and able to push crazyness to get it
alephu5 5y ago
What was the exploit?
danpalmer 5y ago
I was wondering why these apps (inc Parler) seem to be so poorly made. It could just be regular small-team issues, but part of me wonders if it's the lack of diversity in the teams that exacerbates it. It's fairly well known that more diverse teams (different education, backgrounds, universities, as well as racial/gender diversity) produce better products because they have fewer blind spots on things, and a diversity of approaches tends to weed out issues. An apocryphal example of this is avionics software companies hiring teams with no overlap in universities to ensure that software was created with very distinct approaches. These apps are essentially built on a premise of lack of diversity, and so I'd imagine that the teams that work on them are much less diverse than they would otherwise be. The only one that seems to be more immune to this is Gab, which is based on Mastodon I think (funnily enough a project with incredible diversity).
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  I'm sure AT&T was a very diverse place when Bell invented the telephone. Same with early Microsoft or Google. The likely answer is lack of funding. The median app is very poorly made.
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    There are multiple types of diversity, no? ==Women pioneers have been a part of AT&T since 1878. That’s when Emma Nutt joined a team of teenage boys at a telephone exchange in Boston to become the first female operator. Within a few years almost all the telephone operators were women. Those female operators rose to the occasion during World War I, operating the telephone switchboards for the U.S. Army in France.== ==“As a result, AT&T and its subsidiaries became the largest employer of women in the United States,” he said. “At its peak, in the early 1950s, AT&T employed over 200,000 women as telephone operators.”== https://about.att.com/pages/our_people/Our_innovators/female_firsts https://about.att.com/pages/our_people/Our_innovators/female...
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      Sure, but aren't you implying there no female developers that would work on this software?
29083011397778 5y ago
> Miller told Fox News earlier this week he hoped Trump would join but that the former president was considering a number of options. He said Trump was not funding the platform. Is my reading correct here? Trump, after bringing the ban-wave and replace twitter rhetoric to the foreground, isn't even on the platform?
- sidibe 5y ago
  If any of these conservative social media apps succeeds it'll be the one Trump jumps on. Given his nature, he is going to make sure to get very well compensated for picking the winner.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    It’s a chicken and an egg problem. His numbers will always be lower than they were on Twitter, and that will always be pointed out. Same reason his blog lasted about a month.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  I mean, if I was Trump's publicity advisor (bloody hell, what a horrible job), I'd be advising him not to go near it with a ten foot pole, certainly not without seeing how it evolves. The history of these sort of "mainstream social media site is oppressing me, making my own" things is... not inspiring; they tend to fill with rejects that even Trump wouldn't want to be associated with (in particular, see voat).
  - tzs 5y ago
    Or see Gab. Andrew Torba, their CEO, has claimed that Kushner had told Gab that as a prerequisite to Trump joining Gab had to remove anti-Semitic hate speech. Gab refused. Trump later joined Rumble, which Torba claims changed their TOS that day to ban "hate speech" with an explicit ban on anti-semitic messages (which Torba says is also known as "any and all criticism of Israel and/or Jewish people").
roenxi 5y ago
This sort of thing is predictable. Twitter & co are leaving open a huge window for a competitor to come in and take a big chunk of users. The attempts are going to keep coming until one of them has solid technical foundations and sticks. There were a lot of knee-jerk calls for some sort of government regulation or similar on the right when the censorship started to kick up a gear. Hopefully they'll learn that the first reaction is a mistake and that the market eventually corrects for that sort of power abuse.
- Nursie 5y ago
  But if you don't control what's going on on your platforms they become a cesspit that most people don't want to go anywhere near. They either succumb to spam, or just allow the openly racist to dominate, as other participants tend to leave in disgust. These new platforms have generally all been a fantastic example of that, as have the older reddit forks/splinters (voat?)
  - roenxi 5y ago
    They'll figure it out eventually. There'll be a few failed attempts as people figure out that anything-goes doesn't work and eventually someone will find a good balance of moderation and freedom. There is little doubt that we'll see a lot of unimpressive attempts at a right wing social network. But since Twitter is politically hostile to an entire wing of politics, people will keep trying until a competitor hits the right notes. They don't have much to lose and a lot to gain by trying.
    - Nursie 5y ago
      > Twitter is politically hostile to an entire wing of politics This is really quite a big claim, I'm not sure it's that cut and dried, personally. But then I don't tweet or care to read other people's tweets anyway. I think the whole thing is overblown and representative only of a few noisy minorities in the first place.
      - Covzire 5y ago
Nursie 5y ago
