The Briefing Room
General Category => Politics/Government => Topic started by: mystery-ak on January 12, 2021, 02:56:12 pm
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Progressives Who Desperately Want to Censor Parler Just Got Some Bad News
By Jeff Charles | Jan 11, 2021 9:30 PM ET
They tried, and it looks like they may have failed. Social media company Parler, which has been under attack from the far-left for not censoring conservatives, seems to have found a new home after Amazon Web Services decided to stop hosting the company’s site.
The Washington Examiner reported:
On Monday, Parler registered its domain and server to be hosted by Epik, an internet webhosting company known for working with right-leaning websites. Gab, another social media platform popular with conservatives, also uses Epik. A web domain search shows that Parler is now registered with Epik.
Last week, a group of Big Tech companies colluded to destroy Parler, claiming that the platform contributed to the riot that occurred at the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6. Google and Apple both removed the social media app from their stores only days before Amazon announced that it was booting the site from its hosting services. The collaboration came amid a widespread purge of conservative accounts on Twitter.
more
https://redstate.com/jeffc/2021/01/11/progressives-who-desperately-want-to-censor-parler-just-got-some-bad-news-n308467?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=719
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Parleys are still missing.
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Good for them. Also, my son tells me Signal is a good secure messenger service.
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Good for them. Also, my son tells me Signal is a good secure messenger service.
it is really awesome. The App on iOS is very well written. When I signed up, I was amazed to discover my son and a couple of friends I was out of contact with were all already on there.
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What prevents the Tech Oligarchs from playing Whack-a-Mole with these platforms too?
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Last week, a group of Big Tech companies colluded to destroy Parler, claiming that the platform contributed to the riot that occurred at the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6.
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You mean kind of like Twitter did for BLM/Antifa last summer?
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ar15.com is using keybase, end to end encryption. Awesome app.
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Last week, a group of Big Tech companies colluded to destroy Parler, claiming that the platform contributed to the riot that occurred at the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6.
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You mean kind of like Twitter did for BLM/Antifa last summer?
Yep. Exactly.
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What prevents the Tech Oligarchs from playing Whack-a-Mole with these platforms too?
@catfish1957
Signal really has nothing to do with politics. It’s not a Twitter or FB replacement. It’s goal is to be a secure replacement for text messages.
From what I have read Signal is open source. By being open source, the code is available for anyone who is capable to review. In theory, it will be more secure because the community reviews it to find flaws, and because back doors are harder to conceal.
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Last week, a group of Big Tech companies colluded to destroy Parler, claiming that the platform contributed to the riot that occurred at the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6.
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You mean kind of like Twitter did for BLM/Antifa last summer?
The thing is, Parler had nothing to do with organizing the riot. FaceBook was where people were collaborating, primarily.
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Doesn't JimRob host his own site with his own servers? Just asking?
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@catfish1957
Signal really has nothing to do with politics. It’s not a Twitter or FB replacement. It’s goal is to be a secure replacement for text messages.
From what I have read Signal is open source. By being open source, the code is available for anyone who is capable to review. In theory, it will be more secure because the community reviews it to find flaws, and because back doors are harder to conceal.
I believe it's actually end to end encryption, meaning that even the app admins cannot see what is being said or posted.
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Doesn't JimRob host his own site with his own servers? Just asking?
Unless things have changed, he owns his own server (ONE server), which is housed within a small hosting facility somewhere in California.
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I believe it's actually end to end encryption, meaning that even the app admins cannot see what is being said or posted.
Yes, that's correct.
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Doesn't JimRob host his own site with his own servers? Just asking?
Unless things have changed, he owns his own server (ONE server), which is housed within a small hosting facility somewhere in California.
San Jose, a two hour drive from Fresno every time the servers crashed, requiring a trip by John-boy.
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San Jose, a two hour drive from Fresno every time the servers crashed, requiring a trip by John-boy.
Someone needs to teach him about virtualization or out of band management... or cloud but after these past two weeks maybe not. Both save my fat ass from having to drive to the server room when shit goes awry.
