OK but "Parler" is an upstart and the chief beneficiary of having it wiped out is still to be found in the *FAANG Big Tech group.

*Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet(Google).

Fine by whom? Apple and Google are effectively a joint monopoly providing what are now essential services (smart phone/mobile). If they can behave as they wish, then that it a failure of the regulatory environment.

Had they done so, that would be illegal in many countries and in the EU. But there is no evidence, no smoking gun, that they did this.

However they didn’t have to collude, they only had to watch what the others were doing. If they liked what they saw, they did the same thing. Google (Android) started, then Apple matched and a couple days later Amazon did their thing. Exactly the same as petrol/gas stations, supermarkets and airlines do.

It's worse than that, they're working together to suppress people's speech. If they were acting together to fix prices then they would be open to antitrust/anti-monopoly legislation.

Google is not essential, Huawei must be working on an Android alternative because their new phone models cannot use Android due to the trade ban. If you want to stick it to Google, get a new Huawei. Maybe people in key positions should not get a Huawei for security reasons, but I'm a nobody, no worries.

Also, Apple and Google cannot behave as they wish because they don't own or operate the pipelines of the Internet: fiber, 4/5G, cables. The infrastructure is still in hands of local companies. The only long term worry is that, Amazon and FB are trying to become an ISP via satellite and that's cannot be allowed to happen. One thing is they refuse to host a website in their servers and a whole different one is they refuse to let data pass through their pipes.

That's why ISPs (the "pipes") should be heavily regulated, as the internet as such is for all intents and purposes a utility.



man honestly you're seeing ghosts. FAANG is a stock market acronym of high performers and is used in that context. These companies have some competing products, but they are all fundamentally different companies and in different markets. Facebook would benefit from Parler going away because it's social media, but none of the other companies have anything to gain from Parler going away. And as long as you consider your mobile phone an "essential service" then fine by me to be honest.

It's really funny how libertarians and right wing people are suddenly screaming for regulation, when Trump and his definitely-not-swampy cabinet tore down pretty much every piece of regulation they touched, unless it was to protect them from criticism or scrutiny of any kind

__________________
Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool

You could have said the same when Snowden and Manning uncovered the NSA's nefariousness.

Still, nothing changed. At least not for the better.

And why should it. People are giving their data willingly to the tech giants, so obviously they don't care.

Not this one. I support Twitter's right to police Trump as they see fit.

A lot of self-styled libertarians are really just people on the hard culture right, who will drop libertarianism when it suits them (e.g. Ted Cruz). I like to think I'm a real one.

Don't need blockchain for any of that. It doesn't provide anonymity. It provides security that transactions can't be faked. It can work decentralised or centralised - it doesn't do any decentralisation itself. It can easily be shut down (if not decentralised).

I did the same - first hit on google was this page.

Zuckerberg will be the first president of the world.

That is another problem, something else that’s not yet been mentioned is that social media is demonstrably addictive. For many it’s not that they give their data willingly, it’s that they can’t stop themselves.

Twitter’s share price tanked earlier today, and whilst we focus on the US, it shouldn’t be missed that there is the rest of the world out there. Whatever happens in America, Twitter has almost certainly ensured that it will severely regulated or blocked outside the US due to its action over the weekend.

Not for me, in fact with Google this page didn't come up at all!

Tom

Yes, as I said, there could be a number of factors involved here and I did not mean it to be interpreted as a definitive test. The most innocent explanation is that Google had not yet scanned the site at the time I attempted the search. If such a test is devised to detect skewing in search results it has to be done very scientifically and also in such a way that the search provider(s) would not even suspect that a test was being applied. Of course, Google knows now about this specific test !

Maybe you've been identified by Google as a trouble maker and Big Tech sceptic who should be screened from information which could fuel such non-conformist views.

I agree.

Pro-Trump social media site Parler, booted by Amazon, takes step toward relaunching with Eastside firm

link

"Hours after Amazon effectively scrubbed it from the internet, conservative social media network Parler is taking stumbling steps toward a relaunch...

Epik has emerged in recent years as a home for far-right websites, hosting conspiracy theory channel InfoWars and neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer in addition to Gab."

I read that Parler (or probably also, Parler users) have another problem. That is a massive data breach: https://www.computing.co.uk/news/402...parler-offline
Some reports speak only of "public" data being accessed.

There was no breach.

Researchers that work to archive as much of the internet as possible, effectively copied posts by Parler to be hosted in the internet archives. The thing becomes funny and shows the technical ineptitude of Parler (if not malice) as deleted posts were not actually deleted. Instead, the Parler server would tag the post as "deleted" and would keep it and just not show it in the site. It was done in such an amateur way that researchers could easily retrieve these "deleted" trades.

Additionally Parler would not strip metadata from pictures and videos, so if someone uploaded them with GPS information, timestamps etc the information was persisted. So you know what username took which video at which location and at which time. And if I'm not mistaken Parler requested ID for users, so a privacy nightmare all in all

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Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool