70 TB of information collected in Parler data scrape

N.B. I'm not applauding or condoning what has transpired.

On Sunday, before Amazon web hosting pulled the plug on Parler, some hackers downloaded 70 Terabytes of information, including deleted posts, private messages, images with EXIF data intact, and the drivers licenses of Parler's "Verified Citizens."

The mechanics of how it was accomplished has been posted to Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/kuqvs3/all_parler_user_dat...

By my calculations, this would mean that the download cost Parler at least $7700

In semi related news, Parker has filed a lawsuit against Amazon for unlawful termination of services.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

.... a lot like public utilities, these days. They should probably get out of the business of hosting.

Parler's intellectual property was lifted while on Amazon's servers. No doubt, the CIA has the run of the place.

The only thing for certain in this world is that information wants to be free.

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22 users have voted.

____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Pluto's Republic's picture

...may provide more context:

PARLER USERS UNKNOWINGLY GAVE AWAY THEIR PERSONAL DATA IN VIDEOS THEY UPLOADED ILLEGALLY STORMING CAPITOL HILL

Insurrectionists that stormed Capitol Hill and uploaded videos to the right-wing social media app Parler gave away their GPS coordinates to the app.

That data has now been scraped and archived by researchers, who could use the data to help identify criminals.

Many rioters including the Proud Boys - a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group – shared videos on the app, but hacker “@donk_enby” on Twitter has shown that the metadata (information about the content uploaded, such as number of megapixels in the videos or rotation) includes GPS positioning.

‘There is nothing you can do to prevent what’s already happened. All you can do is prepare for the fallout’ — a message from the North Central Florida Patriots Telegram chat reads

@Pluto's Republic

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19 users have voted.

____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
usefewersyllables's picture

@Pluto's Republic

the perfect honeypot, dunnit? Hmm.

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15 users have voted.

Twice bitten, permanently shy.

Pluto's Republic's picture

@usefewersyllables

People are being arrested up and down the East Coast.

It's important for people to remember that this is a psyop. A message is being sent.

Don't think with your emotions and you won't get bamboozled.

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14 users have voted.

____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

@Pluto's Republic

as a streetcorner in daylight. There is NO privacy or security on the internet. DARPA project, after all.

Makes me miss the days of pre-net dial-up bulletin boards. No corporations involved profiting off them (at least not the ones I knew), plus it required at least a special warrant for phone taps (on landlines only; cellphones are wide open to surveillance: all it takes is a Stingray, no warrant needed).

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17 users have voted.
enhydra lutris's picture

@pindar's revenge

I believe that The Well was a corp, but maybe a non-profit, and Compuserve ran on H&R Block's servers. FIDO net boards were owned by whomever owned them, however. Also, a lot of Usenet & UUnet ran on university and research labs' servers, many iwht DARPA links. I remember writing a bang path from my home machine, ag@spot, to a buddy on the well that had a ton of links through places like pyramid technology, TI, and the like.

be well and have a good one

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0 users have voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@enhydra lutris

On a FIDOnet board, and there were some local-exchange BBS's. It was fun. People yelling at you for wasting bandwidth. Too much long-distance charges for The Well. But nowadays long distance is cheap. Time to revive these non-internet venues.

I think FIDOnet still might have a remnant operating through the web.

Good times, buddy.

BTW, I use a slip of aluminized mylar (just about any chip wrapper these days) in my wallet to help block RFID. Any plastic/metal wrapper like most chip bags these days makes a nifty Faraday cage. Just make sure you turn off your cell or it will run the battery out trying to connect.
I'm thinking of getting an exterior coat with wifi-blocking paint; maybe just 2 or 3 walls. Radio might be an issue.

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1 user has voted.
CB's picture

social media focused startups/companies are effectively subsidiaries of the CIA. Just Google In-Q-Tel. The spooks can navigate the 'clouds' at will.

Within the decade, computers will be nothing but terminals - all long term storage requirements and communications will be forced to utilize the 'cloud'. Next will be a required bio-chipping to gain access to these 'services'.

Of course this will be only done for your convenience and safety.

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21 users have voted.

@CB

Like using store "loyalty cards". I never have a problem asking at checkout to use the anonymous store card, I just don't accumulate "loyalty points" for shit I don't want.

I have no trouble avoiding the cloud. Hard drives are cheap. OTOH, I don't know how many "services" still manage to actively profile me.

But yeah, Apple is in the forefront of pushing people to use their devices as thin clients for the megacloud. So I buy external optical drives and hard drives and thumb drives.

