Posted on 01/13/2021 10:43:04 PM PST by nickcarraway
Torrent search engine is still up after years of whack-a-mole with copyright cops
One of the co-creators of notorious BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay has criticised free speech social network Parler for the lack of resilience that saw it go dark after Amazon Web Services booted it out of its cloud.
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi took to Twitter to offer his opinions.
The Pirate Bay linked to vast quantities of copyrighted material that was available without payment. Big Content therefore hated the site and authorities regularly cancelled its domains or sued its operators. Swedish police raided its data centre and hauled away its servers. But the site re-emerged with a Costa Rican domain. It later burned through domains in Iceland, Greenland, the island nation of St Martin, Peru, and others besides.
The site endured many legal troubles, was banned by Microsoft and Google, but never spent much time offline and always managed to bounce back.
As Sunde noted in the Tweets above, it is still running today. Authorities seem less worried about the site these days, perhaps because the likes of Netflix found a way to secure hundreds of millions of punters willing to pay for streaming video.
Before Parler went dark, founder John Matze said he had anticipated that AWS could be a single point of failure and his company had therefore been careful to work with bare metal servers that should in theory make a rebuild easier than if the social network had used Amazon-only tools and techniques. Matze was confident that decision meant the site could be restored within a week.
It’s since emerged that Parler’s site could be thoroughly scraped and users’ posts accessed without permission. Those posts included metadata such as location. It is thought that the unauthorised dump of Parler data is now being used to investigate those who participated in the storming of the US Congress.
That the site could be so thoroughly scraped, and did not take care to protect metadata, has been interpreted as Parler perhaps not having the most robust architecture imaginable.
The service has to date shown no sign of returning. Yesterday, on LinkedIn, Matze said: “It’s not easy to switch to others. When someone the size of Amazon dumps you, everyone else will deny you due to reputational damage.”
However, that thread, and others in which he has recently participated, contain numerous offers of non-Amazonian hosting services. ®
I’m on Gab.
Parler is simply going to go for damages now, they've done the oppo cost of rebuilding. The site had that van-down-by-the-river feel all along.
Meanwhile Y3llowbeard, who has the ultimate distributed app with thousands of illegal self-hosters, criticizes Parler for having to have legit legal hosts, while missing the fine point of Parler's legal strategy altogether. LOFL.
Parler was the invention of an intelligent, young man. He should not be excoriated for the lack of assistance by those pounding their chests.
>> van-down-by-the-river
LOL — few if any sketches rival that one.
Parler could have easily “come alive” elsewhere. I figured that didn’t happen in order to facilitate the damages/injury angle.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1033/printing-ordinance-of-1643
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Well, that didn't happen overnight for them.
For Parler, it's been less than a week.
Let's give them sometime.
Also, I don't know why so many conservatives are kicking them when they're down.
They were basically gang raped by Big Tech.
In the end, it was Big Tech, who just don't want a notch on their gun for Parler, but for ALL of us.
Bongino said specifically that they were not hacked.
kickasstorrents had become the big one but got taken down and fbi got the guy running it. After that, most went away voluntarily except for the piratebay.org which I still use.(for no copyrighed material of course - I wouldn’t think about taking revenue from the fine people in hollywood)
Thanks for your post. A lot of people here believe they are so much smarter and seem to have an unreasonable dislike for young Mr. Matze. What happened and is happening to him is horrible and he should have conservative’s support and we should be outraged.
He’s right. Parler was very naive and foolish to ever trust Big Tech. Just seeing how they collude to try to destroy anybody on the Right or anybody who advocates free speech (Alex Jones and Gab) should have shown them that.
I hope Parler has learned it’s lesson and will soon be back up and running like other victims of Big Tech persecution before them. I also hope everybody who is not a raving leftist lunatic takes notes. You cannot trust Big Tech - for anything. That’s the takeaway here.
I haven’t been able to get onto Parler this week. Is it that way for everyone?
This is what I’ve been getting when I try to go to Parler.com:
“Hmmm… can’t reach this pageIt looks like the webpage at https://parler.com/ might be having issues, or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.”
Does anyone know what’s going on?
I had no idea just how weak the security at Parler was.
The Titans of Tech may have done us a huge favor.
“Bongino said specifically that they were not hacked.”
Bongino helped get Parler off the ground and was a minority owner. He has been talking about setting up right wing alternative media for a few years.
Some people just enjoy piling on for effect.
They get kicked all the time, and enjoy it when they can kick someone else regardless of who or why.
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