FCC Should Prove DDoS Attacks Stopped Net Neutrality Comments (networkworld.com) 104
New submitter Michelle Davidson writes: After John Oliver urged viewers of HBO's Last Week Tonight to fight again for net neutrality and post comments in support of it, people hit a wall — the FCC's site essentially crashed. Originally, it was believed that the number of people trying to access the site caused the problem, but then the FCC released a statement saying "multiple" DDoS attacks -- occurring at the same time Oliver sent viewers to the site -- caused the site to crash: "These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC." The group Fight for the Future doesn't buy it, though, and wants proof. It says the FCC should release the logs: "The FCC should immediately release its logs to an independent security analyst or major news outlet to verify exactly what happened last night. The public deserves to know, and the FCC has a responsibility to maintain a functioning website and ensure that every member of the public who wants to submit a comment about net neutrality has the ability to do so. Anything less is a subversion of our democracy." No word yet from the FCC on whether it will release its logs, leading the interwebs to speculate about whether it was actually an attack to prevent commenting or if the FCC is ill-prepared to handle large amounts of traffic and blamed DDoS attacks to cover their inabilities. People are even questioning whether the FCC's tech team knows what a DDoS attack is.
Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahem, it's known as the right to petition.
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Keep in mind this is not a referendum
And thus it is pretty much useless. A politician will ignore unfavorable results, but proclaim positive feedback as a mandate.
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A politician will ignore unfavorable results, but proclaim positive feedback as a mandate.
I would recommend not reelecting politicians who ignore results or misinform people, I know radical thought, but maybe it will catch on if people get interested in keeping their democracy.
Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Insightful)
So you equate Democracy is Oligarchy? Because I can tell you for certain that Oligarchy doesn't care about anything but what Oligarchy can use to fulfill its dream to fully enslave all of humanity. Democracy however cares about hearing every voice and interpreting the meaning of the voice and then acting upon the majority's harmony.
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And a comment form on a website does a lousy job of providing any reasonable sampling of the majority. Nor does democracy actually typically yield good results. It's a good thing the US is a representational republic and not a democracy.
Just look at Trumps multiple survey's. That...oh wait he actually claims they were rigged because people didn't give the answers he wanted.
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Now I'm curious - what are some examples of democracy delivering substantially worse results than a republic? I've heard lots of fear-mongering over the dangers of democracy, but can't think of many actual examples.
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as opposed to a republic... (Score:3)
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I agree that we are a representative Republic rather than a true Democracy. In fact offhand I can't think of any nation-state scale "democracies" in modern times.
And for your classic "two wolves and a sheep" quote - that's exactly the sort of "common-sense" hyperbole we hear a lot of - but what substantial evidence is there that it's rooted in fact? Or for that matter that it's any worse, even in theory, than the current de-facto alternative of "a few wolves and a whole herd of sheep having mutton for din
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And which of those has this administration, as a whole, been showing lately?
During the 2012 election there was some news articles about Republicans trying to shake off the "old, rich, white-guy" persona since they had once again lost to - in their minds - the devil incarnate. Fast forward 4 years and they've doubled down on the persona. The FCC under Pai so far has been faithfully serving the partisan agenda, favoring big business over the little guy and public interests.
Re:Hyperbole (Score:5, Funny)
Anything less is a subversion of our democracy.
No, it's not. Democracy doesn't give a shit about comment forms on a website.
If Democracy doesn't give a shit, then perhaps they should stop hosting comment forms on their websites.
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They really should. God knows nobody actually reads them. I think those comment forms are kind of like the "close door" button on elevators. It's there to make people feel like they're doing something, but it's not actually connected to anything.
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They really should. God knows nobody actually reads them. I think those comment forms are kind of like the "close door" button on elevators. It's there to make people feel like they're doing something, but it's not actually connected to anything.
We're not talking about whitehouse.gov here.
Many government agencies, the FCC among them, are required by law to seek public comment on regulatory changes, and to actually read and consider all of the comments submitted. No, the decisionmakers don't actually read every one of the tens of thousands of comments submitted, but staffers do, and they create summaries that identify all of the points raised by the commenters, and how many raised them, and the decisionmakers do read those and take the public opin
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The "close door" button on the elevators I use works just dine. The undeniable evidence? When someone already in the elevator presses it, they can indeed get the doors closed before I can get from the "up" button two elevators over. Yeah, it works. And they don't want me to ride with them. It's THEIR damned elevator, and I am not welcome. I don't look like them, and they remember the last time they let someone different on.
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What exactly does 'democracy giving a shit' look l
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Which is more telling? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is more telling; lots of people trying to post comments for net neutrality or some organizations trying to block those people from posting those comments?
Re:Which is more telling? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironic side note: If net neutrality were abolished, ISP's could legally throttle access to the FCC site, effectively blocking people from posting these comments.
