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Why Parler's revival on public cloud is complicated and unlikely
ZDNET ^ | 1/12/2021 | Stephen Nichols

Posted on 01/12/2021 8:35:00 AM PST by Onthebrink

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To: a fool in paradise
It’s not a wedding cake. They will deny you sales.

There are ways around it. Just off the top of my head: 1.) Create an LLC. (Takes a day or two of government red tape.) 2.) Have the LLC be a cloud services company with one customer, Parler. 3.) Create iron clad contractual agreements with service level agreements with vendors providing bandwidth and other resources. Include penalties in the agreement. This is done everyday in IT.

If that doesn't work, add more levels of indirection (holding companies) to hide the end consumer of services (Parler).

There are certainly ways to do this and people a whole lot more knowledge than me that could pull this off if they have the will do so.

21 posted on 01/12/2021 9:12:47 AM PST by ConservativeInPA (See Profile: I'm giving up.)
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To: PMAS

I use amazon for research. Those reviews are a handy tool as are the alternative products they show. Then I go try and find my chosen product elsewhere. I can usually find it at the same price but don’t mind paying a little more.

I just don’t like monopolies or conglomerates. I rarely shop at walmart for the same reason and I never buy the their store brands like Mainstays junk. We buy our groceries from two different small grocery stores. I try to avoid large chains too like auto parts stores, Advance, autozone etc. Our little Federated Auto Parts store usually has better prices and I also use rockauto.com.

Lumber and building supplies are the exception. Our small, regional chain, Do it Best gets twice the price of Lowes on most things. $15 for a sheet of drywall when Lowes was $7 per sheet. I don’t do Menard’s because they sell a lot of their own china store brands and the whole rebate game is a joke. Plus they make you check in and out of a gate for large items and have a bunch of dumb kids working there, including a lot of trans looking kids.


22 posted on 01/12/2021 9:27:01 AM PST by Pollard (Bunch of curmudgeons)
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To: Onthebrink
Interesting how a few big tech companies can gang up and smash a competitor... a billion dollar company.

If I did that in my business I'd be sued into poverty and possibly prosecuted.

We once had anti-trust laws - but that was before we went neo-fascist.

23 posted on 01/12/2021 9:27:01 AM PST by AAABEST (NY/DC/LA media/political/military industrial complex DELENDA EST)
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To: Ikeon
The lawsuits are coming. Danbongino.com

Will end up like the election lawsuits. Smacked down. We have a two tiered justice system now in case you haven't noticed. Lin Wood & Nick Sandman(sp?) was a fluke.

24 posted on 01/12/2021 9:30:20 AM PST by Pollard (Bunch of curmudgeons)
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To: asinclair
My retort - if they are writing about it, they are not doing it. Ergo, they lack experience.

I agree it is difficult and expensive to standup infrastructure. It is complex, as in there are many "moving parts" and it is "large", if that is what you mean by "tricky". Engineers deal with large and complex all the time - at least good ones. It is not an insurmountable problem.

There used to be a can-do attitude in America. We need to stop being defeated before trying.

25 posted on 01/12/2021 9:31:55 AM PST by ConservativeInPA (See Profile: I'm giving up.)
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To: rarestia

That is what I heard hours after the warning went out.

It’s why they think they will be back up today or tomorrow. The content is not lost. If they were using EC2 instances for the web servers, then those same images can nearly be used on other servers. If using containers on EC2 servers, then even less concern rehosting—just being up your containers on other servers with an OS installed already.


26 posted on 01/12/2021 9:40:39 AM PST by ConservativeMind (Trump: Befuddling Democrats, Republicans, and the Media for the benefit of the US and all mankind.)
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To: ConservativeMind

If they’re using DevOps, it should be a matter of a quick spin up from Kubernetes, and they’re off to the races.


27 posted on 01/12/2021 9:43:15 AM PST by rarestia (Repeal the 17th Amendment and ratify Article the First to give the power back to the people!)
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To: Onthebrink
The people who run this country(or at least think they do) are in for a major surprise. I think they are afraid of us. I hope they have good reason to be afraid of us. We have spent so much of our political capitol supporting wealthy and corporate supposedly conservative interests who do not reciprocate to our specific concerns. They have just been using us! Just like the left wing oligarchs use socialists and radical elements. We are a middle class movement and we should understand that and work for our own interests.
28 posted on 01/12/2021 9:50:28 AM PST by amnestynone (We are asked by people who do not tolerate us to tolerate the intolerable in the name of tolerance.)
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To: Sirius Lee
Sorry, in post-Great Reset America, unless they have been pre-approved by the global government, nobody has standing anywhere in front of a judge.

You jest, but there is talk that Amazon has standing on Parler for defamation. The only question should be "Did Parler and Amazon follow the contract?" If the contract is followed, there is no standing.
29 posted on 01/12/2021 9:58:28 AM PST by redgolum (If this culture today is civilization, I will be the barbarian )
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To: poconopundit
There is one, and it’s one of the biggest, Oracle. They won the Tik Tok U.S. hosting contract and you can bet the patriot CEO Larry Ellison will be at least one company that will support Parler and others.

