We live in wild times. Absolutely unbelievable, what’s happened in the span of one week. So much precedent being set, too.

I find the Parler takedown especially fascinating. Yes, there’s schadenfreude because many awful humans are using it to hurt people, but it is also a glimpse into all the logistical and technical elements that make a modern social site “go”, who can cut them off, and how fast.

We watch malware site and infrastructure takedowns all the time, but those are often LEO backed and not normally like, web presences with MFA and legitimate payment processing.

Web services are way more complex than a website in 2005. You don’t just need a registrar, ISP, and host. You have to consider DNS services, DDoS protection, scalable cloud services, support apps, auth providers.... and big sites often use an array of redundant providers.

It’s been really interesting to see how each one of those providers cutting off service to Parler has interfered with their ops and cybersecurity, and how fast they were visibly impacted. It will be even more interesting to see what is recoverable and what is not.

It’s a peek at web vulnerability and redundancy we only usually see in bits and pieces, like during cloudflare or AWS outages.

Anyway, that’s why I’ve been sharing so much about what I’ve been reading about it.