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. ®
He’s not wrong.
Parler took cheap route and depended upon everyone else, now they lost everything. Fools.
When the parler thing went down, I almost posted
/laughs in Pirate Bay
;D
Time for a Parler clone to emerge in its place but with their own servers. Maybe Trump can do it.
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.
___________________________
One hacker bragged he hacked Parler and downloaded all of its last few weeks of taffic. Obviously including the protests in DC. Seems to be true. Could Free Republic be hacked like this and they get our IP adddresses?
Who would have thought it would be removed from so many different Angles.
That the site could be so thoroughly scraped, and did not take care to protect metadata shows that they could not care less about their customers and should die an embarrassing death.
Yes, and maybe with an amaerican name instead of French.
Sure, depending on the depth of the hack and the degree of sophistication. Probably the Apache logs are readable, unless JohnRob only switches them on when debugging, which might be the case. Those logs have your (and my) IPs in them, which is why using an anonymizing VPN is recommended if you need/want to be obscure.
I figure, since I donate monthly, if FR gets hacked, having my IP is the least of my worries -- they'd get my PayPal identity (yeah I use my real one, that was probably unwise, but it's too late now).
NEVER! NEVER! get on the internet without a good VPN. Free is not good.
I have this nagging theory...
...that FB and Twitter (and others to a lesser degree) intentionally goaded conservatives into fleeing to Parler because, via inside exchanges with Amazon, they knew that once they had driven them all to that new home, they could make them all STFU with the flck of a switch.
>click<
Leftist headaches gone.
So far, it looks like the round-up was a success. MeWe isn’t ever going to be safe so long as it’s still on Amazon servers in Ireland.
So...
Anyone for “Battlestar Galactica” reruns?
Yep, He’s not wrong...
Just tried, it. Gab came up in more than a second. Days ago, wouldn't come up at all
One way to more complete privacy is through the various pirate party associates in Nordic countries. They accept cryptocurrencies. Some will even accept cash. One problem with using those services, though, is that some international gangs (including drug cartels) are also using them for money laundering. So if you use one of those services, be sure to report with your tax filings, any transactions that are required by law to be reported.
Well the irony is that Trump and his supporters were on Twitter and Facebook, yakking away for years. It wasn’t until Twitter and Facebook decided to silence Trump that his followers started leaving _en masse_ them for Parler. THEN the tech giants moved to destroy Parler.
I say _loss of users_ to a competing platform is what spurred the move to _eliminate competition._ Trump being Trump and “his toxic followers” is their sad, lame excuse. They want their cake and eat it, too, by compelling lost users to return while taping their mouths shut about politics they don’t like.
Interesting.
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