No DOSS attacks needed to prevent people from speaking out against ISP's.
Re:Which is more telling? (Score:4, Insightful)
they could also hinder access to politically progressive or liberal sites while giving the fake news at big-business friendly fox or breitbart a free pass... hell, with sufficient packet sniffing, they could zero in on reddit's pro-trump subs and allow those while making the rest of reddit load like cat videos streaming on siberian dialup... nix any page that is anti-company.... don't worry, we aren't giving them any ideas, they've already come up with this and a whole lot more that they're just chomping at the bit to implement -- of course, without telling us anything about it either.
Re:Which is more telling? (Score:5, Insightful)
they could also hinder access to politically progressive or liberal sites while giving the fake news at big-business friendly fox or breitbart a free pass... hell, with sufficient packet sniffing, they could zero in on reddit's pro-trump subs and allow those while making the rest of reddit load like cat videos streaming on siberian dialup... nix any page that is anti-company.... don't worry, we aren't giving them any ideas, they've already come up with this and a whole lot more that they're just chomping at the bit to implement -- of course, without telling us anything about it either.
You could do all this, or you could just pay Facebook to do it.
(As if you really need any other tool to influence the ignorant masses.)
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Also one step away from "Millions of citizens with an opinion different from our own."
Stupid grandstanding (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't help much and by the time there is proof one way or another it will all be over either way.
Frankly I'm convinced it is a DDoS for one reason. If it wasn''t, Pai might be stupid enough to claim it was, but there are people are him who would convince him that making the claim it was not a smart thing to do. Hell, rumor has it Verizon is running an electro astroturfing campaign. Creating bots that that create false accounts and submit antiNN comments. Maybe their bots ran wild and created the DDoS.
Keep in mind this is not a referendum, even if the FCC receives negative comments totaling 99% of the US population, they can just blow it off.
When MS and the DoJ reached a settlement more then a decade ago. Before the judge could approve the settlement, they had to do something similar. They received a ton of comments that went something like "Microsoft sucks break it up.". The judge took a few substantive comments and tweaked the settlement a bit and approved it.
I think a better effort would be to make sure that people get a way to confirm their comments actually were submitted and reflect their actual comments. Just think of what would happen if Comcast were caught forging comments!
Something else they can do is get the comment period extended to compensate for the difficulties. Just like when there is a problem with a polling place in an election, a judge can extend the times the polls are open. The FCC, after all, does not have to abide by the comments, but they do, by law, have to receive the comments and listen to them.
Re:Stupid grandstanding (Score:5, Interesting)
You're advocating for silencing people who don't meet some some arbitrary definition of "insightful comments coming from people with knowledge of different portions of the issue who can add depth to the discussion", but you're not considering the problem of who decides what is insightful.
Our current administration has been firing scientists and experts in favor of political pundits, right wing journalists, lobbyists and wealthy people who donated to the campaign in positions of power because those are the people whose comments they like. And that administration is the one that would be deciding what comments qualify as insightful and which people are knowledgeable.
Frankly, what you're suggesting sounds like a good way to start a totalitarian regime.
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How are people being "silenced" if a comment period is extended in the event of technical issues and your comment is still successfully posted?
No one is being silenced here. There are over-reactions, that's for sure. But no silencing.
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It hardly matters. The first pass at the comments sorts them into categories. Yes and no comments sort easily and can then just be considered by count. "John Oliver sent me here" can be taken as a yes to NN.
The more in depth comments can be counted as well, but also read and summarized. Particularly insightful comments can be passed up the chain as is.
Re:Stupid grandstanding (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny how it's always self-styled "anti-Fascists" threatening violence.
Funny how it's always the downtrodden that revolt?
No, I don't find that funny. Nor strange.
Slippery Slope Fallacy (Score:1)
I find it very funny and strange. Even ironic.
(I'm sure some of you are going to tear what I say into bits and pieces in an attempt to make a counter-point on each one. Go for it. Let's have a debate.)
Those among the "anti-fascists" and "the resistance", as they like to keep calling themselves, advocated non-violent protest. When they find that doesn't seem to stop from their interests getting shot down in Congress in an extremely fair manner, they then advocate violence.
Americans are not "down-trodden" by
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You mean the paid "activists"? The "activists" that protest "free speech" on university campuses (which is so insane I had to look that one up myself, plenty of pictures of "activists" burning signs that say "free speech"). What about "bike lock guy", the teachers assistant that is far from downtrodden. What about the other well-to-do people that have been identified as agitators, mostly university professors as well. Is trashing a university campus protesting? Is attacking students and beating them unconsc
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I think a better effort would be to make sure that people get a way to confirm their comments actually were submitted and reflect their actual comments.