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Someone needs to teach him about virtualization or out of band management... or cloud but after these past two weeks maybe not. Both save my fat ass from having to drive to the server room when shit goes awry.
Did you have a FR past? That trip to San Jose meme, was kind of an ongoing joke that coincided with Freepathons. You'd think $350K annually for almost 25 years would buy some semblence of a dependable server wouldn't you?
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San Jose, a two hour drive from Fresno every time the servers crashed, requiring a trip by John-boy.
Thanks. I remembered it as being either San Jose or Santa Clara, but I couldn't remember which it was. I do recall those supposed late-night drives to "reboot the server" (which is ludicrous - every decent hosting provider in the universe has at least remote power on/off capability).
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Did you have a FR past? That trip to Fresno meme, was kind of an ongoing joke that coincided with Freepathons. You'd think $350K annually for almost 25 years would buy some semblence of a dependable server wouldn't you?
LOL! I'm imagining the current Bupathons are pulling in around $200 (reported as $88,000 of course).
Better watch out, though. I'm anticipating mods not wanting ToS convo here.
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LOL! I'm imagining the current Bupathons are pulling in around $200 (reported as $88,000 of course).
Better watch out, though. I'm anticipating mods not wanting ToS convo here.
ARGHH...
Here it comes for me.... Can they double ban me?
(https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/500x/57589984/put-em-on-double-secret-probation.jpg)
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Thanks. I remembered it as being either San Jose or Santa Clara, but I couldn't remember which it was. I do recall those supposed late-night drives to "reboot the server" (which is ludicrous - every decent hosting provider in the universe has at least remote power on/off capability).
I took over sysadmin from another old fashioned sysadmin who didn't have out of band management and most of his servers were bare metal (unvirtualized). He was kind of a moron, but I still have to physically go into the office when there's an issue as our process to upgrade server is still slow.
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LOL! I'm imagining the current Bupathons are pulling in around $200 (reported as $88,000 of course).
Better watch out, though. I'm anticipating mods not wanting ToS convo here.
Meh. It's instructive to contemplate. I hope you don't get upset about our occasional 'thons here.
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Meh. It's instructive to contemplate. I hope you don't get upset about our occasional 'thons here.
I love the thons here. They are over so fast I usually miss them (but one can contribute any time). But, that's because myst uses them to pay for the site hosting, not to provide a salary to her and her family.
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ARGHH...
Here it comes for me.... Can they double ban me?
(https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/500x/57589984/put-em-on-double-secret-probation.jpg)
LOL, love that movie.
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LOL! I'm imagining the current Bupathons are pulling in around $200 (reported as $88,000 of course).
Better watch out, though. I'm anticipating mods not wanting ToS convo here.
TOS is so irrelevant at this point it's not even worth criticizing. The site barely registers on the national conversation.
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I took over sysadmin from another old fashioned sysadmin who didn't have out of band management and most of his servers were bare metal (unvirtualized). He was kind of a moron, but I still have to physically go into the office when there's an issue as our process to upgrade server is still slow.
well, many of us have experienced the occasional “server under the deskâ€. COVID pretty much stamped that out for me. Everything I use now is either hosted in Azure or in a private lab with remote console and power. I had to go in once since COVID to set up the accelerator hardware in a lab server. Haven’t been back since.
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TOS is so irrelevant at this point it's not even worth criticizing. The site barely registers on the national conversation.
For this ex-FReeper (with a still-active account), it's been very instructive. I learned how NOT to Moderate a Forum there. :laugh:
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For this ex-FReeper (with a still-active account), it's been very instructive. I learned how NOT to Moderate a Forum there. :laugh:
I'm actually kind of shocked that ToS even exists anymore. I expected the money to dry up followed by a complete implosion.
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I'm actually kind of shocked that ToS even exists anymore. I expected the money to dry up followed by a complete implosion.
