Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/09/apple-removes-parler-from-app-store-after-google-were-toast-says-parler.html
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Good.
Mmmm… toast.
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According to Trumpers:
- Hate speech = good
- Free markets = good
- Small government = good
- Section 230 = bad
… how do they reconcile that with this?
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Most of them don’t even know what Section 230 does. They think “safe harbor” is some kind of liberal safe space.
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… and nothing of value was lost.
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They should have been pulled for this outright lie:
Parler never was unbiased, was never intended to be unbiased, and certainly is not unbiased. It was created as a right-wing only safe space. Contrary to the we don’t mod our posts lie, they delete posts that fail their right-wing litmus tests.
Both they and Fox news are total liars when they claim to be unbiased.
Whereas, BBS is not unbiased. And never claims to be. Nor should it be because that’s not what it’s created for. So it’s not Parler’s bias that I’m calling them out for, it’s their outright hypocritical lying about it.
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Uh, cant parler just make their app web-based?
And then all white nationalists who want to join just have to go to parler.com
Obviously, it’s an extra step (and one cannot exaggerate how much that extra step going to cost them in subscribers), but eventually they get the word out and meanwhile, they survive.
Uh, can’t parler find any hosting company that would host them? Not even a .ru domain?
(And, OMG, that link had some amazing corrosive parler hatemail. The “semper fi” at the end was so chilling: the gentleman pens a psychotic death threat and then openly identifies as a Marine? Then: “Journalists are soft targets.” Revolting.)
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They could, if they had hosting.
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I hate to say I called it, but I called it.
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I for one am glad you called it. AWS pulling the hosting is huge.
Well, I guess at least one aspect of our cyberpunk dystopian late-stage capitalist world, is that sometimes corporations CAN be pressured to do the right thing.
I called AppleCare about an hour or two before they announced this, I went to a USA-based supervisor from India, I sent a message via apple.com/feedback. Both reps I spoke to tolerated my, uh, strong vehemence in expressing my thoughts (I repeatedly told them I appreciated them hearing me out and that this was not directed at them, they both said they got it). The guy in India I think seemed very supportive and sad about what he saw going on over here, god fucking typing this just makes me want to cry. The American supervisor seemed to very much get it and agree, I told him YOU GUYS NEED TO PUT THE PRESSURE ON FROM THE INSIDE.
IT WORKS, THE PRESSURE WORKS. We need to cut these sad lost motherfuckers OFF, and at least make an effort, somehow, to bring them back from the dark side. But we CANNOT forget that they are there, not for a second, and this shit needs to be cleaned up STAT. They are literally organizing armed insurrection over the coming days as we sit here typing.
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Plenty of Swiss co-lo providers out there.
Biased in the right wing newspeak dictionary means “opinions that right-wingers disagree with”.
The first time I encountered it being used that way (over 15 years ago) I pointed out that they were biased too and they were in complete denial about it. I didn’t even try to claim that I wasn’t biased (I was arguing in favour of socialism).
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I think they (Parler) are largely done. But these people will find ways to plot, and it MUST be rooted out by the Feds. I have a feeling the FBI is probably in intense response mode right now – this was a 9/11-caliber attack on America from the inside, and the Feds were completely unprepared. Yes they were ordered down from the inside on multiple levels, but there were a lot of serious mistakes made here as well. And conspiracy, up to the guy running the Pentagon.
I don’t know if anyone caught this, but our Governor here in MD, who was in the end successful getting the MD Nat Guard to literally save America (GO MARYLAND), said that the final order that he got from the Pentagon allowing him to send in the troops was “not through the normal channels.” I am very curious what is going on in Government and the military at this moment, and who exactly is in charge.
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Amy Peikoff, Parler’s policy chief, said on Fox News last night: If Apple kicks us off the App Store, “we’re toast.”
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Conservatives: “Businesses should be free to make decisions without government interference. They should be able to deny service to anyone for any reason.”
Also Conservatives in regard to Parler and Trump and all the others getting banned/deplatformed/etc: “No, not like that. We meant businesses should deny service to other people.”
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They won’t really be toast until Apple recinds their current app certificate. There are enough existing users on iOS, plus existing Android app store installs, plus Android side loaders, plus desktop web users, plus mobile web users to keep it going for quite a while considering the virulence of their target audience.
With millions of dollars of insurrectionist hard cash from the Mercers to prop it up even if there isn’t a lot of ad revenue, Parler could keep going for years.
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There is a tipping point though. If there’s enough disruption and enough people stop using it, the diminished user base will die completely. You need a sufficient number participating to make it feel worthwhile for the remaining users.
Most boomers won’t sideload, some mobile users hate non-app mobile interfaces, and Amazon just dumped their web hosting so they’ll have to shop around and migrate.
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Not at the scale they need in the time they need.
One reality of the cloud era is that If you need to spin something up parler-sized - lets assume several thousand vcpu’s worth of compute, a large datastore, and probably some complex RDBMS stuff - doing that outside of the cloud requires an entirely different skillset than within. Even if they were prepared for this and dockerized all of their infrastructure they have to figure out things like object storage and how to scale bare-metal nodes when they can’t just click on "Launch instance” (or call it via API) when they need to.
I don’t doubt they can DO it, but it sure as hell isn’t a “tomorrow” thing, and may well require a totally different skillset than their infrastructure team has now. Especially if you want stability.
I don’t know what size of pockets are funding parler but just about anywhere I worked, if you shut our cloud down and said “go relaunch this on servers” (or vice-versa) IMMEDIATELY, that would be an existential crisis.
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I don’t think there’s enough money in it for them to buy the servers they’d need. No one with any money or sense is going to run ads on it or want to buy whatever user data they’re offering. And all of their users have been trained by Twitter and Facebook to not pay for social networks. Plus they and their users don’t seem to be terribly tech savvy otherwise they would have had a progressive web app ready to go when they got pulled from app stores.
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You can bet that when AWS exports Parlor’s data to new servers, the FBI is going to have a copy of it, if they didn’t already.
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