That's kinda fun. The other thing I saw about this platform was that it was effectively being gamed by people flooding things like the Qanon hashtags with pictures of old men in their underpants - https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbwgd/qanon-is-mad-at-trumpworld-twitter-clone-gettr-because-of-all-the-porn?utm_source=reddit.com https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbwgd/qanon-is-mad-at-trump... It's funny because all of these platforms launch to "combat cancel culture!" and "protect free speech!" then almost immediately start restricting what can and can't be posted. It's almost as if putting unrestricted spaces up on the internet necessarily causes a race to the bottom ...
- Chilinot 5y ago
  > That's kinda fun. The other thing I saw about this platform was that it was effectively being gamed by people flooding things like the Qanon hashtags with pictures of old men in their underpants - https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbwgd/qanon-is-mad-at-trump https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbwgd/qanon-is-mad-at-trump... That's pretty funny. And "old men in underpants" style of defacing was started by a youtuber called "Internet Commentiquette" if anyone is interested.
  - leereeves 5y ago
    Posting lewd pictures of other people without their permission is funny? They should be taken down unless the users confirm that these are pictures of themselves.
    - Nursie 5y ago
      How do you know they're lewd? They don't look lewd to me, on the vice article. Most of them are sunbathing or just stock photos of a man in his underpants in the screenshots there.
      - leereeves 5y ago
        > most of them are sunbathing So it would be ok with you if someone went to the beach, took pictures of women sunbathing, and posted them on Twitter without their permission? Absurd.
Dumblydorr 5y ago
Do we have enough people making new social media apps? I don't use social media other than HN, I wonder if the moats of these companies are too strong? Or do we need more coding innovator entrepreneurs? I'm just lamenting the stagnation of our current media environment, feels weak when axios and TikTok are the only new players in media that I can think of.
- amelius 5y ago
  Imho social media apps should be researched and designed by universities. Let companies do it, and you will only get more of the same crap.
- lettergram 5y ago
  Parlor was literally taken out by the tech / cloud companies banning them (without justification) on all their hardware. They were getting millions to sign up. At the time they (Parlor) were working with the FBI and there were a few posts regarding Jan 6 (nothing compared to what was used on Facebook with thousands and thousands of posts). By pulling their hardware they actually impacted the FBI investigation. They also pulled them from both the Apple and Android app stores. After crushing them, they then removed all these restrictions after a few weeks. So yeah, they’re too strong. Then again, we should be building decentralized apps at this point.
rsynnott 5y ago
> Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on Sunday described GETTR as "the Twitter killer" in a post on the new site. Well, that's a bit of a kiss of death.
vmception 5y ago
> A hooded man holds a laptop computer as blue screen with an exclamation mark is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration/File Photo I find the lack of inclusivity in hacker stock photos to be appalling
bronzeage 5y ago
Centralization of media is very dangerous for democracy. All you need to take control of a democracy is to own the media and win a single election. Afterwards, you can just rig election laws and use control of the media to gaslight dissent, never having to win a real election ever again.
hairofadog 5y ago
I don't believe there will ever be a successful social network based on extreme right (or left) viewpoints regardless of the tech stack, because extremism thrives on conflict, and there's no conflict to be had with a bunch of people sitting around going, I know, right!? They think they want a safe space where they can say whatever they want, but what they really want is to say abrasive things in a place where people are obliged to listen. If you and your friends have been ejected from a bar for causing conflict, it's no fun standing out in the parking lot yelling slurs at the sky. People who love conflict need someone to argue with.
- sixothree 5y ago
  It doesn't help that across all platforms so far they ban pretty much anyone who present a left-leaning viewpoint.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - leereeves 5y ago
    All the major platforms ban anyone who presents a right-leaning viewpoint, including the former President. Google is even blocking emails from gettr.
    - thatguy0900 5y ago
      I think they mean on the platforms meant for the far right. Though the major platforms that I know of are image boards that don't issue bans.
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  Then why do some corners of twitter thrive?
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > Then why do some corners of twitter thrive? How big is that corner? That would be the upper limit to the size of the new platform which would service that specific audience.
jwhitlark 5y ago
A pro-Trump social media app is launched with a name (GETTR) that is one similar consonant away from "Get her"? Supporting a guy who led chants of "Lock her up", even before we get to all the sexual harassment complaints? I'm all for irony, but did they put any though into this app at all? (Given that they also inadvertently leaked their source code, perhaps not.)
- krapp 5y ago
  >I'm all for irony, but did they put any though into this app at all? I don't think it's meant to be ironic at all, I think it's entirely purposeful and on brand for them.