I drop in once a month or so out of morbid curiosity. It used to be a center of great conservative discussion. Even Tony Snow was a member. Now 75% of it is a menagerie of nut jobs who are highly extracted from reality. Also don't believe their member numbers. I have asked JR at least 4 times to delete my account, with no luck. And I am sure I am not the only one.
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I drop in once a month or so out of morbid curiosity. It used to be a center of great conservative discussion. Even Tony Snow was a member. Now 75% of it is a menagerie of nut jobs who are highly extracted from reality. Also don't believe their member numbers. I have asked JR at least 4 times to delete my account, with no luck. And I am sure I am not the only one.
Well, it's the roach hotel of reported membership. Ironic, because I expect that in real terms people are only leaving. I can't see anyone sticking around after they sign up and discover that every post has to be reviewed before it goes live.
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Parler is not yet back, and gab is slow as molasses when it loads at all. I would not say this is a very good debut for the new servers.
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Parler is not yet back, and gab is slow as molasses when it loads at all. I would not say this is a very good debut for the new servers.
They both just got dumped on with new users... Just before it was axed, Parler was the number one DL on Google Store... Wonder if actual monopoly is being exercised for regular monopoly reasons... :pondering:
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They both just got dumped on with new users... Just before it was axed, Parler was the number one DL on Google Store... Wonder if actual monopoly is being exercised for regular monopoly reasons... :pondering:
Whatever the cause, it looks like amateur hour for both of them. I hope one or both gets their act together because people need to stop using twitter and facebook.
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Whatever the cause, it looks like amateur hour for both of them. I hope one or both gets their act together because people need to stop using twitter and facebook.
Parler will be back in a day or two, and I will bet money it is scaled when it comes... And gab will come around too... They just got to figger out how to get by firehose mode. It will all work out.
Howabout MeWe in all this? Anybody know?
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Parler will be back in a day or two, and I will bet money it is scaled when it comes... And gab will come around too... They just got to figger out how to get by firehose mode. It will all work out.
Howabout MeWe in all this? Anybody know?
You're going to have to have some moderation, or else Leftist provocateurs will poison the site with all kinds of crap.
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Parler will be back in a day or two, and I will bet money it is scaled when it comes... And gab will come around too... They just got to figger out how to get by firehose mode. It will all work out.
Howabout MeWe in all this? Anybody know?
The last two days Parler was online, the service was actually pretty good. They fixed the major usability issues with their app too.
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You're going to have to have some moderation, or else Leftist provocateurs will poison the site with all kinds of crap.
Yeah... That's what they do... :shrug:
Hopefully they won't let sh*t-stirrers stick around too long. That's the problem. It ain't a difference of opinion, it's an inability to suffer a difference of opinion.
I certainly prefer folks that can lay out an argument (you are usually one of those) over those who just throw poo.
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The last two days Parler was online, the service was actually pretty good. They fixed the major usability issues with their app too.
Well, yeah... on AWS, they were inherently scalable... Getting dumped was dirty pool, sure enough. I hope folks stick around for em.
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Well, yeah... on AWS, they were inherently scalable... Getting dumped was dirty pool, sure enough. I hope folks stick around for em.
@roamer_1
AWS scalability doesn't translate automatically to every application architecture. It is inherently difficult to scale out (as opposed to up) Twitter-type services because of the high cardinality of relationships between entities and the frequence of updates. It's not just like a simple web site with a single relational database back-end.
I believe that the actual last-minute improvements to Parler performance were done by disabling or doing asynchronous updates to the stats that indicate how many replies, likes, and echos each "tweet" had. For example, those last two days, Parler would always show the number of Echos as zero, even though that wasn't the case. Probably they did other things along these lines too.
Not trying to belittle you. It seems like you are an engineer with some good knowledge of the web. But super high scale services are an area that most developers never encounter. Before I landed at Microsoft, I thought I knew a lot about this topic, having authored some high scale (10K transactions per second) services in the financial space. At Microsoft, I eventually took a position managing a development team that had ownership for a significant component of the back-end of the Bing search engine. I wasn't the initial creator of this service, but I inherited it and in the process of improving it learned a great deal about this topic. We had hundreds of thousands of servers. The system was quite complex, but I would consider that an app like Twitter or Parler is more difficult in some many ways (at least has a different set of challenges) due to the cardinality and update frequency characteristics that I mentioned above.
