The social media app Parler may go offline tomorrow (Jan 10, 2021)

Introversion

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws

BuzzFeed said:
Amazon on Saturday kicked Parler off its Web hosting services. Parler, a social network favored by conservative politicians and extremists, was used to help plan and coordinate the January 6 attempted coup on Washington D.C. It has recently been overrun with messages encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington D.C. with weapons on January 19.

Amazon's suspension of Parler's account means that unless it can find another host, once the ban takes effect on Sunday Parler will go offline.

...
 
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ChaseJxyz

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The (big) options besides AWS are Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Oracle and IBM. I doubt MS or Google will take them for obvious reasons, and I doubt the Parler folx will want to put their stuff on Alibaba because China. The problem is that a lot of places just use AWS, anyways, so finding someone with their own servers/cloud stuff will be hard.

Amazon gave them a 24 hour notice, probably so they can get copies of all their data/code before it's deleted. But it's not like they'll be able to immediately get back online if/when they find a new hosting service. All their code for their website and Android app (because you can install apps on Android without using an app store) will have to be gone over and updated to work with whatever the new stuff is. Maybe someone will figure out they can just make their own Mastodon instance and they'll all just be in that.
 

Prozyan

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I'm not sure if I agree with taking a whole platform offline. That's quite a big step from moderating and banning individual users.

Parlor IS a cesspool....but so is a large portion of online content.
 

Helix

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I'm not sure if I agree with taking a whole platform offline. That's quite a big step from moderating and banning individual users.

Parlor IS a cesspool....but so is a large portion of online content.


There's no obligation to host any of those platforms. If users are breaking the terms of service of the platform they get booted. If platforms are breaking the terms of service of the providers, same thing.
 

lizmonster

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Exactly. They're welcome to find anther provider, or to invest in infrastructure and host themselves.

Bootstraps, don't you know.
 

CWatts

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Exactly. They're welcome to find anther provider, or to invest in infrastructure and host themselves.

Bootstraps, don't you know.

You win the internet!
I was just thinking another four-letter word for what they can go do to themselves. I mean, they're a right-wing circle-jerk already.
 
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MaeZe

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You give the kids the keys to the car then find out they are driving recklessly after they get a dozen moving violations. You do nothing. Finally they crash the car. In hind sight you should have taken those keys away sooner.
 

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I'm not sure if I agree with taking a whole platform offline. That's quite a big step from moderating and banning individual users.

Parlor IS a cesspool....but so is a large portion of online content.

The only company that is doing that, one could argue, is Apple because there is no way to side-load apps, but it's possible that you can still access it via a web browser (though some websites are dumb and refuse to work on mobile that way).

The problem with Parler is that they, in general, do not really moderate things. They did remove SOME posts from A guy who was saying that people should kill Pence, but all the posts about going to DC on the 6th and finding/hurting/killing congresspeople were allowed to stay. Part of the reason why Twitter finally got rid of Trump was because his tweets were driving people to keep doing what they're doing, and that they're planning on doing this AGAIN on the 17th. They're actively inciting violence, which even the 1st Amendment doesn't give you the freedom to do.

Also keep in mind that conservatives fought for the right to not make wedding cakes for gay people because they don't want to be forced to make political speech they don't agree with. Ergo, Twitter and Amazon have the right to not be forced to make (or allow) political speech they do not agree with. They did this to themselves.
 

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I saw a quip on twitter that Conservatives should think of Amazon as a Christian-owned bakery and of Parler as a cake for a gay wedding.

They're so into private property rights to deny people goods and services until they're suddenly the ones who have to scramble for find what they need.

I think this is really at the root of a lot of their anger. After telling everyone for years that they should just suck their marginalization up and toe the line of "polite," mainstream society if they want to be accepted, they are starting to see that they are the ones who increasingly lie outside "polite," mainstream society. They're the ones who politicized cultural shifts and framed them in terms of a "culture war," and they have been slowly but surely losing that war for years now.

I am not saying two wrongs make a right, but when a site exists for the express purpose of enabling those who have gone so far beyond normal that they are advocating and inciting violence, then I think a line has been crossed.

If violence-focused leftist groups like the Weather Underground still existed, you betcha the government would be watching them like hawks and taking any threat seriously, and I'm pretty sure most private companies would be reluctant to host web platforms that enable them.

Overwhelmingly, today's anarchists and would-be insurrectionists and terrorists are right wing, not left. It's amazing how many in government and law enforcement still can't seem get their head around this. Is it that hard, considering all the years of preaching on the evils of government by conservative legislators and presidents?
 
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Diana Hignutt

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Parler probably not coming back according to CEO:

Parler CEO John Matze said today that his social media company has been dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements with the social media service.
“Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day,” Matze said today on Fox News.

https://deadline.com/2021/01/parler...any-1234670607/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

F around and find out, I suppose.
 

Helix

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Well, well, well...

Every Deleted Parler Post, Many With Users' Location Data, Has Been Archived

In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler...Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99.9 percent of its content. In a tweet early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this tranche of data, now several terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed the raw video includes GPS coordinates, which point to the locations of users when the videos were filmed.
 

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Kaiser-Kun

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This administration has been full of missed opportunities. Asking for donations for a symbolic border wall away from the border, MAGA hats made in China, opening new apps for rejected suckers from other apps... I feel like everyone is taking money from these dorks but me.
 
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MaeZe

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From the desk of lies upon lies upon lies, what is a person to believe?

Back in 2018 people were warned that Parler might be a Honey Trap.

voxday blog (whoever they are): Parler may be a trap
At best, Parler is for the cons and civnats who are being banished from the SJWsphere. It strikes me as the Breitbart of social media, a gatekeeping action meant to keep conservatives in the corral and ineffectual.

