Twitter bans President Trump permanently

[BlasterBates]

Indeed if Islamic terrorists could simply organise their attacks on Twitter I suspect that they would be slammed by the same media that expect rightwing extremists who plan to kidnap and kill liberal politicians to be allowed to tweet freely.

[BlasterBates]

Too late, the vote has been certified.

[eek]

Is it just me or is the real story here that AWS took down someone's production system at the drop of a hat?

I had no idea what Parler was until today. Regardless of how bad it is, I expect some AWS customers will now be reading their T&Cs a bit more closely, perhaps even considering it to be a risk.
Gone are the days you can enter the datacentre and take your servers and data back to safety.

Corey Quinn who specialises in AWS billing covered this over the weekend. It seems Parler had plenty of notice regarding it's failure to moderate the content on it's site (as required in the T&Cs).

[BlasterBates]

Corey Quinn who specialises in AWS billing covered this over the weekend. It seems Parler had plenty of notice regarding it's failure to moderate the content on it's site (as required in the T&Cs).

I used to work for major internet company. You can't simply abdicate responsibility for the content you distribute on your platform.

[Old Greg]

Indeed if Islamic terrorists could simply organise their attacks on Twitter I suspect that they would be slammed by the same media that expect rightwing extremists who plan to kidnap and kill liberal politicians to be allowed to tweet freely.

That's a false equivalence between Islamic terrorists and white lone wolves.

[NotAllThere]

I've seen one FB post that claims that Trump sign the Insurrection Act last night. It's on the intenret so it must be true.

[Whorty]

If people hold a different opinion to you, that doesn't make them stupid. A few posters here are just plain nasty.

I don't agree with you

[Uncle Albert]

Ooops...
All Parler user data is being downloaded as we speak! : ParlerWatch

Here is a description of what went down according to someone with far greater technical knowledge than me:

"so a group of developers latched onto the Press Release that Twilio put out at midnight last night. In that Press Release, Twilio accidentally revealed which services Parler was using. Turns out it was all of the security authentications that were used to register a user. This allowed anyone to create a user, and not have to verify an email address, and immediately have a logged-on account.

Well, because of that access, it gave them access to the behind the login box API that is used to deliver content -- ALL CONTENT (parleys, video, images, user profiles, user information, etc) --. But what it also did was revealed which USERS had "Administration" rights, "Moderation" rights.

Well, then what happened, those user accounts that had Administration rights to the entire platform... The hackers, internet warriors, call it what you will, was able to use the forgot password link to change the password. Why? Because Twilio was no longer authenticating emails. This meant, they'd get directly to the reset password screen of that Administration user.

This group of Internet Warriors then used that account, to create a handful of other ADMINISTRATION accounts, and then created a script that ended up creating MILLIONS of fake administration accounts.

Now that they had a way of creating admin accounts without interruption, they created a Docker Image (basically a virtual machine) called a Warrior, that anyone could download, and when fired up, would immediately start collecting data off of Parlre, in a coordinated fashion.

Consider it like SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) that people used to load up as screen savers when their computers were not being used. Same concept, crowdsourcing.

All of this data, the videos, the images, the posts, the metadata (including the GEO location of all images and videos, and the connections to the accounts that posted it, has been (since midnight) being uploaded to various cloud drives and storage arrays for the purposes of Archiving this information, for later retrieval by law enforcement, by the public, by Open Source Intelligence communities.

And the kicker.. is this: all of this information was thought to be secure and private by individuals who were making the posts. A significant number of those individuals went through the process of being a "Verified Citizen" on Parler. What does that mean?

It means they uploaded a picture of the front and back of their REAL State Driver's License........ Let that sink in for a second.

I am positive the FBI has been actively soaking in this information along with the Internet Warriors, but this is how they are going to officially track down.

And it's how the FBI, DHS, and FAA have been able to immediately and exhaustively create no-fly lists. Every verified attendee of the Capitol riot where they can find a real name has been placed on No-Fly Lists.

It might seem like a small geeky glitch or hack.. but in the age of Information warfare... this is the silver bullet for the people who used Parler as a place to organize their efforts.

Also, a lot of posts were deleted by Parler members after the riots on the 6th. Turned out... Parler didn't actually delete anything.. just set a bit as deleted.

Guess what has access to all "deleted" content?

Administrator accounts."

[Old Greg]

Ooops...
All Parler user data is being downloaded as we speak! : ParlerWatch

We shouldn't be surprised. Simon Dolan has already hinted at concern that Parler is controlled by George Soros.

[BlasterBates]

We shouldn't be surprised. Simon Dolan has already hinted at concern that Parler is controlled by George Soros.

Sounds like a good business model. Set up a "libertarian" platform, don't moderate it and then sell the contents to the FBI.