I think Parler would be stupid to get in bed with Oracle. They need to build and operate their own hardware. The 'cloud' just means it's someone else's computers. If your data is in the 'cloud', it means you do not own or control it, as we have seen rather dramatically over the past week.

I have a personal dislike of oracle, as I recall how crappy it was from a licensing perspective when they bought out WebLogic. The company I was out moved the majority away to open source alternatives because of Oracles insane licensing schemes on VMs. Oracle is every bit as predatory as any of these other companies.

30 posted on 01/12/2021 10:21:20 AM PST by zeugma (Stop deluding yourself that America is still a free country.)
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To: PMAS

We are an economic force.


31 posted on 01/12/2021 10:21:39 AM PST by UpInArms (without failure there's no success only slavery)
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To: Pollard

I agree.

I don’t have a problem with Lowe’s or Home Depot, just try to avoid building products Made In CHY-NA, I’ve been avoiding those for years whenever possible, made like sh!t anyway


32 posted on 01/12/2021 11:04:03 AM PST by PMAS (All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing)
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To: zeugma

Well, you have more experience than I certain do with Oracle, just watching them from afar.

If there’s enough competition and a company is somewhat independent and at least friendly with Trump. Ellison held a fundraiser for Trump in Silicon Valley, it’s a least an option.

I guess the biggest bottleneck is video. It’s a matter of who you can trust. And you bet, Oracle is going to charge top dollar.


33 posted on 01/12/2021 11:19:10 AM PST by poconopundit (Hard oak fist in an Irish velvet glove: Kayleigh the Shillelagh we salute your work!)
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To: Onthebrink

ZDNet is a competitor of my tech company...but this analysis is beyond stupid. It points up the utter lack of IT acumen of these so-called “tech writers.” Building your own infrastructure is not difficult, although it is costly. But money is fungible. And there are a variety of open source tools built for privacy that are available for a nominal cost, (ie, Inrupt, Solid, BitMitigate, 2nd Amendment Processing, ProtonVPN,etc.). Blockchain-based peer-to-peer computing nodes are available now making spare disk and bandwidth available for a nominal license fee. The Handshake protocol lets you build TLDs as a private tunnel atop ICAAN’s root file. These are the tools that will lead to a decentralized Internet in 2-3 years. Google and Apple don’t know it yet, but they are on the downward curve


34 posted on 01/12/2021 12:42:18 PM PST by confederatecarpetbag
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To: ConservativeMind

Epik is a registrar, but also does hosting and back=end infrastructure with BitMitigate DNS ...the whole gamut... it does way more than just sell domain names.


35 posted on 01/12/2021 12:45:41 PM PST by confederatecarpetbag
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To: Onthebrink

ZDNet is a competitor of my tech company...but this analysis is beyond stupid. It points up the utter lack of IT acumen of these so-called “tech writers.” Building your own infrastructure is not difficult, although it is costly. But money is fungible. And there are a variety of open source tools built for privacy that are available for a nominal cost, (ie, Inrupt, Solid, BitMitigate, 2nd Amendment Processing, ProtonVPN,etc.). Blockchain-based peer-to-peer computing nodes are available now making spare disk and bandwidth available for a nominal license fee. The Handshake protocol lets you build TLDs as a private tunnel atop ICAAN’s root file. These are the tools that will lead to a decentralized Internet in 2-3 years. Google and Apple don’t know it yet, but they are on the downward curve


36 posted on 01/12/2021 12:51:25 PM PST by confederatecarpetbag
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To: Onthebrink

Do what FR does, what Parler can do, buy the servers.


37 posted on 01/12/2021 2:42:59 PM PST by Biggirl ("Iden One Lord, one faith, one baptism" - Ephesians-4:6)
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To: ConservativeMind

I listened to John Matze in a podcast interview that posted yesterday. As problematic as the AWS actions were, the action that Twilio took was perhaps even more damaging. Parler differentiated itself from Twitter in that it required accounts to have an active SMS number associated with it. This limited fake accounts or bots to run multiple accounts that Twitter suffers from. Twilio was the service Parler used to authenticate users with their given SMS number. Matze said they’d probably have to build this functionality themselves instead of using an outside service such as Twilio as so many do.

This entire fiasco has been a black mark on the public cloud computing industry. This industry sold itself to the market as the most efficient path to build technology platforms so that you don’t have to do it all yourself. I guess it came with the caveat that this is only true if the public cloud companies agree with your business model or your political positions on issues.

Fine, they are private companies and they can make their own policies within the boundaries of the law. But there are many First Amendment issues at play here and that takes this disagreement to a whole new level. Expect a lot more to happen here.

Q: What hosting service does Free Republic use? Is it run on private data centers or public cloud? I can easily see this platform being a target soon, if not already. Jim is already on their radar, we know.


38 posted on 01/13/2021 6:47:45 AM PST by NohSpinZone (First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers)
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To: NohSpinZone

Free Republic uses all their own servers and software. They have a colocation setup that recently moved.

Unless the building wants to eject the servers or kill the Internet access, this should be safe from such concerns.


39 posted on 01/13/2021 6:58:03 AM PST by ConservativeMind (Trump: Befuddling Democrats, Republicans, and the Media for the benefit of the US and all mankind.)
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