Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments • Hacker News Board

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#61

Post by calibas » Sat, May 02, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

bmm6o wrote: post #50

calibas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big businesses learned long ago that if you back both sides you always win.

This particular issue is pretty partisan.

A former Verizon lawyer received unanimous Senate support for an FCC position back when Obama was president. That's what set this all up, I blame both parties for exactly what they did.

You can't put industry insiders into top regulatory positions of the very industries they work for, you have to be a drooling moron to not see why that's a bad idea, much less unethical. The fact that both parties are okay with it should speak volumes.

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#62

Post by rideontime » Sat, May 02, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

It's already been discovered that fake comments were generated using personal information found in data breaches. I've lost hope of anybody being held responsible for this obvious fraud.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-f...

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#63

Post by acdha » Sat, May 02, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

Gaelan wrote: post #59

acdha wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this is actually much of a privacy change. Here’s what you agree to when you submit a comment: > Any comments that you submit to the FCC on a proposed rulemaking, petition, or other document for which public comment is requested will be made public, including any personally identifiable information you include in your submission. We may share non-personally identifiable information with others, includin…

> including any personally identifiable information you include in your submission Wording here is a little ambiguous. As a techie, it's pretty easy to make an argument that the IP address is something I "included" in the submission (it's part of the packets my computer is sending on my behalf), but I'm not sure the average person would read it that way, instead interpreting it as pertaining only to information they…

Yes, but even in that case how much does it change matters to go from your name, city, state, zip code, email address, etc. to include an IP? I mean, a data miner might be able to tell if you were posting from a house which isn’t yours or using your employer’s network but the entered PII is enough to uniquely identify a large number of people.

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#64

Post by ikeboy » Sat, May 02, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #58

ikeboy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Where is the evidence that there was even a single bot campaign - again, emphasis on bot - on the pro-net-neutrality side? There's plenty: >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 Angeles. She isn’t in favor of repealing those rules, she said, “but I ne…

> 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 Angeles. She isn’t in favor of repealing those rules, she said, “but I never wrote that.” This is consistent with my claim: "the pro-net-neutrality side organized virtual letter-writing campaigns, getting lots of…

The standard of evidence you're requiring to call something a bot compaign is high enough that nothing counts.

So sure. It's theoretically possible that all the apparent hints of impropriety are just coincidences and lots of people just forgot what they did and so on. But then that goes both ways. It's not like the evidence is significantly stronger on one side or the other; if you're inclined to explain away everything, you can do so.

If you'd like, read my initial comment as saying something more along the lines of "there's some evidence of massive bot compaigns on both sides", or replace that with a weaker claim if you think none of this counts as evidence.

But motivated skepticism of the evidence on one side only doesn't help.

So: what evidence do you see that there was bot behavior on the anti-NN side that's so much stronger than any of the evidence on the other side? Everything I've seen can be easily explained away by the same standards you're applying.

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#65

Post by geofft » Sat, May 02, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #64

geofft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Angeles. She isn’t in favor of repealing those rules, she said, “but I never wrote that.” This is consistent with my claim: "the pro-net-neutrality side organized virtual letter-writing campaigns, getting lots of…

The standard of evidence you're requiring to call something a bot compaign is high enough that nothing counts. So sure. It's theoretically possible that all the apparent hints of impropriety are just coincidences and lots of people just forgot what they did and so on. But then that goes both ways. It's not like the evidence is significantly stronger on one side or the other; if you're inclined to explain away everyth…

The standard of evidence I'm applying is simply that evidence for X being true must not also be plainly compatible with X being false.

Here, for instance, is some evidence that meets that standard, from that very same article you love:

> He found a near-constant rate—1,000 every 10 minutes—punctuated by periods of zero comments, as if web robots were turning on and off. He determined many were from hacked accounts.

This pattern is either server-side (e.g., a server-side rate limit and an extremely flaky server) or client-side. If it's server-side, we'd expect to find it independent of the contents of the comment, we'd expect to have stories of people being unable to submit comments, etc. Unless we have those stories, then this pattern is plainly incompatible with actual humans submitting comments, even with the aid of some automation or pre-written letters. That is evidence that these comments were almost certainly not from actual humans.

No similarly strong evidence exists on the pro-net-neutrality side. "A bunch of comments claimed an address from Russia" is certainly suspicious and weird, I agree, but it is not plainly incompatible with humans (if it's IP address, bad geolocation; if it's e-mail address, Russian-run mail provider whose accounts are used by Americans; etc.). I am happy to grant with more detail about what's is meant there - which neither the FCC nor the WSJ has provided to us - there may be strong evidence, but it's not there yet with what you've posted.

If you want to revise your initial complaint to "Friendly reminder that some weak evidence exists in favor of small, isolated bot campaigns on the pro-network neutrality side and very large bot campaigns on the anti-network neutrality side, such that if all suspicious comments were disregarded in proportion to their likely untrustworthiness, the overwhelming weight of public sentiment as measured by this exercise would be firmly on the pro-network-neutrality side," then I have no remaining objection.

