Parler and Rumble (1 Viewer)

[Pat Hartman]

Mark Levin interviewed the CEOs of Parler and Rumble last night. What Amazon did to Parler was even worse than blocking their website. Parler actually rented servers from Amazon and Amazon shut down their servers essentially isolating them from their software and data!!!!! AWS gave them a short while, I think it was 24 hours to get everything they wanted and then shut them off.

Think about this people. I have always worried about this push to the cloud. Once you give up your own servers, you have lost control over your data. This is a really scary action. Lots of small companies have taken the opportunity to give up their hardware to let someone else manage it. I don't think they were thinking that they were giving up what Parler gave up. They are still locked out of their servers and don't have all their data. Who knows if they will ever get it back.

@Jon,
Does your contract with your provider protect you from something like this? Shutting down the website was bad enough but not giving a company sufficient access to rebuild somewhere else essentially destroys a business!!!!!!!!!!

Rumble is the alternative to YouTube. They currently are suing Google for manipulating search results. Google's algorithm seems to be set to divert traffic from Rumble to YouTube. The example he used was "silly dogs rumble". In Google, you are directed to youtube videos but using duckduckgo, you get right to Rumble. Another example he gave was of a blogger who after several years had only managed to acquire 10,000 followers but after moving to Rumble got up to half a million within a few months. Google is playing favorites

 

[Jon]

My host is very unlikely to shut me out. The previous host though was a nightmare, run by complete cowboys. URLJet was great, but they were bought out by another company and then everything went to shit. Slow service, lots of downtime, hack attacks, appauling support. You name it, it was happening. Naturally, most here don't see any of those shenanigans, but I had tons of headaches behind the scene. This new company is excellent. My support tickets with the previous host could take days to get an answer. This new one answered a recent ticket in 2 minutes!!

It is ridiculous for Amazon to give 24 hours for Parler to get their data. Give them a month. Why the limit anyway, unless they have another agenda?

 

[Pat Hartman]

Check your contract. Anyone who rents servers in the cloud needs to check their contracts VERY CAREFULLY. What if you rented a storefront or an office and your landlord gave you 24 hours to vacate the premises?? You can't download all that data in such a small window. Transfer speeds are too slow plus you have to organize a landing place for it.

If you think this couldn't happen to you, you are being naive. A few years ago I had two clients who lost data using SalesForce. They didn't like the service and cancelled but there was no way to get their data back in a usable fashion. Their only option was to retype it into a new application.

 

[Jon]

If you think this couldn't happen to you, you are being naive.

I don't think that way. Rather, I see the probability as very low. I view the world as a series of probabilities, bell curves, that sort of thing. You are right about the need for backups though. Do you remember many years ago we were hacked for the death of a Palestinian leader? They deleted about 120K posts and it took me over 40 hours of work to even get the site working again. Sadly, those posts were lost to history.

 

[Steve R.]

Think about this people. I have always worried about this push to the cloud.

Mark Levin's interview with the Parler CEO was "eye opening" in that companies such as Parler could be "locked" of even accessing their content even if it was not content that the public would ever see. Prior to this round of content abuse, there have been numerous cases were services have been shut-down leaving the users of that service in a type of limbo and demonstrating that the user can essentially be jerked around by the platform with little recourse.

Google Play Music Shutdown Dates Set: Service to Be Replaced by YouTube Music by End of 2020
Sony agrees to pay millions for removing Linux support from the PlayStation 3

My pet peeve, in terms of underhanded disingenuous business practices has been with Intuit. Whether they still continue today, to use deceptive business practices is basically unknown to me, other than for TurboTax. A few years ago, with TurboTax you were able to complete (in form view) your stock transactions with the Deluxe edition. Without, informing the customer base, this feature was quietly removed and moved to the Premier edition. A firestorm ensued. So for that one tax year, Intuit did restore that feature. Of course, the following year, it was not there.

Intuit used to offer, with Quicken, a money back guarantee. So if you didn't like that particular edition of Quicken you could get your money back. Sounds great!!! Turns out that all data that you entered with the new version that you had entered could not be accessed when you went back to the prior version. There are other dirty trick examples, but then I'm getting off-topic.

