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FCC Admits It Was Never Actually Hacked (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The FCC has come clean on the fact that a purported hack of its comment system last year never actually took place, after a report from its inspector general found a lack of evidence supporting the idea. Chairman Ajit Pai blamed the former chief information officer and the Obama administration for providing "inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people." It was so galling to everyone looking for answers that the GAO was officially asked to look into it. The letter requesting the office's help at the time complained that the FCC had "not released any records or documentation that would allow for confirmation that an attack occurred, that it was effectively dealt with, and that the FCC has begun to institute measures to thwart future attacks and ensure the security of its systems." That investigation is still going on, but one conducted by the FCC's own OIG resulted in the report Pai cites.
Pai's statement was issued before the OIG publicized its report, as one does when a report is imminent that essentially says your agency has been clueless at best or deliberately untruthful at worst, and for more than a year. To be clear, the report is still unpublished, though its broader conclusions are clear from Pai's statement. In it he slathers Bray with the partisan brush and asserts that the report exonerates his office: "I am deeply disappointed that the FCC's former [CIO], who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable. I'm also disappointed that some working under the former CIO apparently either disagreed with the information that he was presenting or had questions about it, yet didn't feel comfortable communicating their concerns to me or my office. On the other hand, I'm pleased that this report debunks the conspiracy theory that my office or I had any knowledge that the information provided by the former CIO was inaccurate and was allowing that inaccurate information to be disseminated for political purposes." UPDATE: The complete Office of Inspector General report has been released, refuting claims that a cyberattack was responsible for disrupting the FCC's comment system last year.
Pai's statement was issued before the OIG publicized its report, as one does when a report is imminent that essentially says your agency has been clueless at best or deliberately untruthful at worst, and for more than a year. To be clear, the report is still unpublished, though its broader conclusions are clear from Pai's statement. In it he slathers Bray with the partisan brush and asserts that the report exonerates his office: "I am deeply disappointed that the FCC's former [CIO], who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable. I'm also disappointed that some working under the former CIO apparently either disagreed with the information that he was presenting or had questions about it, yet didn't feel comfortable communicating their concerns to me or my office. On the other hand, I'm pleased that this report debunks the conspiracy theory that my office or I had any knowledge that the information provided by the former CIO was inaccurate and was allowing that inaccurate information to be disseminated for political purposes." UPDATE: The complete Office of Inspector General report has been released, refuting claims that a cyberattack was responsible for disrupting the FCC's comment system last year.
Taking a page right out of Trump's book... blame the guy who came before you.
Is there a single agency, department, or aide in this degenerate president's administration that is not steeped in corruption and lies?
I would feel better if there was, because otherwise I'd have to begrudgingly acknowledge that Trump is history's greatest evil genius. I mean, he must have accidentally hired an honest person, right? I mean, even his campaign was a parade of reprobates and sleaze. It just never stops.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, he's still president.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You did catch that this was blamed on the former CTO right? Seems that the person responsible no longer works at the FCC, which is as it should be.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It's that some unknown parties were abusing the comment system and automatically generating comments supporting getting rid of net neutrality. When reached, many of the people said they didn't even know what it was, and definitely didn't fill out the comment form.
In addition, there were some very peculiar things going on with it. Such as the timestamps correlated with the names in order (alphabetically inserted).
Someone was definitely doing something screwy, and it was in support of dropping net neutrality. Somehow I think Ajit, being the slimeball that he is, won't be looking into this.
This administration? Wake up, Obama is no longer in office, we elected a golden pumpkin.
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Ok... this is a mostly IT audience which should have noticed the red herring when this happened.
They claimed it was a "hack". No one hacks a web site to skew comments... they script the submissions. Bots. Or humans employed to manually add scripted comments.
So think about it- the FCC leadership is either so incompetent, or so evil, that they blamed the "truth" on hackers in order to avoid the appearance of unpopularity.
I point this out resigned to the fact that not many people care. An exercise in futility. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
He wasn't 'let go', he left on his own, long, long, long before the report that implicated him. Even if he was the one to blame (he wasn't), it doesn't change the fact that, first, the FCC's comment system was a POS that shouldn't be used to get public opinion, and second, that someone used the fact the POS comment system failed to get partisan legislation passed. Sounds like an inside job to me.
And of course, who's to blame but Obama! Man that guy sure does get around.
Love how Pai makes big deal of previous CIO being hired by previous administration... When he himself was hired by same previous administration. Great stance suddenly denouncing the guy who is gone, when plenty of people have denounced FCC claims all along, yet Pai somehow couldn't reach the same conclusions those people did until now. Obviously his next step is politically empowering those who made this criticism all along. Not.
