Yeah, he's the worst. I knew him in YC, and actually liked him. But I watched him spiral as he wasn't able to raise money for his startup, including starting to go to Trump rallies "out of curiosity". His FB posts began to include worse and worse rhetoric. It was crazy to watch him get radicalized in realtime. It ended in him harassing some (minority) YC founders who said they were scared by saying we should "Build the wall".
I'm a minority, and I feel really fucking stupid that I have to say that so I don't get banned, but how on earth can anyone get expelled for saying they support the policy of the US government?
That is insular to the point of caricature for out of touch democrat staffing aids, not people trying to make money.
Private groups don't have to swear fealty to the government. Individuals are allowed and encouraged to dissent, form groups of dissention, and don't owe it to anyone to grant them access to that group.
Regardless of one's personal politics, insisting "if the government says it's ok, you shouldn't be allowed to reject someone who supports it" isn't really in line with the core ideals of the US, where YC is organized.
Alienating 50% of customers, and lets be honest these are the stupider customers you can more easily monetize, is not a good move for anyone trying to make money, which is the point of a startup.
A well thought out Gab that was politically neutral will be able to steal the most engaged facebook users and then then sell them gold, guns and bibles, or whatever else those folks enjoy in their spare time.
This isn't an issue of morals, it's an issue of money.
Getting into the realm of Reddit tier comments in replying to this...
But in a genuine attempt to clear you up -
The people who made Nazi Germany a thing were "just citizens of Germany supporting the policy of the German government."
Institutions, such as YC, typically tend to have a set of morals/guidelines that they follow (and usually clearly state)
If it so happens that a policy of the US government goes against said morals/guidelines and you're in support of them... as what most see as a pretty important part of being in the US, they're free to give you the boot from their institution.
If they who be booted perceive their bootening as something that is illegal, they're also free to sue. Whether or not that lawsuit is credible/goes anywhere is up to a judiciary.
> Torba had also tweeted a screenshot of another founder’s Facebook comment (the founder’s name was removed) that “being a black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary” with his own comment: “Build the wall.” Then, in another thread, a YC alum alluded to Torba’s behavior without mentioning him by name, prompting him to jump in: “Say my name when you talk about me, coward. Build the wall.”
He wasn't just publicly supporting Trump's border wall policy, he was doing it in an assholeish way, and directing that towards other YC founders. If he'd cut out the assholeish manner and the direction towards fellow founders, and just kept the publicly supporting Trump's policies part, I doubt YC would have responded in the same manner. That's consistent with Kat Manalac's email quoted in the same article – he was banned for behaving in a hostile way, not purely for his political beliefs.
Replying to both your nearly invisible comments: On the one hand, yes, selling things to people is the point.
On the other hand, one does not need to be an ass to one group just to get trade from another. Tim Cook was part of the big tech group that used to meet with Trump, yet managed to maintain corporate policies that are (from my non American POV) stereotypical of the American left.
Just for context, the situation being referenced here is that Gab claims Donald Trump is verified on the platform but the address associated with the account is really the CEO's email (Kuhcoon was his YC company).
Maybe I'm missing some context, but what about that Tweet was disgusting versus just trashy or in poor taste? Compared to some of the crap on Twitter it's pretty tame.
FWIW, regardless of the origins, “poor taste” always seemed to be a more minor condemnation than that when I have witnessed it — things from Frankie Boyle’s standup or Trump’s interior design preferences to the UK Queen announcing austerity while wearing (and sitting on) the royal bling; never
Opinions may differ, but I think refusing to take a journalist seriously because of their religion is pretty disgusting, and goes past mere "bad taste".
Hillary Clinton is one of the most corrupt politicians in American history. She paid off a British informant to start Trump's first impeachment, and has accepted up to $2 billion from the Saudis for her family's foundation.
And Trump has never said a racist thing. If you don't believe me, try to find a single quote. He's called a racist because he blocked corona passengers from the Chinese mainland, and he wouldn't denounce certain groups at the behest of leftists. Makes sense to me.
Exactly this. Opinions apart, the guy is just a giant pain in the behind
If he was that obtuse and verbose about picking website colours he would have been booted the same way but of course a-holes pick the topics they know will cause the most controversy.
He got expelled from YC for saying much worse than that. You can find archived copies of his old social media posts if you really feel like rolling in filth.
It actually does make sense if your goal is not to stop immigration but criminal immigration and drug trafficking. People that could never received a visa in the first place due to a criminal background are who it really keeps out.
SF (and the US tech sphere at large) isn't an environment where people are taught to bridge the divide and understand others who think differently than they do. But booting someone from YC for simply supporting a pretty mainstream viewpoint would be surprising, even in that environment.
Then again, I was downvoted for requesting confirmation of a statement that turned out to be inaccurate. So maybe SF (and the tech zeitgeist to which it is fused) has fallen off that cliff already. He wasn't booted for supporting the wall. He was booted for being an obnoxious asshole to many others, including YC peers.
I don't believe anyone in this thread has expressed surprise that racism and support for building the wall often go hand in hand.
But that doesn't mean all comments supporting a wall are necessarily racist. If you say "we need a border wall to stop cartels from profiting off of human trafficking, and should instead offer more visas for migrant workers from Central America," that's not a particularly racist view.
> SF (and the US tech sphere at large) isn't an environment where people are taught to bridge the divide and understand others who think differently than they do.
You're painting a very diverse group with quite a broad brush. People in SF and the US tech sphere come from all over the place (even outside the US) and from many different backgrounds. People in US tech circles live and work side-by-side with people from all around the world, many of whom have been directly materially harmed by the right's politics. That's not an opinion or some kind of political position; it's a fact of life. From that, I can only assume that most Trump supporters either don't know people who come from different backgrounds, or simply don't care about or actively dislike such people. (And yes, of course there are exceptions to that! I know some of them.)
For my part, I try very hard to understand why people support Trump. The fact that a quarter of the country voted for him last November frankly scares me, and I want to understand why, and find ways to bridge the gap. I personally find support for him back in 2016 pretty understandable (if still a bit gross), but I'm scared for the future of the country that he still maintained so much support through 2020 despite his alarmingly high number of daily lies while he was in office, and his overwhelmingly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-science, anti-rational attitude. Over the past few years, I've talked to several people in person about their support of Trump (and right-leaning policies in general), but (with one single exception) they were all obstinate and unwilling to accept objective facts that conflicted with their ideology, to the point that they'd get defensive and angry and make further conversation pointless.
At this point the only reason I can see to support Trump is that you're so fed up with the establishment that you just want to watch the world burn, even if the guy doing the burning has based nearly all his policy positions on lies, and doesn't actually intend to help his supporters at all.
> But booting someone from YC for simply supporting a pretty mainstream viewpoint would be surprising, even in that environment.
As you noted, he wasn't booted for supporting a mainstream viewpoint; he was booted for harassing other YC founders with his political views, harassment that took a decidedly racist/xenophobic turn.
> But that doesn't mean all comments supporting a wall are necessarily racist. If you say "we need a border wall to stop cartels from profiting off of human trafficking, and should instead offer more visas for migrant workers from Central America," that's not a particularly racist view.
True, but unfortunately the overtly racist calls for a border wall tend to drown out the people who are attempting to be reasonable, so it's understandable for nearly anyone -- especially an immigrant -- to have a negative knee-jerk reaction to the topic.
Beyond that, where's the evidence that a border wall even helps with the things you're talking about? From what I understand, most human (and drug) trafficking takes place by plane or boat, or over land using legal ports of entry. And that's the thing that a lot of us find suspicious: the reasons stated for building a border wall might sound reasonable on the surface, but when you dig more, you find that a border wall doesn't actually make a meaningful dent in the problem being talked about. So then you can only draw one of two conclusions: either the person is woefully ignorant about the benefit of a border wall, or they know that a border wall isn't helpful and are just promoting it for xenophobic reasons. And when someone in the first camp still supports the wall after you give them evidence that it won't solve what they're talking about, they somehow still support it, so you naturally assume that they've actually been in...
Diversity of opinion is about much more than ethnic background. Also, just to be clear, I haven't said anything about Trump in my three other comments in this thread. CTRL+F me.
