Parler getting kicked off AWS is really wild. Don’t get me wrong, AWS has the absolute right to do it, but the fact that they ARE doing it is mostly unheard of.
For sure, the act *itself* makes Parler toxic to every other cloud computing provider with infrastructure in the U.S.
Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure certainly won’t touch them with a ten foot pole. And as much as Parler admins claim they developed the site to avoid vendor lock-in, that’s probably the most expensive way to host on AWS, and is almost certainly not true in real life.
And they have, what, a day to move the site? There’s probably enough data alone to make that impossible, even with Mercer Money. Unless they’ve been backing up offsite to external media (highly doubtful), they likely won’t be able to get all their data out in time.
Given the political connections to Parler (the Mercers), it’s likely that *some* data has been offloaded for data mining & machine learning purposes. The onboarding value (using the martech definition) is high, so that’s almost a given.
(The short martech definition of onboarding: the act of enriching a little bit of personal data from one source with a shit ton more personal data from multiple other sources. Like when Facebook merges your personal profile with data from credit card processors and ad networks.)
Which, yes, they (Facebook) absolutely do. Among a myriad of other sources of personal data, including data purchased from data brokers. Companies that know what stores you visit because you left WiFi and Bluetooth on when you walked in the door. But that’s a different topic.
Anyway, the bottom line: odds are, Parler is deeply fucked. And, as an aside, with the Mercer family involved, it’s almost certainly a honeypot for conservative data because that’s all that family is interested in.
Alright, I’m done nerding out for now.
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With the bounty of raw video and photo files available from the January 6th Capitol terror attack, participants can potentially be identified using the video taken by someone else. Or, more specifically, by identifying who is recording the video.
A thread!
1/9
Every cellphone uses a sensor to convert a visible image (or video) into digital data that is processed to create the final media file. These sensors—and the digital signal they create—are imperfect (because physics). But every sensor is *uniquely imperfect*.
2/9
These imperfections result in digital “noise” in the data. Videos taken by one cellphone can be analyzed to extract a sort of “fingerprint” of the digital noise inherent in that cellphone’s imperfect image sensor. That fingerprint persists, even in videos taken weeks apart.
3/9
Twitter told @verge: “If a government account, like @POTUS, was used to evade @realDonaldTrump’s ban, Twitter said that it would remove the content associated with this behavior and try to remove Trump’s access to this account.”
Protesters are now **inside** the Capitol Building. Senate hearings are suspended.
These MAGA terrorists are now brawling with police inside the U.S. Capitol Building, and trying to get through to the interior chambers.
Doors to the Senate have been locked, Pence and Grassley were whisked away to a secure location, remaining senators instructed to stay away from the doors and remain silent.
New York Times reporter @jennymedina liveblogs, “Georgia election officials have suggested we may not know final numbers until midday tomorrow,” which is true.
But it looks like we’ll know tonight if we won the Senate.
You’d think that Trump’s own DOJ would be shouting from the rooftops about “Hunter’s hard drive” if it was found to be legitimate after a digital forensics analysis. But they’re not.
One thing we do know: the FBI was investigating if it’s a Russian disinformation campaign.
The repair shop owner said the computer (an an external hard drive that appears to have been purchased by the shop after the laptop was allegedly dropped off) was given to the FBI for a grand jury investigation in December 2019.
Also in December 2019: NSA Chief O’Brien told Trump that he believed Giuliani was being targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign in an effort to influence the 2020 election by discrediting Joe Biden.
“The colossal emptiness and lack of meaning of these never-ending events was by no means unintentional. The population should become used to cheering and jubilation, even when there was no visible reason for it…”
German journalist Sebastian Haffner, writing in 1939 about Nazis.
If you wonder why Trump’s rallies all have the same lies, the same lines, and the same call-and-response with the crowd, it’s because it’s effective as a propaganda tool. The impressionable people watching those crowds can be made to feel a sense of belonging when they watch.
Goebbels, head of the “Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,” believed these frequent, flashy events—no matter how devoid of substance—would be a powerful tool to win enthusiastic adherents to the Nazis’ nationalist dogma, even as their own agency was being eroded.