I think its more boring than that. Their platform was built by amateurs who didn't know what they were doing. Things like soft-deleting posts and auto-incrementing post IDs. This is why it was so easily crawled in a day before the shutdown.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parle...
It's easy to blame incompetence, but startups are startups and many things are hacked together in a hurry when you're growing fast.
https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20090805/
I believe they also for a long time had a public API^.. and I'm pretty sure they soft-delete posts (bonus that they could revive the tweet down the track if it was a 'mistake'). I don't think the Twitter team are amateurs though.
Having monotonically increasing IDs for non-distributed systems removes the possibility of duplicate IDs. In distributed systems ID conflicts are unavoidable, and you might have less conflicts if you generate random IDs, as well as it becomes difficult for an attacker to guess IDs.
^ likely it would have been rate-limited, which isn't a problem if you've got a large pool of users you can authenticate with
In parler's case, having monotonically increasing ID typed as signed 32-bit integer _guaranteed_ duplicate IDs once they reached 2.1 billion unique items. This is well-known failure mode, and yet it took them by surprise.
1) It invites resource enumeration attack
https://www.cequence.ai/use-cases/enumeration-attacks/
https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Forced_browsing
2) they ran out of ints. Stop me if you think you've heard this one before
Maybe the techies with those skills dont want to work there and so the existing employees might not have the skills to do that.
Parler hasn't seen 1/10th the the deplatforming that The Pirate Bay has seen for example, yet that managed to survive throughout the years and is still up now. The reality is that whoever was running Parler had no clue what they were doing.
No, it's on the open Web.
Large divergences in worldview and values, combined with universal policies, create underserved market segments, and thus opportunities.
"Aid and abet" and "insurrection" are part of a framing that not everyone accepts.
anyone that tries to both sides this shit deserves eternal shame
I personally just want a social network were I don't have to worry about being banned every minute. (Not sure if PArler qualifies, but I suppose it is their selling point).
Funny how it's working out now…
https://www.wsj.com/articles/parler-backed-by-mercer-family-...
"Matze said that Parler had faced trouble in finding a new service provider, ... He also said that others had refused to work with Parler: "Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Attempts_to_return_onli...
It is probably easier to find an alternative hosting platform when you are booted from AWS because of porn. In the case of parler they also might need to migrate more data.
Soon people will understand why it was taken down.
They are getting kicked off AWS because of content that is absolutely criminal in nature, and their inability and inaction in moderating it.
If a platform has ANY illegal content what standard is then acceptable? If you moderate 99.999% of your content is it reasonable for you to be blacklisted for the 0.001%? If someone found 90 examples of calls to violence on Twitter would that make it OK to deplatform them too?
This sounds like you're trying to get us to pretend along that Parler had a moderation policy that was in any way effective, equally applied, or not just pandering to the crowd it was trying to entice.
For instance:
https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in...
(IMHO both Facebook and Twitter should be shut down. Size matters.)
This argument is problematic. In any criminal endeavor, what most of the criminals do isn’t illegal or even unusual.
When HSBC was laundering cartel money, they also served regular customers. They processed credit cards, gave loans and so on. 99.9999% legal activities and yet they were fined billions of dollars for fascinating money laundering operation of few murderous warlords.
This is about money and power, nothing else. Facebook is “too big to fail” so clearly it will never face any consequences, while Parler is a random little site that’s easy to pick on.
IMHO social media needs to be regulated, companies should not be able to simply cut you off from the rest of the public and you shouldn't be unaccountable for your actions and there must be ways for harm reduction. (if you tell/share a something, them maybe people affected by it should have right to equal exposure to challenge it. i.e. their POV could be attached to your post and everyone who interacted with your post receives a notification that the post was challenged)
My understanding is that the law simply says that doing _some_ moderation doesn't make you the publisher.
I hope they will be back, stronger than before.
Nevermind that maybe, just maybe, if your platform users advocate for violent revolution, you're going to have a harder go of things. Prior to approximately October, 2001, there was a taleban.com too. I didn't read any hand-wringing when they got the axe. Newsflash: At least Tor can't remove you.
The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom.