41–50 of 82 posts
This is definitely a touchy subject. As the article notes, this will remove the privacy from all people who commented on net neutrality, but it will also allow 2 NYTimes reporters to try to figure out why there were fake comments that led to the loss of neutrality for the people. The separate question that still needs to be figured out, is who is going to be penalized for lying to the american people and taking away…
I have a lot of issues with this. This should have never been recorded by a government agency. Be careful what you wish for.
And I don't see why we wouldn't want our government's servers to have logs that can be inspected when we have questions about integrity.
Friendly reminder that there were massive bot compaigns on both sides of the issue. https://archive.fo/sp9Q7 this WSJ article found thousands of people that said they never posted the comments attributed to them. >One 369-word comment supporting the Obama-era net-neutrality rules was posted on the FCC website more than 300,000 times. One of those was attributed to Gloria Burney, 87, a retired speech therapist in Los…
What bugs me the most is that the government either doesn't really want to know who's interfering with the democratic process or they know and they're not telling us. The former implies extreme ignorance, the later implies agency capture to the point the FCC is no longer a public institution.
I seem to recall at the time some pretty clear signaling from Pai and the FCC that their decisions were really not going to be influenced by the comments no matter what they contained.
As a reminder: the overwhelming public opinion and media coverage was on outrage over the fraudulent comments prior to Pai announcing that the public had shown support for ending Net Neutrality. That alone should be grounds for having him tried. At what point can you no longer legally get away with malicious lying for profit? I think he crossed that line, which is impressive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The New York times isn't seeking the name or address in their request, just some other metadata about each comment including the IP and user agent header. Gizmodo failed to link to the actual opinion with this info: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7906482/33/the-new-york... Edit: upon reading more, now I'm not sure if the NYT already has the names and addresses and is just seeking the metadata or if they don't n…
> The New York times isn't seeking the name or address in their request, just some other metadata about each comment including the IP and user agent header. The point of the person you're responding to is that the NYT doesn't need to seek names or addresses, because they're already public information. Anyone can go look up the docket and see them[1]. So, their argument I believe is that, given that the names and addr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The privacy aspect to this is definitely touchy: > The FCC argued in court that making the millions of IP addresses contained in the logs publicly accessible would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” And while [Judge Schofield] didn’t entirely disagree, she said the agency had failed to adequately spell out how anyone would be harmed by the disclosure. > Regardless, Schofield said she also decid…
Would a good middle ground would be add some salt to each unique IP, hash the addresses, and hand hashed data over?
127.0.0.1
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the evidence you've posted supports that there were massive bot campaigns. The popular thesis, which the evidence you've presented is consistent with, is - the pro-net-neutrality side organized virtual letter-writing campaigns, getting lots of actual human people to send in pre-written messages they agree with but did not author - the anti-net-neutrality side, unable to find large numbers of actual huma…
Did you read the WSJ article I linked to? It shows plenty of fake comments submitted by the pro-net-neutrality side. Just asserting that it was only one side who resorted to fake comments is an evidence-free position. I struggle to think how you can characterize 7 million fake comments out of 23 million total that came from a "single fake e-mail generator website" as "the pro-net-neutrality side organized virtual let…
The claim I made was, "I don't think the evidence you've posted supports that there were massive bot campaigns," bot in italics.
You have now changed your claim to be about "fake comments," independent of bots, which is not what we were talking about. Nor did I claim that it was "only one side who resorted to fake comments" - I said "we should disregard many more of the received anti-net-neutrality comments. I did not say that we should disregard zero received pro-net-neutrality comments. It is certainly true that a nonzero number of comments on both sides were fake comments. The question is whether that's a small number or a large number, and whether the numbers are the same (let alone "massive") on both sides.
The WSJ article you linked to includes evidence that a number of anti-net-neutrality comments were posted by bots - see the paragraphs starting "Chicago programmer..." - and that a number of pro-net-neutrality comments were posted by humans encouraged to send in pre-canned messages. Those are certainly not "bot campaigns." Whether those comments count as "fake comments," whether those comments correspond to a small number of actual humans who were stealing others' identities, whether those comments correspond one-to-one with actual humans who failed to fill in their own contact information, etc. is an interesting question that's worth discussing, but let's settle the claim you originally made, first, that there were "massive bot campaigns on both sides of the issue." Where is the evidence that there was even a single bot campaign - again, emphasis on bot - on the pro-net-neutrality side?
The comment from an FCC spokesman about a "single fake e-mail generator website" refers to fake e-mail addresses (it's a website much like Mailinator). Such addresses could well have been used by real people to send real comments, so this does not necessarily correlate with "fake comments." (For instance, I assume your legal name is not "Ikeboy," so you're using a "fake name" on this website - but that hardly means you're making "fake comments," or that you're part of a bot campaign.)