Parler Pivots To 'Uncancelable' Cloud Services (theverge.com) 168
On Friday, Parler announced that it was entering the internet infrastructure industry in order to provide new "uncancelable" cloud services for online businesses. From a report: In a Friday press release, Parler announced that it was restructuring; the new venture, called Parlement Technologies, will provide new internet infrastructure services for businesses it says are at risk of being forced off the internet. With $16 million in new Series B funding, the company purchased Dynascale, a California-based cloud services company that touts more than $30 million in annual revenue and 50,000 square feet of data center space. "We are entering a new era as Parlement Technologies, one that goes far beyond the boundaries of a free speech social media platform," said Parlement Technologies CEO George Farmer. "We believe that Parlement Technologies will power the future. And the future is uncancelable."
Cool (Score:3, Interesting)
So someone can on Parler and say they want to see the orange goon strung up for his sedition. That won't be cancelled, right?
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Slow down there cowboy. There should be no limit to the freedom of speech, but you're talking blasphemy against our God-King. That's way too extreme!
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Slow down there cowboy. There should be no limit to the freedom of speech, but you're talking blasphemy against our God-King. That's way too extreme!
My apologies. I thought after the last guy was in office and people were saying he should be shot [time.com] or hung [msnbc.com] or certain people should be executed [cnn.com] we were okay with saying such things. I guess only one group gets to say that and be cheered for doing so.
Re:Cool (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes, TFG did commit treason. However, the guy I replied to was saying that people were calling for Obama to be shot or hanged and that certain other people were calling for democrats to be executed.
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From Article III, Section 3:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
You can disagree, I suppose, but the fact we could meaningfully debate about it says a lot.
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Free speech helps us easily identify the assholes among us so we can avoid them.
Re: Cool (Score:3)
It would probably violate the law to do that. Though maybe you could give him 10 layers of spray tan, then instead of being orange man he'd be mandarin orange chicken man.
Probably not law violation within the US (Score:5, Insightful)
IANAL, but freedom of speech is quite broader than many people give it credit for these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So, you can definitely say you'd "like to see orange man strung up for sedition", as you're not actually threatening to do so yourself, you're just indicating that you'd personally enjoy witnessing that spectacle.
Re:Probably not law violation within the US (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, libel laws. If the speech hurts someone then it's not legal just as any other means to hurt someone can also be illegal
Even libel laws can be hard. For one, just that fact that it hurts someone is not enough.
A. It needs to be untrue. Truth that hurts someone is still legal.
B. Typically, you need to have KNOWN your statement to have been untrue.
and C. You have to have said it with the intent to cause harm.
And honestly yes freedom of speech does only apply to the government, however the "private entity" aspect is largely being exploited now. There is very little speech that isn't transmitted or handled in some way by a private entity nowadays. Your ISP is a private entity. Your phone company is a private entity. UPS and Fedex are private entities (and even USPS is partially privatized now).
Now, not only do you have many of these private entities censoring content they don't agree with, in many cases you have the government actively encouraging them to censor content that the government finds distasteful. That's flat out just using a loophole to enforce government censorship via a private proxy. This is the entire reason the idea of a "common carrier" came about in the first place - that a private entity is solely transmitting speech of an individual with no stake in the game. Unfortunately large tech companies have negotiated legislation to basically get all the protections of being a common carrier without actually being classified one, allowing them to edit and censor content as much as they want.
IMHO, allowing user generated content but curating it based on your own political views (rather than what is legal) should not be allowed. The law may not state that right now but that is a fault rather than a success, and it should be rectified.
Re: Probably not law violation within the US (Score:2)
This is the entire reason the idea of a "common carrier" came about in the first place - that a private entity is solely transmitting speech of an individual with no stake in the game.
That's absolutely untrue. Common carriage originated with freight hauling -- you could hire a contract carrier to haul your goods from anywhere to anywhere for any amount, with all the terms subject to what both sides could agree to, or you could give the goods to a common carrier who traveled a set route at a set rate and would accept any amount of freight up to their capacity, but who would not give you preference or provide any flexibility.
Later on the idea was extended to utilities which were highly reg
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Don't forget the Tucker Carlson defense, where Fox lawyers argued that no reasonable person would believe what he says on TV.