> As you noted, he wasn't booted for supporting a mainstream viewpoint; he was booted for harassing other YC founders with his political views, harassment that took a decidedly racist/xenophobic turn.
The original comment didn't link to additional information, and simply said the dude was booted for saying "build the wall" to someone else. Seemed like an extreme reaction by YC, so I asked if that's really what happened, which is when the link was provided and more nuance was commented by others. Check the timestamp on my comment. There was another guy, too, who had the same reaction as me at around the same time, but he was downvoted to oblivion for some reason (again, the intolerant SF zeitgeist) so you may not have seen his comment.
> I do admit it's possible they're much quieter voices
Bingo. The extremists on one side are so quick to cancel the extremists on the other side, that the people in the middle just shut up and keep their heads down. The end result is actually a worse public conversation, polarized and undamped.
> Diversity of opinion is about much more than ethnic background.
Agreed, though restricting your interactions (even unintentionally) to people of the same background as you does have a big limiting effect on the kind of opinions you'll have. It's a physical echo chamber for some attitudes.
But you can make the same parallels for other attributes: how many openly LGBTQ people live in heavily conservative areas vs. liberal? Definitely fewer. In many conservative areas, LGBTQ folks literally fear for their lives. As a consequence, conservative people have less experience and understanding of these folks, and that (among other things) leads to fear or even hate.
> Also, just to be clear, I haven't said anything about Trump in my three other comments in this thread. CTRL+F me.
Never claimed you did; no need to be so defensive about this. You suggested that people in the bay area / US tech circles don't try to consider other people's perspectives. Given that most tech people in the bay area are left-leaning, it stands to reason they're not Trump supporters. Regardless, I was merely talking about my own personal experience as someone trying to understand people with (a particular type of) different values from mine, and mostly failing.
As both an former art student and Austrian living in Germany I don't think it is forbidden to think about how Hitler became Hitler.
Because for some time of his life Hitler was just some angry guy until he turned to a fully fledged genozidal fascist dictator.
Hitlers antisemitism was partly created by his rejection in the viennese academy and his hurt ego made him want to pay them back for the rest of his life.
Why should forbid ourselves from talking about that psychological mechanism? Because Hitler is not seen as a human but a demon? Because accepting Hitler as a human would mean this could happen again, with us in the role of the baddies?
When your main reaction to personal rejection is to search for a scapegoat, because you can't handle it otherwise you are going down a similar path. Surely most will calm down on the way, surely most will not do so in a political and historical environment that allows them to become violent or even genocidal, but why not talk about it?
There are many, many, more people who blamed scapegoats or were angry than became Hitler or Hitler-like figures. Likening Torba to Hitler because both of them are angry is an extreme and unproductive association. I think it's enough to say "You should treat people with respect" or "You shouldn't say that Mr. Torba", or even "Andrew Torba is a racist/transphobe/etc" without having to liken him to Hitler.
Hitler didn't switch from angry guy to legitimate problem overnight. He did things like forming a political party replete with armed forces and attempting a coup. I don't think building a mostly-failed Twitter clone is comparable.
I really hate how Sam didn't respond on the first objection about double standards when other founders openly sexually harassed women on the streets and got nothing for that.
Like...what, commentator just made it all up and nobody noticed? Or it actually happened and Sam doesn't have even the minimal plausible excuse?
This thread is really eye-opening about how stagnant the discourse around free speech/wokeness/political correctness has been. Four years later and the conversation would be exactly the same today.
It's cultural trench warfare. We're in a very profitable (for media companies that harvest clicks off of outrage) stalemate.
We need to develop new rhetorical and ideological tools too push the conversation in any meaningful direction. We also need to be able to disseminate them.
He really drunk the kool-aid becoming part of the cult.
It is not everyday you see the CEO of a company saying "Gab Does Not Negotiate With Criminal Demons".
It is a strange use of language so it would be interesting to see what he defines a demon as. If he has said “Gab does not negotiate with evil people” no one would have cared but saying demon criminals brings forth images of horned beings we all see in fantasy movies, perhaps that’s the imagery he was going for.
Someone got freaked out because he said "build the wall"? Oh come on, I think its a magnanimous monument to stupidity but surely someone wouldn't actually be -afraid- after hearing that. Anger, resentment, disgust I understand. However being afraid of these people is ridiculous. Thanks for the article!
Edit: read the article. YC threw him out because he was harassing people, not because he was conservative or threatened anyone. Obviously you have to be respectful and tolerant in a group like YC regardless of your political leanings. I see why he got the boot, his comments were hot garbage.
It's a severe disservice to non-bigoted, non-toxic people who struggle with a myriad of mental health issues to reduce a description of that specific person to "he must be mentally ill".
Though undoubtedly it's entirely possible to be a cancerous individual and also have mental health issues simultaneously.
One of the wisest things I ever heard from a mental health professional:
"There's a normal range of asshole, beyond that, it's mental illness"
There is an entire range of diagnosable mental illnesses, below that there are entire clusters of personality disorders that don't quite raise to the diagnosis of the others.
When it comes to personality disorders, especially, the current consensus of the psychiatric community (for better or worse) is that they're made and formed in childhood. Essentially, many of these people are acting out things that were done to them; quite possibly through no fault of their own in their early development.
Of course the results of their unacceptable behavior is what it is but there is some credence to the theory that these people are suffering in their own right. We're miserable just digesting their thoughts one tweet at a time. Meanwhile they walk around with that all day everyday.
You’re getting downvoted but I think this actually is worth considering.
It doesn’t devalue diagnoses. These categories and labels are to some degree arbitrary, and the underlying conditions are often very elastic and amorphous.
The categories and labels are very helpful in some ways, but it’s unhelpful to rely on them exclusively to inform yourself if someone is having mental issues or not.
I’m not sure if this is what you were touching on or not.
That's what I was going for, was definitely not trying to say people don't have issues. It's helpful to try to treat conditions based on what has helped other people with similar symptoms in the past, but it's still just pattern matching, there is no hard scientific line we can point to and say "this person is bipolar".
When you are on receiving side of the "assholeness beyond normal range", it is significantly destructive.
It does actual real world significant damage to actual real world people who then suffer a lot. If such person have real power, say over salaries and firings, the damage is financial and long term very very quick.
It is not just it is unacceptable in abstract way. It is that innocent people are made suffer.
I believe to be a cancerous individual, there is typically going to be some degree of mental illness manifesting. Most people are nowhere near as angry, aggressive, unreasonable, and perhaps delusional as he is.
He’s a professional, a CEO in the spotlight, and his response has been to act with impotent rage on the internet. There is something wrong with the picture. He’s acting way, way outside the bounds of his professional role and failing to function as a decent person as well. This often indicates some degree of mental illness.
I don’t mean to “reduce” a person to mental illness at all. I think it has broad and important implications rather than the inverse. I also don’t agree at all that one person’s illness can be a disservice to another.
What? A bubble reality where we're all worthy of love, respect and the right to be our most authentic selves? If that's how you define a bubble reality, yes I am. Thank you!
Would you please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with? Obviously we have to ban such accounts. Continuing down this path will get your ban account banned as well, so please don't.
not from usa, but genuinely curious. why is "not talking to X journals" disgusting? many people do that because they don't want to be on a journal with an editorial line they don't like. am I missing something about the guy or the story?
Not talking to a journalist because of their political ideology is understandable to me, although this person probably has a very broad definition of what a communist is.
Not talking to someone based on their religion on the other hand is really quite rude, shallow and discriminatory.
How is that so? Race, sexual orientation, gender, age, sure. Religion on the other hand is no different from ideology (or rather, in my view many left/right-wing ideologies are not very different from religions) - they can be chosen and abandoned freely, and they are prescriptive.
We know you're shocked but might you not have provided at least one comment (the worst, say) as a an example? On a scale of human actions from 1 to 10, how disgusting?
Gab is a joke. I got banned for making a post asking how are all the domestic terrorists Trump supporters doing after the capitol riot. I guess that is ban-worthy on their free speech network while advocating for assassinating public officials is a-ok.
I bet it felt good to create an account for a website just so you could log in and say "how are all the domestic terrorists Trump supporters doing after the capitol riot?".
That's pretty much the online equivalent of peeling-out in your car and thinking it made you look awesome.
