Thread by @stealthbadger

I'd like to offer a few words about why Parler's "Russian IP" is nothing of note to me.

First, the IP belongs to ddos-guard, a CDN (Content Delivery Network). First, a CDN is a service gets content to your site visitors faster through methods which aren't important right now. /1

Well, it kind of is, hrm. There are two ways it makes it faster: 1. by putting copies of often-loaded content closer to the end users, and by using a dedicated network to spread out to places closer to your end users. There's a problem: right now DDOS-guard isn't doing that.

Right now, when you look up Parler.com, the return is a single IP address in Russia. That IP is not in Russia, it's in Belize.

DDoS-guard offers a service where you locate your own address allocation on their network, but this isn't what Parler is doing (yet, and I suspect they never will).

Basically, all we know is that Parler has not committed to using ddos-guard yet, in the sense that they...

aren't using it for anything that would be useful from a technical point of view (with the possible exception of some network filtering). I say that because CDNs really shine when you have a page that makes a lot of calls back to the origin server, but right now...

...it's nothing more than a really crappy group microblog. Speaking of which, here's the latest entry:

Speaking of which, if anyone out there has the Parler app downloaded, I'd be genuinely curious as to what you're seeing. They may feel so badly burned by clients that are out of their control (e.g. a web browser) that they may have dumbed it down. Just covering bases here.

My point is that people tying Parler using a Russian CDN to it somehow being under the thumb of the Russian government, well, that's like you getting thrown out of one bar, going to another one, the bartender putting a coaster under your glass, and someone jumping up...

...and pointing at the coaster, saying "AHA, THE OWNER OF THIS PLACE OWNS YOUR SOUL NOW!"

My point is that the choice of CDN is the least interesting part about this. Focus on things like whether Rebeccah Mercer is still throwing money at Parler: cnn.com/2020/11/15/med…

Because if they're going to an iffy CDN and they're shying away from spending $1K/mo. for a real plan that would put endpoints closer to their clients, it may be that she's not, which would be really big news. /fin

Also: testing with a VPN, that IP address in Belize is what you get pointed at connecting from both US East and West, Bulgaria, Australia and Japan.

That's not a CDN, it's basically a single remote reverse proxy with some traffic filtering thrown in.