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From the very richest Forbes Magazine (reprint) come news of a nefarious plot:
There's no better example of the power, and the terror, inspired by blockchain than Gab.com, the social network used by the accused Pittsburgh synagogue gunman to threaten Jews.
About a month and a half before the alleged gunman made good on those threats by opening fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue and killing 11 people, Gab submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $10 million via an initial coin offering (ICO). The offering, dated September 18, 2018, has so far received commitments to raise $5.6 million in capital for the "free speech" social network, which is a favorite of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other members of the "alt-right."
Since the shooting on Saturday, Gab has been shut down by a host of mainstream services including payment processors Stripe and Paypal, Web-hosting company Joyent and briefly, domain registry GoDaddy. But that might not matter, because Gab has already taken the first step toward freeing itself from dependence on traditional infrastructure and support mechanisms, thanks to its funding via the ethereum blockchain. Ultimately Gab's goal is to build an entire ecosystem beyond the reach of centralized authorities—whether Facebook, Twitter or venture capitalists—making it nearly indestructible. On this, the tenth anniversary of the publication of Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, which gave birth to bitcoin, Gab epitomizes the darker consequences of his vision.
[...] Gab can also use other blockchain services if mainstream providers try to kick it off the internet by refusing to provide critical services. If Gab needs to replace GoDaddy for domain service (the addresses people use to find websites), Ethereum Name Service provides domains for decentralized applications built on the ethereum blockchain. Web hosting? No problem. Ethereum's Substratum provides a decentralized alternative to Joyent. Others have already pioneered the idea. PeepEth is a nascent ethereum-powered social network, and Mastadon is a blockchain-based Twitter.
Previously: Social Media and the Pittsburgh Shooter: Gab.com Going Down
(Score: 2, Troll) by jmorris on Friday November 02 2018, @06:34PM (2 children)
That is actually a very interesting question. My instinct is they are destined for greatness, getting in now would be like being RedHat employee 10. But Torba keeps making very basic bitch mistakes, indicating he still, at this late date, vastly underestimates the forces arrayed against him. And accepting employment at Gab is a success only ticket since you won't work anywhere else again if it fails. If Gab succeeds of course everyone involved will be hailed as heroes and highly sought after. And probably stinking rich.
By mistakes, this week's downtime was entirely a result of his walking unwittingly into a trap. He should have never hosted on Azure in the first place, but when they tossed him he failed to properly vet Joylent's ownership chain. It didn't matter what the sales weasel or even the CEO promised, it would come down to what their owner said and any entity owned by a Fortune 500 must be assumed to be SJW converged and thus unsafe. No contract can protect against the lawless.
He should have also had realtime replication of his database running 24/7 to an undisclosed location protected by VPN from his current host. He has now managed to get his data back twice, but apparently this one has been slowed to a crawl to punish. He should not expect to be so lucky a third time.
He should, at all times, have a bare bones skeleton of his production system, complete with a replica of the database, lurking at an undisclosed location, ready and tested to be able to, at a moments notice, add load sharing nodes and take the full site traffic.
After the dailystormer fisaco, he should have never trusted GoDaddy. For anything. That was just stupid. Thankfully he got lucky.
He still does not understand that his task is to run a high traffic, high availability website under the most adverse conditions anyone has ever attempted to run any website under. And do it with zero ad revenue, zero venture capital, zero access to the financial networks and constant lawfare. If he wins he will defeat Facebook and Twitter and become exceedingly wealthy, and go in the history books as a pivotal figure of this dark chapter of American History. Failure will not be a lot of fun.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Friday November 02 2018, @06:56PM
Ha! "jmorris's instinct"? Ha! Ha! That's a good one! Like miiitary intelligence, or Italian Driving Lessons! Thanks for making me laugh out loud!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02 2018, @09:40PM
IF they can get over their racist affiliations then maybe they have a chance.
Most likely racism is baked into the organization itself and is one of the selling points. If they were truly all about non-censorship then they would have a decentralized platform. As it stands it is a bunch of libertarian fools ranging from deranged racist neo-nazi fucks to freedom loving naive tech bros.
Humanity on average is done with the extreme bigotry and prejudice that has survived for so long. It will never totally go away, but a platform that is at least partially based on such is going to face very tough times. No one wants to associate with genocidal maniacs, even if the person is a care-bear version who probably wouldn't hurt anyone.
Ok ok, only OTHER genocidal maniacs want to associate with each other. And some poor bullied schmucks who seek community and support anywhere they can, even if it means embracing the dark side.