 

[Pat Hartman]

There are two different issues here.
1. you use their software either as a widget or to manage your data
2. you just lease servers

The two links and my sad story relate to item #1. This a caveat emptor situation. Before you depend on a cloud based software application, have an exit plan for your data. This is CRITICAL. If you are using their "code" as add ins, think about what would happen if the company no longer wants to support the "tool". For the software I sell, I put my source code in escrow and if my partner and I decide to stop support, the client has the option of purchasing a license for the source code for his own use, not to resell. Or, for a lower price buying a perpetual license so they can continue using the compiled app without modification as long as they want to. This gives them continuity protection so they can continue operating and even modify the software if they choose the option to lease the source code.

For #2, Technically, the host shouldn't have anything to do with what happens on the servers. There may be things in the contract about conducting an illegal business but beyond that, they shouldn't have any say whatsoever about what you do as long as you pay the rent.

I've been warning my clients about #1 for years but #2 just never occurred to me to be possible if you went with a solid provider. What did I know? I guess AWS can just put any company they don't like out of business on a whim. Spread the word far and wide.

One of my clients went with a cloud services provider for most of their hardware but kept a single server to run SQL Server for my Access apps and a third party app that couldn't be run any other way. All the backups went to the cloud and I never thought to review the backup plan. NO backups were kept on site. The day our local server died was tragic. It took FOUR days to download the backup to restore the server that crashed and another two days to rebuild it. In the meantime, they instantiated the server in the cloud. That allowed my Access apps to work but they were so slow it was like watching paint dry. So, if you have a similar situation, backup locally and then upload the old backups to the cloud. Make sure you have a couple of days local just in case.

 

[Steve R.]

Parler was recently de-platformed by Amazon citing an alleged "violation of the terms service". This type of action is usually justified as Amazon is a private company, so they have a "right" to manage who is on their website. For the sake of moving on, lets assume that Amazons actions were justified.

Parler, however was also "attacked" in an instantaneous and coordinated effort by a "gang" of companies to keep Parler off the internet. It would seem that if a bunch of companies collude to prevent one from doing something that that raises concerns, such as anti-trust. Again, to move on to the main point, let's put that theme on hold for now.

One of the assertions made by many is that if one private company won't let you use their website, that you can simply choice another. But can you really? What happens then if you do magically find another service provider?

Seems that Parler has now made a tentative connection with a Russian company. Guess what happened? House Oversight calls for Parler investigation. "House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) is requesting that the FBI investigate Parler and the social media platform’s role in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection." From this continued targeted persecution of Parler, one can easily speculate that social media platforms such as Amazon and the Democratic Party are both colluding together to prevent Parler from functioning. A suppression of both free speech and private enterprise.

PS: What about the bad optics that Amazon, the day after Biden assumed office, offered to help the Biden administration with Covid-19 will repressing the ability of a Parler to present conservative thought critical of the Biden administration?

 

[Pat Hartman]

Steve, there is a huge difference between shutting down a website and pulling access to the server used to run your whole business. Every business that rents cloud servers now should worry about "can my provider just pull the plug like that and put me out of business because they don't like me?"

Clearly this is an anti-trust situation but the DOJ isn't going to prosecute. They don't like Parler. But this is a dangerous president for all businesses that rent cloud servers and every business needs to make sure that his provider can't just shut off his servers with 24 hours notice. Just because this happened first to some conservatives company. What about the hundreds of thousands of other companies run by conservatives? What about My Pillow for example? What if Amazon is his provider?

 

[Isaac]

Steve, there is a huge difference between shutting down a website and pulling access to the server used to run your whole business. Every business that rents cloud servers now should worry about "can my provider just pull the plug like that and put me out of business because they don't like me?"

Yeah if they were concerned about incitement to violence they would have just taken the minimum required action to make Parler's service un-useable.....not banned them from accessing their data. There's a difference between necessity and spite