With that definition, would you think unlimited spam is also ok? Most likely you got reported by the community and picked up by the same sort of algorithm that exists on every other platform.
Spam would indicate some type of repetitious behavior, or unwanted advertisement. A single snarky comment generally wouldn't be considered spam. Every other platform would be fine with the comment.
They have their own definitions of lots of things.
Free speech, as far as I can tell, to them, means they can make any claim they want, << have nobody challenge them >>, and not have to be consistent or responsible for any consequences.
To them, oppression is someone challenging their claims, at all, ever. They believe it's a form of control and a violation of their core liberties.
You violated that.
I'm a member of DSA and volunteer for leftist anarchist groups like food not bombs. My account on gab is fine because I don't do those things.
You might think debate is what gets to truth. They do not. They believe humans are fundamentally rational and if you let a thousand flowers bloom by "hearing the other side" or the "alternative facts" then the truth will rise among the multitude.
In fact, they think being challenged is so oppressive and against american values that it's in the same category as totalitarianism.
It's the same homo-economicus model that the free market people use. They want to be "free of coercive forces", like say, a rational counterargument so they can use their (alternative) facts and (faulty) logic to promote a "marketplace of ideas".
I'm sure you've heard these phrases before. They aren't being coy, this is what they actually believe.
That's why they have Alex Jones, Pizzagate, Qanon and facilitate quacks talking about free energy, time travel, mole children, etc. It's also why way out there alternative medicine about earth vibrations and celestial magnetism is part of the far right now. Remember those quack doctors and phony covid cures Trump talked about? It's also why Trump's or Marjorie Taylor Greene's behavior doesn't bother them.
It's also why they think militant blood libel white nationalists are just people exercising liberties but someone telling them to use a different pronoun is A Huge Honking Problem.
That's also why when you show them, say, that ping pong pizza has no basement they shrug their shoulders, almost as a challenge like "pshh, you're not going to stop me from my exercising my freedoms!"
You see problems with their models? Good, me too. Dunno what to tell you. If you want to join their party you gotta play by their rules. They're actually pretty chill if you stay in these lanes.
They flocked there claiming they were being censored by other social media networks saying it a bastion of free speech, yet they are censoring too for less than what many of them were banned from other platforms for. I agree with what you're saying, that as long as you kind of tow the line you're fine... but Twitter or a plethora of regular social media networks aren't going to censor me as I'm not providing nefarious health advice, threatening people, or telling minorities and people of a different sexual orientation that they are subhuman.
People on Gab will say far worse, and as long as it aligns with their political beliefs it is fine with Gab. In fact, I think it aligns with the owner's beliefs based on his comments. I just wanted everyone to know it isn't a free speech platform.
> telling minorities and people of a different sexual orientation that they are subhuman.
Remember what I said about about "facilitating speech"? The kinds of people who think in strict eugenicist hierarchies are welcome in the "let a thousand flowers bloom" model.
If you get a chance to go to a rally or watch one on youtube, I recommend it, especially when they have open speech time. People get up there, say the wildest things in the world, like decoding bible passages to decipher stock tickers as an investment strategy, and they give them their time. So of course racist nonsense is welcome as well.
They have values and principles in a comprehensible framework of mutual respect (again, a totally different kind) as long as you take the time to understand it.
Now to the rest:
Would you believe they have different definitions of "censor" as well as "politics"?
Everything they say makes sense in their head. I promise.
But what's in their head is pure madness.
For instance, a woman I was listening to back in April, stay with me for all of it, said we should stay home for covid because she believed covid is fake and was invented by trump so he could do "the storm" and arrest the hidden pedophile network. She thought it was her patriotic duty to stay home during the fake virus so the secret plan could happen. Really... she ends up doing the right thing but the reasons are just padded-room level insane.
So far removed from reality.
It's a truly broken way of dealing with the world but they didn't ask for you to pull them out of cartoonland and they're actually happy there. So make gab a trip to the petting zoo and don't fight the animals.
Dude you are disconnected from reality. First off, you're taking the worst of a group (which exist in every group), and extrapolating their beliefs & actions as the norm across the entire group. You obviously believe this is the norm from your words.
> To them, oppression is someone challenging their claims, at all, ever.
This is entirely backwards. The right is extremely open to debate, but are banned from platforms owned by the left. Hence new popular platforms popping up to cater to them. The left is literally using every ounce of power they have to silence debate (Twitter bans, un-reported news stories from mostly left-owned media, etc). They don't even believe the peasants should be able to dictate the topics of conversation, which is why they jam narratives down peoples throat and use cancel culture to punish anyone speaking against them.
Also, what's the "faulty" logic aspect you mention in regards to a marketplace of ideas? It more-so sounds like your cognitive dissonance is kicking in once some common-sense logic is used to knock down your beliefs.
Absolute total rubbish. Every word. A few quick hits
> Twitter bans
They don't want to be accused of "inducement", the same kind that got Kim Dotcom locked up. Bullshit posts leading to death and murder will come back to the platform owners - there's precedence with tabloid press cases. That's what they are doing here. Not facilitating brazenly illegal acts, it's from the lawyers. Silk road guy is sitting in jail for simply providing a marketplace. The platform providers have legal responsibilities.
> the peasants should be able to dictate the topics of conversation
Total nonsense. Their agenda is constructed by think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, AEI, the Cato institute, the Heartland institution, all backed by powerful multinational billionaire media moguls and heads of industry. SPN and Sinclair isn't "peasant directed".
Salem media group practically owns the AM band of radio with hundreds of stations doing nationally syndicated talk shows that pay their hosts millions of dollars to pretend like they're some poor working class oppressed group. They Are The Only Voice On AM Radio. Who is oppressing them when they're the only voice?
Rush Limbaugh died with $600 million. They own almost all of it and pretend like they're some snappy underdog.
Second, the left doesn't even have a major political party, how do they have any power?
How many Socialist or Communist party senators are there? 0. How many have there ever been? 0.
When was the last time there was a Peace and Freedom governor? A Green Party president, heck even a Party for Socialism and Liberation dog catcher? Hasn't happened since literally the 1930s.
Absolute and total made up nonsense.
Also the liberals and the left are oppositional. They killed each other in the Paris commune, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish civil war, and the French revolution so go learn the difference, they hate each other.
You can go do that on gab and parler and I'll be ok with it there but on hn the rules are about verifiable reality.
This is why the "thousand flowers bloom" "marketplace of ideas" petting zoo model is so toxic.
People get pilled on multiple 7-layer bullshit cakes
Oh one last thing, "common-sense logic" is when people invent stuff entirely from thin air, refuse to check for validation, testing, verification or any evidence and automatically believe it must be real.
Then they "disagree" with measured, quantifiable, quantitative, verifiable analysis by calling that "personal beliefs".
Take the wacko medical theories during covid for instance. Real data wasn't as important as the most comfortable fiction.
When shown to be wrong they'll make up excuses, play with word definitions, move goal posts, anything at all Except for updating their beliefs. Because their made up story feels true so they try to force their perception of reality to fit.
This same method was used by the Tobacco industry and Exxon on climate change. It's like how religious people say how a lack of evidence is only a test of your faith. The lack of evidence is the evidence.
Speaking of religion, it's also how completely baseless free market theory took hold as well. In fact milton friedman penned numerous essays about how evidence based analysis disrupts the purity of thought when people did quantitative studies showing him wrong. He said his made up logic was way more important than actually testing it.
That's why the Chicago school taking over policy has been a total disaster. Because they decided to stop looking at actual results and consequences.
So no, common sense logic is totally made up and the fantasies it leads to doesn't mean anything except in the head of the person saying it.
Actually it would be more equivalent to showing up at a Blue Lives Matter event in a pig costume. There are content creators dedicated to similar content and it does make them look pretty awesome in my opinion.
I’m not a gab user, a Republican, or even an American for that matter. But it strikes me that what the situation seems to call for is more compassion and constructive discourse, but you seemingly wanted to harass people online under the guise of free speech.
I think I understand why that would lead to being banned just about anywhere. It doesn’t serve anyone in any useful way.