Try out the site - it does send you a confirmation. Nice thing is, once you confirm this, you'll have commented instead of whining aimlessly on a site that the FCC probably doesn't even know exists. (Not that that denigrates /. at all, I'm sure the current FCC doesn't realize anything exists other than fox.com, paramount.com, disney.com, etc....)
That's basically what a DDoS looks like (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people trying to access a resource at the same time.
We know this phenomenon as "slashdotting". And funny enough, it hasn't really happened a lot in the more recent past, maybe the FCC should get up to speed. Even though unlikely, it might suddenly get hit by a lot of traffic because suddenly a lot of people might get interested in that "net neutrality" thing.
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It's possible to tell DDoS traffic from legitimate traffic quite easily. Even if it's just zombies hitting the web page. However more often that not a DDoS is not even remotely similar to legitimate web traffic.
You are over reacting - adjust your tin foil hats! (Score:3)
Dudes - Adjit pai has your back on this! Calm down and relax!
Alternative facts not withstanding - who needs any sort of oversight or regulation of the Internet? It routes around total authoritarian control.
Irony on Net Neutrality (Score:1)
The irony of net neutrality is that without it, Verizon can stop you accessing the FCC website to complain about the lack of Net Neutrality.
You're distracted, Trump sacks Comey shortly after Comey asked for a subpoena of Flynns in connection to large payments from Turkey and Russia that were not disclosed. So lots of people are doing lah lah lah look over here.
Kushner corp just tried to raise $150 million from Chinese investors in exchange for investor visas.... why would a billionaire need money? And where
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they cant fully use their brain. theyre not going to understand your point there.. unfortunately.
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The FCC should be given vast regulatory power over the Internet; the FCC's tech team doesn't know what a DDoS attack is.
Begging the question much?
Brought down by bot against net neutrality? (Score:5, Informative)
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I am not a specialist but looking at the comments it seems that a bot has been posting the same text *against net neutrality* (starting with "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation..."). It looks like a bot because the messages appear to come from people that posted in alphabetical order of their first name/last name combination: Brittany Mccain, Brittany Proctor, Brittany Sharp, etc. in the view sorted by date posted.
LOL! This is what happens when you contract out your "anti-net-neutrality-posting-bot" to the lowest Indian bidder on Upwork.
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According to those on Reddit, it is "DCIGroup.com". That web site, in turn, is under heavy DDoS attack and using Cloudflare to protect themselves. Some of the wording seems to come from CFIF [prnewswire.com].
It's happened in the past... (Score:5, Informative)
Just incredible how this administration is basically trying to re-write history...
Whether or not it was a DDoS attack, the thing is, this already happened in the past, for the exact same reason. So regardless if there was a DDoS attack or not, the website would've come down the same way:
http://www.latimes.com/busines... [latimes.com]
That link there? It's from 2014, despite looking exactly like past weekend. That was the moment when this matter should've been settled. No need for clowns with extremely punchable faces like Ajit Pai to try to reverse it in any way, if public comment even mattered. The public opinion has been heard on this, they are already ignoring whatever comments were made in the past. People don't need to be doubtful whether public comment is being heard or not... it clearly isn't.
Question is exactly the same, the fears are exactly the same of 2014, net neutrality did not change since then nor it's reasons to exist.
The companies along their greed to make more money on costumers also didn't change... if anything, it only grew.
Now they also have a whole lot more politicians in their pockets, people who are willing to go against public comments because they have their heads stuck in their asses. Remember people, it was only 3 years ago that the public outcry for net neutrality happened. All this administration is doing is reversing what people conquered. This would be unacceptable in any decent democracy, but here we are held prisioners by an administration that refuses to listen.
Fight for the Future has all the reasons to be suspicious about this, because pretty much anyone can claim that a website crash was not because of unpredicted access numbers but rather some coordinated attack of some form. But ultimately, the violation has already happened. When you have an administration that is this willing to bend over for corporations wishes, it doesn't matter if they revert something or not, they'll find a way to bend laws and turn a blind eye to violations. Net neutrality has ended as soon as Ajit Pai got the chair. Whether net neutrality crashes or not, I guarantee we'll be seeing problematic behaviours arising plenty soon.
It's not so much what's on paper, but rather the signals politicians send with stuff like these.
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Yes, it is indeed frightening how many greedy corporations are trying to sway net neutrality legislation in their favor. You can find a list here [internetassociation.org].
DDoS (Score:2, Interesting)
Denial - Was the resource denied to its user base?
of - (i got nothing)
Service - The thing.
Unfortunately, the line between activism and vandalism is going to be drawn by a court somewhere. Oliver did an awesome thing in an awful way
One question to ask yourself is, "is this any different from a hacker running a
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The only thing you're proving is that they are using creative license to classify this as a DDoS, when it is really legitimate comments that they don't have the infrastructure in place to support. Sure, there are bots posting the same thing over and over, but those can be filtered in the end.