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Not trying to belittle you. It seems like you are an engineer with some good knowledge of the web.
Nope... My real online experience ended in a flurry of threats - and nearly warrants... So I stay off the big iron and stay with what I can put in my hands.... So I will happily defer to you.
:beer:
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Nope... My real online experience ended in a flurry of threats - and nearly warrants... So I stay off the big iron and stay with what I can put in my hands.... So I will happily defer to you.
:beer:
Well, that's scary. I think I've picked a less terrifying post-retirement career. :laugh:
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Well, that's scary. I think I've picked a less terrifying post-retirement career. :laugh:
If it's not too personal, what is this? It sounded like you were running for some office?
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Well, that's scary. I think I've picked a less terrifying post-retirement career. :laugh:
Many years have gone by since then... But it ain't the first time for me... My concept of law and order has always been somewhat elastic. Revenuers and such... I come by it natural. :whistle:
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If it's not too personal, what is this? It sounded like you were running for some office?
LOL!! No, no, no... You've got it all wrong. I was running FROM some office, in a manner of speaking. It was a place with lots of blinky things and I wasn't physically there...
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@roamer_1
AWS scalability doesn't translate automatically to every application architecture. It is inherently difficult to scale out (as opposed to up) Twitter-type services because of the high cardinality of relationships between entities and the frequence of updates. It's not just like a simple web site with a single relational database back-end.
I believe that the actual last-minute improvements to Parler performance were done by disabling or doing asynchronous updates to the stats that indicate how many replies, likes, and echos each "tweet" had. For example, those last two days, Parler would always show the number of Echos as zero, even though that wasn't the case. Probably they did other things along these lines too.
Not trying to belittle you. It seems like you are an engineer with some good knowledge of the web. But super high scale services are an area that most developers never encounter. Before I landed at Microsoft, I thought I knew a lot about this topic, having authored some high scale (10K transactions per second) services in the financial space. At Microsoft, I eventually took a position managing a development team that had ownership for a significant component of the back-end of the Bing search engine. I wasn't the initial creator of this service, but I inherited it and in the process of improving it learned a great deal about this topic. We had hundreds of thousands of servers. The system was quite complex, but I would consider that an app like Twitter or Parler is more difficult in some many ways (at least has a different set of challenges) due to the cardinality and update frequency characteristics that I mentioned above.
Yeah sounds like you definitely know your stuff. We have auto-scaling but it's used for large scale computations (SAS, statistical software for clinical trials), different than trying to have a well-performing site for millions of users. Very different. Scaling up (beefier servers, more ram, more cpus) vs. out (spawning more servers) is one of our considerations. I'm tangentally involved in this stuff. Soon to move into it.
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Yeah sounds like you definitely know your stuff. We have auto-scaling but it's used for large scale computations (SAS, statistical software for clinical trials), different than trying to have a well-performing site for millions of users. Very different. Scaling up (beefier servers, more ram, more cpus) vs. out (spawning more servers) is one of our considerations. I'm tangentally involved in this stuff. Soon to move into it.
I know in great detail how to build a search engine, but I can only guess what the architecture is at Twitter. There are probably some conference papers about it - I haven't looked.
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I know in great detail how to build a search engine, but I can only guess what the architecture is at Twitter. There are probably some conference papers about it - I haven't looked.
Some info here: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale.html
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If it's not too personal, what is this? It sounded like you were running for some office?
Shhhh!
ETA: Yes. I won First Vice Chair of the County GOP. I think I got Kelli Ward's vote, she lives here.
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Shhhh!
ETA: Yes. I won First Vice Chair of the County GOP. I think I got Kelli Ward's vote, she lives here.
Congrats!
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Congrats!
Thank Yew!