from the like-coughing-up-a-hairball dept.
"We write to request information that will help both us and the public better understand how the Federal Communications Commission managed the record in its recent net neutrality proceeding," begins a letter sent today by all the Democratic representatives on the House Energy and Commerce committee.
The missive notes that the comment period was "notoriously replete with fake comments" and argues that as a result it "raises novel questions about how an agency can properly handle and interpret the public's feedback to make sound policy decisions."
The seven-page memo [PDF] contains no less than 16 pointed questions over how the FCC handled abuse of its comment system, while noting that its subsequent decision to approve the controversial repeal of the nation's net neutrality rules provided "scant detail" on that aspect.
The letter also makes it plain that the lawmakers believe that the legitimacy of the FCC's decision is in doubt. "While we may not support the outcome of this proceeding, we hope you agree with us that transparency in the process is crucial," it reads. "In order to restore public confidence in the integrity of the process and give the American people a better understanding of how the FCC analyzed the comments filed in this proceeding, we request that you provide us information on how the agency reviewed the public comments."
[...] While the letter is unlikely to provide a smoking gun, it does keep up political pressure on the FCC over how it handled the public comment process.
[...] So far, the FCC has demonstrated no intention of investigating what went wrong or how it can be mitigated in future. In fact, in an increasingly partisan atmosphere, even mentioning that the comment process was entirely undermined has become a political statement.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday February 15 2018, @01:49PM
... it's not like anyone reads those comments anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:38PM (14 children)
Seriously, what is it anyway? Can't you just summarize the points of all the comments?
Do comment spam bringing up the same points over and over again suddenly make it more convincing?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:55PM
It's a kind of alt-comment, I guess.
Sent in by an artificial-dumbness - aka spambot - not sentient enough to count as an opinion to consider.
To demonstrate - how dumb one, not related with humongous-ISP-corps, needs to be to think traffic shaping is aligned with their interest?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Thursday February 15 2018, @03:00PM (6 children)
In a million of the fake comments, they were sourced from the wise denizens of pornhub.com.
This is all quite reasonable in the grand scheme of things, until some irritating internet expert points out to the FCC that despite Pornhub being an established fine goods provider of speedy e-commerce payload delivery--they do not actually have a domain that allows for non-employees to send emails from it. That is -- there might be an MX entry for Pornhub corporate offices to send emails, but there are not a million unique user IDs with email coming from the Pornhub domain.
They might have millions and millions of viewers, and millions more page hits, millenial, gen-x, and people very much not booming with babies anymore -- but none of them have email addresses there.
The million or so comments from Pornhub... speaking out *against* net neutrality (which almost sounds like it was not only fraudulent and false, but a great troll as well) are thus not eligible because not only is it not likely, it isn't possible. They dont have that many user ids, that many email addresses, and dont even have the infrastructure to handle such a thing even if they started offering free porn to your phone via signing up with your own email address on their domain.
They didn't then and they don't now -- of the many services and positions (uh) they may demonstrate to have, email accounts for users are not among them. No one that works there sent them, either, as they stated as much (no I don't have the citation handy... feel free to search for a NSFW pornhub link though, I can't quite do that at the moment...)
If it was even remotely realistic that the domain could have done this, then the argument would be murky, if perhaps memorable due to the domain chosen and their existing political leanings that seem to differ. But it isn't murky; the only way it would be possible to send so many messages and claim to be from them is via spam and the forging of their headers. And you can do this even in Outlook 2007 and prior by adding a "from" field option to the email composition window. You can claim to be from anywhere, and the FCC forms didn't validate any of it. (MS Office is a clunky way to do it, though, so I imagine someone just pirated a spam tool and pressed the "fire the cannon" button.)
The emails probably came from randomdomain.xyz or something, because you don't need a hack a domain to put up a facade to some simple web form with little to no validation checks that is run by government workers who are doing the least amount of effort possible to filter out noise (with no specific reason from me being implied as to why--lazy, ignorance, politics--could be all three or more).
The FCC stands to lose credibility, regardless of their political leanings, when this type of discovery is made across numerous examples. People expect them to be filled with experts that have an idea of how this all works; there are standards and best practices and even paid for services that can be followed to do simple checks and cut down the volume of noise significantly--there are even captchas that can at least slow down the problem if not stop it.