One thought experiment here. What if the 94 Rwanda genocide were happening today, in today's social media? Instead of being spread by radio messages, what if Facebook and Twitter were chock full of "let's get rid of all the Tutsis and also moderate Hutus who are too accomodating"? Do they get the defense that they were only providing a political message and not a call to violence,
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Err, common carrier status was originally about transporting freight, to stop shipping lines and railroads from playing favorites by charging different rates to different people/companies.
It was extended to the phone system where the carrier had to treat all the same.
It is for carriers, ISP's should be covered, messaging services perhaps but not basically the press, which always has been biased and today these social media platforms are closer to the press, a press that mostly prints letters to the editor,
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That's a bit overly broad.
Yes, to be successful in getting compensatory damages in a defamation lawsuit, the plaintiff needs to show some harm and the ability to get punitive damages varies widely by state.
However in most cases it's perfectly legal to publish true information about someone even if it "hurts" them and even if you are publishing it specifically to hurt them or convince them to change th
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oh you sweet summer child
What a joke (Score:2)
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My basic categorization for these folks is (1) Sincerely stupid, (2) Proudly ignorant, or (3) Paid to fake it. But this sounds like "All of the above". Without the PROFIT step.
(Actually there are profits, but not in their pockets.)
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The profits are all in the form of "donate to our legal defense, reelection campaign, and mansion refurbishment fund." Seriously, get the true believers riled up, ask them for money, then keep the money. Which is what Bannon is being indicted on. Any "re-election" fund must, by law, cannot be for personal use. If outside of elections, if a legal defense fund is used to pay for a mortgage then that's fraud. And there's a lot of indications out there that all this fund raising by Team Trump isn't really
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I'm still looking for the joke, and the newfangled profitability of lying is not funny.
How about this attempted joke? "I can still sort of remember when I was a young whippersnapper, but now I'm just an old whippersnapped."
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(5) Faking it to further a cause that benefits them personally
Re: What a joke (Score:2)
They don't have to. Once the site goes down, they can beg for donations.
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All the more reason ISPs, peering, domain, etc basically what we would call the backbone to the Internet, should not be "canceling" anyone without a court order or failure to pay.
Imagine if the power company could turn off your electricity because you said mean things about them. Internet is almost as important as electricity and yet we allow companies to dictate what we can say.
Seems very much like the government is just using private companies as a way to avoid the Constitution and it's restrictions. I wo
Uncancelable? (Score:2)
Uncancellable? What if I want to switch providers?
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No, no, no. It means you can't be canceled by liberals, socialists, undocumented workers, and other UnAmericanists. That's the new meaning of "cancel". But you can be old-meaning-canceled in spades. Just insult the wrong politicians, upload pictures of orange butts, fail to pay your bills, etc.
Re: Uncancelable? (Score:2)
Uncancellable? What if pirated material, illegal porn, stolen info, etc is all posted? Hah! "Uncancellable" my ass.
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Depends, is it socialist porn where something other than the missionary position is being used? But those American flag tramp stamps are certainly allowed and encouraged.
Cancelled (Score:5, Insightful)
Is another word for "Nobody will do business with us"
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Yep. They will continue to bill you for their "service", but your service will not have connectivity to anyone on the Internet.
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Is another word for "Nobody will do business with us"
They only started using internet after smart phones got popular enough that people laughed at their flip phones, so they don't realize that companies tried this over 20 years ago and the backbone providers had to "cancel" them.
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Famous last words (Score:2)
"And the future is uncancelable"
Famous last words.
Re: Famous last words (Score:2)
Future is uncancellable if you are religious and you think somehow magically we can't ruin the environment because "god would never let that happen". (Just like he doesn't allow starving children in Africa to die?)
As long as they pay (Score:5, Interesting)
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It is like a weird reverse ponzi scheme. How many non-paying customers do they need to show a profit?
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It is like a weird reverse ponzi scheme. How many non-paying customers do they need to show a profit?
"We'll lose a little bit of money on each customer and make it up on volume!"
The echoes of 2001 are starting to get a little loud lately.
keeping it succinct (Score:2)
We all know anything they touch is a trainwreck shipping dumpster fires to Bengazi.
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I don't get why anyone would agree to anything but money upfront when dealing with a Trump company. He is known to be outright proud of not paying people for products and services rendered. He frames it as being a crafty dealmaker rather than a dishonest cheapskate.
