Amazon Web Services, which provides backend cloud services, has informed Parler that it intends to cut ties with the company in the next 24 hours, according to a report in BuzzFeed News. Parler’s application is built on top of AWS infrastructure, services that are critical for the operation of its platform.
Private company though eh?
Off topic but….
Golfer Justin Thomas has got himself in to all sorts of bother after on course microphones picked him muttering “faggot!” to himself after missing a short putt.
He wasn’t calling anyone else that name. Just muttering it to himself.
Apparently this is a crime not far short of genocide. It’s an terrible homophobic “anti-gay” slur. In a statement, the PGA Tour said his comment was “unacceptable” and the former world number one is expected to be fined for his conduct.
It was always risky running your business in “The Cloud” (on someone else’s computers). However, I think this high profile removal of service might give pause to other companies who are thinking of moving to the cloud. Even using multiple cloud providers won’t help if they all decide on the same course of action.
Only takes a slightly risque advert which causes complaints and you have your IT infrastructure service ceased with little or no notice. Previously it seemed there was little risk of that happening but it only takes a few cases like Parler to change minds.
What a shame if this was what derailed AWS profit growth and thus the share price rise of Amazon. Perhaps Larry Ellison is seeing a business opportunity here to make Oracle a larger player?
>Just build your own social media platforms LOL
>Just build your own payment processors LOL
>Just build your own App stores LOL
>Just build your own cloud infrastructure LOL
>YOU ARE HERE
>Just build your own DNS registration LOL
>Just build your own Internet Protocol LOL
>Just build your own fixed line and wireless communications infrastructure LOL
>Just build your own government LOL
If I told you they’re planning a defacto Chinee style social credit system in the West, run by unaccountable hyper-global-mega corporations staffed with psychotic blue-haired trannies and remorseless algorithms programmed to scour your internet footprint for Badthink, you’d probably think Steve should start taking his crazy pills again. Yet here we are.
Interesting times.
It seems that tech is so confident that there is no alternative to them that they are prepared to piss off half their customers to the point where said customers are prepared to go to any alternative supplier, even if it is otherwise inferior.
My bet is that they are right in the short term but wrong in the long-term. It will take some time to develop alternatives, but the incentive is there so it will happen.
And the alternatives will no doubt spring up in places like Russia or China.
Pat – it’s definitely worth a go, but if you tried this tomorrow you’d quickly find your website blocked from accepting payments, denied ad revenue, probably blocked at ISP or DNS level.
Big Tech is feeling froggy because they really do wield enormous, historically unprecedented political power and there’s a very tightly defined consensus among Silicon Valley / Wall Street / the institutional class / their pet politicians. And they don’t really care about money (you can’t bribe a billionaire) as much as they do seizing and defending their place at the top of the social dominance hierarchy.
Any social medium is vulnerable to sabotage by people signing up and then posting content which others can complain about, incitement to violence being the most obvious. Gab claims to be suffering that right now, and will be the next to go.
And Steve is right, they can stuff up just about any move you make on the net.
And so Amazon cuts its own throat.
Want an ISP that will leave you alone ? Go to Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, India wherever. Bandwidth might be a little less but in the modern Interwebs location is unimportant, response times are a marginal factor. There are plenty of hosting centres out there that would bite your arm off for the custom.
Buy a bank of PCs, armed with Linux or Solarisx86 spread it around a few countries to offset the load. This is what we were doing 25 years ago, technology has improved a lot since then, so load redirection with content switches is even easier – before we used to have to have a dedicated UNIX servers doing the donkey work.
I have been telling people for years that “Cloud Services” and SaaS are a bad idea and that there is no real added value in them, this alone justifies my scepticism.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2021/01/07/a-truth-reckoning-why-were-holding-those-who-lied-for-trump-accountable/?sh=5f87c8255710
“This isn’t cancel culture . . .”
Lying fucking cunt.
Left-wing union activists: “We demand improvements to working conditions!”
Right-wing capitalists: “If you don’t like working in my factory, there are plenty of other factories; or better yet, try starting your own business. You’re fired.”
Right-wing tweeters: “We demand free speech on Twitter!”
Left-wing capitalists: “If you don’t like my platform, go try another; or better yet, just build your own. You’re banned.”