I don’t believe they should allow advocating assassination either, but I wouldn’t pretend these things are equivalent or that gab is politically unbiased. Regardless, what you were doing was unnecessary in its own right and i don’t see how it’s much different from what you’re criticizing.
Give me a break. Free speech means you don't get banned for talking about violations to election laws or a politician's dirty laundry or FBI crime stats or even a well referenced book highlighting differences between races. All of these are bannable offenses on current social media sites. In Gab's case, if you wanted to debate why you disagree with any of these issues, you'd not be banned if you were arguing in good faith. This is quite contrary to many leftist tech platforms these days.
Free speech is not outright trolling or spamming get rich quick schemes or pumping meme stocks, as is popular of late. And it never has been. Though censorship has gotten out of hand - mostly from the left- few sites have ever allowed this type of stuff, and most worked hard to keep it off their sites.
I don’t just disagree with them. They’re dangerous to me and most of the people I care about. It’s not about judgment, it’s about protecting myself and the other people they hate.
I'm not sure it is really outright trolling, when the FBI director said that it was indeed far-right groups that were responsible for the capitol riot and not antifa or whomever they're blaming.
RSA is dead. RSA remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?
If one were to posit that we are in fact living in a simulation of some sort, breaching god would probably look something like a method to gain host bare-metal memory access or code to escape from a virtual machine.
I use gab quite frequently but mainly for the memes and jokes. The vast majority of people on there use pseudonymous aliases anyways so no one cares if the site gets hacked. People on the right-wing have also been subject to extensive persecution (harassment, doxing etc.) from the left-wing so we're all quite used to it by now.
I'm been trying to teach as many people as possible about how to stay anonymous online, how to use high-privacy tools and why using technologies like monero is extremely important.
Do you think the average user, whose passwords are things like "password", used an email address that couldn't be tied to then to sign up? Because my guess is that a whole bunch of people do very much care that the stuff they wrote on gab can be traced back to the email account they use everywhere.
>> extensive persecution from the left-wing
Check your biases if you think this is somehow a one directional concern.
No one using the platform even cares. Everyone on the platform just shares memes and jokes anyways. The people using gab aren't stupid like the people who use facebook where they put all their personal information out in the open for all to see.
> There's also the risk of incorrectly assuming that a presence in the breach implies your views have some degree of alignment with those regularly expressed on the site, yet clearly based on the presence of my own email address, that assumption is incorrect.
I've seen comments elsewhere saying something to the effect of "Gab is just a bunch of right-wing terrorists, who cares if their personal info gets hacked"
There are plenty of everyday people who have Gab accounts, some just wanted to reserve their username, others (like Troy Hunt) don't post about politics, others were just checking it out and haven't posted anything. It would suck if their info was leaked and they started getting spammed even though they have no connection to illegal activity.
Fortunately Troy took steps to limit searching for email addresses, I hope others with full access are just as cautious.
Ironically enough, I saw someone make a post on another site I read where they were saying in order to exploit cancel culture and doxing, they were working on a bot that would scrape public data from facebook profiles (mainly the name and profile picture) and then have that bot cross create the account on gab and parler. Then the bot would go and repost content from the site and add comments. The idea is that other people would come to the website looking to doxx people or harass people but the reality is the people they would be trying to harass are just fake profiles that the individual person never actually made.
It is kind of interesting to think about because if you go on facebook, you can see lots of people using their real facial picture and real first name, last name and the people doing the doxing/harassments don't really put much thought into how that profile account was created.
If you just want to know how the breach[1] happened: it was SQL injection, where string interpolation was used to construct a query, rather than use parametrized queries.
I thought bcrypt had built in salts, how was he able to reverse those hashes for simple passwords? Any better algorithm to use or recommendation on salting?
Salts have virtually nothing to do with the security of password hashes. Unix password hashes have essentially always be salted; they're cracked with dictionary generators, not with rainbow tables.
As you know (but others might not) salts aren't (just) for stopping rainbow tables. They also mean that two users picking the same password doesn't result in identical hashes. That's often a more meaningful protection than stopping rainbow tables.
The salts are typically stored together with the data, as is the case here. So, if you want to see if the first password is 'password', you salt it with the first salt and hash it with bcrypt. If the result matches, you know with a huge degree of confidence[0] that indeed the first password was 'password'. You can easily do this for the entire dataset, and for a few more common passwords.
[0] of course, there is a chance that you just discovered a hash collision, but that is exceedingly unlikely. It also means that Gab would have accepted 'password' as the password for that user anyway, even if the string they typed in was 'warblerer' (which it would also accept).
> [0] of course, there is a chance that you just discovered a hash collision, but that is exceedingly unlikely. It also means that Gab would have accepted 'password' as the password for that user anyway, even if the string they typed in was 'warblerer' (which it would also accept).
I don't think password policy enforcement can be reasonably done after the hashing. You cannot apply password rules as information about length and specific characters is lost; applying a blacklist would also be exceedingly expensive as you'd need to hash each word in your list with the selected salt.
I don't understand how your comment relates to what you are quoting.
Password policy enforcement is done on the plain text password, during initial account creation or during a password change workflow. Then, the password and salt are hashed and the result and the salt are stored.
When the user tries to login they then provide the plaintext password; the salt is retrieved, it is added to the password, the result is hashed, and the hash is compared to the stored hash.
Since the space of all passwords is larger than the space of all hashes, there is a theoretical possibility that the user can provide a different password than the original plaintext, and this new plaintext + the salt happens to have the same hash, so the login system (which has no idea what the original plaintext was) will accept it.
With any halfway decent cryptographic hashing function this is less likely than winning every lottery in the world at once with the same ticket.
Let's assume that the Gab user used a long and complicated password, that happened to hash-collide with "password". How do you know that Gab would have accepted "password" as a password? All we know is that it accepted the long and complicated one.
This is obviously moot, as a collision is exceedingly unlikely in this case, but still.
Some people like to add "pepper" in addition to salt. Salt would be a unique value that's combined with each password. Pepper is a global secret combined with the unique salt, that is not stored near the passwords (e.g. stored in a config file). The idea being in an sql injection, you can typically dump the entire db but not config files or anything else. Of course if they totally take over your server you are still just as screwed, and if you have sql injections you likely have other vulns too.
It doesn't seem right that the big players like Facebook and Twitter enjoy much better security. Is there really no open source offering that just gets this stuff right? A Twitter-in-a-box, like WordPress is a blog-in-a-box, but secure this time?
Apparently Gab used Mastodon. Is Mastodon intrinsically hard to secure?
No, we can't conclude that yet. Gab modified their instance heavily from Mastodon code over several years. People are also pointing to an addition made by Gab, where an SQL query is used without input sanitization, as a possible culprit for the breach.
SQL injection that was used for the breach was introduced after the fork. We know that for sure because the source code was public, as is required by AGPL Mastodon uses.
This is a pretty non-political rundown from Troy, and a great read as always. It's not always easy to find trustworthy people, but he's one of them.
If anyone is offended by supposed political leanings in this article, I'd suggest separating Torba's political views from his words. Blaming a data breach on "mentally ill tranny demon hackers" (his words, not mine) is not a sane or rational thought. The most realistic scenario is that he knows exactly what he's saying and is doing so simply to rile up fanatics, because otherwise he actually believes that and should be in an institution. I'm not sure which one is worse.
>The most realistic scenario is that he knows exactly what he's saying and is doing so simply to rile up fanatics,
I don't know, if there's one thing I've learned from Q-anon and other modern cultists is that they are who they tell you they are. There's no need for mental gymnastics on our part to explain awful behaviour away.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the grifters who are parroting the qanon lingo in some sort of short term attempt to make a buck or gain a following, and the true believers. In the end, if it causes the same effects by poisoning rational public discourse, does it matter whether somebody is cosplaying as a qanon believer or not?
On the other hand it was revealed from a 2019 video that Alex Jones hates Trump, while publicly pretending to love the guy to appeal to it's target audience; my guess is that he does believe a few of the nonsense claims he makes on his show but not all; but like the sibling comment says the difference may not matter at all.
> Blaming a data breach on "mentally ill tranny demon hackers" (his words, not mine) is not a sane or rational thought.
I still think it's overly sensitive to get caught up on it. People say a lot of things when they're in distress, or angry - so what. Grow some skin (I would say balls but someone might get offended :rolleyes: (oops I forgot I might offend people without skin)).