50 points by shivbhatt 5y ago

It looks like they didn't learn from what happened to Gab. I will never understand why they don't use a mastodon or pleroma instance instead of trying to maintain yet another centralized social media platform.

danpalmer 5y ago
Do you mean Parler? I think Gab is a Mastodon fork.
- input_sh 5y ago
  Funny you should mention that, but it's both. Both got hacked. Gab's was a result of a patch they've made on top of Mastodon. Since Mastodon's license required them to share the code, here's a commit that introduced it (https://github.com/d0nk/gab-social/commit/fb3b7545705153022c24bb072fbdb3925b8cbfeb#diff-065f2e5f4a7d47f5d3f93f4de1899416b95aee7809dc6d0d8074c8650c63378f https://github.com/d0nk/gab-social/commit/fb3b7545705153022c...). They've since "fixed" the problem by sharing just an archive of the code, and password protecting it with "JesusChristIsKingTrumpWonTheElection"). I find it quite hilarious.
  - the_snooze 5y ago
    >"JesusChristIsKingTrumpWonTheElection" Very un-Christian of them to be spreading straight up lies.
    - umanwizard 5y ago
      Well, presumably they genuinely believe it to be true.
  - kyrra 5y ago
    What was wrong with that change that allowed them to get hacked? Edit, can I guess that this isn't how to do proper sql parameterized input? > s.account_id = #{@id} I don't know ruby at all...
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      Something along the lines of "https://thewebsite.com/the_url?max_id=); https://thewebsite.com/the_url?max_id=); DROP TABLE orange_face_paint ; [.. make the remainder valid sql here]" I would think. Essentially, it allows user-provided input to do anything; it's the most trivial form of SQL injection vulnerability.

therobot24 5y ago

surprise pikachu -- technology associated with highly polarizing individual is targeted for any cyber exploits

hsn915 5y ago

> "The problem was detected and sealed in a matter of minutes, and all the intruder was able to accomplish was to change a few user names," Miller said in an emailed statement to Reuters. Maybe this is a publicity stunt? I would never have heard about this site otherwise. Trump is (was?) good at this: feeding the media exactly what they want so they write about him. This is too good a bait to ignore. "lulz trump's social network got pwned on launch day! what a lozer lul"

throwanem 5y ago
Judging by what I've heard of some of their source code that got leaked, I don't feel like it really taxes parsimony to suspect they genuinely did get popped.
- hsn915 5y ago
  What source code leak?
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    They had source maps on and you could browse through all sorts of fun bits like client-side password encryption. https://twitter.com/adgodev/status/1410667547335217169 https://twitter.com/adgodev/status/1410667547335217169
ticviking 5y ago
I was wondering something very similar. There's a way where he deeply believes that any press is good press and is willing and able to push crazyness to get it

alephu5 5y ago

What was the exploit?

danpalmer 5y ago

I was wondering why these apps (inc Parler) seem to be so poorly made. It could just be regular small-team issues, but part of me wonders if it's the lack of diversity in the teams that exacerbates it. It's fairly well known that more diverse teams (different education, backgrounds, universities, as well as racial/gender diversity) produce better products because they have fewer blind spots on things, and a diversity of approaches tends to weed out issues. An apocryphal example of this is avionics software companies hiring teams with no overlap in universities to ensure that software was created with very distinct approaches. These apps are essentially built on a premise of lack of diversity, and so I'd imagine that the teams that work on them are much less diverse than they would otherwise be. The only one that seems to be more immune to this is Gab, which is based on Mastodon I think (funnily enough a project with incredible diversity).

