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Just like the election, I wonder if the people behind this care if they get caught as long as they get what they want first. There doesn't seem to be much prece

Just like the election, I wonder if the people behind this care if they get caught as long as they get what they want first. There doesn't seem to be much precedent for overturning laws or elections that were subject to misinformation campaigns.

Natsu 9y ago
Does it really matter? This wasn't a vote and they weren't listening to our opinions anyhow, this was just some jerk spamming a comment box. What really matters is that they're on the site of the ISPs that want to screw us all over. I still remember the very start of net neutrality when everyone was still on the same side, before the lobbyists went to work dividing us over how to respond to it.
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  >I still remember the very start of net neutrality when everyone was still on the same side, before the lobbyists went to work dividing us over how to respond to it. Indeed, I remember the astroturf group Hands Off The Internet starting up back around ~2005. They've been working on this for over a decade now. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hands_Off_the_Internet https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hands_Off_the_Internet
  - tudorw 9y ago
    Fights for control have been going on in various forms since the start, '1978 the Post Office proposed to open a new service, called E-COM' from 'Mail Chauvinism: The Magicians, the Snark and the Camel' by Ted Nelson https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism...
- wpietri 9y ago
  If it didn't matter, why do you think somebody spent a lot of time doing it?
  - viraptor 9y ago
    I don't know if it mattered, but the comments as shown in the article are pretty much the same copy with various simple replacements for many phrases. This happens in lots of spam campaigns. I'm not sure anyone spent much time doing it - could be few hours for someone who does spam already. It doesn't look like a sophisticated or costly action.
    - wpietri 9y ago
      You didn't answer the question. If it didn't matter, why did somebody invest time in doing it?
      - Natsu 9y ago
        Just because I have good reason to believe it never mattered, that doesn't mean that everyone agrees with me. Even then, people spend significant amounts of time on things that don't matter (see also: social media, entertainment, etc.). Given that spamming a comment form is a few lines of Perl - http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lwpcook.pod http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lwpcook.pod - the idea that some nut might spend 30 seconds ordering their computer to spam the FCC does not strike me as farfetched, nor does it seem reasonable to waste time caring about that. Better to focus our efforts on lobbying the FCC to change this boneheaded decision. Frankly, I think the point that they don't care about our comments to begin with is more damning than whether or not an idiot spammed a comment box.
      - viraptor 9y ago
        I wasn't planning to, since we can't answer this without knowing who did it. My point was just to provide context for "spent time". It wasn't some huge operation. It could've been one day for one person. At that point the cost is so low it could've been done for the lulz. Or it could've been a cheap case of foreign groups trying to achieve something. Who knows.
brudgers 9y ago
[I am not a lawyer] Only Congress passes laws (statutes). The FCC is a regulatory body. It has statutory authority (delegated by Congress) to create regulations, not statutes (laws). Proposed FCC regulations have to go through a process defined by statute. Publication and comment are part of that process. Irregularities in the process may form the basis of judicial challenge. Whether what is described here constitutes an irregularity is another matter. Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent. If Congress were to a law to explicitly end net neutrality, the courts would have to assume that the law is the will of the people and a challenge could only be made on Constitutional grounds. An FCC regulation can also be challenged on legal grounds (the regulation violates a statute).
- winter_blue 9y ago
  > Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent. Yes, statutory laws must be proven unconstitutional to be struck down, and regulatory laws can be more easily affected by judicial decisions. But for the last 30 years, regulations have been accorded an inappropriate degree of deference by the courts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/25/gorsuch-is-right-about-chevron-deference/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
  - alacombe 9y ago
    If "anti net-neutrality" regulations shall be considered unconstitutional, so shall "pro net-neutrality" ones. [edit: instead of downvoting me, tell me why left-leaning regulations are automatically Good (and constitutional), and why right-leaning are automatically Evil (and unconstitutional) ?]
    - existencebox 9y ago
      I'll take the bait and explain why I'm downvoting you. The parent posts had literally nothing to do with left vs right. It has to do with accepting the results of misinformation campaigns, and post-factum not taking steps to revert malign legislation. Even in the case that I give you the benefit of the doubt in that you're taking "pro-net-neutrality" to be in some way left-leaning, the bulk of the arguments I've read fall into the "empiricism" bucket rather than "partisanship," either citing precedent of negative outcomes (portugal) or the industry's proven inability to self-regulate (local monopolies ala comcast, fights against municipal broadband, etc). I'm also somewhat entertained that maintaining a competitive business landscape has somehow become "leftist." To my mind that's very pro-small-business/free market to prohibit large entities from soley dominating a market and legislating protective walls; even Reagan took an aggressive antitrust stance; this not even touching on that internet looks a lot more like a utility necessary for "survival" in a modern world than a good nowadays.
frik 9y ago
They are not individuals, but bots by companies. You just have to look at the bots that write pro-comments on HN, Reddit, etc. Think about, who has advantage from it?
searealist 9y ago
> Just like the election Please don't instigate a flame war.
- downandout 9y ago
  If you’re referring to my comment (which is now flagged, for no reason other than it being less than sympathetic to HC’s argument that the Russians ruined the election for her - you have to love HN), I wasn’t flaming anyone. I simply pointed out that IMO this FCC incident is much more serious than what happened in the election. Leaked but real emails about unethical/illegal conduct did nothing more than make the voters better informed about actual facts, while this incident intentionally presented false data to the voters at the FCC, who may rely on it in their decision making. The latter is infinitely worse IMO. One involves better informing the voters, the other involves lying to them.
  - Bud 9y ago
    Voters were made "better informed" by Roger Stone's ratf*king and the Comey letter? No they weren't.
downandout 9y ago
>Just like the election This seems far worse than what happened with the election. The hacked emails at issue in the election were real, and they revealed bad things that the Clinton campaign was involved in. I have always found it laughable that the complaint seems to be “we lost because the Russians uncovered the bad things I was doing, and it’s not fair that people found out about them”. If the emails had all been about how she was going to bend over backwards to help the American people, perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a problem for her. In this case, the data being given to a comparatively minuscule group of “voters” (the FCC) was fake, and intended to completely misrepresent public opinion. To the extent that the FCC cares about public opinion, this is worse than simply exposing the actual misdeeds of a political candidate and her henchmen.
- Gaelan 9y ago
  Given that the FCC resisted efforts to investigate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the FCC was complit in the fake messages (so they could claim they were in line with public opinion)
  - freshboxoffice 9y ago
    Pictures Of Bollywood Actors You May Have Never Seen Before rare and unseen snaps of bollywood stars must watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHam1l8I8nc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHam1l8I8nc
  - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
    After working as a government contracting for many years I'd lean more towards gross incompetency than anything complicit. All the people in charge of critical tech in the DoD that I dealt with here placed their through nepotism and had no clue what they were doing. Granted I'm not saying anything of this is good I just think it's far more likely that they're all idiots over there.
- inpdx 9y ago
  I'd love to see Trump's emails. But, very curiously, wikileaks didn't release anything negative about Trump. Only seeing one side's dirty laundry is the problem. Don't kid yourself that only one side had it.
vuln 9y ago
Like every company in the tech industry? 'Disrupt' ie break all of the laws and grow faster than you can get sued. Then when you do get sued throw mountains of investor money at it and ask for more.