Some bit of gossip about the CTO of Gab, seeing as how I've got a bit of context. (Throwaway, for obvious reasons.)
The CTO was never a software engineer. They were a developer advocate so had some interaction with code, but was more of a "talk to developers using things and make sure the requirements were passed along to the dev team" sort of guy, rather than someone that knew his technical details (beyond say, the thing he was actively working on) inside and out.
Fosco started out pretty reasonable. When Trump was first elected, he did a "talk to a conservative" series, and while there was the expected disagreement, it was a pretty, civil, positive, well-received olive branch overall. However, like a lot of right-leaning folks in the Trump era, he became more extreme as time went on.
I had some reasonably close interactions with Fosco (not going to go into details with how), but it was being kind of clear that he had started to buy into the "Fox News caricature of what someone on the left is like" — to the point of putting words into the very people's mouths he'd so civilly made a point of talking to prior — and surrounding himself with like-minded folks. For all the talk of "diversity" that he had (and indeed, initially fostered!) he became pretty much the sort of caricature, albeit one of the opposite side of the spectrum, that he was deriding.
In that sense, while there's a lot of holier-than-thou and disgust that the whole Gab situation prompts, I feel pity and sadness more than anything else. Fosco was a decent guy at one point, but even decent people can end up in their own echo chambers. It's unfortunate to see the state that he's in now.
For what it's worth, I'm not actually surprised you left Facebook when you did. A solid half year of covid meant that you stopped having to interact with folks, in person, that might've reminded you what real people that disagree with you are like, rather than just the caricatures.
If you actually think you're as good as you are, I'd dare you to do the "talk to someone that thinks differently than you". I wouldn't be surprised if you'd learn a thing or two. :)
It's odd to me that you think I've insulated myself with only people that think like me. It's like you don't know me at all. I'm literally the person who reached out and had 60 different meetings with all sorts there, and continued to maintain bipartisan group chats. Try to realize that you appear to be the one who thinks I'm a caricature.
> I'm literally the person who reached out and had 60 different meetings with all sorts there,
Yup, and I commended you for it. However, that was in 2017. I don't know how carefully you read my original comment, but it can be summarized up as "Fosco started out great, but he's been slowly getting worse". :)
> and continued to maintain bipartisan group chats.
I'd ask you to poll the folks there about how representative of the political spectrum the folks in those chats think they are and if they think any of the parts of the political spectrum are missing from those chats.
I don't know very many people in this world who would call this past year one of their best. This false bravado barely masking the petulance from being called out publicly is really not a good look for you. Maybe your god-emperor can pull off deflecting his own failures in this manner, but you surely cannot.
I am not sure that is necessary. These guys know how the game is played. The alt-right has turned into an ecosystem of performative trolls all trying to out troll one another. They then leverage the infamy/fame into interviews, speaking gigs, book deals, etc... They all pretend to be outraged when they get banned from twitter, but they were purposefully toeing the line knowing full well that the inevitable ban would lead to a few headlines that they can then leverage to build their brand. And as Troy Hunt has shown, even in the middle of a security incident, they can't dare drop the facade, it would be bad for business.
For someone who opens with "I only care about the data", at least half of the "analysis" is about politics, including the links tweets which range from his opinions on whether you can change your gender, to categorizing gab users as "neo-nazis".
All I see are a bunch of people allying with big tech to crush their competitors while using absurdly hypocritical morals as their reason. This is the same big tech that uses slave labour while plastering their websites with BLM slogans.
Seems like the author is implying but not directly saying the hashed passwords were not salted. Am I reading that right, and does anyone know if they were salted?
The string output from the bcrypt function always contains a 22-character salt embedded within it, so these are salted. This is placed after an initial algorithm identifier (i.e. $2a$) and an adjustable cost used to generate the output string (i.e. 10$). There's an overview of the structure of the output string here if you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt
However, if your password is "password" or another very common password, then someone can just try those with the embedded salt and still find out that was your password.
You'd still have to crack each password individually though, right? i.e. for row 1 I would need to try X passwords from my password dictionary, and for each of the attempts bcrypt the guess with the given salt and check to see if worked, and then repeat that for each row individually, rather than checking every row simultaneously.
Troy has a fair take. Ultimately the Gab breach is interesting, good material for an analysis like this one, and won't matter particularly in the future.
At a guess, the people on Gab are there because they feel like they are under sustained political attack. This breach will be interpreted as further evidence that they are under sustained political attack. It won't make anyone behave differently - although I hope Gab hires a security expert.
Thanks for mentioning Popper’s paradox, I looked it up just now and its scenario has been on my mind for a long time. Now I can just refer to it, in a fashion like Dunning-Kruger.
Popper is often misunderstood. He was a passionate advocate of free speech and rational argument; when he said "intolerance" he was referring to people who would use violence to suppress free speech:
> for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
And even while explaining the paradox, he expressed his opposition to censorship in general:
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Popper has a point, but that particular quote has become an albatross around the neck of any discussion concerning censorship and cancel culture, to the point that it could very well be its own internet 'law'.
GP's point of mentioning it was a preemption of the inevitable citation that someone might trot out as a cudgel against further dialogue.
“Being intolerant of intolerance” is one of those funny social paradoxes we grapple with somewhere around sixth grade. And yet we need to. No way I just tolerate your 6th grade BS directed towards me, for example.
Actually formulating and calibrating the behaviors and responses that allow a suitably tolerant society (and tolerant of what exactly) is intriguing and seemingly worthy. Getting people to agree to taboos is one part of the negotiation. There’s a fairly well-reasoned article out there on how the less-tolerant and highly motivated end up steering society. The motivation and vigor of the intolerance matters a lot.
> No way I just tolerate your 6th grade BS directed towards me, for example.
I didn't downvote you, and I generally avoid the downvote feature. I was providing an explanation as to why you might have been downvoted. I'm not sure how I came across as immature, or unreasoned to you.
Pretty sure I've read the article you're referencing (topped HN at some point in the past few months, I think). Was it this?
193 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread(Edit: His comments were worse than I let on; here's the full context https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-booted-...)
That is insular to the point of caricature for out of touch democrat staffing aids, not people trying to make money.
Here's the full comments: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-booted-...
Racist bullying isn't new of course, but this particular phrase is fairly new.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/local/school-bu...
Regardless of one's personal politics, insisting "if the government says it's ok, you shouldn't be allowed to reject someone who supports it" isn't really in line with the core ideals of the US, where YC is organized.
A well thought out Gab that was politically neutral will be able to steal the most engaged facebook users and then then sell them gold, guns and bibles, or whatever else those folks enjoy in their spare time.
This isn't an issue of morals, it's an issue of money.
But in a genuine attempt to clear you up -
The people who made Nazi Germany a thing were "just citizens of Germany supporting the policy of the German government."
Institutions, such as YC, typically tend to have a set of morals/guidelines that they follow (and usually clearly state)
If it so happens that a policy of the US government goes against said morals/guidelines and you're in support of them... as what most see as a pretty important part of being in the US, they're free to give you the boot from their institution.
If they who be booted perceive their bootening as something that is illegal, they're also free to sue. Whether or not that lawsuit is credible/goes anywhere is up to a judiciary.
> Torba had also tweeted a screenshot of another founder’s Facebook comment (the founder’s name was removed) that “being a black, Muslim or woman in the USA is going to be very scary” with his own comment: “Build the wall.” Then, in another thread, a YC alum alluded to Torba’s behavior without mentioning him by name, prompting him to jump in: “Say my name when you talk about me, coward. Build the wall.”
He wasn't just publicly supporting Trump's border wall policy, he was doing it in an assholeish way, and directing that towards other YC founders. If he'd cut out the assholeish manner and the direction towards fellow founders, and just kept the publicly supporting Trump's policies part, I doubt YC would have responded in the same manner. That's consistent with Kat Manalac's email quoted in the same article – he was banned for behaving in a hostile way, not purely for his political beliefs.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/12/pro-trump-ceo-gets-booted-...
On the other hand, one does not need to be an ass to one group just to get trade from another. Tim Cook was part of the big tech group that used to meet with Trump, yet managed to maintain corporate policies that are (from my non American POV) stereotypical of the American left.
