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The Internet Technology

Parler is Back Online, More Than a Month After Tangle With Amazon Knocked it Offline (washingtonpost.com) 307

Parler is back online following several weeks of darkness after the social media site popular with supporters of former president Donald Trump was knocked offline. From a reportL: Parler effectively fell off the Internet in January when Amazon refused to provide technical cloud computing support to the site after the tech giant determined Parler was not doing enough to moderate and remove incitements to violence. The site was not fully functional on Monday, and some users reported technical glitches as they tried to log in and refresh feeds. Private messaging was disabled, but the basic outline of the site was live. "We're in for a little bit of a bumpy ride for the next day or two, there's been a ton of backend work we've completed over the last couple of weeks," Parler Chief Technology Officer Alexander Blair posted on the site Monday morning. [...] Parler appeared to be using a Los Angeles-based cloud hosting company called SkySilk to return online. Hackers on Twitter, including the user who orchestrated a large-scale scrape of Parler's public data as it fell offline, identified SkySilk as the host. John Jackson, founder of hacking group Sakura Samurai, confirmed the technical footprint points to SkySilk via public records.
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Parler is Back Online, More Than a Month After Tangle With Amazon Knocked it Offline

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  • by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Monday February 15, 2021 @06:32PM (#61066954)

    So funny these guys are so gullible.

  • Glad they found a way to be online, I'm never going to use them and don't recommend them to anyone.

    • Time to go trolling..
  • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Monday February 15, 2021 @06:35PM (#61066974) Journal

    So they weren't being censored, they were just shit at sysadmin. Remember when we used to rag on that sort of thing here?

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      I don't know. If a service gets big enough and its providers pull the plug, bringing it up elsewhere is not exactly trivial, although arguably given the market position they were attempting to occupy they should have had contingency plans in place.

      • Fascinating (Score:2, Insightful)

        by tiqui ( 1024021 )

        Just WHY is it that "they should have had contingency plans in place", to use your words?

        One year ago would ANYBODY have said that any company using Amazon's servers automatically needed to have contingency plans in place (as though AWS was not reliable)? Over the past few years the consensus in the computing universe was that "the cloud" and Amazon's web services were totally reliable - much better than any infrastructure any typical business might be able to setup on its own. Personally I reject the idea

        • Re:Fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)

          by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian@bixby.gmail@com> on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @12:52AM (#61067682)

          If they didn't have disaster recovery plans in place (which they didn't) then their IT leadership is incompetent. You **always** have contingency plans or your business doesn't survive the next emergency.

        • Re:Fascinating (Score:4, Informative)

          by BadDreamer ( 196188 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @03:26AM (#61067908) Homepage

          There have been multiple severe outages of AWS, which have shown that having contingency is required. And the only ones who will start assuming they need contingency for fear of getting thrown out are the ones who, like Parler, get warnings well beforehand that they need to wizen their act up or get thrown out.

          Because this was no surprise to Parler. Nor was it as simple as someone saying or doing something some employers didn't like.

          And yes, AWS, like any single vendor solution, always was and remains a huge business risk. Anyone not seeing that before Parler is damn lucky they get an eye opener now.

        • Re:Fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ledow ( 319597 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @03:46AM (#61067936) Homepage

          If you think that just because you're using a cloud provider, even a large cloud provider, that you don't need a contingency plan in a multi-million-dollar company based on that cloud provider as your primary provider, then you're insane.

          You bought into hype that's never been true and any IT professional would laugh you out of the room. Just because some management might try to sell you that because a salesman is selling *them* that, or some small app that got popular sings AWS's praises does NOT mean you can just pivot your entire IT-based business on AWS, or Azure, or any other such system without a contingency.

          Especially not if, quite literally, part of your business plan is to be seen as a haven for those people who have been thrown off other services.

          AWS just got itself rid of all the troublesome customers that would cost it money, lawyers, time, effort and engineering, while any sensible operation are just using AWS as one of many backends. Apple iCloud, for example, ran for years as a mix of Azure, AWS and other cloud instances:

          https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]

          So don't go telling people how to run their business when you don't understand that anybody with any sense has never considered AWS a single bulletproof solution to all their problems. Only an idiot would design a huge IT business like that, and then go piss off AWS (mainly because they didn't read the terms and conditions of AWS usage).