Natsu 9y ago

Does it really matter? This wasn't a vote and they weren't listening to our opinions anyhow, this was just some jerk spamming a comment box. What really matters is that they're on the site of the ISPs that want to screw us all over. I still remember the very start of net neutrality when everyone was still on the same side, before the lobbyists went to work dividing us over how to respond to it.

SkyMarshal 9y ago
>I still remember the very start of net neutrality when everyone was still on the same side, before the lobbyists went to work dividing us over how to respond to it. Indeed, I remember the astroturf group Hands Off The Internet starting up back around ~2005. They've been working on this for over a decade now. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hands_Off_the_Internet https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hands_Off_the_Internet
- tudorw 9y ago
  Fights for control have been going on in various forms since the start, '1978 the Post Office proposed to open a new service, called E-COM' from 'Mail Chauvinism: The Magicians, the Snark and the Camel' by Ted Nelson https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism...
wpietri 9y ago
If it didn't matter, why do you think somebody spent a lot of time doing it?
- viraptor 9y ago
  I don't know if it mattered, but the comments as shown in the article are pretty much the same copy with various simple replacements for many phrases. This happens in lots of spam campaigns. I'm not sure anyone spent much time doing it - could be few hours for someone who does spam already. It doesn't look like a sophisticated or costly action.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    You didn't answer the question. If it didn't matter, why did somebody invest time in doing it?
    - Natsu 9y ago
      Just because I have good reason to believe it never mattered, that doesn't mean that everyone agrees with me. Even then, people spend significant amounts of time on things that don't matter (see also: social media, entertainment, etc.). Given that spamming a comment form is a few lines of Perl - http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lwpcook.pod http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lwpcook.pod - the idea that some nut might spend 30 seconds ordering their computer to spam the FCC does not strike me as farfetched, nor does it seem reasonable to waste time caring about that. Better to focus our efforts on lobbying the FCC to change this boneheaded decision. Frankly, I think the point that they don't care about our comments to begin with is more damning than whether or not an idiot spammed a comment box.
    - viraptor 9y ago
      I wasn't planning to, since we can't answer this without knowing who did it. My point was just to provide context for "spent time". It wasn't some huge operation. It could've been one day for one person. At that point the cost is so low it could've been done for the lulz. Or it could've been a cheap case of foreign groups trying to achieve something. Who knows.

