Torn between "thoughts and prayers" and "womp womp."

[james_davis_nicoll]

Parler fucked.

Comments

[dewline]

Definitely.

[jessie_c]

It's always appropriate to sing.

[redbird]

There's something weird going on there, beyond what we knew, if their lawyers have also quit over this.

The simplest explanation, of course, is that he's lying about that.

[bunsen_h]

It seems to me to be an odd thing to bring up as a falsehood. It strikes me as more likely that it's a "we've been demanding things of our lawyers that would be professional misconduct for them" thing.

[mindstalk]

Or maybe he's happy to get out of the treason business, and is using "everyone is dunking me" as cover so the base doesn't turn on him.

[violsva]

One possibility is that, as I understand it, Parler is not and has never been profitable. They have plans to get ads and so on, but obviously recent events will not help with that. So the lawyers may just have done basic calculations as to the likelihood of their ever getting paid.

[redbird]

Yeah, I can easily see someone spinning "the law firm said the current bill is due immediately, and wants to be paid in advance for any future services" as "our lawyers dropped us."

[bunsen_h]

Wouldn't lawyers be on retainer in such cases?

[armiphlage]

Possibly they burned through the amount paid already?

[(Anonymous)]

Probably this. There's the retainer for ordinary corporate service: making sure no one is stealing your trademarks, looking over the contracts, checking the annual SEC filings, that sort of thing. When told "Hey, we need you to sue three of the wealthiest corporations that have ever existed!" then suddenly a new retainer was required, one with several additional zeros.

I'm not a lawyer myself, but I would just guess that suing to force Amazon, Google, and Apple to do something that they don't want to do is going to cost in the double-digit millions in legal fees, at least if you want any hope of prevailing.

--
Nathan H.

[dsrtao]

I have been informed but cannot verify that Parler's ad base was largely porn.

[azurelunatic]

A thread from Denise: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1348307254781628418

I would 100% believe that the lawyers looked at the conversation where the service provider required moderation, and the refusal to moderate even blatantly illegal shit. I wouldn't blame them if they said that there was nothing that could be done without conceding on that front.

[kithrup]

Law firms don't generally like this sort of attention -- it makes their other clients nervous. If it was a single lawyer, and said lawyer had other clients involved in, say, funding parler, it could be cutting their losses and avoiding the inevitable conflicts of interest that are coming.

[violsva]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[bunsen_h]

As is so often the case with cries of "censorship!", nobody's stopping them from using their own equipment and systems if they want to. That their lawyers dropped them is telling.

[rpresser]

They'd still have to find an ISP. Or more likely a colocation data center. Expensive and they still might get blackballed.

[ba_munronoe]

Perhaps the Russians can provide one - all after all, after you've backed a coup attempt, what's a little trafficking with foreign powers?

[kithrup]

If they do get back online, that was our guess as to where it'd be.

[viktor_haag]

Depending on how they've built their service to run within AWS they may find that the road back to being online will be ... long and difficult. If all they were doing was effectively running on AWS-hosted boxes and treating Amazon as a co-lo, then things might be simpler for them, but they may find that the effective cost of migration may be considerable.

If they're lucky than they were storing/backing up their service data outside AWS and have reasonable access to it; if they're not lucky, then they may find themselves unable to get their data out of AWS (depending on how fast and in what manner Amazon switched them off). This may seem like a trivial point, but it's really not. You might think "of course you backup your data in a place that's now AWS", but Amazon sure doesn't want you doing that: the easiest place to back up AWS service data is using another AWS service. You might be paranoid and grab all your service's data on a regular cycle off Amazon and put it in a fire-proof safe somewhere, but the cost of doing this might be rather prohibitive, and the attention you've paid to how you might be able to use that data to jump start your service in a new hosted environment might be again prohibitive and very complicated.

Consider that web services might well be storing terabytes if not petabytes of data. Slinging that kind of data around is a challenging task all on its own, let alone "rebuilding your service" from a data backup.

Quite simply, I would highly suspect that many cloud-hosted web service vendors simply don't do the disaster recovery architecture and planning required to solve the problem of "uhoh, Amazon has kicked us off and we now need to move our entire service over to some other hosting environment"... getting kicked off by Amazon might be as existential a problem to solve as "oh no, all our co-los just burned to the ground, somebody, go fetch our escrowed hard-drive backups from our lawyer's safe..."

And also, here, there's two kinds of data: there's the data that your service creates as it operates (user names, user posts) and there's the kind of data that is your service... where's their source code hosted? How do they deploy it to AWS? If they've stored their code in AWS as well as their user data, they may have a significant problem. If they've stored it in some other cloud hosted version control system like GitHub, I'd be interested to know if that version control vendor has also now refused to host them.

This is not at all a trivial circumstance.

For the computing non-aware, imagine you wrote an app to run on Windows, and then Microsoft said (and could enforce) Windows will no longer run your application as of this Friday. What do you do? Hurry to "make" a Linux version of your app? Good luck.

[violsva]

Amazon told them in the "go away" letter that they would preserve their data while they migrated it elsewhere. It's unclear how long they're keeping it for, but it was definitely the equivalent of "your lease is ended, please be out by [date]" rather than just changing the locks and nailing a notice to the door.

That said, I too find the "we'll be down for up to a week while we rebuild from scratch!" attitude to be absolutely hilarious.