Really?
"As per my policy of not communicating with non-Christian and/or communist journos, I will not be replying to this non-story. "
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1366954798524887042
If I showed someone a crime scene photo they might be "disgusted" but they won't say it's "bad taste".
If you want to see a YC alumnus with silly comments, read Sam Altmans's link about his political leanings. What a tool:
https://blog.samaltman.com/the-2016-election
Hillary Clinton is one of the most corrupt politicians in American history. She paid off a British informant to start Trump's first impeachment, and has accepted up to $2 billion from the Saudis for her family's foundation.
And Trump has never said a racist thing. If you don't believe me, try to find a single quote. He's called a racist because he blocked corona passengers from the Chinese mainland, and he wouldn't denounce certain groups at the behest of leftists. Makes sense to me.
If he was that obtuse and verbose about picking website colours he would have been booted the same way but of course a-holes pick the topics they know will cause the most controversy.
They could not find a better name than Bookface?
(It’s not as if the border wall makes any logical sense, since the southern border is too long to wall off, and the majority of illegal immigration is visa overstays anyway (https://apnews.com/article/48d0ad46f143478d9384410f5ae3d38b))
Then again, I was downvoted for requesting confirmation of a statement that turned out to be inaccurate. So maybe SF (and the tech zeitgeist to which it is fused) has fallen off that cliff already. He wasn't booted for supporting the wall. He was booted for being an obnoxious asshole to many others, including YC peers.
I don't believe anyone in this thread has expressed surprise that racism and support for building the wall often go hand in hand.
But that doesn't mean all comments supporting a wall are necessarily racist. If you say "we need a border wall to stop cartels from profiting off of human trafficking, and should instead offer more visas for migrant workers from Central America," that's not a particularly racist view.
You're painting a very diverse group with quite a broad brush. People in SF and the US tech sphere come from all over the place (even outside the US) and from many different backgrounds. People in US tech circles live and work side-by-side with people from all around the world, many of whom have been directly materially harmed by the right's politics. That's not an opinion or some kind of political position; it's a fact of life. From that, I can only assume that most Trump supporters either don't know people who come from different backgrounds, or simply don't care about or actively dislike such people. (And yes, of course there are exceptions to that! I know some of them.)
For my part, I try very hard to understand why people support Trump. The fact that a quarter of the country voted for him last November frankly scares me, and I want to understand why, and find ways to bridge the gap. I personally find support for him back in 2016 pretty understandable (if still a bit gross), but I'm scared for the future of the country that he still maintained so much support through 2020 despite his alarmingly high number of daily lies while he was in office, and his overwhelmingly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-science, anti-rational attitude. Over the past few years, I've talked to several people in person about their support of Trump (and right-leaning policies in general), but (with one single exception) they were all obstinate and unwilling to accept objective facts that conflicted with their ideology, to the point that they'd get defensive and angry and make further conversation pointless.
At this point the only reason I can see to support Trump is that you're so fed up with the establishment that you just want to watch the world burn, even if the guy doing the burning has based nearly all his policy positions on lies, and doesn't actually intend to help his supporters at all.
> But booting someone from YC for simply supporting a pretty mainstream viewpoint would be surprising, even in that environment.
As you noted, he wasn't booted for supporting a mainstream viewpoint; he was booted for harassing other YC founders with his political views, harassment that took a decidedly racist/xenophobic turn.
> But that doesn't mean all comments supporting a wall are necessarily racist. If you say "we need a border wall to stop cartels from profiting off of human trafficking, and should instead offer more visas for migrant workers from Central America," that's not a particularly racist view.
True, but unfortunately the overtly racist calls for a border wall tend to drown out the people who are attempting to be reasonable, so it's understandable for nearly anyone -- especially an immigrant -- to have a negative knee-jerk reaction to the topic.
Beyond that, where's the evidence that a border wall even helps with the things you're talking about? From what I understand, most human (and drug) trafficking takes place by plane or boat, or over land using legal ports of entry. And that's the thing that a lot of us find suspicious: the reasons stated for building a border wall might sound reasonable on the surface, but when you dig more, you find that a border wall doesn't actually make a meaningful dent in the problem being talked about. So then you can only draw one of two conclusions: either the person is woefully ignorant about the benefit of a border wall, or they know that a border wall isn't helpful and are just promoting it for xenophobic reasons. And when someone in the first camp still supports the wall after you give them evidence that it won't solve what they're talking about, they somehow still support it, so you naturally assume that they've actually been in...
> As you noted, he wasn't booted for supporting a mainstream viewpoint; he was booted for harassing other YC founders with his political views, harassment that took a decidedly racist/xenophobic turn.
The original comment didn't link to additional information, and simply said the dude was booted for saying "build the wall" to someone else. Seemed like an extreme reaction by YC, so I asked if that's really what happened, which is when the link was provided and more nuance was commented by others. Check the timestamp on my comment. There was another guy, too, who had the same reaction as me at around the same time, but he was downvoted to oblivion for some reason (again, the intolerant SF zeitgeist) so you may not have seen his comment.
> I do admit it's possible they're much quieter voices
Bingo. The extremists on one side are so quick to cancel the extremists on the other side, that the people in the middle just shut up and keep their heads down. The end result is actually a worse public conversation, polarized and undamped.
Agreed, though restricting your interactions (even unintentionally) to people of the same background as you does have a big limiting effect on the kind of opinions you'll have. It's a physical echo chamber for some attitudes.
But you can make the same parallels for other attributes: how many openly LGBTQ people live in heavily conservative areas vs. liberal? Definitely fewer. In many conservative areas, LGBTQ folks literally fear for their lives. As a consequence, conservative people have less experience and understanding of these folks, and that (among other things) leads to fear or even hate.
> Also, just to be clear, I haven't said anything about Trump in my three other comments in this thread. CTRL+F me.
Never claimed you did; no need to be so defensive about this. You suggested that people in the bay area / US tech circles don't try to consider other people's perspectives. Given that most tech people in the bay area are left-leaning, it stands to reason they're not Trump supporters. Regardless, I was merely talking about my own personal experience as someone trying to understand people with (a particular type of) different values from mine, and mostly failing.
Because for some time of his life Hitler was just some angry guy until he turned to a fully fledged genozidal fascist dictator.
Hitlers antisemitism was partly created by his rejection in the viennese academy and his hurt ego made him want to pay them back for the rest of his life.
Why should forbid ourselves from talking about that psychological mechanism? Because Hitler is not seen as a human but a demon? Because accepting Hitler as a human would mean this could happen again, with us in the role of the baddies?
When your main reaction to personal rejection is to search for a scapegoat, because you can't handle it otherwise you are going down a similar path. Surely most will calm down on the way, surely most will not do so in a political and historical environment that allows them to become violent or even genocidal, but why not talk about it?
Hitler didn't switch from angry guy to legitimate problem overnight. He did things like forming a political party replete with armed forces and attempting a coup. I don't think building a mostly-failed Twitter clone is comparable.
Includes comments from Sam Altman and Torba, posting as rvcamo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12935057
Like...what, commentator just made it all up and nobody noticed? Or it actually happened and Sam doesn't have even the minimal plausible excuse?
We need to develop new rhetorical and ideological tools too push the conversation in any meaningful direction. We also need to be able to disseminate them.
Edit: read the article. YC threw him out because he was harassing people, not because he was conservative or threatened anyone. Obviously you have to be respectful and tolerant in a group like YC regardless of your political leanings. I see why he got the boot, his comments were hot garbage.
Though undoubtedly it's entirely possible to be a cancerous individual and also have mental health issues simultaneously.
"There's a normal range of asshole, beyond that, it's mental illness"
There is an entire range of diagnosable mental illnesses, below that there are entire clusters of personality disorders that don't quite raise to the diagnosis of the others.
When it comes to personality disorders, especially, the current consensus of the psychiatric community (for better or worse) is that they're made and formed in childhood. Essentially, many of these people are acting out things that were done to them; quite possibly through no fault of their own in their early development.
Of course the results of their unacceptable behavior is what it is but there is some credence to the theory that these people are suffering in their own right. We're miserable just digesting their thoughts one tweet at a time. Meanwhile they walk around with that all day everyday.
