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FCC Should Prove DDoS Attacks Stopped Net Neutrality Comments (networkworld.com)
New submitter Michelle Davidson writes: After John Oliver urged viewers of HBO's Last Week Tonight to fight again for net neutrality and post comments in support of it, people hit a wall — the FCC's site essentially crashed. Originally, it was believed that the number of people trying to access the site caused the problem, but then the FCC released a statement saying "multiple" DDoS attacks -- occurring at the same time Oliver sent viewers to the site -- caused the site to crash: "These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC." The group Fight for the Future doesn't buy it, though, and wants proof. It says the FCC should release the logs: "The FCC should immediately release its logs to an independent security analyst or major news outlet to verify exactly what happened last night. The public deserves to know, and the FCC has a responsibility to maintain a functioning website and ensure that every member of the public who wants to submit a comment about net neutrality has the ability to do so. Anything less is a subversion of our democracy." No word yet from the FCC on whether it will release its logs, leading the interwebs to speculate about whether it was actually an attack to prevent commenting or if the FCC is ill-prepared to handle large amounts of traffic and blamed DDoS attacks to cover their inabilities. People are even questioning whether the FCC's tech team knows what a DDoS attack is.
Distributed - Was all the traffic originating from one location?
... by inciting the activity he gives a very public central focal point to those seeking retribution for the perceived offense.
Denial - Was the resource denied to its user base?
of - (i got nothing)
Service - The thing.
Unfortunately, the line between activism and vandalism is going to be drawn by a court somewhere. Oliver did an awesome thing in an awful way
One question to ask yourself is, "is this any different from a hacker running a denial script?" Playing devil's advocate here, but where does your right to free speech end and my right to use a government service provided by my tax dollars begin? If this army of activists continued in perpetuity, would it still be free speech?
On the plus side, maybe the government will use this as impetus to design better website infrastructure. Can't handle 100s of thousands of posts per minute? In this day of Facebook, Twitter, and Google? Weaksauce.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
You're advocating for silencing people who don't meet some some arbitrary definition of "insightful comments coming from people with knowledge of different portions of the issue who can add depth to the discussion", but you're not considering the problem of who decides what is insightful.
Our current administration has been firing scientists and experts in favor of political pundits, right wing journalists, lobbyists and wealthy people who donated to the campaign in positions of power because those are the people whose comments they like. And that administration is the one that would be deciding what comments qualify as insightful and which people are knowledgeable.
Frankly, what you're suggesting sounds like a good way to start a totalitarian regime.