throwaway3699 5y ago
I'm sure AT&T was a very diverse place when Bell invented the telephone. Same with early Microsoft or Google. The likely answer is lack of funding. The median app is very poorly made.
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  There are multiple types of diversity, no? ==Women pioneers have been a part of AT&T since 1878. That’s when Emma Nutt joined a team of teenage boys at a telephone exchange in Boston to become the first female operator. Within a few years almost all the telephone operators were women. Those female operators rose to the occasion during World War I, operating the telephone switchboards for the U.S. Army in France.== ==“As a result, AT&T and its subsidiaries became the largest employer of women in the United States,” he said. “At its peak, in the early 1950s, AT&T employed over 200,000 women as telephone operators.”== https://about.att.com/pages/our_people/Our_innovators/female_firsts https://about.att.com/pages/our_people/Our_innovators/female...
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    Sure, but aren't you implying there no female developers that would work on this software?

29083011397778 5y ago

> Miller told Fox News earlier this week he hoped Trump would join but that the former president was considering a number of options. He said Trump was not funding the platform. Is my reading correct here? Trump, after bringing the ban-wave and replace twitter rhetoric to the foreground, isn't even on the platform?

sidibe 5y ago
If any of these conservative social media apps succeeds it'll be the one Trump jumps on. Given his nature, he is going to make sure to get very well compensated for picking the winner.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  It’s a chicken and an egg problem. His numbers will always be lower than they were on Twitter, and that will always be pointed out. Same reason his blog lasted about a month.
rsynnott 5y ago
I mean, if I was Trump's publicity advisor (bloody hell, what a horrible job), I'd be advising him not to go near it with a ten foot pole, certainly not without seeing how it evolves. The history of these sort of "mainstream social media site is oppressing me, making my own" things is... not inspiring; they tend to fill with rejects that even Trump wouldn't want to be associated with (in particular, see voat).
- tzs 5y ago
  Or see Gab. Andrew Torba, their CEO, has claimed that Kushner had told Gab that as a prerequisite to Trump joining Gab had to remove anti-Semitic hate speech. Gab refused. Trump later joined Rumble, which Torba claims changed their TOS that day to ban "hate speech" with an explicit ban on anti-semitic messages (which Torba says is also known as "any and all criticism of Israel and/or Jewish people").

roenxi 5y ago

This sort of thing is predictable. Twitter & co are leaving open a huge window for a competitor to come in and take a big chunk of users. The attempts are going to keep coming until one of them has solid technical foundations and sticks. There were a lot of knee-jerk calls for some sort of government regulation or similar on the right when the censorship started to kick up a gear. Hopefully they'll learn that the first reaction is a mistake and that the market eventually corrects for that sort of power abuse.

Nursie 5y ago
But if you don't control what's going on on your platforms they become a cesspit that most people don't want to go anywhere near. They either succumb to spam, or just allow the openly racist to dominate, as other participants tend to leave in disgust. These new platforms have generally all been a fantastic example of that, as have the older reddit forks/splinters (voat?)
- roenxi 5y ago
  They'll figure it out eventually. There'll be a few failed attempts as people figure out that anything-goes doesn't work and eventually someone will find a good balance of moderation and freedom. There is little doubt that we'll see a lot of unimpressive attempts at a right wing social network. But since Twitter is politically hostile to an entire wing of politics, people will keep trying until a competitor hits the right notes. They don't have much to lose and a lot to gain by trying.
  - Nursie 5y ago
    > Twitter is politically hostile to an entire wing of politics This is really quite a big claim, I'm not sure it's that cut and dried, personally. But then I don't tweet or care to read other people's tweets anyway. I think the whole thing is overblown and representative only of a few noisy minorities in the first place.
    - Covzire 5y ago

Nursie 5y ago

That's kinda fun. The other thing I saw about this platform was that it was effectively being gamed by people flooding things like the Qanon hashtags with pictures of old men in their underpants - https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbwgd/qanon-is-mad-at-trumpworld-twitter-clone-gettr-because-of-all-the-porn?utm_source=reddit.com https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbwgd/qanon-is-mad-at-trump... It's funny because all of these platforms launch to "combat cancel culture!" and "protect free speech!" then almost immediately start restricting what can and can't be posted. It's almost as if putting unrestricted spaces up on the internet necessarily causes a race to the bottom ...