It doesn’t devalue diagnoses. These categories and labels are to some degree arbitrary, and the underlying conditions are often very elastic and amorphous.
The categories and labels are very helpful in some ways, but it’s unhelpful to rely on them exclusively to inform yourself if someone is having mental issues or not.
I’m not sure if this is what you were touching on or not.
It does actual real world significant damage to actual real world people who then suffer a lot. If such person have real power, say over salaries and firings, the damage is financial and long term very very quick.
It is not just it is unacceptable in abstract way. It is that innocent people are made suffer.
Mental health issues are just mental patterns that fall outside the bounds of what we've decided to call "normal".
Torba definitely qualifies imo.
He’s a professional, a CEO in the spotlight, and his response has been to act with impotent rage on the internet. There is something wrong with the picture. He’s acting way, way outside the bounds of his professional role and failing to function as a decent person as well. This often indicates some degree of mental illness.
I don’t mean to “reduce” a person to mental illness at all. I think it has broad and important implications rather than the inverse. I also don’t agree at all that one person’s illness can be a disservice to another.
Unfortunately he's not wrong...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Not talking to someone based on their religion on the other hand is really quite rude, shallow and discriminatory.
I'm not surprised. Parler and Gab were just thrown together, and made themselves hugely attractive sites to attack.
That's pretty much the online equivalent of peeling-out in your car and thinking it made you look awesome.
Unless trolling doesn’t count as free speech?
Free speech platform so long as it doesn't step on any in-group toes.
Free speech, as far as I can tell, to them, means they can make any claim they want, << have nobody challenge them >>, and not have to be consistent or responsible for any consequences.
To them, oppression is someone challenging their claims, at all, ever. They believe it's a form of control and a violation of their core liberties.
You violated that.
I'm a member of DSA and volunteer for leftist anarchist groups like food not bombs. My account on gab is fine because I don't do those things.
You might think debate is what gets to truth. They do not. They believe humans are fundamentally rational and if you let a thousand flowers bloom by "hearing the other side" or the "alternative facts" then the truth will rise among the multitude.
In fact, they think being challenged is so oppressive and against american values that it's in the same category as totalitarianism.
It's the same homo-economicus model that the free market people use. They want to be "free of coercive forces", like say, a rational counterargument so they can use their (alternative) facts and (faulty) logic to promote a "marketplace of ideas".
I'm sure you've heard these phrases before. They aren't being coy, this is what they actually believe.
That's why they have Alex Jones, Pizzagate, Qanon and facilitate quacks talking about free energy, time travel, mole children, etc. It's also why way out there alternative medicine about earth vibrations and celestial magnetism is part of the far right now. Remember those quack doctors and phony covid cures Trump talked about? It's also why Trump's or Marjorie Taylor Greene's behavior doesn't bother them.
It's also why they think militant blood libel white nationalists are just people exercising liberties but someone telling them to use a different pronoun is A Huge Honking Problem.
That's also why when you show them, say, that ping pong pizza has no basement they shrug their shoulders, almost as a challenge like "pshh, you're not going to stop me from my exercising my freedoms!"
You see problems with their models? Good, me too. Dunno what to tell you. If you want to join their party you gotta play by their rules. They're actually pretty chill if you stay in these lanes.
People on Gab will say far worse, and as long as it aligns with their political beliefs it is fine with Gab. In fact, I think it aligns with the owner's beliefs based on his comments. I just wanted everyone to know it isn't a free speech platform.
> telling minorities and people of a different sexual orientation that they are subhuman.
Remember what I said about about "facilitating speech"? The kinds of people who think in strict eugenicist hierarchies are welcome in the "let a thousand flowers bloom" model.
If you get a chance to go to a rally or watch one on youtube, I recommend it, especially when they have open speech time. People get up there, say the wildest things in the world, like decoding bible passages to decipher stock tickers as an investment strategy, and they give them their time. So of course racist nonsense is welcome as well.
They have values and principles in a comprehensible framework of mutual respect (again, a totally different kind) as long as you take the time to understand it.
Now to the rest:
Would you believe they have different definitions of "censor" as well as "politics"?
Everything they say makes sense in their head. I promise.
But what's in their head is pure madness.
For instance, a woman I was listening to back in April, stay with me for all of it, said we should stay home for covid because she believed covid is fake and was invented by trump so he could do "the storm" and arrest the hidden pedophile network. She thought it was her patriotic duty to stay home during the fake virus so the secret plan could happen. Really... she ends up doing the right thing but the reasons are just padded-room level insane.
So far removed from reality. It's a truly broken way of dealing with the world but they didn't ask for you to pull them out of cartoonland and they're actually happy there. So make gab a trip to the petting zoo and don't fight the animals.
> To them, oppression is someone challenging their claims, at all, ever.
This is entirely backwards. The right is extremely open to debate, but are banned from platforms owned by the left. Hence new popular platforms popping up to cater to them. The left is literally using every ounce of power they have to silence debate (Twitter bans, un-reported news stories from mostly left-owned media, etc). They don't even believe the peasants should be able to dictate the topics of conversation, which is why they jam narratives down peoples throat and use cancel culture to punish anyone speaking against them.
Also, what's the "faulty" logic aspect you mention in regards to a marketplace of ideas? It more-so sounds like your cognitive dissonance is kicking in once some common-sense logic is used to knock down your beliefs.
> Twitter bans
They don't want to be accused of "inducement", the same kind that got Kim Dotcom locked up. Bullshit posts leading to death and murder will come back to the platform owners - there's precedence with tabloid press cases. That's what they are doing here. Not facilitating brazenly illegal acts, it's from the lawyers. Silk road guy is sitting in jail for simply providing a marketplace. The platform providers have legal responsibilities.
> the peasants should be able to dictate the topics of conversation
Total nonsense. Their agenda is constructed by think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, AEI, the Cato institute, the Heartland institution, all backed by powerful multinational billionaire media moguls and heads of industry. SPN and Sinclair isn't "peasant directed".
Salem media group practically owns the AM band of radio with hundreds of stations doing nationally syndicated talk shows that pay their hosts millions of dollars to pretend like they're some poor working class oppressed group. They Are The Only Voice On AM Radio. Who is oppressing them when they're the only voice?
Rush Limbaugh died with $600 million. They own almost all of it and pretend like they're some snappy underdog.
Second, the left doesn't even have a major political party, how do they have any power?
How many Socialist or Communist party senators are there? 0. How many have there ever been? 0.
SPUSA, the largest socialist political party holds ZERO seats in any office, local county, district, state, federal. Z e r o. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_USA
When was the last time there was a Peace and Freedom governor? A Green Party president, heck even a Party for Socialism and Liberation dog catcher? Hasn't happened since literally the 1930s.
Absolute and total made up nonsense.
Also the liberals and the left are oppositional. They killed each other in the Paris commune, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish civil war, and the French revolution so go learn the difference, they hate each other.
You can go do that on gab and parler and I'll be ok with it there but on hn the rules are about verifiable reality.
This is why the "thousand flowers bloom" "marketplace of ideas" petting zoo model is so toxic.
People get pilled on multiple 7-layer bullshit cakes
Then they "disagree" with measured, quantifiable, quantitative, verifiable analysis by calling that "personal beliefs".
Take the wacko medical theories during covid for instance. Real data wasn't as important as the most comfortable fiction.
When shown to be wrong they'll make up excuses, play with word definitions, move goal posts, anything at all Except for updating their beliefs. Because their made up story feels true so they try to force their perception of reality to fit.
This same method was used by the Tobacco industry and Exxon on climate change. It's like how religious people say how a lack of evidence is only a test of your faith. The lack of evidence is the evidence.
Speaking of religion, it's also how completely baseless free market theory took hold as well. In fact milton friedman penned numerous essays about how evidence based analysis disrupts the purity of thought when people did quantitative studies showing him wrong. He said his made up logic was way more important than actually testing it.
That's why the Chicago school taking over policy has been a total disaster. Because they decided to stop looking at actual results and consequences.
So no, common sense logic is totally made up and the fantasies it leads to doesn't mean anything except in the head of the person saying it.
I think I understand why that would lead to being banned just about anywhere. It doesn’t serve anyone in any useful way.