[viktor_haag]

Agreed. It seems that Amazon's point is not that Parler violated their ToS but that they demonstrated no capability at preventing their users from violating the AWS ToS, so I can understand their stance of "we'll hold your beer for you while you call a cab". On the other hand, it's possible I suppose that another reason for holding on to the data "while they migrate" also conveniently keeps the evidence within Amazon's control just in case some judicial body should like to examine it at some point in the future...

[(Anonymous)]

Humor https://twitter.com/daveyalba/status/1347965046966648833

[neowolf2]

As mentioned in a comment to a previous post:

[The suppliers] may have felt compelled to do this to avoid prosecution under 18 U.S. Code § 2383

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383

The wording there comes from the 14th amendment and that overrides the 1st amendment here.

[naomikritzer]

From the department of "Oh Gosh What a Shame," have you seen the video making the rounds of the domestic terrorist who just found out he's on the no-fly list having a meltdown at the airport?

[conuly]

No. Do you have a link?

[catsidhe]

https://youtu.be/Mrce4-xHvQ4

[conuly]

Oh, that's great.

And there's some nitwit in the comments screaming about due process. Buddy, if you didn't care about how due process intersects with the no fly list before, when you thought it only stopped other people, then nobody cares about your opinion today.

[naomikritzer]

https://twitter.com/RayRedacted/status/1348388601118273537

[conuly]

Not that I'm a huge fan of the no-fly list and how it's (typically) handled... but you know what? I bet he was a big fan right until it bit him, so whatever, I'm laughing.

[violsva]

Oh, good! I saw a call from the head of the flight attendants' union calling for that (on the grounds of their disruptive behaviour on the flights in), and I'm so glad it was done!

[kithrup]

Most, if not all, of those were from before the insurrection -- most of the ones I saw, that were identified, were about people who refused to wear masks. And some of whom got into altercations with the flight crew.

Now, there have been arrests all weekend, so I'm sure there are videos of those circulating now.

[bunsen_h]

Turns out that the guy was banned by that airline for refusing to follow their mask policy, not for anything to do with the Capitol riot.

[malada]

I vote for 'womp womp' with a side order of 'sad trombones'.

-m

[timill]

Someone has been archiving Parler content, and it's not Parler...

https://twitter.com/bitburner/status/1348558563019427842

Tim

[bunsen_h]

... Oops.

[viktor_haag]

Turns out their claim of "don't worry, our services are specifically architected so that we can easily move them to another cloud service in a week if we can't use AWS" was perhaps a bit ... optimistic (one might even say "naive").

[(Anonymous)]

A cousin of mine is an engineer with one of the big three cloud services. He's told me that they are generally in vigorous competition with each other, and thus all have built automated systems that make it as painless as possible to migrate between services. E.g. when MS Azure is trying to poach a client from AWS, the client is going to be more enthusiastic about switching if it won't require a lot of effort on their part and there's little likelihood of bugs cropping up.

So the Parler techies may have been saying that they could easily switch from AWS to Azure or Google Cloud. But I expect they have discovered that none of AWS's rivals wants to host them either.

--
Nathan H.

[viktor_haag]

While I believe it's true that each big service attempts to provide an easy-onramp for incomers from one of the other big three, I also believe that when you create an architecture with any degree of complexity, it's not going to be a push-button transition and there are likely to be all sorts of gotchas that complicate the process. How complex Parler's architecture was is not really apparent. Anecdotally, I believe they were highly serverless, and this leads me to think that they're less easily portable than otherwise.

But I also believe that they might well find opposition from Google or Microsoft to want to host them.

[bunsen_h]

They are reportedly suing Amazon.

If their lawyers have indeed dropped them, that might indeed be a case for "no, we won't risk professional sanctions for saying these things on your behalf".

[violsva]

So, the buyer (Parler) is arguing that the seller (Amazon) "has unlawfully sought to restrain competition by" ... refusing to sell to them.

IANAL, nor am I at all a fan of Amazon, but I don't think that one's going to fly.

[viktor_haag]

I would not have thought so either -- the whole point of terms of service is to, you know, set the terms one should comply with in order to continue using the service...

[keith_morrison]

There's a reason why Amazon pointed to Parler not ensuring users abided by Parler's TOS.

[viktor_haag]

Oh! I missed that... I thought they were pointing out that they could not effectively ensure users abided by the AWS ToS. Interesting!

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think that makes sense unless Parler's ToS with their customers was based on/dictated by Amazon's ToS with Parler. I mean, why should Amazon care if Parler's ToS is violated?

[(Anonymous)]

Per a Buzzfeed article that contains leaked emails between Amazon and Parler, Amazon was upset because Parler was violating Amazon's policies. "Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST."



https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws

[(Anonymous)]

[continuing thought from previous]

I mean, just as a silly hypothetical, suppose Parler has a clause in their ToS that no-one may post pictures of M&Ms unless all of the M&Ms are brown, and Amazon had nothing to do with that clause. So lots of people post pictures of non-brown M&Ms, and Parler doesn't do anything about it. Why does Amazon care?

But if the clause was there because Amazon insisted on it, then it makes sense for Amazon to indicate that pictures of non-brown M&Ms on Parler is a problem.

[violsva]

Yeah, basically Parler's inability (and lack of desire) to ensure that their users complied with Parler's ToS resulted in Parler therefore being in violation of Amazon's ToS.

[viktor_haag]

That would make sense.

[bunsen_h]

Amazon's response is that that doesn't make sense to them either. Etc.