Talk: Millions of content posted or removed from the network are actually publicly accessible

Reminding for all intents and purposes that what is posted on a social network is public, a programmer embarked on the challenge of archiving as much content as possible from Parler, the platform popular with supporters of Donald Trump, and held partly responsible for the assault on the Washington DC Capitol on January 6.

Sometimes described as an unscrupulous hacker, the budding archivist @donk_enby ensures that they only have access to public network data – in the same way, that we can access our tweets ourselves. Issue: Content that was supposedly deleted from Parler remains accessible on company servers.

Parler has not deleted content deleted by its users from its servers

In the United States, it is a real manhunt that is organized to identify the people who stormed the Capitol last week. Seeing the tide turn, many of them try to suppress the evidence of their involvement on the networks, and in particular on Parler, which has been identified as the platform that served to frame what some do not hesitate to call an attempt. coup d’etat.

Anxious not to let the alleged perpetrators get away with it, @donk_enby got it into her head to archive everything she could find on Parler’s servers – only by ” scraping ” public URLs, she recalls.

The result is a rich file of more than a million links, the content of which is for some ” very incriminating “, explains the programmer to the Gizmodo site. Videos, for the most part, always contain metadata and in particular those corresponding to the GPS coordinates of the person holding the camera. In other words: potential evidence of the presence of such and such a user at the Capitol on the evening of January 6.

Talking would aim to develop thanks to influencers

Inaccessible since Amazon Web Services broke its contract with Parler yesterday, the social network is getting organized. Difficult, for now, to know when and even if he will be able to come back online. Still, some Talking projects were also highlighted by @donk_enby during his dig.

In particular, it is about a module reserved for influencers. Indeed, during an interview with CNBC last year, John Matze the co-founder of Parler had expressed the wish to start generating income thanks to the “model” of influencers. The idea was no different from any other social network: to even emerge strong personalities among the users of the network, who would promote products or external companies for remuneration.

Whether the project is still relevant or not, the controversial social network has other more important things on the fire. Although its founder initially assured that Parler would be back online for its users as of today Tuesday, a final message published on Sunday evening (a few hours before AWS disconnected the network) suggested that it could take longer. longer than expected. In question, according to him, the bad press which is made of Parler currently, and which makes close the doors of potential new hosts.

Either way says lawyer Corey Quinn on Twitter, migrating Parler’s servers from AWS to another host could take years.

Via: Gizmodo