          • by Rinikusu ( 28164 )

            There's something a lot of so-called "free market" types can't stand and refuse to acknowledge. They fail to understand that just as they're free to "fire" (or boycott, or cancel, whatever) a vendor, that it works BOTH WAYS. I have had to fire some of my customers. These are people who no matter what I did, always found something to complain about. Always something not satisfying. We're talking maybe 1-3% of my total customer base and there just was no pleasing and yet generated probably 80% of my headaches

  • AWS Lambda? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Monday February 15, 2021 @06:35PM (#61066976) Journal

    If they were making use of AWS Lambda services then they really did get screwed. They would have to re-implement those portions of their back end. Even if I have no risk of running afoul of Amazon's whims, I still won't commit to vendor lock-in of that magnitude.

    • Yeah, AWS is nifty, but sole-source. Not suitable for anyone needing resilience at a high level.

      Resilience from your neighbors? Maybe. Until they whine loudly. Resilience from Amazon and governments? Hahahaha.

    • Re:AWS Lambda? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday February 15, 2021 @06:39PM (#61066996) Journal

      There are a thousand reasons not to use AWS Lambda, but here I'll just list one:

      If you committed to Lambda, how did you do resource planning? Did you just kind of hope that Amazon would have enough for you? How do you calculate your latency?

      • It is indeed a trickier proposition, but actually AWS does have limits and SLAs on most of this stuff, which they'll tell you if you ask them (if it's not already published - although good luck finding it in the sea of misshapen AWS documentation).

        Lambda can do a lot, but it can't do everything - so long as you design inside its capabilities you'll probably do fine. If you assume things, or worse "wish" things were the way you'd like, you'll almost certainly go wrong (at your cost) at some point though. The

    • Re:AWS Lambda? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Monday February 15, 2021 @06:43PM (#61067014)

      If they were making use of AWS Lambda services then they really did get screwed.

      Lambda is based on firecracker, which is available over here [github.com]. That plus some wrapper code and you're in business. There are already lambda emulators used for development.

      Lambda isn't magical.

      • You also need a mechanism to auto-provision additional physical servers not just micro-VMs.
        • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

          No you don't. If you're AWS with vast numbers of tenants you need that, but if it's your private platform (ah la Parler) you can 'provision' stuff in simple minded ways.

          • by Etcetera ( 14711 ) on Monday February 15, 2021 @10:04PM (#61067456) Homepage

            No you don't. If you're AWS with vast numbers of tenants you need that, but if it's your private platform (ah la Parler) you can 'provision' stuff in simple minded ways.

            It's worth noting that for younger cloud-centric folks, PXE is dark magic to them and OS provisioning is almost a lost art. I shouldn't have to be explaining the things I find myself having to do so to folks today that would have been basic knowledge for even a junior sysadmin starting out 15 years ago.

            I'm sure the pendulum will swing back in time, but I would be surprised if these Parler guys valued cloud-ease over low-level resilliency. If they did, they probably weren't listening to their own rhetoric about Big Tech being able to do bad things to your economic model with the flip of a switch.

      • by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @03:45PM (#61069970)

        Lambda is based on firecracker, which is available over here [github.com]. That plus some wrapper code and you're in business. There are already lambda emulators used for development.

        Would you look at that. Apparently this is still Slashdot. Who knew.

    • Indeed - as you note, you can't get Lambda anywhere else.

      However, Google, Oracle and I presume Azure have a "serverless" capability, so you could use that - you do have to re-engineer somewhat to do so, but the core business logic should be fine. The real problems come in because once you've gone down the Lambda route, you probably felt it was no big deal to also use (say) SNS (message queues) or DynamoDB (k/v store). Again, the other providers have the same functionality, but you're in for yet more re-engi

  • Good! (Score:2, Insightful)

    I probably wouldn't agree with much of what goes on there, but I'm happy they're back online.
  • Great! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Camel Pilot ( 78781 )

    Now Trump Supporters have a place to go and complain about the leftist cancel culture and call for the Senators that voted for impeachment to be censured.

  • not doing enough to moderate and remove incitements to violence

    As in their default policy is to not surveil their users by default. So someone has to complain for them to look at a person. Admittedly they were having problems catching up to the backlog of complaints but the only acceptable immediate solution to Apple, Google and Amazon was to start preemptive screening and data mining of all posts.

    Yeah they screwed up their rollout and yeah they should have been better able to respond to complaints. A 1.0 rollout screwed up, imagine that. Still it would be nice to h

    • by werepants ( 1912634 ) on Monday February 15, 2021 @07:31PM (#61067168)

      Yeah they screwed up their rollout and yeah they should have been better able to respond to complaints. A 1.0 rollout screwed up, imagine that. Still it would be nice to have a social media option where one is not data mined and profiled by default, which is their goal.