I don’t believe they should allow advocating assassination either, but I wouldn’t pretend these things are equivalent or that gab is politically unbiased. Regardless, what you were doing was unnecessary in its own right and i don’t see how it’s much different from what you’re criticizing.
it's different because it's an intentional jab at the hyprocracy - free speech, yet bans those who don't agree with the site's concensus.
Free speech is not outright trolling or spamming get rich quick schemes or pumping meme stocks, as is popular of late. And it never has been. Though censorship has gotten out of hand - mostly from the left- few sites have ever allowed this type of stuff, and most worked hard to keep it off their sites.
"God Has Been Breached"
First RSA falls, now god, what's next.
I'm been trying to teach as many people as possible about how to stay anonymous online, how to use high-privacy tools and why using technologies like monero is extremely important.
>> extensive persecution from the left-wing
Check your biases if you think this is somehow a one directional concern.
Conservatives are the new untermensch in this dystopian technocracy.
If you strip away all that it is still a very embarrassing breach. Having a data exfiltration of that magnitude is simply devastating.
I've seen comments elsewhere saying something to the effect of "Gab is just a bunch of right-wing terrorists, who cares if their personal info gets hacked"
There are plenty of everyday people who have Gab accounts, some just wanted to reserve their username, others (like Troy Hunt) don't post about politics, others were just checking it out and haven't posted anything. It would suck if their info was leaked and they started getting spammed even though they have no connection to illegal activity.
Fortunately Troy took steps to limit searching for email addresses, I hope others with full access are just as cautious.
It is kind of interesting to think about because if you go on facebook, you can see lots of people using their real facial picture and real first name, last name and the people doing the doxing/harassments don't really put much thought into how that profile account was created.
Dont let your dreams be dreams
Ah, you must be a fellow C++ programmer.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/rookie-coding-mistak...
Thanks, I guess. Whoops, more noise.
The only thing that works are better passwords. But in theory Argon2 should be a bit better than bcrypt.
[0] of course, there is a chance that you just discovered a hash collision, but that is exceedingly unlikely. It also means that Gab would have accepted 'password' as the password for that user anyway, even if the string they typed in was 'warblerer' (which it would also accept).
I don't think password policy enforcement can be reasonably done after the hashing. You cannot apply password rules as information about length and specific characters is lost; applying a blacklist would also be exceedingly expensive as you'd need to hash each word in your list with the selected salt.
Password policy enforcement is done on the plain text password, during initial account creation or during a password change workflow. Then, the password and salt are hashed and the result and the salt are stored.
When the user tries to login they then provide the plaintext password; the salt is retrieved, it is added to the password, the result is hashed, and the hash is compared to the stored hash.
Since the space of all passwords is larger than the space of all hashes, there is a theoretical possibility that the user can provide a different password than the original plaintext, and this new plaintext + the salt happens to have the same hash, so the login system (which has no idea what the original plaintext was) will accept it.
With any halfway decent cryptographic hashing function this is less likely than winning every lottery in the world at once with the same ticket.
This is obviously moot, as a collision is exceedingly unlikely in this case, but still.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(cryptography)
https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v3#SearchingPwnedPasswordsByR...
Apparently Gab used Mastodon. Is Mastodon intrinsically hard to secure?
Specifically, this was the commit (from a mirror of the repository): https://git.rip/gab/gab-social/-/commit/6e42e3b1eca73c306db1...
If anyone is offended by supposed political leanings in this article, I'd suggest separating Torba's political views from his words. Blaming a data breach on "mentally ill tranny demon hackers" (his words, not mine) is not a sane or rational thought. The most realistic scenario is that he knows exactly what he's saying and is doing so simply to rile up fanatics, because otherwise he actually believes that and should be in an institution. I'm not sure which one is worse.
I don't know, if there's one thing I've learned from Q-anon and other modern cultists is that they are who they tell you they are. There's no need for mental gymnastics on our part to explain awful behaviour away.
I still think it's overly sensitive to get caught up on it. People say a lot of things when they're in distress, or angry - so what. Grow some skin (I would say balls but someone might get offended :rolleyes: (oops I forgot I might offend people without skin)).
The CTO was never a software engineer. They were a developer advocate so had some interaction with code, but was more of a "talk to developers using things and make sure the requirements were passed along to the dev team" sort of guy, rather than someone that knew his technical details (beyond say, the thing he was actively working on) inside and out.
Fosco started out pretty reasonable. When Trump was first elected, he did a "talk to a conservative" series, and while there was the expected disagreement, it was a pretty, civil, positive, well-received olive branch overall. However, like a lot of right-leaning folks in the Trump era, he became more extreme as time went on.
I had some reasonably close interactions with Fosco (not going to go into details with how), but it was being kind of clear that he had started to buy into the "Fox News caricature of what someone on the left is like" — to the point of putting words into the very people's mouths he'd so civilly made a point of talking to prior — and surrounding himself with like-minded folks. For all the talk of "diversity" that he had (and indeed, initially fostered!) he became pretty much the sort of caricature, albeit one of the opposite side of the spectrum, that he was deriding.
In that sense, while there's a lot of holier-than-thou and disgust that the whole Gab situation prompts, I feel pity and sadness more than anything else. Fosco was a decent guy at one point, but even decent people can end up in their own echo chambers. It's unfortunate to see the state that he's in now.
The perceived support of a community is addictive. Hope you'll realize at some point what you're giving up to feed that addiction.
If you actually think you're as good as you are, I'd dare you to do the "talk to someone that thinks differently than you". I wouldn't be surprised if you'd learn a thing or two. :)
Yup, and I commended you for it. However, that was in 2017. I don't know how carefully you read my original comment, but it can be summarized up as "Fosco started out great, but he's been slowly getting worse". :)
> and continued to maintain bipartisan group chats.
I'd ask you to poll the folks there about how representative of the political spectrum the folks in those chats think they are and if they think any of the parts of the political spectrum are missing from those chats.
I am not sure that is necessary. These guys know how the game is played. The alt-right has turned into an ecosystem of performative trolls all trying to out troll one another. They then leverage the infamy/fame into interviews, speaking gigs, book deals, etc... They all pretend to be outraged when they get banned from twitter, but they were purposefully toeing the line knowing full well that the inevitable ban would lead to a few headlines that they can then leverage to build their brand. And as Troy Hunt has shown, even in the middle of a security incident, they can't dare drop the facade, it would be bad for business.
All I see are a bunch of people allying with big tech to crush their competitors while using absurdly hypocritical morals as their reason. This is the same big tech that uses slave labour while plastering their websites with BLM slogans.
However, if your password is "password" or another very common password, then someone can just try those with the embedded salt and still find out that was your password.
You'd still have to crack each password individually though, right? i.e. for row 1 I would need to try X passwords from my password dictionary, and for each of the attempts bcrypt the guess with the given salt and check to see if worked, and then repeat that for each row individually, rather than checking every row simultaneously.
At a guess, the people on Gab are there because they feel like they are under sustained political attack. This breach will be interpreted as further evidence that they are under sustained political attack. It won't make anyone behave differently - although I hope Gab hires a security expert.
I mean aren't they? I don't see another intellectually honest way of framing this. And yes, I'm aware: Popper's paradox, fighting fascism, etc., etc.
> for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
And even while explaining the paradox, he expressed his opposition to censorship in general:
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Discussio...
GP's point of mentioning it was a preemption of the inevitable citation that someone might trot out as a cudgel against further dialogue.
Actually formulating and calibrating the behaviors and responses that allow a suitably tolerant society (and tolerant of what exactly) is intriguing and seemingly worthy. Getting people to agree to taboos is one part of the negotiation. There’s a fairly well-reasoned article out there on how the less-tolerant and highly motivated end up steering society. The motivation and vigor of the intolerance matters a lot.
I didn't downvote you, and I generally avoid the downvote feature. I was providing an explanation as to why you might have been downvoted. I'm not sure how I came across as immature, or unreasoned to you.
Pretty sure I've read the article you're referencing (topped HN at some point in the past few months, I think). Was it this?
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309925 - March 2021 (744 comments)
Rookie coding mistake prior to Gab hack came from site’s CTO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319649 - March 2021 (312 comments)