The core problem is that mass social media is now little more than an involuntary resignation machine. ...

While it's possible that some of these restrictions are in place to deal with the inevitable SJW infiltrators and activists, I would not utilize it based on the dichotomy between its public free speech posturing and its Terms of Use. It's founder's statements about fighting badthink are also a significant red flag.

Then we have the doxxing of the data, and for some reason people registering on Parler had to provide picture ID.

And it looks like the data has all been scraped by the FBI and it includes GPS locations in addition to everything else.

Now someone has circulated a letter telling people to hurry and send information in with their believed crimes, names and addresses, so that Trump can give them all pardons. It's purported to be from the attorney at the White House working on pardons Trump wants to issue.

To follow up with that, we have this from the Justice Department: Statement on Misinformation on Social Media Regarding the Office of the Pardon Attorney
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice issued the following statement:

“Please be advised that the information circulating on social media claiming to be from Acting Pardon Attorney Rosalind Sargent-Burns is inauthentic and should not be taken seriously.

"The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney does not have a social media presence and is not involved in any efforts to pardon individuals or groups involved with the heinous acts that took place this week in and around the U.S. Capitol."

:roll: (Not laughing about the public doxxing.)
 
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MaeZe

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Update trivia: civnats are civic nationalists
For anyone that doesn't know: SJW social Justice warrior

And finally voxday is one I probably should have known, how is one to keep up? :e2paperba

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day
Theodore Robert Beale (born August 21, 1968), also known as Vox Day, is an American far-right activist,[2] writer, musician, publisher, and video game designer. He has been described as a white supremacist,[3] a misogynist,[4] and part of the alt-right.[5][6][7]

Beale went into video game development, which led to him writing science fiction, and social commentary with a focus on issues of religion, race, and gender. He became active in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, from which he was expelled, and was a central figure in the "Rabid Puppies" controversy involving the Hugo Awards for science fiction. He is active in publishing being a founding member of Castalia House.

I knew about this scandal but not the specifics:
Based on Larry Correia's 2014 "Sad Puppies" ballot-manipulation campaign, in 2015 Beale implemented a slate of candidates for the Hugo Awards called "Rabid Puppies", announcing it one day after the announcement of the Sad Puppies recommendation, instructing his followers to nominate the slate "precisely as they are."[36] The Rabid Puppies slate successfully placed 58 of its 67 recommended nominees on the ballot. Two of the nominations were for Beale himself, and eleven were for works published by his small Finnish publisher Castalia House,[37][failed verification] where Beale acts as lead editor.[36] Of those other nominees, two authors, an editor, and a fanzine subsequently withdrew their own nominations; three of these four explicitly cited the wish to dissociate themselves from Beale as being among their reasons for doing so.[38][39][40] Withdrawals from the Best Novel category allowed space for Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem to move into a finalist position,[41][42] and it went on to win the Best Novel Award.[43] Although the winning novel was one of the few nominees not on the Rabid Puppies slate, some sources credited the win to Beale's backing of the novel.[44]
 
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ChaseJxyz

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Parler is suing* Amazon for anti-trust, as Amazon is killing off all other micro-blogging sites in order to kill any competition for Twitter**. And I mean, yeah Amazon def needs people to go after them for their monopolies, but I don't think this is the case that is going to do it.

*But I thought their lawyers also dumped them? So who's doing this

**I don't think they realize that Amazon doesn't own Twitter, or any sort of microblogging site/service
 

Introversion

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Parler partially reappears with support from Russian technology firm

Reuters said:
Parler, a social media website and app popular with the American far right, has partially returned online with the help of a Russian-owned technology company.

Parler vanished from the internet when dropped by Amazon Inc’s hosting arm and other partners for poor moderation after its users called for violence and posted videos glorifying the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

On Monday, Parler’s website was reachable again, though only with a message from its chief executive saying he was working to restore functionality.

The internet protocol address it used is owned by DDos-Guard, which is controlled by two Russian men and provides services including protection from distributed denial of service attacks, infrastructure expert Ronald Guilmette told Reuters.

If the website is fully restored, Parler users would be able to see and post comments. Most users prefer the app, however, which remains banned from the official Apple Inc and Google stores.

...
 

Roxxsmom

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This is so surprising. No one expected this. I mean, why would Russians want to take on a site that sows misinformation and discord in the US?

Okay, I've given up on my deadpan typing face.
 

ChaseJxyz

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I can never figure out if the Trump fanboys love or hate Russia.

But yeah, the fact that the actual SERVICE isn't up is no surprise. Changing all the code from working with AWS to [whatever Russian thing] is going to take a lot of time and engineering resources. AWS is so common, there's a ton of documentation on how to work with it, I don't know how much there is for [Russian thing] in English. They're also going to have to update their Android app, too (as you can just download the APK, you don't need the app store) but I imagine that's lower down on their list.
 

frimble3

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I can never figure out if the Trump fanboys love or hate Russia.
I think they like the authoritarian dictatorship side, but then every now and then someone reminds them that the Russkies are Commies and the relationship falters. Fortunately or not, the Trumpers don't remember much political stuff, unless they're reminded of it.
Strongman with Secret Police good, dirty Pinkos bad is about as nuanced as they get.
 

Kaiser-Kun

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Oh, Trump followers love the idea of fascism because they think they'd be the ones doing the oppressing. Some of their demands I've read online include being allowed to "patrol" historical sites while armed, which of coure means being licensed to harass whoever they want. It's not unlike some of the reports from 2016 right after Trump's inauguration.