      Seems like their goal is to collect incriminating information on right-wing extremists, considering that they require IDs and leave up public calls for violent insurrection for posterity. That Parler database is going to help a ton of FBI prosecutors seal the fate of many members of the Trumpist sedition mob.

  • Seriously, there's no magic in this. The IP address registry is quite literally as old as public IP addressing!

    I'm sure these are competent IT people, but doling out praise for basic reading/typing skills devalues IT skills as a whole.

  • by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Monday February 15, 2021 @08:00PM (#61067246)

    The number of Parler users who permanently switched to Gab is pretty incredible. Gab was barely usable because of the load that the news users put on it, and Gab is now by a very wide margin the largest Mastodon-based site in the world. It has several million users now and the active engagement stats they're posting put them at a level of theoretical worth greater than a lot of significant brands on the Internet. The only reason they're struggling to explode on revenue is the constant efforts (most successful) to persecute them out of the financial transaction systems.

    And even worse for Parler, the vast majority of self-identifying Parler refugees on Gab say they're done with Parler. They're burned by Parler and want a platform lead by a CEO who actually takes free speech seriously and doesn't run a technical and privacy shitshow.

    • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @01:15AM (#61067706) Homepage

      The only reason they're struggling to explode on revenue is the constant efforts (most successful) to persecute them out of the financial transaction systems.

      No, the reason it's tough to make bank when running an online cesspool is that most sponsors don't want to touch you with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole, and the users are generally a bunch of cheapskates.

      Hell, amateur porn stars manage to make money by accepting Bitcoin donations. It's not rocket surgery, provided your customers are actually willing to open their wallets.

  • by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby@ c o m c a s t . net> on Monday February 15, 2021 @08:14PM (#61067274)

    I think we can put to bed the absurd lie that you can just build your own services now.

  • Why does this seem to be the central point to this article. Facebook was instrumental in helping to coordinate in the capitol dc attack but yet parler took the blame. Now, this article is leading people to take the site down again. I'm sure people are emailing SkySilk and DEMAND to take Parler down. This cancel culture we live in today is absolutely horrible. I grew up in the 80s on a Commodore 64 running the BBS gauntlet saying "Man, it would be so cool if this were a global thing", now i'm reconsider
    • And ... let the games begin!
    • You're clearly mis-remembering the BBS days. Most SysOps had a God complex, and rightfully so. Running a smaller BBS as a hobby generally was a net negative drain on your income and free time. If someone was being a dick on hardware you paid for, through phone lines you're also paying for, you generally didn't hesitate to show them the business end of the ban hammer.

      Most folks quickly learned that being allowed to access someone else's machine over a modem was a privilege, not a right.

  • It'll be worthless in a matter of days.
  • Reply to this comment if you would not have heard of Parler or its return if not for the media constantly bitching and whining about it.

    • Reply to this comment if you would not have heard of Parler or its return if not for the media constantly bitching and whining about it.

      That's how I heard about it. I was immediately interested, I'll admit.

      • by c-A-d ( 77980 )

        I was interested until I saw they still require your phone number to set up an account.

  • by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Monday February 15, 2021 @11:29PM (#61067560) Homepage Journal

    I honestly want to go back to hosting my own site, writing my own insane ramblings, and occasionally have my friends that I know and have hung out with IRL comment on them. Just thinking of hiding all of my old posts on social media, and making a post to my new site.

  • by dohzer ( 867770 )

    Actually, it was the crazy right-wing shit at Capitol Hill that knocked it offline.

    • by Uberbah ( 647458 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @01:39AM (#61067752)

      Then actually, it would have been Twitter, Facebook and Youtube that would have been kicked offline, as that's where most of the protest was planned. But those companies donate to the DNC, unlike Parler, so...

      • Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have policies in place to remove content that violates their ToS which includes content intended to incite violence. Parler does not. That is the key difference. Amazon likely recognizes individual users are going to post whatever they want regardless of a ToS, but as long as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube seem to be making an honest attempt to remove the content as they become aware of it, that's a lot better than what Parler was doing, which was to blatantly refuse to follow

  • Seems like a bad idea to use servers based anywhere in the U.S., the same attacks will happen again.

    There must be some decent offshore hosting (maybe Mexico?) that is not as prone to morality judgements.

  • by eadon-com ( 630323 )
    Before you have the urge to yell, "Far right" please take pause. Every single relatively-free-speech plaform is denounced as "Far right", or "White supremicist" or whatever. If you go along with that narrative, that anything that is not left-wing FB or Twitter is bad, then free speech is dead. Censorship has won the day.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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