Parler? Not Today.

Parler is French for "talk," but today the Twitter clone for Republican terrorists is singing like a canary, according to Dell Cameron in Gizmodo. The cheaply engineered and hastily cobbled together service where Republicans planned, celebrated, and exhaustively documented last week's coup attempt has been canceled by every third party provider that had any connection with it. Apple and Google yanked the app from their app stores, Twilio and Okta shut down its notification and authentication services. And finally Jeff Bezos himself reached down from his flying dragon lair high above Mt. Rainier and laid the Quivering Palm Death Touch upon it, in the form of an AWS ban with a 24 hour clock. 

A day doesn’t sound like much time, but Parler pulled off the messiest death in social media history and vomited up every bit of data it ever collected before it went offline—70 terabytes of boss loot including geotagged videos of users breaking into the Capitol, publicly posted identification linking users to their real world identities, and even media that users thought they had deleted. A hacker who goes by @donk_enby organized an ad-hoc downloading effort to push everything that had ever been posted on Parler to Archive.org. The total data transfer from everyone participating peaked at about 50 gigabits per second. Reddit users also alleged that Parler's entire auth system was compromised after Okta dropped it, allowing millions of admin accounts to be created, but that is disputed. According to @donk_enby, none of that was even necessary for the archiving effort, which just relied on uploaded media being numbered sequentially and not requiring any authorization to fetch, two dumb mistakes that are even dumber together. 

Parler's CEO John Matze claimed the service was built on "bare metal" and the AWS ban wouldn't keep them down for long, but if they were using a third party for something as core as user auth, that is definitely a lie. At press time, Parler has been dropped by every vendor up to and including its lawyers, and my prediction is that it will only return in the form of evidence. Hard to believe that a company who thought "Twitter, But Worse" was a good VC pitch could have ended this way.

Whom’s’t Canceled Trump So Far: Stripe, Twitter, the game of golf, Chevron, Axe Body Spray, January 10th Chris Christie (but not January 9th Chris Christie), and noted radical leftists The National Association of Manufacturers. Jealous? Well now YOU can ban the President too, thanks to Adi Robertson!

With everyone deplatforming white supremacists, Ben Smith thought it was a good time to reminisce a little about his former BuzzFeed coworker, white supremacist influencer Baked Alaska, whom he doesn't quite name, perhaps because of the tiny little voice at the bottom of his conscience trying to tell him this story is badly timed and indefensible. At least we learn that BuzzFeed was really good at social media. Like... really good. So good that maybe it was actually bad? That's pretty good right? 

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Andrew Yang unexpectedly ends his run for NYC mayor with incredibly dumb quote. WhatsUp with WhatsApp? Today in Crabs.  Send your yarn remnants, get back a pair of dope socks (via BLACKBIRD SPYPLANE).

This Weekend’s Main Character: “Racist daddy hat girl.” No… stop… stop. You don’t need to know any more about this person.

Today’s Song: V.I.C. “Wobble,” via this great Tiktok.

~Bon, répétez: Où est l'onglet? Où. Est. L’onglet?~

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