Other Services too? (Score:2)
Sounds like a good place to host 4chan and the pirate bay. In all seriousness, once they stop paying the bills for the internet transit they'll dry up faster than lake meade.
Never say never (Score:2)
Because that is just begging someone to do exactly that. But I guess we'll see what happens now.
Paradox of tolerance (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm this'll get responses from absolutists who'll go on about free speech but in reality there's no such thing as free speech. Every country puts legal limits on what people are allowed to say in public, including the USA. The question is what limits we choose to put & how we propose to enforce them.
Parler, The Daily Stormer, Breitbart News, etc., are all propagators of hate speech & incitement to violence, however they may try to dress it up, or not. If you want to live in a shitty world where a small minority of willfully ignorant arseholes make life miserable for everyone else, just do nothing. That's all we need for evil to succeed.
Re:Paradox of tolerance (Score:5, Insightful)
Karl Popper said that we should be tolerant but not tolerant of intolerance. If we're tolerant of intolerance, it supplants tolerance & we end up with only intolerance, AKA the paradox of tolerance.
The "paradox of tolerance" has always struck me as ridiculous. It's like saying there's a "paradox of freedom" because I'm not free to own other people. The real world just isn't compatible with any pure ideology; maximizing freedom requires some restrictions, as does maximizing tolerance.
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I've met people who feel they *ought* to have the right to own other people. So your example doesn't work, though your argument does.
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It may be ridiculous, but it's worth keeping in mind. A tolerant person is expected to always be kind and nice, but to truly care, they have to be willing to be a hardliner in some scenarios.
Also intolerant people like to play the victim card and claim you aren't tolerant of *them* so obviously you must be a hypocrite. The situation warrants being explicit so as not to let folks hide behind the fallacy.
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I guess maybe you're being pedantic about the word 'paradox'? Not sure I see the point in that, since this is a well established phrase which has spent nearly 80 years quite effectively communicating its meaning to millions of people. In any case, the basic idea is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain who thinks about it for 30 seconds.
--
We will soon have the option to harvest our fa
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Re:Paradox of tolerance (Score:5, Insightful)
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
(Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, as quoted by Chris Hedges, American Facists)
The first salvo of today's Republican movement is saying "all mainstream journalism is hopelessly corrupt and biased, and so you can't trust the non-Republican-sanctioned press or the so-called fact-checkers." For me, that sentiment is the 21st-century version of Popper's "begin by denouncing all argument."
Re: Paradox of tolerance (Score:2)
So we're all on the same page, would you mind defining "hate speech"?
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I'm not the GP, but here are a couple of my attempts:
1) Hate speech is the analog of bullying, except directed against a group of other people instead of against a nameable other person.
2) Hate speech is speech which has the purpose or goal of arousing hate within one group against another group.
These don't quite work, as I don't feel objective descriptions of actions that are known to have been taken should count as hate speech. But they're close.
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I'm not saying I know the answer, but a lot of the content on politically-aligned sites like Parler, Breitbart, Epoch Times, and ... what's on the right? The Jimmy Dore Show maybe? Anyway what's dangerous about these sites isn't just hate speech. It's the spin, disinformation and agitprop. In a sense these, too, create intolerance because they preclude rational dialogue.
Hate speech has been defined in various ways by various groups. Google is pointing me to the UN, which defines it as “any kind of com
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The Jones example shows how hate speech can be very lucrative. Hate speech attracts grifters because of the opportunities for wealth and power. Add in the true believers with the gullible and it can end up like Nazi Germany. That is the scenario facing the United States with Trump and a majority of the Republican Party.
It can happen here.
Re:Paradox of tolerance (Score:5, Insightful)
Conservatives championed the right of a bakery to refuse service to a customer. This is no different. Private companies can refuse service to anyone except for federally protected classes. Being a republican is not a protected class.
Re: Paradox of tolerance (Score:3)
Ironically the difference is that in Colorado, being gay is a protected class.
"uncancellable" (Score:2)
Re: "uncancellable" (Score:2)
Just tell them that your political position is against paying for services.
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your political position is against paying for services.
I believe the correct spelling for that is Libertarian. Thanks, I'll be here all week. Tip your wait staff.
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You special Socialist wrong.
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so this plan won't have any legal challenges.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I imagine Kiwifarms is already talking to them.
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All of that, plus kiddie and other illegal porn.