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#66

Post by londons_explore » Sat, May 02, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

rasengan wrote: post #2

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…

Why not release a randomly selected sample of 100 comments?

A random sample should be sufficient to see whats going on, if its sufficiently widespread to affect results.

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#67

Post by ikeboy » Sat, May 02, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #60

ikeboy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's not even addressing the fact that WSJ contacted a portion of those leaving some of the form letters and found that 32% of one pro-NN batch said they never sent anything. The number is higher for the other anti-NN batches they checked, 60-80% range, but that's not the difference between massive and not-massive.

Assuming you trust the WSJ to have conducted the survey in an honest and non-leading manner, but I thought we weren't supposed to be trusting "biased media." The article starts off by portraying net neutrality as "pro-regulation" - I'd imagine a good number of people who are pro-net-neutrality would not have answered yes to, say, "Did you send a letter to the FCC favoring additional regulation on the internet?" despi…

>They also haven't given you enough information to know the size of the pro-NN batch they investigated, so we still don't know that it's "massive."

There's thousands of people who said they didn't leave the respective comments. That's enough to be statistically significant and to extrapolate across the whole sample.

There might be selection bias, as only a small percentage of people responded.

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#68

Post by Natsu » Sat, May 02, 2020, 8:04 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #39

sloshnmosh wrote: post #16

I remember that there were websites that allowed users to comment on NN that had pre-made comments already completed. The user only needed to enter a valid email address and could then forward the comment to the FCC or erase and put in their comment in their own words. I could see how this would look like obvious spam if users did not take the time to modify the form into their own thoughts. This shall be very intere…

The point is whether canned responses came from a "organic" groundswell of concerned citizen or a handful of astroturfers.

Which doesn't make much sense, because the arguments are used in the decision making process, not the number of comments. This wasn't some kind of vote where you could stuff the ballot box, this was somewhere that you could flag items of concern.

We all know that anyone could fake an IP address, as well. It would take little thought to spam a bunch of nonsense through a random proxy via a script. But, just like every other kind of spam, it would just get ignored by the recipient.

They were looking for legal arguments made by people regarding their plans, not public support. So, screw the spammers, but it's really weird that this is being made into such a huge deal. This isn't a vote, there's no ballot box to stuff. And even in the off chance a Russian made some good legal point about net neutrality, why would that be a bad thing?

It feels a lot like this:

https://xkcd.com/932/

Meanwhile, for those following the Russia stories, there's been huge news in the Flynn case, but I see almost no coverage. Well, we'll have to see how it plays out, sure, but the radio silence is just weird.

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#69

Post by geofft » Sat, May 02, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #67

geofft wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you trust the WSJ to have conducted the survey in an honest and non-leading manner, but I thought we weren't supposed to be trusting "biased media." The article starts off by portraying net neutrality as "pro-regulation" - I'd imagine a good number of people who are pro-net-neutrality would not have answered yes to, say, "Did you send a letter to the FCC favoring additional regulation on the internet?" despi…

>They also haven't given you enough information to know the size of the pro-NN batch they investigated, so we still don't know that it's "massive." There's thousands of people who said they didn't leave the respective comments. That's enough to be statistically significant and to extrapolate across the whole sample. There might be selection bias, as only a small percentage of people responded.

Sure. So how big is that population you can extrapolate over?

The WSJ article is carefully not saying, 32% of people who appear to have left pro-NN comments said they didn't make them. They said 32% of people in this batch did. They didn't say, as far as I can tell, how big the batch is. (Maybe I'm just misreading?)

There's a big difference between "32% of a thousand pro-NN comments are untrustworthy" and "60% of a million anti-NN comments are untrustworthy."

The WSJ, like any MSM outlet, is manipulating you through half-truths. Pay attention.

Re: Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

#70

Post by ikeboy » Sat, May 02, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #65

ikeboy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard of evidence you're requiring to call something a bot compaign is high enough that nothing counts. So sure. It's theoretically possible that all the apparent hints of impropriety are just coincidences and lots of people just forgot what they did and so on. But then that goes both ways. It's not like the evidence is significantly stronger on one side or the other; if you're inclined to explain away everyth…

The standard of evidence I'm applying is simply that evidence for X being true must not also be plainly compatible with X being false. Here, for instance, is some evidence that meets that standard, from that very same article you love: > He found a near-constant rate—1,000 every 10 minutes—punctuated by periods of zero comments, as if web robots were turning on and off. He determined many were from hacked accounts. T…

>Unless we have those stories, then this pattern is plainly incompatible with actual humans submitting comments, even with the aid of some automation or pre-written letters.

A site is set up to collect names for form letters. They don't submit it in real time; instead, they submit it in batches every few minutes.

This is at least as plausible as the various explanations you gave above.

In fact, if you read the linked blog post, they explain that this is how the API worked - you'd upload a CSV and everything would be uploaded in bulk.

And the sizes still don't add up. As mentioned, a single campaign for the pro-NN side had 7 million suspicious comments. That's bigger than any of the alleged bot campaigns on the other side. Overall, there's more suspicious comments for the pro-NN side. Whether the evidence is enough to definitively call them bot campaigns or not, that's still true.