Can Democrats really save us from the ultimate in bad bosses? Well, in this life, perhaps. If we find ourselves in Hell, I don’t the Democrats there can help us. Satan is probably beyond the control of Democrat machine politics. But here? Well, if enough Democrats start seeing people like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer as really bad bosses, it is possible the Democrats can save us.
Do these people look like good bosses?
Well, looks can be deceiving. Heaven help you if you have to negotiate with one of these people. I understand the best businessmen, much less one of their employees, have found them unreasonable.
Is it too late? If — no, when — these people become our bosses of our company, what are the potential problems?
- They don’t take responsibility for making anything work. They constantly engage in name calling and blame casting. Everything is someone else’s fault. Ask Donald Trump.
- They cannot balance a budget. So, if we work for them, we can expect our company to go broke.
- They provide a wonderful benefits package (healthcare and pension), but they cannot fund it.
- They are extremely bossy. Don’t expect them to just give you a job and let you do it. They will monitor you constantly and tie you up in red tape.
- They love to hire numerous expensive consultants and administrators who drive you crazy with paperwork.
- They are not willing let you have your own ideas about anything. So, you will spend hours and hours in long, pointless, and insulting employee bias training courses. If you were not bigoted before hand, they will do their best to make certain you become a bigot.
- They will not reward you for hard work, saving money, or innovation. Instead, they will punish you for making even the smallest mistake. If your job includes managing a budget, that includes punishing you for not spending every cent.
- They reward brown noses and yes women, not productivity. This is called political correctness?
- They are crony capitalists. Instead of fixing the problems they created, they pay off politicians for government bailouts.
- There are even creditable reports that these executives misuse their authority to personally enrich themselves.
- Worst of all? When you are completely depressed, spent and worn out, they will either make you train a cheap imported worker to replace you, or they will ship your job out of the country, preferably to a slave labor camp. If you need a job, you may have to move to the slave labor camp.
So, if you are a stockholder, would you please hire someone else to run the company?
Citizen Tom 
Once again, my immediate reaction to your title — “God help us” because no they can’t!!!
@Julie
I feel the same way, but it is true. Without self-restraint among the People, no People can make a republic work. If Democrats keep making outrageous demands, refusing to respect the rights of others, no one’s rights will be respected.
My prayer is that average folks will wake up, seeing the lunacy as just that or I fear more fringe groups on either side of the divide will continue marauding
I do not know, whether or not any of you is using Parler, the touted free speach / conservative alternative to Twitter. It is about to go down. I want to leave implications for communication aside for the moment (which Tom will likely want to discuss), but give a short important puplic security warning on data safety for now.
For its role in being used to organize the Capitol riots and continued use to organize riots on inauguration day, while not doing enough to moderate calls for violence, its apps have been banned from both Google playstore and Apple’s app store. Now AWS, its cloud service provider, has given it a 24-hour notice that it will be kicked for violations of Amazon’s terms of service, running out sometime Sunday night. That means, unless Parler finds a cloud service provider willing and capable of carrying their network traffic, Parler will no longer be usable, neither by mobile device nor by webbrowser.
Trump and allies seem to scramble to collect contact details from their followers during this grace period, while Parler is still available. If you do think about sharing your data, please take a lot of care. Parler verfied registration required you to tell them your SSN and a copy of both sides of a photo-ID and your phone number. People collecting contact data will at a minimum ask for your name and phone number. By the looks of it, some collections happen by publicly collecting the data, so __any__ user can see them.
So if you consider passing on your contact data to anyone, please make sure, that they are actually connected to whom you want to share your data with, And make sure, they will actually use the data you provide for the purpose you want them to. The Parler registration procedure was a recipe for identity theft, as you both had to trust Parler to not abuse the data and that no hacker would break in and siphon this data, which is way more valuable for criminals than credit card data. I do not know, what others will ask for, even lists of clear names matched to verified phone numbers are valuable tender, both for criminals and legitimate companies. Expect there to be many sharks out there, eager to collect personalised data to abuse later.
And no, I do not have a good solution for this situation, as I do not see one.