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Nota Benny – this has been in the pipeline for years, and was going to happen irregardless of the mostly peaceful protest in Washington DC the other day. That might have pushed the timeline up by a fortnight at most, but it was already baked into the gay wedding cake in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election.
Civil liberties are like hothouse flowers, they can only exist in an environment which supports them. The “Left” (effeminate globalist managerialism may be more accurate if less catchy) has been trending totalitarian for decades now – that was the whole point of redefining homoscepticism as “homophobia”, the forever war on “hate”, coppers phoning people to “check their thinking” on tranny ishoos, the recent attempts to force you to worship black people, etc. etc.
12 months ago people would’ve called you a David Icke style nutter if you said entire nations would be forbidden to go outside except with a valid excuse as defined by the government, that the leader of the free world would be effectively banned from the internet, and so on.
But while conspiratards are usually wrong on the details, they’re not wrong about the malevolent intent that drives elite decision making. Christians have a good theoretical framework for this (spoiler: Satan), but YMMV – the most important point is TPTB hate you and mean you harm. What larks, Pip!
He’s not been “banned from the internet” though has he. He also has an entire pres team to help him run news conferences and issue press releases. He can also still dial into Fox News at his leisure. It’s not like all his means of communication have been cut off
Perry, they are trying to de-platform Fox News too by getting it chucked out of cable packages. It is largely going along with the Never-Trumpers anyway with a few exceptions.
What was telling was the angry mob, from internets commentators to media to heads of state, all about this horrible right-wing attack on the institution, “now they are attacking the institutions”, LBC cunt even tweeted “shoot them!”. They weren’t too bothered about institutions when police and courts of law buildings were been attacked and burned down in 2020.
“My bet is that they are right in the short term but wrong in the long-term. It will take some time to develop alternatives, but the incentive is there so it will happen.”
There’s Mastodon, which avoids the central command and control problem. People run their own servers with a number of users and you can join a server, but also communicate with other servers.
Without a single central control, it’s hard to knock it out. Sure, you can take one Mastodon server out, which is Trump’s home server, but he just jumps to another and everyone re-points. The host gets pulled down, but he’s already gone.
The value of stuff like Facebook, Twitter and AWS was that you didn’t have to run your own shit, but if they’re going to fuck up your place, people will go back to DIY.
I would bet big money, that Mastodon servers are teeming with Trumpers.
Once you’ve moved your business to AWS, what’s stopping Bezos from fucking up your business at 24 hours notice for any reason he wants? And if your answer is “because it wouldn’t be ‘rational’”, take another look at the past five years. Simply “because I can” is enough.
All this “use a hosting system elsewhere” fairytale thinking forgets you still need a physical network to move packets.
The packets have addresses.
Those that go to or come from unwanted places can (and will) be dropped.
Left-wing union activists: “We demand improvements to working conditions!”
Right-wing capitalists: “If you don’t like working in my factory, there are plenty of other factories; or better yet, try starting your own business. You’re fired.”
And as history and Henry Ford shows, this is actually what workers do.
Right-wing tweeters: “We demand free speech on Twitter!”
Left-wing capitalists: “If you don’t like my platform, go try another; or better yet, just build your own. You’re banned.”
And as we’re seeing (see Steve’s guide above) that doesn’t work.
The difference, Andrew M, being freedom vs tyranny.
I’m pretty conservative, but I have to come down on the side of a private company ought to be able to refuse to do business with someone if they choose. I know I’ve certainly either fired clients or refused to do business with someone because I didn’t like them. Nothing stops the people on Parler (which I’d never heard of until a couple of days ago) from saying whatever they want, but a third party is not obligated to assist them.
I’m pretty conservative . . .
Then your banking services aren’t safe.
I thought the chief techie of Parler said on Gab that they don’t use AWS? Did I read that wrong?
This simply confirms that Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest totalitarian.
More over, George Soros.
huh?
huh?
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/02/27/financial-blacklisting-chase-bank-withdraws-service-from-independent-and-conservative-figures/
Andrew M – it’s exactly like that, if the evil right wing capitalists were also able and oh-so willing to prevent you from ever getting a job elsewhere, starting your own business, having a bank account or telephone service, or even being able to talk about it in mainstream public fora.
Perry – imagine thinking the TV networks are going to give Trump a platform, lol. He can’t even get them to cover his speeches (without Running Man style dishonest editing) now. They authorities will try to ruin, jail or maybe just straight up murder him when he leaves office.
