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Common Dreams reports
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver on [May 7] issued another powerful rallying cry to save net neutrality protections, and, repeating the outcome of his 2014 plea, his viewers flooded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) site, causing it to temporarily crash.
[...] Oliver said it's worth noting that [FCC Chairman Ajit] Pai is "a former lawyer for Verizon", a company which "won a lawsuit which meant that if the FCC wanted strong, enforceable protection, its only real option was to reclassify the ISPs, and yet he cheerily insists under questioning that there is just not evidence that cable companies were engaging in rampant wrongdoing".
"Title II is the most solid legal foundation we have right now for a strong, enforceable net neutrality protections", Oliver said, and urged "we, the people, [to] take this matter into our own hands".
To that end, Last Week Tonight bought the domain name gofccyourself.com, which redirects users to the official FCC page[1] where open internet advocates can leave a comment and call for these protections to remain in place. (Oliver notes that it simplifies the commenting process the FCC "has made more difficult since three years ago".)
"Everyone needs to get involved. Comment now, and then maybe comment again when the FCC makes its proposal official. Even call you representative and your senators", Oliver urged.
So successful was the start of his campaign, according to Motherboard, that there was such a high volume of traffic flooding the Federal Communications Commission that the site temporarily went down. As of this writing, it is up and running again.
[1] The fcc.gov page is almost entirely behind scripts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @02:41PM (8 children)
WTF does "crash" even mean here? Was it returning 500 internal server error? Did any servers go down? Or does DDoS-level traffic from legitimate traffic now count as a "crash?" Were there any actual DDoS attempts that contributed in addition to legitimate traffic?
(Well, I think we may be able to conclude that there were no DDoS attempts as long as nobody's screaming about the Russkies "hacking" the FCC.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @02:47PM (7 children)
Bad form to reply to myself (but I'm AC! who would know if hadn't said that?!), but I thought I should clarify.
A campaign like this may constitute a DDoS in a loose sense. I typically don't think of something as a DDoS unless there's a botnet involved, especially a botnet doing things to specifically cause the target service to use as many resources as possible to respond to each request in comparison to each request taking a few resources as possible on the botnet's end. Something like syn flooding, but I admit I'm not l337 enough to care to be up to date on the latest DDoS techniques. I'm just aware that putting curl, wget, nc, or similar in an infinite loop on botnet slaves is not the most efficient way to do it.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @02:57PM
It wouldn't matter if John Oliver told everyone to crash SoylentNews. Absolutely nobody has heard of SoylentNews and nobody jumps on a bandwagon that nobody has heard of. Everyone would assume SoylentNews is a joke that John Oliver made up.
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Tuesday May 09 2017, @04:01PM (5 children)
> A campaign like this may constitute a DDoS in a loose sense.
A statement by the FCC's CIO claimed
[...] multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks [...] These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC.
-- http://www.zdnet.com/article/fcc-says-ddos-attacks-not-net-neutrality-comments-tied-up-comments-system/ [zdnet.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:42PM (1 child)
Under Idjit Pai the FCC has really strong incentive to lie about that.
But even if we take it at face value what does that really say? That someone wants to stop citizens from filing pro-neutrality comments.
Who would want that? Could that be the idjit's former employer, Verizon? [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:50PM
There's a certain foreign power that's been using botnets and would also take an interest in this issue...
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday May 09 2017, @07:21PM (2 children)
The proceeding are not accessible at the moment.
Tried calling to show I was not a bot: apparently it went down again about an hour ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:09PM (1 child)
http://www.webcitation.org/6qLB6oJ5l [webcitation.org]
The CIO's statement is supposed to be readable via
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344764A1.txt [fcc.gov]
but the site told me my "request looked malicious and has been blocked." Here's an archived copy.
http://www.webcitation.org/6qLB6oJ5l [webcitation.org]
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday May 10 2017, @12:05AM
The second archived copy is the same as the first. Both have the document (mangled a bit).