Amazing Report Of Pushback By Hackers Against Dangerous Knox-Type Conspiracy Theorists
Two-Step Comeuppance of Parler
The nihilist forum Parler is now much in the US news, and not in a good way.
It has long hosted myriad Knox-type conspiracists, including many who organized to trash the Washington DC Capitol and possibly to execute some of the US political leadership.
The video report above explains how Amazon, Apple and Google have organized to put it offline as from early today.
Now there’s this amazing report about the exploits of a female super-hacker said to be in Austria. She has grabbed EIGHTY TERRABYTES of Parler posts, videos and volunteered personal information, and is putting the entire catch online for us all to see.
Gulp! And cyber security experts are suggesting that this was not illegal at all.
Parler was an enormous site requiring many servers - but it was built on the freebie Wordpress, good software, but inferior to our own and open to hacking in the way described below and on various sites elsewhere.
Parler was taken offline in the early hours of Monday, January 12, at around 5 am EST, but not before a hacker found a way to retrieve all data posted by users including messages, images, videos and users’ location data shared during last week’s attack on the Capitol Hill building in Washington, DC.
The data taken from Parler is still being processed but President Donald Trump’s followers are already voicing their concerns about what the data dump could reveal about them and their activity in Washington, DC last week. The [Parler] app has already disappeared from the Apple and Google app stores after they cut ties with the right-wing platform.
In a series of tweets posted by a self-described hacker from Austria, @donk_enby claimed to have gained access to all of the “unprocessed, raw” video files uploaded to Parler “with all associated metadata”. The hacker even included a link to the file library in order to prove that the data leak was real.
In a series of tweets, she wrote, “I am now crawling URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially from latest to oldest. VIDXXX.txt files coming up, 50k chunks, there will be 1.1M URLs total. This may include things from deleted/private posts.”
She further said, “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” and “if you have the storage space for this, this is currently the best way to help out.” She further continued: “I’d estimate the total size for this would be ~80TB, 4TB per chunk. It’s S3/CloudFront so as much bandwidth as you can throw at it,” and “The crawl is now complete. 1098552 video URLs.”
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She began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99 percent of its content. @donk_enby later shared a screenshot showing the GPS position of a particular video, with coordinates in latitude and longitude.
@donk_enby describes herself as “someone with a creative, but skeptical attitude toward technology,” to paraphrase a definition offered by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest hacker association. “I want this to be a big middle finger to those who say hacking shouldn’t be political,” she said.
@donk_enby’s work has aided other researchers, including one at New York University’s Center for Cybersecurity. Her work is documented on the website ArchiveTeam.org, according to which, the data will eventually be hosted by the Internet Archive.org.
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A user on Reddit said, “When I first heard of Parler I assumed it was some encrypted anonymous board where everyone would use pseudo names. Instead, I think they were afraid to get infiltrated, so they wanted to authenticate everyone and then display their full names and job titles. And then chose to be hosted on [Amazon’s] AWS…
I thought they were against surveillance and being tracked and all that?? And then they commit terrorism with no masks on during a time where there is a perfectly legal and valid reason to wear one. They even live stream themselves with their full names attached. I guess idiots are easier to brainwash…”
One shared a series of screenshots and said, “Remember how people were dunking on Parler for being built on WordPress? Well, through a plug-in exploit, literally all the user data (including photos of verified state id cards) has been retrieved by hackers and is being posted online. Lmao.”
The very definition of klutzy. All by itself this klutziness could really chill things going forward.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/11/21 at 10:59 PM in
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This is one of the relevant twitter feeds offering thanks to the Austrian super-hacker.
A few ticked-off nihilist commenters are blaming “extreme left wingers” for the hack.
Really? Helping the police in law enforcement is not normally seen as a sign of extreme left-wing-ism… Pro-good-systems moderates of all flavors typically favor it. In fact early polls are suggesting that 80 percent or so of the rattled American public are pretty pro-police in this.
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PS On that “extreme left wing”. What is derided thus is actually centrist and mundane in European terms. Much of what Europe has that the US does not - good universal health and good universal education and effective environmental management for example - polls extremely well in the US.
In effect around 80 percent of the population are being derided by the other 20 percent as “extremely left wing”. The archaic US Constitution has caused a massive system problem, one of the tail wagging the dog.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/12/21 at 12:02 AM | #
All of this turmoil can be seen - should be seen - as a “war” between those who know how to make systems work and those who don’t and (rightly!) feel left out.
Washington DC does not even understand the problem and so has been floundering in setting it right.
In contrast NYC is full of those who make one kind or another of systems work. Culture, finance, fashion, retail, publishing, media, health, the list goes on and on.
But in much or most of the rest of the US, they are pretty bereft. NYC could and should have helped way more.
But instead certain (financial etc) systems in NYC were misused in 2000-2008 and with little oversight from Washington DC they were allowed to run wild.
That lead to financial collapse around the world and left the bereft areas even more bereft.
It’s only the broad sharing of systems knowhow that will make bad situations everywhere come right.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/12/21 at 08:08 AM | #
The Twitter and Facebook companies are spending small fortunes on moderation of posts - Facebook has contracted for 15,000 content moderators in the US and both companies use robots too - so the worst of the worst is no longer making its way through.