Antifa is literally an imaginary bogeyman (Score:2, Interesting)
Bad stuff happens and Fox News talking heads say, "There goes Antifa again." Funny thing is, if a republican wins the presidency in 2024, I am betting Antifa.com [antifa.com] will suddenly redirect elsewhere.
The reality is there is no left-wing equivalent to these right
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Excellent point you bring up. I keep hearing that it was antifa that rioted on Jan 6th. Trump claimed if he were re-elected he would pardon all the J6 rioters. Why would Trump pardon antifa?
So an Epik competitor? (Score:2)
Epik hasn't had a whole lot of luck with the same business plan...
And when the republicans kill Section 230 (Score:5, Funny)
Re: And when the republicans kill Section 230 (Score:3)
No no no. Killing 230 is to hurt all the people they hate, not to hurt themselves, lol. It wouldn't surprise me too much to literally see excemptions like this if 230 was cancelled.
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To be fair, I'm not really satisfied with the current section 230 law. But I don't think I'd trust any recent administration to do a better job. Or any recent congress.
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If they kill 230, it will be hard to imagine how any website without a huge budget could ever run with user-generated content.
Government doesn't want everyone posting on the Internet anyway. Had they realized WHAT the Internet was, we would of never been allowed access to it.
The technical term is "bulletproof hosting" (Score:2)
It's a quick way to collect blacklist entries and search warrants. Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.
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I've always preferred "...and the pig got up and walked away." https://lyricsplayground.com/a... [lyricsplayground.com]
Unrivaled among their peers (Score:3)
Re:Unrivaled among their peers (Score:5, Informative)
Since they won't have any peering agreements after a couple months of complaints.
Smaller hosting companies like this don't have peers. They pay for transit. They don't own any backbone fiber so there's nothing to peer with.
Their transit providers won't care what they get up to. If they're a target of more than the usual mount of DDoS, the transit providers will happily bill them for the traffic or bill them for the mitigation, whichever they like. Their actual "legitimate" traffic (for some strange value of the word "legitimate") is likely to be very small. Parler isn't exactly popular, and the nutjobs who think they need a service like this are even less so.
I expect them to go belly up eventually precisely because what they want to provide has so little demand while imposing quite a heavy burden in responding to warrants and lawsuits. If Hulk Hogan can bitch slap Gawker into oblivion, these people's customers don't stand a chance. (Hogan allegedly had third party funding for his lawsuit. You can bet there's plenty more where that came from.) Their problem is going to be that their "free speech" customers may be principled and conscientious objectors but their rhetoric tends to attract actual criminal activity. Every subnet they get allocated is going to get blacklisted for spam and hacking, for actual spam and hacking, in short order.
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Just host out of Russia. We refuse to ban them from the Internet despite most of the problems originating there.
cesspool (Score:2)
They've purchased a datacenter and it will turn into a cesspool of the parts of the internet that have a hard time existing elsewhere. How big the cesspool gets will be mostly a function of cost. A high price on 'freedom' will limit long term use and limit underfunded actors. However, those with money and a not-too-distant goal will probably find it to be a boon. Will the price of 'freedom' be higher if management dislikes your speech and lower if you are helping management's cause?
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build your own (Score:2)
There has been a lot of talk about Internet services censoring people, about Internet services being monopolies, about Internet services being the new town square. My response has always been "build your own". I'm honestly kind of surprised that we are here, where they've made their and support their own. Will be interesting to see how their experiment turns out.
Did they notice that they can an no one stopped them, no one censored them, that they can compete, that they can have their own town square? That
Re:build your own (Score:4, Insightful)
> My response has always been "build your own".
Parler is the posterboy for this.
So they built their own social network. Apple, Google, and Amazon conspired to destroy them.
So build your own hosting. Which they're doing now, but:
OK build your own app store (can't).
Build your own datacenter.
Build your own transit.
Build your own mobile os.
Build your own electric grid.
Build your own DNS.
Build your own water system.
Build your own Internet.
Build your own country.
Build your own planet.
Where precisely on that list should we stop and say, "enough"?
Some people would respond "never, if they are our political opponents." That there is the road to Hell.
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I'm saying that Parler, or whatever they are called, should compete with Twitter, compete with the Internet services they rail against.