Stay safe, everyone.
@marmoewp
So, Big Tech is destroying its competition. Without a trial — condemned by its rabidly partisan competitors — Parler must be guilty as charged?
The word for the day: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/naive
Coincidentally, this happens just after the election of a Democratic Party majority is confirmed. BIG COINCIDENCE!
Assuming Parler is innocent without even knowing it is equally naive.
@marmoewp
Naive? No. Just? Yes.
YEOAUCH!!!
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/parler-capitol-hill-personal-data-b1785343.html
It looks like 70TB of data have been scraped from Parler by hackers. The data includes videos, geolocation data, photo IDs of people using verified accounts and much more. The hackers have made the data publicly available and it is going to be a treasure trove for the FBI, as they look into what happened at the Capitol riot, as the Proud Boys seem to have coordinated their attacks via Parler. Also interested will be criminals looking for data useful in identity theft.
This is a security breach nightmare.
Stop spreading misleading information.
I quote from the following article: https://threatpost.com/parler-archive-amazon-suspension/162928/
“The researcher behind the archival effort, who goes by @donk_enby on Twitter, told Threatpost that no private information was disclosed as part of the effort – all archived posts were already publicly available via the web.”
“On the heels of the Capitol riot, @donk_enby on Jan. 6 began to archive the posts. With Sunday’s news of Amazon stripping Parler from its web hosting service, she ramped up her efforts, saying on Twitter she was crawling 1.1 million Parler video URLs and calling for others to join in on the effort.
Contrary to various reports circulating on Reddit and other internet forums, there is no evidence that Parler was actually hacked; according to reports, @donk_enby was able to reverse-engineer the Parler iOS app, in order to discover a web address that the application uses internally to retrieve data.”
“On Monday, @donk_enby dispelled rumors posted on Reddit forums that said that private data had been scraped as part of the archival effort, reiterating that only content publicly available via the web is being archived. Data such as email addresses, phone numbers, private messages or credit-card numbers were not affected (unless they were publicly posted), she said.”
I consider The Independent to usually be reliable source. It is a relieve, that “Data such as email addresses, phone numbers, private messages or credit-card numbers were not affected”.
What is more, the data contains also items that were “deleted” by the users, which often means that the social media system marks the item as deleted and does not display it any longer to users, but does not physically delete it.
You continue to spread misleading information.
I’ve read the article you’ve linked to twice.
Nowhere does it say that the scraped data includes items marked as deleted.
It’s true that “deleted” items are usually not physically deleted but it is also true that such items are usually not only hidden from the user but that they are no longer publicly accessible.
As stated by the “hacker” herself: only content publicly available via the web is being archived.
So, could you provide us with a source for that information?
Part (1/2) (split to stay within link limit)
I do not remember, where exactly I started reading about the Parler scrape.
This Gizmodo article might be the one closest to the story, as they at least talked to donk_enby. While they do have “deleted parler post” in the title, there is no mention of that within the article.
https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-users-location-dat-1846032466
An article on Mashable claims “She claims she was even able to access content Parler users had “deleted” from the platform themselves because Parler didn’t actually remove the content”.
https://mashable.com/article/parler-archive-user-posts/
(continued in Part (2/2))
Part (2/2)
However, this may well be a misreading of one of donk_enby’s tweets, which stated the following about the video urls she made accessible.
“This may include things from deleted/private posts.”
That much for the reporting. As for deleted stuff claim, this is something that comes from inference. donk_enby has found an interface on a Parler server, where you could access all images and videos posted in chronological order simply by passing interger values to that interface (i.e. access URLs of the form some_parler_server / some_path / some_integer). That interface was accessible without authentication and rate limit. Simply start at zero, get the image, increment, get the next image, and so on. Having an interface like that at all only really makes “sense” [1], if the association between integer and image/video is static. It is my understanding that there was another such interface for posts in chronological order, but I am not sure about that; they may have scraped the posts another way. Anyway, as far as I understand, there were no gaps in the lists of images and videos available, i.e. any such URL did return an image/video, no 404 errors. So from this supposed lack of gaps and the assumption that the association number to media was static, I make the conjecture, that images and videos (and possibly posts) that were publicly posted on Parler at any point of time are all part of the scrape (except for those few percent of data where the scrapers ran out of time), irrespective of whether the user deleted them on the platform in the meantime or not. And yes, this conjecture of mine may well be wrong.
[1] Having this interface at all is a major failure with regard to data security and privacy on Parler’s part. The scrape is testament to this failure.
I appreciate your honesty.
As a programmer I can assure you that I deal with accessing non static items via index all the time. It all depends on the purpose of the API.
Your inference is only one of THREE possible inferences.
1, The caller of the API does not care what the items are.
Example: Get the first 20 images and put them on the screen.
If there are less images, put them all on the screen.
2. The caller of the API does know which index is associated with which item.
That is a scenario which happens quite frequently.
All you have to do is to get these associations through a different API call.
Alternatively, if the caller is dynamically generated, by server side script for example,
the association between index and unique image ID would occure on the server side,
not visible to the user or a client side app.
3. Your scenario: The index is static and always associated with the same item.
As for the reason why the items would be accessed by index, there could be all kind of reasons.
Two Examples:
Performance: Integers are much shorter then long unique ID strings.
Constraints. The length of URLs is limited and one wants to keep URL queries in HTTP GET requests as short as possible.
Since neither you nor I nor the “hacker” know the purpose of the API we cannot say that your inference is the right one.
Remember, the API was discovered through reverse engineering, which by it’s very nature comes without a documentation 😉
The lack of authentication is not necessarilly a security problem.
Again, it the depends on the purpose of the API.
If the purpose of th API is access to publicly available information then lack of authentication is no security risk.
The only downside is that malious callers could cause an explosion in traffic and a server overload.
What I find alarming is that no one (except people like Tom and me) seems to care about the legality of the whole operation.
Most programs have in their license agreements a clause which explicitly prohibits reverse engineering.
When companies associated with Trump or his voters are the target of such operations, concern for the rule of law magically goes out the window.
“What I find alarming is that no one (except people like Tom and me) seems to care about the legality of the whole operation.”
Funny, I do not rember hearing any such concern or reservations from conservatives, when it came to Hillary’s e-mails or Climategate.
“Most programs have in their license agreements a clause which explicitly prohibits reverse engineering.”
IMO, there is a gray area. There is, of course, legitimate interest as the producer to protect your intellectual property. There is, however, also legitimate interest of the consumer to see, whether or not the software is fit for its purpose, which includes whether it is secure and does not include unwanted behaviour. I am aware, that more legal backing is given to the former.
The API donk_enby found makes the Parler server access restrictions look like this 😉
@marmoewp
Until his debate with Biden, Trump did not even know who the Proud Boys were. Without all the publicity from the so-called mainstream news media, nobody would have known who they were, but Liberal Democrats had to have their white supremacist group. Whatever they are, they are not racist.
Anyone stupid enough to put illegal activity on the Internet or even to send text messages of illegal activity to their friends is kind of dumb. Ask the FBI agenda who creating an insurance policy just in case Trump won the election in 2016.
My suggestion is you take a deep breath. Wait. My guess is that this is going to end up being more complicated.
Note that that article has nothing in it about the legality of seizing all that data. Someone doesn’t give a damn. The object is to destroy Parler.
Go on any social media platform and you will find groups using that platform for illegal activity. That’s why those companies want legal protection as platforms, not publishers.
Tom,
Your post reminded me of a Ronald Ragin quote from the past.
I googled the quote which contained a number of other quotes about government and democracy.
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ronald_reagan_128358
What is revealing is that if you ever read Aristotle Politics, you will readily recognize the same or very similar experiences in the Greek experiment of Democracy 2500 years ago is being repeated in our contemporary times in our Democrat Republic in the USA.
I sometimes wonder if we humans have some type of DNA defect programed in us mere mortals that drives us to keep repeating instead of learning from past experiences.
Sad.
Regard and goodwill blogging.