brudgers 9y ago

[I am not a lawyer] Only Congress passes laws (statutes). The FCC is a regulatory body. It has statutory authority (delegated by Congress) to create regulations, not statutes (laws). Proposed FCC regulations have to go through a process defined by statute. Publication and comment are part of that process. Irregularities in the process may form the basis of judicial challenge. Whether what is described here constitutes an irregularity is another matter. Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent. If Congress were to a law to explicitly end net neutrality, the courts would have to assume that the law is the will of the people and a challenge could only be made on Constitutional grounds. An FCC regulation can also be challenged on legal grounds (the regulation violates a statute).

winter_blue 9y ago
> Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent. Yes, statutory laws must be proven unconstitutional to be struck down, and regulatory laws can be more easily affected by judicial decisions. But for the last 30 years, regulations have been accorded an inappropriate degree of deference by the courts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/25/gorsuch-is-right-about-chevron-deference/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
- alacombe 9y ago
  If "anti net-neutrality" regulations shall be considered unconstitutional, so shall "pro net-neutrality" ones. [edit: instead of downvoting me, tell me why left-leaning regulations are automatically Good (and constitutional), and why right-leaning are automatically Evil (and unconstitutional) ?]
  - existencebox 9y ago
    I'll take the bait and explain why I'm downvoting you. The parent posts had literally nothing to do with left vs right. It has to do with accepting the results of misinformation campaigns, and post-factum not taking steps to revert malign legislation. Even in the case that I give you the benefit of the doubt in that you're taking "pro-net-neutrality" to be in some way left-leaning, the bulk of the arguments I've read fall into the "empiricism" bucket rather than "partisanship," either citing precedent of negative outcomes (portugal) or the industry's proven inability to self-regulate (local monopolies ala comcast, fights against municipal broadband, etc). I'm also somewhat entertained that maintaining a competitive business landscape has somehow become "leftist." To my mind that's very pro-small-business/free market to prohibit large entities from soley dominating a market and legislating protective walls; even Reagan took an aggressive antitrust stance; this not even touching on that internet looks a lot more like a utility necessary for "survival" in a modern world than a good nowadays.

frik 9y ago

They are not individuals, but bots by companies. You just have to look at the bots that write pro-comments on HN, Reddit, etc. Think about, who has advantage from it?

searealist 9y ago

> Just like the election Please don't instigate a flame war.

downandout 9y ago
If you’re referring to my comment (which is now flagged, for no reason other than it being less than sympathetic to HC’s argument that the Russians ruined the election for her - you have to love HN), I wasn’t flaming anyone. I simply pointed out that IMO this FCC incident is much more serious than what happened in the election. Leaked but real emails about unethical/illegal conduct did nothing more than make the voters better informed about actual facts, while this incident intentionally presented false data to the voters at the FCC, who may rely on it in their decision making. The latter is infinitely worse IMO. One involves better informing the voters, the other involves lying to them.
- Bud 9y ago
  Voters were made "better informed" by Roger Stone's ratf*king and the Comey letter? No they weren't.

downandout 9y ago

>Just like the election This seems far worse than what happened with the election. The hacked emails at issue in the election were real, and they revealed bad things that the Clinton campaign was involved in. I have always found it laughable that the complaint seems to be “we lost because the Russians uncovered the bad things I was doing, and it’s not fair that people found out about them”. If the emails had all been about how she was going to bend over backwards to help the American people, perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a problem for her. In this case, the data being given to a comparatively minuscule group of “voters” (the FCC) was fake, and intended to completely misrepresent public opinion. To the extent that the FCC cares about public opinion, this is worse than simply exposing the actual misdeeds of a political candidate and her henchmen.

Gaelan 9y ago
Given that the FCC resisted efforts to investigate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the FCC was complit in the fake messages (so they could claim they were in line with public opinion)
- freshboxoffice 9y ago
  Pictures Of Bollywood Actors You May Have Never Seen Before rare and unseen snaps of bollywood stars must watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHam1l8I8nc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHam1l8I8nc
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  After working as a government contracting for many years I'd lean more towards gross incompetency than anything complicit. All the people in charge of critical tech in the DoD that I dealt with here placed their through nepotism and had no clue what they were doing. Granted I'm not saying anything of this is good I just think it's far more likely that they're all idiots over there.
inpdx 9y ago
I'd love to see Trump's emails. But, very curiously, wikileaks didn't release anything negative about Trump. Only seeing one side's dirty laundry is the problem. Don't kid yourself that only one side had it.

vuln 9y ago

Like every company in the tech industry? 'Disrupt' ie break all of the laws and grow faster than you can get sued. Then when you do get sued throw mountains of investor money at it and ask for more.