Amazon, Apple and Google (and now Google YouTube) are all pressing Parler for similarly effective moderation.
That will mean (1) less fake facts; (2) less demonizations; (3) less plotting of deaths.
Also a bigger moderation staff (they claim to have five) and so big bills.
Parler is probably kept alive financially only by Rebekah Mercer the daughter of a NYC hedge fund manager.
Will she spring for all of that?
And should moderation apply also to the many online rants pro-Knox?
Interesting…
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/13/21 at 11:38 AM | #
Hard to believe from the immense amateurishness of their operation but the two co-creators of Parler are computer science graduates from Denver Colorado.
Parler itself is located in a strip mall on the eastern (Henderson) edge of Reno Nevada where I did some Federal work.
Having created the main vehicle for seditious overthrow of the US government and assassination planning, it seems CEO John Matze claims he himself is now being chased. What a whiner.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/16/21 at 11:40 AM | #
I’d rate too many billionaires creating too little value to be Plague #1 on the planet right now.
A lot of what they do is de-stabilize government functions and dupe the Little People who too often think they are gods.
Plague #2 is the propagating of conspiracy theories, now on its way to becoming a trillion dollar industry in the US, and pretty big elsewhere.
Of which industry, of course, Amanda Knox herself and her enablers and enabling media outlets including Netflix are a longstanding part.
By so propagating, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have each been generating at least 1/4 of their revenue that way.
By so propagating, several cable TV channels survive that way, and many hundreds of talk-radio stations.
By so propagating, certain political parties around the world try to come out on top.
And Russian trolls are everywhere, priming the pump.
Maybe we need to wind back to Cold War days where all the enemies - real enemies - were “over there” and there was pretty good social and political cohesiveness back here.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/16/21 at 12:49 PM | #
Everybody here knows that US voting machines have no modems or wireless LAN chips in them, right? No way of being connected to the Internet.
They can only print out paper confirmation of each vote and record it for download by flash drive. They are absolutely unhackable.
Now try to wrap your mind around this wild claim (actually reported here scathingly on a Republican website) about the machines which has had close to a million Facebook reads already and is pushing for forcibly activating the military and banned social media accounts - including Parler.
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There’s two new developments concerning conspiracy monger Mike Lindell who was seemingly trying to encourage the White House to do a last-minute coup.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/17/21 at 01:52 AM | #
The lawyers among us might be interested to read these legal reasons why the hoster Amazon has put their customer Parler on ice for the moment.
It’s not every day that you can read evidence like this in Exhibit A… Well, except for the Knox grovellers on Twitter and YouTube:
In mid-November 2020, AWS [Amazon] received reports that Parler was hosting content threatening violence, in breach of the agreement…
Over the next seven weeks, AWS reported more than 100 additional representative pieces of content advocating violence to Parler’s Chief Policy Officer, including:
* “Fry’em up. The whole fkn crew. #pelosi #aoc #thesquad #soros #gates #chuckschumer #hrc #obama #adamschiff #blm #antifa we are coming for you and you will know it.”
* “#JackDorsey … you will die a bloody death alongside Mark Suckerturd [Zuckerberg].… It has been decided and plans are being put in place. Remember the photographs inside your home while you slept* Yes, that close. You will die a sudden death!”
* “We are going to fight in a civil War on Jan.20th, Form MILITIAS now and acquire targets.”
* “On January 20th we need to start systematicly [sic] assassinating [sic] #liberal leaders, liberal activists, #blm leaders and supporters, members of the #nba #nfl #mlb #nhl #mainstreammedia anchors and correspondents and #antifa. I already have a news worthy event planned.”
* “Shoot the police that protect these shitbag senators right in the head then make the senator grovel a bit before capping they ass.”
* “After the firing squads are done with the politicians the teachers are next.”
* “Death to @zuckerberg @realjeffbezos @jackdorsey @pichai.”
* “White people need to ignite their racial identity and rain down suffering and death like a hurricane upon zionists.”
* “Put a target on these motherless trash [Antifa] they aren’t human taking one out would be like stepping on a roach no different.”
* “We need to act like our forefathers did Kill [Black and Jewish people] all Leave no victims or survivors.”
* “We are coming with our list we know where you live we know who you are and we are coming for you and it starts on the 6th civil war… Lol if you will think it’s a joke… Enjoy your last few days you have.”
* “This bitch [Stacey Abrams] will be good target practice for our beginners.”
* “This cu** [United States Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao] should be hung for betraying their country.”
* “Hang this mofo [Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger] today.”
* “HANG THAT N***** ASAP”
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Sunday night update. Parler seem to have arranged some hosting.
Today the 17th was expected to be a day of countrywide armed insurrection, but almost nobody showed up.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/17/21 at 02:51 PM | #
No surprise here. Conspiracy monger Parler is back online courtesy of guess-who:
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/19/21 at 06:04 AM | #
More news on Parler. The FBI is known to be examining the many videos of the Capitol insurrection pretty naively uploaded there.
Now Democrat House Oversight and Government Reform Chairwoman Caroline Maloney has asked the FBI to look back at Parler’s unsavory past a lot more.
And two pro-Constitution Republican congressman are requesting that Twitter and Facebook be added to the FBI’s list.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/25/21 at 12:14 PM | #
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