Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

Re:Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support by bob1029 on Monday January 11, 2021 @03:38PM (#25736341)

Best mitigation is to involve as few 3rd parties as possible. Find more obscure allies in the space who are not motivated (controlled) by public perception and political gains. Consider building your own tools and technologies to replace 3rd parties.

For instance, the load balancing and DDOS protection products sold by Cloudflare are not the effects of some ancient mystical artifact that we could never hope to emulate. These are simple network engineering practices that can be replicated by any experienced IT staff. Sure, you might not be able to mitigate a theoretical 100+ terabit DDOS attack, but is this actually a problem in practice for your business? Even if you have ridiculous capacity, at a certain point you would still have to defer to ISPs, law enforcement and other external measures in order to restore sane operations.

Certainly, there is no perfect solution. But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.

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Re:Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support by lolc on Monday January 11, 2021 @05:38PM (#25738631)

I have no reason to believe that Parler has the means to build infrastructure for DDOS mitigation that compares in any way to Cloudflare. If you're not a multihomed AS, you can't even begin to offer what Cloudflare offers.

> But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.

Where's the cutoff? Lay your own fiber to your own datacenters? At some point economy dictates that you rent. And with Parler, I'd assume that that point comes sooner than later. I mean I don't know their funding situation, but I find it reasonable to assume that if they'd built a NOC first they wouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.

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Re:Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support by heleninboodler on Monday January 11, 2021 @07:03PM (#25740175)

I'd say if they don't have the means to stand on their own and build all their own mitigations against this sort of attack, then they've bit off more than they can chew.

If their goal is to be a free-speech-above-all platform that is definitely going to piss off both infrastructure providers and the world of people who might attack them, then they better have the technical capabilities to back that up or they're going to get torn to shreds. Nobody else is required to help them in their misguided (in my opinion) endeavor.

And yes, it's possible that such a grand plan takes more resources than they actually have. Not anyone else's problem.

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Re:Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support by lolc on Monday January 11, 2021 @08:42PM (#25741197)

I totally agree. Their situation looks untenable.

I'd love to know the risk-scenarios they considered. Could they imagine getting booted off AWS?

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Re:Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support by bob1029 on Monday January 11, 2021 @06:52PM (#25740003)

Sometimes the trick isn't so much about the technology, but about the regulatory environment and your agility within it. The Pirate Bay is still online, so getting around this kind of thing isn't entirely unprecedented.

Something to consider on the tech front would be Starlink. What happens when the orbital layer is independent of terrestrial backhaul under ideal routing conditions? Consider the implications of a datacenter that is in space or located at a geographic location that is incredibly difficult to access. Just a decent desktop PC hooked up to a 100mbps pipe can serve a lot of traffic if the application is built properly (i.e. text-only).

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Re:Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support by lolc on Monday January 11, 2021 @08:27PM (#25741078)

I responded to your claims around DDOS mitigation. At 100 Mbps you're swamped the second a couple cell phones decide to flood you.

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