Maybe this helps sum up what’s going on here:
Michael Tracey
@mtracey
The new corporate authoritarian liberal-left monoculture is going to be absolutely ruthless — and in 12 days it is merging with the state. This only the beginning
No doubt 2030’s respectable conservatives will be defending Jeff Bezos’s right to send tranny hormones to your 12 year old directly via drone, while insisting their belief in the traditional 57 genders doesn’t make them necrofurrypedophobes, but for everyone else this “private company” schtick doesn’t do justice to what is effectively the East India Company meets OPEC meets the evil corporation from the Aliens franchise.
Bezos just blew it. While the average consumer may not directly buy from AWS they are the backbone of the core of his business empire, Amazon itself. So just don’t use Amazon for anything. Just don’t do it! Let’s see what happens when Amazon revenue from the households of 75,000,000+ Trump supporters disappears!
John Smith
I’d doubt that many folk will cancel Amazon usage; it’s just too convenient.
But anyone ever seen what an AWS contract looks like? Does it actually have a “I can cancel you at a moment’s notice and you have no recourse and no chance of getting paid damages” clause? Or is it simply that Parler isn’t making any money (I assume) and therefore either hasn’t lost any money and/or because they’re too small to be able to afford a good lawyer and a good court fight?
But as a company, rather than an individual: – certainly, now, were I a manufacturer of something detested by the Left (GMO seeds, gasoline, coal, automobiles, ships, planes,…) I’d be very very careful of outsourcing my *anything* to an American services company. You never know when something will become the latest fad and they’ll just turn you off…
That would put a dent in Amazon’s revenue, but not a major one. AWS is much bigger now than selling products, and companies who have moved to the cloud are pretty much locked in so that revenue won’t easily drop.
BIT – can almost guarantee it’ll be some weasley worded “code of conduct” slipped somewhere into their T’s and C’s that allows them to designate you as promoting “hate” or contravening “community standards” whenever they feel like it.
Otherwise they’ll get sued, but as Trump found out, US courts are political players too and can be relied on to support the Narrative (as does our Blairite “supreme court”, which the Tories show no signs of abolishing). If the US Supreme Court proves troublesome, the Biden administration will simply pack it to the applause of the MSM.
Wonder if they’ll insist on separate water fountains for right-wingers, or if that’s too on the nose.
Just update Section 230, that’s all.
Remove the “good faith” clause, since that shit’s clearly gone out the window in Silicon Valley. And if the government already forces private businesses to hire employees according to constitutional civil rights provisions, I don’t see why they can’t enforce equality when it comes to business operations. The only reason that bakery won their case over the same-sex couple, is because they were only refusing to bake a wedding cake. They still were willing to serve these customers if they wanted to purchase anything else from the establishment. If they outright banned these people altogether, they would have been fined or forced to bake the cake at the very least.
Tech companies who pick and choose who is worthy of their platforms are discriminating not based on terms of use, but based on their CEO’s ever-changing personal preference and political convenience. Doesn’t the Better Business Bureau at least require companies to operate according to their OWN policies?
Allowing the Ayatollah to tweet, and banning ordinary citizens for saying there are 2 genders, is unequal application of Twitter’s own stated terms. At best, these double standards are false advertising, and all of these tech CEOs have committed perjury in front of Congress.
Just update Section 230, that’s all.
The option to override detonation procedure has now expired.
“But anyone ever seen what an AWS contract looks like? ”
The usual ToS for any software/service: “We pretend not to own your Stuff as soon as you use our Services, but mey use anything on our network for our own purposes. Any use of our services is subject to arbitrary change we do not need to inform you of, unless a sueball hit, and it’d cost us money. Any loss of business or revenue using our services is entirely your, and never our fault. And yes, we can cut you off whenever we don’t like you.”
@ Dennis, Clear-Eyed As Always January 10, 2021 at 3:28 pm
“This simply confirms that Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest totalitarian.
More over, George Soros.”
Are you saying that Elon Musk, this week’s richest person, is not totalitarian?
Just askin’, for a friend.
DP
One observation: Parler’s John Matze has been saying that he expects to be able to stand up Parler on a new provider (presumably not Apple or Google) in the next couple of days. That implies to me that they’ve been planning ahead for weeks for this eventuality, and already have a new (small) instance of the Parler service up and running on that alternative provider. Trying to do this all from scratch would take weeks if not months.
Of course, Matze might be hopelessly optimistic – but he’s originally from Amazon, so probably has some idea of what’s involved in this kind of migration.
Wait a moment… The dude ran his business off the hardware/services of his ex-employer?
Now there’s a new bar for Boundless Optimism…. And a much more logical reason for the drop, instead of High Moral Grounds ( which Amazon simply hasn’t got…. unless it suits them..)
US Federal law prohibits privately owned facilities that offer food, lodging, gasoline or entertainment to the public from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. We need to declare Trumpism a religion & that our social media usage to be entertainment.
http://up-ship.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/circle-of-inclusion.png
So when will TW be hit? This is a pretty small site but I would think it punches above its weight class. It is also mainly about the UK and so less likely to attract the Eye of Sauron.
But you want to bet it will still be up by the end of the year?
For those of you keeping score at home: Differences between “riots” and “peaceful demonstrations”.
Riots don’t have:
-Looting
-Arson
-Laser and firework attacks on police
-Streets barricaded with burning dumpsters
-Passing autos attacked and drivers shot
-Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
-Molotov cocktails
-Freeways blocked
SMFS, It depends on how our host hosts his sites. A “couple of blogs” doesn’t need anywhere near cloud services though. I do not know, but wouldn’t be surprised if the sites were run out of a modest server in the garage/attic of the site’s webmonkey. It all depends on said webmonkey’s home connection.
And given the UK’s pencheant for control and Gut-think, as evidenced by plenty of articles here, there’s actually a bigger chance of our host soon not being able to penetrate the Great Firewall of the UK ( Think of the Children!! ) given that most of us here are racist white patriarchists who mock the feelings of the frocked moustaches…
Grikath January 10, 2021 at 11:01 pm – “It depends on how our host hosts his sites.”
TW has mentioned this before. But his solution – if I remember rightly – was to be hosted in the US. Previous concerns were about Europe and the UK going Full Orwell.
I would think the easiest solution will be for them to deplatform and defund him. No Google searches will turn up his name. No credit card of PayPal-type thing can be used to send him some cash.
Blogs can survive. Look at Steve Sailor.
But we should all kick in some before it is too late.
‘Golfer Justin Thomas has got himself in to all sorts of bother after on course microphones picked him muttering “faggot!” to himself after missing a short putt.’
Surely the obvious reply here was to claim he really said ‘Fuck it.’
“I would think the easiest solution will be for them to deplatform and defund him.”
Hardly easy.. Practically impossible if you’ve got skills, or employ a webmonkey who knows his stuff.
If it were easy, the internet (which is not Social Media™) would look a lot different today.
But we’ll see… It’s Interesting Times.. And I can’t wait for the ruckus that’ll break out when eventually the realisation sinks in with other politickians that what happened to Trump could also happen to them..
“And so Amazon cuts its own throat”
Maybe Amazon just began the process of cutting the Government’s throat. Remember all those science fiction stories where the world belongs to a few big companies; and people had to be their ‘customers’ merely to exist?
The “Internet” isn’t as resilient as you think. Use a hosting provider and you are bound to their T&Cs which, generally, will say we can cut you off if we please. Yes, Russia, Eastern Europe etc are potentials but then doing business their is more difficult and probably won’t help from external attacks (see below).
You could buy a leased line (and/or broadband) and host at the end but you’re likely to be offline more than on as you come under DDoS attack by thew SJWs. The large networks with the capacity to absorb these attacks are the same that want to police your content.
The lesson here is don’t conduct your battles on a battleground wholly owned by your enemies under their rules. If you value freedom of expression don’t expect it to provided to you as a free gift.
It’s why I detest this idea of “rights”. There’s no fucking thing. There are only obligations. And you gain from them by forcing them on those you wish to provide them. Your “legal rights” depend on who’s running the legal system. Make sure it’s you.
In other news, Mozilla has joined in, so this is posted from the Brave browser, Firefox is now ‘deprecated’ as they say in software land.
Cloudflare FTW.
@ BiG
Not immune from cutting sites off – https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/stripe-stops-processing-payments-for-trump-campaign-website
What could stop some of this is having the provider “prove” violation of T&Cs in a court rather than make arbitrary decisions themselves. Yes, I realise that is the state meddling in private business but it’s not like we don’t have that already (see gender pay gap reporting etc).
