What is Parler? / Parler gets owned
 

I'm seeing references to Parler but I don't know what it is. Seems like another new social media thing.

I gather it is an uncensored Facebook kind of thing. Kind of like the 4chan of social media. White supremacists took a fancy to it when FB gave them the boot. Parler means 'to talk' in French IIRC.

A new social media space in reaction to what some on the right view as censorship by Facebook and Twitter.

It's meant to be a place of greater freedom.

Voat was a similar "anything goes" space. In that case, the wild west lack of rules made it a haven for the more toxic side of things, which lost them any more mainstream users who wandered over and got turned off, leaving the remaining discussion to get even more toxic.

I expect Parler will either experience a similar effect or they'll exercise some restrictions or moderation while arguing about how theirs are different.

Over on Reddit, the conservative subreddits tend to be both incredibly vocal about the evils of social media moderation as a violation of free speech. They also tend to be the most moderated spaces. r/conservative has about half of their threads limited to confirmed conservatives.

I didn't think it was something I'm interested in. I don't even do Facebook, so no thanks for this one. I was just curious. Uncensored can be really ugly.

Let’s Parler Franglais c’est un book par le remarkable author Anglais Monsieur Miles Kington. Il a ete aussi le player de bass pour le beat combo populaire Instant Sunshine.

Now you've done it...

Hope you brought your Piece of Eight!

You have the freedom to express any far right idiocy you like on Parler. The slightest hint of liberalism will get you banned right quick.

From the Nashville Bombing thread, some comments from the Parler braintrust:

I'm in awe of the towering intellect on display.

Oh, not to mention the extraordinary level of literacy!

"blue up the building"
"a escape goat"
"domino machine"

That sure isn't any mainstream chatting.

I keep my escape goat in the garage behind the freezer. Still no one has found it.

The Escape GOAT, of course, is nothing other than The Amazing Randi.

(OK, maybe after Houdini...)

Its a conservative facebook, even other conservatives are making fun of it.

It took me 3 reads to figure this out. I like it! :D

:thumbsup::D

This thread talks about why, given recent events, Parler is likely dead for good.

Yeah - William probably should ask the mods to edit the title to “What was Parler?” :D

"Escape Goat" I've heard a few times before, but what is a "Domino Machine"? I tried saying it out loud and didn't figure it out. Deux Ex Machina? What?

Dominion vote counting machines, the ones which stole the election.

Ah, duh! Thanks!

For a moment I thought they meant Lotus Domino servers.

Parler is a sloppily hacked together, joke of a social-media site which has so many security flaws, this just happened.

TL;DR, the entire Parler database, including deleted posts (which weren't actually deleted, just removed from public view), images and their metadata (locations, IP address of uploader etc), account information, and even verified account information has been downloaded and stored in various places online. How do you get a Parler verified account? You upload a copy of the front and back of your driver's license and link it to your account.

I won't link to the online copies of Parler's content, but I don't suppose that it's too difficult to find, should you be curious. There might be a bottleneck on downloading the data, as quite a few law enforcement agencies are probably downloading the information also. If you're wondering why the FBI were so quickly and easily able to populate the no-fly list and take into custody certain people, this is probably part of the reason why.

Congratulations to all involved.

Thanks for bringing on my PTSD.

Parler gets owned
 

https://twitter.com/mattsheffield/st...73748450918402

Look forward to massive Wikileaks-type data dumps.

Truly taking the democratization of free speech seriously by letting anyone be an admin.

Thanks cow_cat.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...-b1785343.html


As the saying goes: oh look it's the consequences of your actions.

Estimates seem to differ between 70 and 80 TB of data.

I don't even think you can post on r/conservative until you give yourself flair showing off your political leanings. This makes it much easier for them to steer the narrative.

Assuming this is real, but if not it would also work as an amazing prank, if one wanted to troll those charming consequence-free speech advocates into abandoning parler.

The people behind this "archiving" are the real heroes.

I am now rather glad I resisted my baser instincts to create a Parler account for the purposes of "trOllZing tEh maGaZ". Parler is now offline, and it looks like nobody is interested in hosting it or being involved in it anymore.

This is being discussed in a few places - here and here. I wonder if a merge is in order.

In their defense, they were really terrible at programming, network security, and data encryption, but if it helps, they also lost their services so fast I don't think they had a chance.

From what I've read in a few spots, it sounds like their 2FA and email verification provider stopped providing them the service. This meant accounts could be created without any registration process at all. Someone used that to figure out how to create an account with admin privileges (I still haven't figured that one out) and then scripted it to make a ton of admin accounts, which have the perms to download everything. They also never actually deleted posts that were "deleted" through the app, they just changed the visibility bit to false. Meaning nothing was ever really deleted and people "verified" their accounts using their state issued ID's. It's just terrible all around.

The right move would have been to just shut it off once you realized your services vendors were dropping you. They didn't, now they'll pay the price.

It's worth reading the twitter feed from https://twitter.com/donk_enby


Python script to create users at https://gist.github.com/d0nk/7251444...9cc69987070e21

So when you say data dump, do you mean only users' posts and perhaps direct messages, or is it email addresses and other confidential user information?

Edit: looking through the twitter account now, apparently it's even location data.

I put this in another Parler-related thread earlier today, it's probably better off here.

So it appears that A LOT of user registration data are now out there, even down to the location, IP Address and maybe even MAC address associated with logins and pictures.

Oops...

The MAC addresses might be tough unless Parler had it as part of the phone registration if you use the app. Network gateways discard layer 2 data as it's only really useful on a local network as far as routing goes.

If I was a Conspiracy Nut, I might think that the FBI created Parler as a trap ...

I was wondering that while I was typing. I thought I saw something on a tweet earlier today mentioning MAC address information. I couldn't locate my source (and even if I could - it's twitter), so that's why I surrounded it with a "maybe". See - conditional language that completely absolves me of any wrongdoing, perceived or implied!

Even so, jpeg pictures tied to jpeg EXIF data tied to accounts tied to the front and back of driving licenses. Oops...

I'm not sure if that would even be such an outlandish CT. Not that I believe it in this case, but haven't they already done this to catch sexual predators, particularly those sharing images and videos of children?

A "sloppily hacked together joke" seems to describe the entire alt-right and gravy SEAL movement at the moment.

Nah, it's a corrolary to Hanlon's Law "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

If I were the FBI and Parler was my trap, I would have kept the doors open as long as possible. Certainly until after the inauguration and at least to for a good period of time after to try to catch more terrorist plans in the works.