They're only advertising to one peer. It's possible they have other peering arrangements in place they're not advertising to. Or maybe they're single homed. They also only have a single IPv4 /24 from ARIN. No IPv6. Not terribly robust or impressive.

I've never used Gab or looked at their infrastructure before. A quick look shows they're behind Cloudflare. No clue where they're actually hosted or what the infra looks like but I wouldn't be surprised if they just snatched up this /24 "because they could" and are just sitting on it.

I doubt this is where their backend actually is. Single homed isn't a great idea in the first place and if HE pulls the plug they're lights out until they can get new peering arrangements in place - which usually isn't a quick process in the best of times.

You're right that the single peer is a concern. Maybe they have others that are hidden for now, like you said?

I don't think they need more than a few IP addresses since most of their hardware could sit on a private network with only a single load balancer visible from the Internet. Also, a small ASN doesn't really need IPv6 compatibility to function, and won't for many years to come.

Since they're still using Cloudflare, it looks like multiple layers of defense. When Cloudflare eventually bans them, people will realize that it was only pointing to their own ASN and no one knows which datacenter it's in. The single peer with HE doesn't actually mean they're in an HE datacenter.

Ideally, for redundancy, you'd run in more than one datacenter. That's hard to do with only one /24; most networks won't take BGP advertisements more specific than /24, so you can't easily run half your ips at each DC. Maybe HE allows it for transit customers, but it makes the routing messier.

They could be doing anycast, but that's pretty sophisticated. They could also only advertise the /24 from one DC at a time, but that's error prone. Or maybe advertise from both and forward to the live DC over a private link/VPN.

I do see in Octoberish, they were peering with a second network, and they have second network in their IRR records. Could just be so they can use one of the DDoS filter companies that advertises your netblock, and sends you clean traffic. Can't do that (easily) if you get IPs from your transit provider and it's not a service they support.

You can still have redundancy. Basically active + backup config, where the other datacenter takes over and announces the /24 if the active goes down. They could certainly be utilizing "oob" IP connectivity to coordinate failover instead of using their own IP space.

Disclaimer: I haven't worked with IP transit in five years so this could very well be dated.

A single peer and a single IPv4 /24 (to me, at least) kind of tells the story of "Hey this might come in handy, costs a couple hundred dollars, and is just a couple of applications to fill out. Might as well." as opposed to something that's actually running in production.

While there is more autonomy with your own ASN and the resulting infrastructure there's also the obvious and required information leakage that comes as a result. Compared to being able to hide everything behind billions of essentially ephemeral addresses inside of a Cloudflare, AWS, etc at best (worst?) they've got a maximum of 256 easily discovered static IP addresses that Anonymous or any other DDoSer can readily point their bots at to obliterate.

I'm not familiar with DDoS mitigation equipment or products that HE has in place but I doubt they'd be able to as smoothly or economically absorb some of the large targeted attacks we've seen pointed at Google, AWS, Cloudflare, etc.

If Gab does decide to start multi-homing they would then need to coordinate DDoS mitigation across multiple providers and/or utilize some of the products from companies that specialize in layer 3+ DDoS scrubbing and clean return. This is all because anyone can just go grab all of their current IPs from the latest route announcement and bury them in anything from layer 3 to 7.

It gets very complicated and very expensive very quickly compared to how fast, cheap, and easy hiding your HTTPS stuff behind a CDN is. That's why everyone just does that.

If they're using their own ASN which transit providers they have and which datacenters they're in doesn't matter - all of their routes would be publicly announced and any reasonably competent attacker would configure their tool to pull the most recent route announcements from any number of looking glasses and update the bots. The internet will do what it does and happily route the legitimate and illegitimate traffic to any number of providers and datacenters worldwide.

At their (apparent) size and scale using their own IPs and their own ASN (both under their own corporate name) completely defeats the purpose of using a CDN, load balancer, DDoS mitigation service, etc and just doesn't make any sense.

To your point: on the modern Internet if you're banned from Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, and Azure (maybe a few others) even IF you can get hosted somehow/somewhere your next concern is going to be a DDoS. From what I know anyone large enough to handle a modern day DDoS probably won't do business with you either -or- will happily forward you a massive (six figures, easily) per-incident invoice and then probably give you the boot anyway.

I don't have any personal experience hosting controversial web properties but there are some HUGE technical, social, and political differences between The Pirate Bay and Gab, Parler, etc that the article fails to address.

EDIT: Above I describe receiving a per-attack invoice with DDoS mitigation companies. That's not actually how it works. I could get into it further but those costs are a rough ballpark.

I know Gab uses this domain registrar and hosting company called Epik but no clue how exactly how much of Gab's infra is handled by Epik.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_(company)

https://www.epik.com

I set up an account this evening and it’s unusable due to loading times. They’ve added 1.7m in 4 days which may explain it. Be interesting to see how long it takes them to scale

I've been impressed by Gab

What puts me off Gab and Parler is that the vast majority are those alienated or banned from other platforms for the same reason, for the most part they all think the same way and the topic of conversation is almost exclusively political. Gab has some interesting groups which slightly mitigates this.

Gab is #537 highest traffic website in the US, up from #647 yesterday.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gab.com#section_traffic

I agree with you about the political agitation but I would say its becoming less of an issue on Gab. Parler was quite toxic. However, I prefer MSN messenger style chatrooms, so I use Telegram mostly which has now reached 500 million daily active users.

These platforms aren't just filled with people banned from facebook anymore, and will become less political as time goes on

It used to be that Parler was clean-ish and Gab was "problematic". Interesting that you think this swapped.

parler is owned by partisan media personalities such as dan bongino now. gab is political, but more so in terms of ideas and values. parler is explicitly, aggressively, partisan political from what i can see. I don't use either platform

I’m not as optimistic as your last prediction, unless Twitter and facebook start eating their own and that Sparks a more diverse range of points of view coming on board. I also think that in terms of interests, people joining these platforms will always have politics as number 1

If they get large quantities of Gen-X and baby boomers to move from FB to Gab, I think that will kill FB.

When they open up digital marketing on a platform thats less saturated, that will be the real test though. If Gab can do digital marketing decently corporations will start paying them money and stop criticising them so openly.

Scott Alexander put it well in Neutral vs. Conservative[1]:

"if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches."

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

This piece may be the single most intelligent thing I have read all week (though this perhaps does not speak well of my usual information sources...). :)

I feel like one of the defects in most of our discourse these days (from any position, on any subject) is an almost complete disregard for trying to understand opposing views (and even a lack of concern that ones assumptions about the opposition might not be entirely correct).

Why? Seems like the level of discussion is not all that far away from the level on Parler.

Or on Twitter, or facebook

Curiosity, exchange of views, diversifying the news and information I’m exposed to, follow some people I am interested in hearing from, respect for censorship stance. These are the first that spring to mind

They had to do that because they got kicked off of everywhere else.

And sadly Andrew Torba was kicked out of YC because of his politics (however YC tries to spin it).

No big deal to run your own ASN, especially when your provider only has two companies advertising upstream. Both of those companies are providing Epik their network.

Epik runs a wide variety of hate filled content purveyors. Wouldn't be a horribly difficult thing to advertise their routes on BGP and black hole their asses.

I remember this happening by accident to Cox Cable.

But sad to think that YC spawned someone like him as well.