Apple, Google, AWS and even Parler’s attorneys have conspired to keep the platform from existing altogether. Companies like Stripe, Shopify, Twitter, Facebook, Uber, Chase Bank and PayPal have cancelled services for people who either say controversial (not illegal) things, or even *associate* with such people. All while more controversial and even illegal behavior (death threats, doxxing, etc.) is overlooked. A number of people have lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result of this discriminatory snuffing out by major corporations.
How is this team effort much different from other illegal corporate behavior, like price fixing? There doesn’t even seem to be much gray area in the “it’s a private company” argument. This is blatant crony capitalism that allows big companies to break the rules that smaller companies have to follow.
This isn’t outsourcing labor to save money. It’s not using legal loopholes in the tax system or having access to more expensive lawyers. It’s the enforcing of non-existent “hate speech” laws that these companies invent to stave off their competition. I’ve never heard any economist, or anyone like Tim Worstall for that matter, say that strong-arming and bullying competition away is a facet of Free Market capitalism.
Why, then, don’t we allow banks to deny loans to companies who practice equal opportunity employment? If companies can discriminate against users for practicing Free Speech on what are supposed to be “Free Speech platforms,” then should TD Ameritrade disable accounts when certain users have successful stock portfolios? Why don’t we just abolish the Sherman Antitrust Act while we’re at it?
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/twitter-stock-price-trump-account-deleted
Be nice if this downward trend continues.
It’s all come back to Porter and the effectiveness of barriers to entry, if there aren’t enough barriers just make up some new ones
I’m finding it quite amusing that those who broke the law by entering the capitol building and live-streamed themselves doing so are now arrested and/or on fbi no fly lists
Perhaps it should have been called the March of morons or something
. . . those who broke the law by entering the capitol building . . .
Is there a law against entering the capitol building? Indeed, before the trouble started some small number of red hatted persons were inside chatting to the police.
Plenty of people on the videos were well masked up, and I suspect a lot of those will be shown to be instigators and still at large. For all the scumbags there were more who tried to protect the property and the cops. And of the tens of thousands who walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to “peacefully and patriotically protest” (as Trump requested) only a small percentage got near the building to cause trouble.
Wasn’t it the pink pussy patrol or somesuch that liked to go to Capitol Hill to protest US Supreme Court nomination hearings? That was cool and all if they broke in and disrupted things.
We’ve had an entire summer of burning cities – even burning or trying to burn federal buildings – burning a church near the White House in DC, all for BLM and Antifa and Saint George Floyd, and that’s ok, Peaceful Protest, no laws broken, let em walk, all hail the Brave Woke. But when some angry people bust in and heaven forbid support Trump, everyone gets the vapors?? Lay waste, burn, loot, pillage, kill, maim, threaten – all perfectly good and law abiding if you do it for the Correct Reasons. Got it.
. . . let em walk . . .
Bill Clinton commuted the sentence of (i.e. released) commie terrorists involved in the bombing of – the US Capitol.
I doubt Perry’s “morons” will receive such mercies.
https://disrn.com/news/parler-sues-amazon-for-shutting-down-site-cites-antitrust-violations
So AWS also provides the equivalent to Twitter, didn’t give the required 30 days notice and doesn’t care that twitter has hand Mike Pence as trending. Hmmmm
“and/or on fbi no fly lists”
Our venerable host often cautions against giving the government powers you want when in government lest the other side use them when they are, inevitably, in government in future. This is a prime example of republicans creating an extra-judicial punishment system with no due process, and no appeal possible, that can now be used against them.
If the US does go full-on Chinese Communist-inspired repression and technocracy, it is at least in part due to the tools provided by previous republican administrations, which Trump has failed to dismantle.
MrKing, I think cloudflare have publicly booted one other site as well, possibly one of the chans. It’s still a better record than anywhere else. I had a site terminated by a host over a decade ago, because people were saying inconvenient things about a professional body, and that professional body threatened to sue the host, knowing that it was far more effective to try that route than to threaten to sue me.
>Just build your own bank LOL
Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank will ‘sever ties with Trump
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9137075/Deutsche-Bank-sever-ties-Donald-Trump-Trump-organization-owes-340-million-loans.html