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It's down to intent and all the vagaries that entails. If the intent was to communicate an opinion, then it is not a denial of service attack, it is simply a site unable to handle the legitimate load. If the intent is to keep others from commenting, it is exactly a denial of service attack.
If it is due to a bot masquerading as individuals, then it is fraud.
John Oliver laid out the argument and then pointed his viewers to a site where they could comment as they wish. That is substantially different from targ
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For all of its mis-steps, (Score:2)
The FCC was once a pretty good organization, and mostly managed to enact and enforce regulations that were in the best interests of the public good. But with Ajit Pai's kowtowing to Trump and to the corporate interests he serves, and now this, it seems the FCC is just another utterly corrupt organ in a thoroughly cancer-riddled body politic. Sad.
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I don't think the FCC should be in the business of regulating ISPs. Leaving aside the fact that they're not elected and ignoring the fact that they're political party based, their only claim to authority was based on the idea that the internet is somehow within "telecommunications."
That's pretty insane if you think about it. What should have happened was the expansion of their authority or the creation of a entirely different agency to handle internet regulation, but that would literally require an act of C
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That's kind of an irrelevant argument. I mean you could also argue that the FCC should just be renamed FCIC (Federal Communications & Internet Commision) in the same way that the ATF covers three pretty separate sets of regulations.
Not to mention the hassle you'd have when you consider the fact that telephone, cellular and TV (all definitely under FCC purview) are by far the primary providers of internet access. So putting internet under a different organization would mean two independent bodies both
As if the government cares what you think (Score:3)
Why does it matter? Would the government be embarrassed if the website couldn't handle the traffic? Would they not want to admit that there was a massive barrage of comments from citizens opposed to their policies? Or are they just waiting a few days to blame it on the evil Russians?
Even if every single HBO subscriber wrote a comment to the FCC, the government wouldn't read more than a few (if they bother to read ANY) and certainly wouldn't do anything in response. We might get a new head of the FCC in a few years, but the career bureaucrats aren't elected and won't be up for re-appointment. They don't care what you think because they have no reason to care.
Re: As if the government cares what you think (Score:1)
The Obama care site couldn't handle te traffic. What makes anyone think the FCC could handle it. They design websites with the thought "no one reads this crap."
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I'd be surprised if no one read it. Why even offer the site if that was the case?
Most likely, it will be a handful of interns and other low-level staff who go through and tally up yay/nay on whatever list of pre-defined concerns/issues someone decided on. And when the tallying is done, they'll present the totals to their bosses (possibly with some quotes from the better comments) who will take it into account when they make their decisions.
This is of course a bit of a biased process -- whoever defined the
FCC is hellbent on abolishing net neutrality (Score:1)
It's probable the FCC did it to themselves just to keep comments from net neutrality supporters getting posted.
Morons (Score:2)
These dumb fucks don't know how the internet works and they want to regulate it????
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What could possibly go wrong???
When I was with a government department I went to a meeting in which all of the people involved with the web applications met the new CIO for the department. One of the first things he said was that he knew nothing about the Internet. Up until that day I had never actually felt morale drop in a room before. Then he called us interchangeable cogs and I felt the morale drop again since we were developers, managers, graphic designers, and a few other professions.
(Turned out he m
I agree (Score:1)
Yeah, when I read those article about the DDoS I thought to myself that it was just a bit too convenient after John Oliver's show and "direction" to have folks comment. A convenient "scapegoat" if you will: i.e. Sorry, can't receive comments at this time, we've been DDoS'ed!
That's ok (Score:4, Funny)
precious (Score:2)
This indignation is precious in light of how people bent over backwards to rationalize the failings of the healthcare.gov site.
Not just a "Comment Forum" (Score:2)
Why not buy a DDOS for political reasons? (Score:1)
It was a huge mistake to weaponize the free and open internet because so much of our society and democracy works on it. Our democracy is in an existential crisis as it becomes easy for a few people to censor the political process.
It has become completely normalized that your vote doesn't matter.
It is becoming normalized that your vote won't even be counted.
It is becoming normalized that pe
Old School (Score:2)
The FCC could be telling the truth, but ... (Score:2)
It was a fucking DDoS, get over it. (Score:2)
That the DDoS was a result of everyone on the planet showing their utter displeasure might be another matter, but this was still a DDoS, as the originating amount of bandwidth was distributed across the globe, and it resulted in a denial of service.
Anyone else trying to pull any other fucking definition out of their ass is a goddamned moron.
Be careful when accusing an entitity. (Score:2)
Next on fox... (Score:2)
John Oliver MUST be charged as the DDOS mastermind! Obviously, Last Week Tonight was the command and control. We cannot allow our democracy to be undermined by the dullard and uninformed population! LOCK HIM UP!