It's a game being played by people with a profit motive, and they are motivated to win. The referees responsible looking the other way, assuming they are even there. People that play nice will lose when the experts are proven to not understand how to cheat, or act willfully ignorant, regardless of who is in charge. It's one of those things where an invidiual comment from a person like me literally can't measure up against the volume that a million pornhub users can collectively put out... even though we know it's all fake anyway!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:17PM (5 children)
You still haven't addressed the point, why would comment spam be a concern? Just summarize and judge it on its own merits. If strawman has a point, then it has a point.
If you can just ignore it because of anonymity, why have a public commentary at all? Why not only have well-known president appointed talking heads give comments? Surely they are even more "trusted" than anonymous commenters to spam their views.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:58PM (4 children)
It's only partly about the logical arguments; it's also partially a popularity contest/poll of public opinion. But of course when you ballot-stuff that means you can't get useful numbers out of it. 20 people with the same opinion is 20 votes; one guy submitting the same opinion 20 times should not be 20 votes.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:14PM (3 children)
20 same opinions with the exact same points is still a single point, how does it become stronger? I think you are conflating votes with RFCs.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:04PM
Because 20 people hold that view, not just one. Duh!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:12PM (1 child)
Maybe it's not a literal vote, but I'd still like to see them have the balls to decide against a hypothetical proposition where 99% of the feedback they get is on one side of it.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @08:17PM
Why not? The FCC is not an elected body, it is kind of the point of having appointed positions. If they are doing against public interests, have Congress or the Court Justices reign them in.
(Score: 3, Informative) by WizardFusion on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:08PM (5 children)
There was a lot of comments made by people that were long dead. There are twitter posts asking the FCC how someones parent or grand-parent, who had been dead for several years, had logged several comments in favour of NN.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:48PM (4 children)
Why is that even an issue? Can anyone explain why can't the FCC just summarize the points?
Why do people believe repeating the same point over and over makes it magically stronger? Don't you have proper authentication than to claim "my great grand mother hates NN"?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:55PM (3 children)
It's this thing we have called "democracy."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:09PM (2 children)
The FCC chair is not an elected position, it is not a democracy.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:09PM (1 child)
I'm not saying the FCC itself is; it's just the concept of asking for the input of the population before making a decision.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @08:14PM
Last I checked, they are asking for input, not for a public vote. Asking the public for permission is for Congress, not the FCC.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday February 15 2018, @03:39PM
Oblig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eeg4J8yNk4g [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JeanCroix on Thursday February 15 2018, @04:54PM (6 children)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Hyperturtle on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:05PM (2 children)
I can't take credit for it, but I think this was great (in reference to your Ajit Payola)
Kajit has legisliation... if you have coin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:28PM (1 child)
Can I get some skooma while yer at it? We need something for the people with IQs over 75.
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Friday February 16 2018, @02:01PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:06PM
Sure, but there is value in not letting him get away with hiding that behind astroturf. Make him stand behind his blatantly anti-democratic corporate brown nosing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:22PM (1 child)
And as far as the fake comments go, just about any of us could have written a script to make them happen. It wouldn't even be a big challenge, just a bit of Bash, Curl, route through Tor if they're doing some IP source throttling, and go. If you want to be a bit more clever about it to hide the astroturfing, you add some randomized spelling errors and a pool of statements to draw from in a random order to make your comments seem not quite identical. And of course you pull names and addresses of those supposedly sending those comments from publicly available records or privately sold mailing lists.
I'm sure that someone at one of those wonderfully ethical organizations of Comcast, Spectrum, and AT&T wouldn't have even dreamed of hiring somebody to do something like that. And I'm sure that they'd have had a really hard time locating a desperate computer guy from, say, the former Soviet bloc, that would take them up on that offer in a heartbeat.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 15 2018, @06:53PM
Based on prior comments they weren't doing any source throttling, or even validating.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday February 15 2018, @10:08PM (1 child)
When the original story about this came out I recall some talk that this would have violated various state laws. If so, it's arguable that the FCC is obstructing justice, and for political reasons, by sweeping this one under the carpet. Par for the course these days I guess, with every federal agency being handed to their sworn corporate enemies everywhere you look. It'll take decades to reverse this sort of shit.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 15 2018, @11:47PM
You're correct. [thehill.com]
In fact, there was even a story on the front page [soylentnews.org] about it.
.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @11:41PM (1 child)
Somebody or something dumped large boatloads of fake messages on a Federal agency. That's certainly worthy of investigation. Somebody out there has a nasty hacking/DOS tool-set.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 15 2018, @11:50PM
There. FTFY.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr