I ducking hate when that happens.
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we don’t have “labor camps” here, we just have prisons and prison camps and detention centers and detention camps and weird black sites on foreign soil and cages inside office buildings and ankle monitors and homeless people hiding from the police and
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And a constitutional amendment that specifically allows the enslavement of prisoners. :-/
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BUT THAT DOESN’T MAKE THEM LABOR CAMPS /s
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iPhone user?
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Hahahaha guilty.
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Don’t forget the part that rules the most: if AWS did an immediate termination they probably don’t have any b backups that weren’t in AWS, trashing all user data.
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The had about 36 hours of warning. If they didn’t start on immediately moving it somewhere else then shame on them.
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You can dump SQL from RDS, just like from any other database server. Parler may have kept those dumps in S3 but personally I would be offloading them to my own system, even if it has to be a portable disk attached to my laptop.
At my work it bothers me that we have no storage outside AWS.
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Telegram is used by an awful lot of marginalized folks and actually has a moderation policy. It’s also not a social media platform, it’s much more like a traditional chat app.
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It depends on your risk profile. It’s expensive and difficult to securely move backups out of AWS, and if you keep some of them in a second region and aren’t setting yourself up to get your account terminated, it’s not a terrible bet.
However, it’s often still worth hedging.
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Betting on these folks being competent and thorough has been a big loser this year. I expect they never even made backups and the folks that hacked them over the weekend have a much better dump than any of the parler engineers.
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Damn, so much for that hope then.
Mhm! Where I work all the backups and such would be stored in S3, it depends on your failure mode. In our particular case it’s acknowledged in how we’ve architected things that “AWS goes down permanently” is not an acceptable failure mode, so there’s no need to plan for it.
I actually half believe them about the “back up in a week” thing if they have a single competent architect, because of course their social network whose entire point is hate speech is eventually going to get kicked off its hosting provider. That’s an obvious problem which you would architect around.
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In more than two decades working in infrastructure, big and small, I’ve never had important backups live in one place. even if that was just rsyncing the nightlies to a system in a different DC or whatever.
I know nothing about Parler’s infra team, including whether or not they had any control over software security or not. But like, them’s got some big data there, and I don’t care who you are, abstracted or not, that’s not an easy thing to just move to another provider with a different setup. Just moving that much data around is going to take awhile.
If I had 36 hours to move everything, this would (roughly) be my steps. in order of what I’d imagine was most important for a site like parler:
1 - figure out how I dump my entire object store and put it somewhere, because I’m betting that’s a big ol’ pile of data and it’s going to take many hours just to get out
2 - Immediately setup an off-AWS DB replica and start writing to it
3 - Start an immediate registry transfer process for domains (unlock them, get the transfer codes
4 - copy my artifact store somewhere (they mentioned “bare metal” though, so who knows if they were even containerized)
This assumes that 1) all the code and deployment is around something like git so they can ignore that, and that systems were created using terraform or at least with config management and not CloudFormation, so your setup is somewhat portable.
maybe with all of that you can deploy some servers somewhere, load your data and start reconfiguring your apps/containers/services to talk to one another again and get up pretty quickly. But given the number of SaaS components they were apparently using, their statement of being “platform-agnostic” sounds like bunk and they were probably pretty tied to some of those APIs, and untangling that has to happen before you can even pretend to come back online.
And remember, they’ve got a firehose of clients waiting on the other end, it’s not like they can trickle back, there’s however many API calls/sec being made to these endpoints from existing clients. They have to get the crushing load part right from the beginning.
As a purely intellectual exercise, this is a hell of a challenge. As an example of karma, it’s delicious.
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Clause 7.2b doesn’t allow the user to retrieve content. Otherwise the user gets 30 days after termination. (7.3a(i))
But, IANAL.
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I still have trouble understanding why “Nationalists” get chummy with former threats to national sovereignty. The MAGA in bed with Russia, and the Korean right-wing in bed with Japan.
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When I lived in Russia, I was warned not to leave my apartment on Hitler’s birthday, which is when gangs of Russian skinheads would rampage through the metro and markets, beating up anyone who looked foreign. Usually market vendors from China, Central Asia, or the Caucuses, but they’d happily maul an American or German if they had the chance.
I never understood their reverence for Hitler. He considered Slavs inferior and wanted to wipe them all out, and yet there they were, “celebrating” with a rampage.
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It’s a form of aspirational bully worship and behaviour modelling. Their ultra-nationalism takes second place to their desire to be what they see as “winners”.
With Russia and the MAGAts there’s also a predictable element of racism, with Putin’s Russia seen (naively, in their ignorance) as an exemplar of a nation-state where white supremacy has triumphed.
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Agreed. When I read headlines that some European leaders expressed concern with deplaforming, I was confused. The more I think about it, the more I can see how it is problematic. It’s all fine and great if corps step in when the government/politics has gone off the rails, but once they’ve exercised that power (overtly) it is hard to draw back.
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