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15 users have voted.

@pindar's revenge

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5 users have voted.

I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness
I've been buying food and essentials online. I've always avoided that before, both because I want to stay low-profile and because I want real stores to stay open. I probably have a ton of profiles now. Maybe there's a "cleaning service" for that crap?

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0 users have voted.

it tries to copy my hard drive to 'my' cloud service. Since I'm sure the guy who gave me his machine when he gave up WOW - and then shot himself - would never sign up for such a service I have no idea how to access it - if Microsoft gave him one without his consent, which they probably did.

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15 users have voted.

On to Biden since 1973

bondibox's picture

@doh1304 Apple is constantly trying to get me to upload my stuff to the cloud. No, thanks.

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13 users have voted.

F the F'n D's

Pluto's Republic's picture

@doh1304

and freeze my Apple ID. And I have extensive Apple devices that are now cut loose from the matrix and floating blind in cyberspace. I couldn't get things to stop syncing and the cloud to stop hacking my security system. My user experience database developed multiple personality disorder.

I'm sure once I complete my Ph.D. in computer science, I'll be able to go back in there and line edit the operating system to instruct the cloud not to cannibalize my intellectual property and revise my bookmarks. /snark

(This is a big moment for me. I thought I was the only one.)

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14 users have voted.

____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
snoopydawg's picture

@Pluto's Republic

I just bought a new iMac because my other one is so old and clunky and it keeps freezing on me. But I haven’t set it up yet because my mind isn’t in to it right now. But I’m betting that it’s going to come with things I don’t want it to do. Sigh. I remember way back when apple 1st started and was a better company. I had one of the first Macs made. A whole 8mgb of memory or was that the hard drive?

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10 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@doh1304
It took me three hours to install in a VM. Most of that was declining to be serviced, I mean "services".
It's still HUGE compared to win7 and XP looks negligible. I only bought a license to run TurboTax. I might just use FreeFile fillable forms instead.

my advice: install Linux. Start with Ubuntu, fedora, or Debian to get used to it then move to a version that you control instead of IBM, first on my mind: Gentoo and FreeBSD. Avoid systemd if at all possible, which leaves the big three out.

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8 users have voted.

I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness and incentive to get off my duff and get Linux installed.

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4 users have voted.

Well, it eventually came to this. Remove the website. And according to reports, no other hosting company wants any part of this. Only recourse is to host the website themselves. When Alex Jones was wiped off social media, were all of this posts, etc also deleted? No need for re-education camps, prisons, etc, just totally disappear the dissentient and make sure their voice is never heard.

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12 users have voted.

@MrWebster for the Great Orange Satan (the other one, not Trump). We're still here.

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4 users have voted.

@MrWebster
Biden is Big Brother. Hillary is Big Mother ______

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2 users have voted.

I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

Perhaps Wikileaks could contact Trump and offer the that they will not publish the information hacked from Parler if he pardons Julian Assange. I am not aware that Wikileaks has the information or even if the supposed hack is true but it would be one method of Julian regaining his freedom.

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5 users have voted.
Bob In Portland's picture

Trust no one, especially Snowden. Mr. Privacy. Not.

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1 user has voted.
Pluto's Republic's picture

@Bob In Portland

... you are smearing him.

His message is not "Trust me" as you imply.

Setting him up as a strawman is neither ethical nor fair.

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3 users have voted.

____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
earthling1's picture

Who would give up their drivers lic. info just to post on Parlor? If the right wing rubes fell for that, they deserve what happened.
On the other hand, after Spring Break 2020, the cel phones present at a certain beach on the east coast were all tracked to determine the spread of partiers going home, under the guise of tracking the spread of the Covid virus. I saw a graphic of it and it was quite a wide-ranging dispersal.
What struck me was the ability to track individual phones in mass and create a visual of it. Clearly, they can follow those phones right to their owners hand.
The ramifications of this are identical to the "Gorgon Stare" surveillance from above.
Like a time machine that can go back in time,
because every bit is stored away forever.
Big brother is here already, watching, recording, tracking. And it cannot be avoided.

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5 users have voted.

Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

enhydra lutris's picture

@earthling1 Yerba_Mate

can't. of course use the phone while it is in the bag, but nobody can find, read or track it either.

be well and have a good one

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2 users have voted.

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

earthling1's picture

@enhydra lutris
Thanks for the tip.
Now, how to mitigate the everwatching eye in the sky.

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1 user has voted.

Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.