Chilinot 5y ago
> That's kinda fun. The other thing I saw about this platform was that it was effectively being gamed by people flooding things like the Qanon hashtags with pictures of old men in their underpants - https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbwgd/qanon-is-mad-at-trump https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbwgd/qanon-is-mad-at-trump... That's pretty funny. And "old men in underpants" style of defacing was started by a youtuber called "Internet Commentiquette" if anyone is interested.
- leereeves 5y ago
  Posting lewd pictures of other people without their permission is funny? They should be taken down unless the users confirm that these are pictures of themselves.
  - Nursie 5y ago
    How do you know they're lewd? They don't look lewd to me, on the vice article. Most of them are sunbathing or just stock photos of a man in his underpants in the screenshots there.
    - leereeves 5y ago
      > most of them are sunbathing So it would be ok with you if someone went to the beach, took pictures of women sunbathing, and posted them on Twitter without their permission? Absurd.

Dumblydorr 5y ago

Do we have enough people making new social media apps? I don't use social media other than HN, I wonder if the moats of these companies are too strong? Or do we need more coding innovator entrepreneurs? I'm just lamenting the stagnation of our current media environment, feels weak when axios and TikTok are the only new players in media that I can think of.

amelius 5y ago
Imho social media apps should be researched and designed by universities. Let companies do it, and you will only get more of the same crap.
lettergram 5y ago
Parlor was literally taken out by the tech / cloud companies banning them (without justification) on all their hardware. They were getting millions to sign up. At the time they (Parlor) were working with the FBI and there were a few posts regarding Jan 6 (nothing compared to what was used on Facebook with thousands and thousands of posts). By pulling their hardware they actually impacted the FBI investigation. They also pulled them from both the Apple and Android app stores. After crushing them, they then removed all these restrictions after a few weeks. So yeah, they’re too strong. Then again, we should be building decentralized apps at this point.

rsynnott 5y ago

> Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on Sunday described GETTR as "the Twitter killer" in a post on the new site. Well, that's a bit of a kiss of death.

vmception 5y ago

> A hooded man holds a laptop computer as blue screen with an exclamation mark is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration/File Photo I find the lack of inclusivity in hacker stock photos to be appalling

bronzeage 5y ago

Centralization of media is very dangerous for democracy. All you need to take control of a democracy is to own the media and win a single election. Afterwards, you can just rig election laws and use control of the media to gaslight dissent, never having to win a real election ever again.

hairofadog 5y ago

I don't believe there will ever be a successful social network based on extreme right (or left) viewpoints regardless of the tech stack, because extremism thrives on conflict, and there's no conflict to be had with a bunch of people sitting around going, I know, right!? They think they want a safe space where they can say whatever they want, but what they really want is to say abrasive things in a place where people are obliged to listen. If you and your friends have been ejected from a bar for causing conflict, it's no fun standing out in the parking lot yelling slurs at the sky. People who love conflict need someone to argue with.

sixothree 5y ago
It doesn't help that across all platforms so far they ban pretty much anyone who present a left-leaning viewpoint.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- leereeves 5y ago
  All the major platforms ban anyone who presents a right-leaning viewpoint, including the former President. Google is even blocking emails from gettr.
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    I think they mean on the platforms meant for the far right. Though the major platforms that I know of are image boards that don't issue bans.
chakkepolja 5y ago
Then why do some corners of twitter thrive?
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > Then why do some corners of twitter thrive? How big is that corner? That would be the upper limit to the size of the new platform which would service that specific audience.

jwhitlark 5y ago

A pro-Trump social media app is launched with a name (GETTR) that is one similar consonant away from "Get her"? Supporting a guy who led chants of "Lock her up", even before we get to all the sexual harassment complaints? I'm all for irony, but did they put any though into this app at all? (Given that they also inadvertently leaked their source code, perhaps not.)

krapp 5y ago
>I'm all for irony, but did they put any though into this app at all? I don't think it's meant to be ironic at all, I think it's entirely purposeful and on brand for them.