Does Twitter provide its own transit, mobile OS, and all of those other things? And if they do, then there was a way to do it and others can do it too (with enough backing).
Twitter is not the 'town square' and you cannot force Twitter to carry your speech. But you can build your own Twitter and say what you want, you can even call it the town square if you want.
The First Am
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So they built their own social network. Apple, Google, and Amazon conspired to destroy them.
That's a funny way of saying Parler has problems because they did not want to follow rules of other platforms that everyone else has to follow.
So build your own hosting. Which they're doing now, but:
That's also a funny way of saying that they bought an existing company. "Built" is not the same as "bought". I "built" a car is not the same as going to the dealership as buying a car.
Where precisely on that list should we stop and say, "enough"?
Wait. Wait. I thought the whole point of small government is that people did not want the government to do any of that. But according to you, you are complaining that they should benef
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To be fair, I think that not only are people laughing at Parler's past incompetence, they're hoping for future incompetence. (I may be projecting a bit.)
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So they built their own social network. Apple, Google, and Amazon conspired to destroy them.
No they simply exercised their right as a private business to refuse service. Ever hear the term "turd in a swimming pool"?
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Indeed. All you need is an IP address and a DNS entry for your domain. If somebody can "cancel" these, you are screwed, but usually that requires at the very least a court decision. I doubt this "Parler" offer is resistant to that either.
For resistance against a court decisions, you have to either be pretty agile (think PirateBay) or use Tor and really good server security and thereby limit your exposure to the public as a special client is needed.
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It's a good free market solution! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think AWS sucks, hire someone else. Give a startup who doesn't suck the opportunity to rise. That's competition, that's free market. That is a good thing. I am no fan of Parler and hope they go out of business...but I hope they do so via natural causes... because no one wants to pay money to advertise on them, not because they were forced out of any reasonable hosting...and more importantly, I don't want to force any private business to have to deal with them. Amazon should be able to say who they do business with and AWS thinks you're a treasonous, seditious lot with no respect for the law or democracy, that's a reasonable reason for them to walk away from a deal with you. You're welcome to think Amazon is full of shit and wrong...but regardless, no one should be FORCED to do business with anyone, especially in cases like Parler.
Instead of whining about your enemies, how about you support and give money to your friends? These other companies are stepping up to prop up your "operation" reward them and stop this sad victimization fetish.
Re: It's a good free market solution! (Score:2)
If Amazon can't kick them as a customer to stop them from spreading garbage, they can always block their entire AS number / subnet blocks. Similar for ISPs. Lol. "Uncancellable", until you hit my firewall. Idiots.
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I mean they have to get transit from someone...or they have to interconnect. Ultimately...they have to rely on something they don't control. They're not counting on "what if all the backbone operators decide they don't want to carry us".
Re:It's a good free market solution! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually Paler/Parlement Technologies is late to the party Rumble is in Florida offering cloud services and there's also RightForge doing the same thing. The Icing on the cake is Bongino is doing payment processing too.
Glad I'm not hosted at Dynascale (Score:3)
However, existing customers of Dynascale may have a different attitude if the hosting IP range suddenly starts appearing on block lists.
Get out of CA and out of the US (Score:2)
"Uncancelable cloud services" (Score:2)
So... porn sites?
Anything can be canceled... (Score:2)
Ultimately its held on a physical server somewhere and that can be shut down.
Everything can be cancelled (Score:2)
At least if you can identify were the server is. That is pretty much what Tor has shown. If you can hide where the servers are, you are good, but that is it. For the rest you may have to do an attack on the service via the legal system and that takes time though.
Otherthrowing the U.S. Goverment as a Service (Score:2)
Kind of like un-fireable (Score:2)
I once interviewed with a company that bragged that they never fired anyone, ever. When I heard that, there was no way I was going to work for them. When you don't have to work to keep your job, the company is not going to be a good place to work.
If Parler promises never to cancel, they too will get the dregs of the internet. Oh wait, that's how they started out, so maybe it will work out for them.
Re:Lol good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
But Parler is known for censoring any opinion they disagree with. It's basically just a hangout for bigots and such that got kicked off of other places with better moderation
Re:Lol good luck (Score:4, Insightful)
How fast would Bernie Sanders get a perma ban?
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Well, as long as your normal customers don't find out, things may work out alright. But I wonder how many of your "new customers" have the habit of not paying their bills.