Interesting, you make it seem by your wording as if the former CIO had been let go recently, yet he left the office over a year ago. An entire year the FCC has had to look into this and yet they chose not to. Chairman Pai vehemently dislikes ex-Chairman Wheeler, under whom this CIO was appointed, and yet took the man's word at face-value and didn't bother to look into the issue after dismissing him? Oh wait,t hey didn't dismiss him, he left.
Now, this whole thing about a DDoS... I really don't expect Pai, who honestly knows as much about technology as my butthole knows about how skittles taste, to understand how a high-volume flood of people attempting to access the comment system all at once could bring it to its knees. Considering Bray is the person who modernized the FCC's computer systems front to back (and reduced government spending on legacy IT support by 35% in doing so), I think he knows exactly what he is talking about, but may have communicated it poorly and said "Its similar to a DDoS attack." when trying to explain it to the commissioners.
But, who knows? I mean, its not like he could possibly take Pai's words today as slander or libel and sue and get those emails put into the public record for all to see. I mean, that kind of accusation is pretty damning for someone in the private sector trying to hold down a job at the c-level. Calls into question everything he does professionally, words like that. So, we'll see.
Notice no one has shared said improper report to date though. Just keep it in mind when you try to defend Idjit Pie from now on.
if you don't fire _all_ of them. When they let one go the one that got 'canned' goes to a cushy job at the telecoms (or whatever lobbyist group is buying whatever law we're talking about) and then another gets replaced.
This won't stop until Americans make refusing corporate & PAC money the primary litmus test for their candidates; _especially_ in primary elections. You can't serve two masters. Either you serve the people or you serve the donor class.
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What is the deal with the orange face? Is it an improvement over the previous orange hair?
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Here's the thing -- when YOURE the one who has been caught lying, trying to pass the buck on to your predecessor just makes you look more like a douchebag.
We aren't fucking idiots Pai. We know it was never hacked.
Because it's not his JOB to keep the IT infrastructure from being hacked, he's just a commissioner. He's just the appointed chairman of the FCC, it's similar to being on the chairman of the board of a company. He just has a vote in the hiring and firing decisions of the executives.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Keep in mind that the political left heavily supports the idea of unionization.
Infowars called - they want you back
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The economy was already growing(despite Trump's exhortations to the contrary), unemployment is being counted the same way as it was before, which Trump himself said was a lie, and our relationship with North Korea is the same as it was before, despite Trump's claims to meaningful accomplishments, the net result of his summit in Singapore was a waste of tax dollars.
Oh wait, the deficit is growing, Puerto Rico is still being ignored, and the Turnip administration is whining about its own child internment policies forcing it to expand the effort to reunite families.
Nearly all the benefit of the "improving" economy is going to the already rich (real wages adjusted for inflation have stagnated since the 70s), and NK is still building nukes. Every "accomplishment" claimed by the retard in chief thus far has been a sham perpetrated on the ignorant.
is there will be exactly zero consequences even after admitting they lied to pretty much everyone.
Zero. None. Nada. Zip.
As I posted in another thread about corporations and their standby scapegoats whenever they get caught doing something immoral, unethical
or downright illegal, so too does the government have their pockets full of excuses ready to go when they fall into the spotlight of shame.
They always tend to blame everyone except themselves.
Yet, so deep is the bullshit, they are too blind to realize that the real problem, is them.
The comment period for the NN rules was a shit show all around, and utterly failed to fulfill it's purpose because people on both sides faked and spammed millions of times. By far, most of the fakes / spams were opposing the rule. Roughly 87% of the crap was opposed, probably because those who were in favor (isps) were more likely to understand that spamming shit comments would be absolutely pointless, as opposed to the Facebook reactionaries who had until then never heard of a "comment period".
It's helpful to understand what the comment process is all about. The agency publishes a draft of the rule and then people interested can comment on the wording, structure, and details of the draft. The agency then looks at each comment and adjusts the wording where appropriate, where they agree adjustments are needed, in order to produce the final draft. Occasionally, there is a second round of comments, with an interim draft.
It is NOT American Idol, not "press 2 to vote for Ajit Pai". It's not anything like a vote, in any way. It's a process to refine the wording and details, turning a proposed draft into the final rule.
Useful / proper comments which can effect this process point to specific words in specific sections, such as:
In section 2, subsection c, the proposed list does not indicate whether those requirements are "or" or "and". The word "or" should be inserted like so:
ISPs may block traffic that is:
1. Spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM act
2. A ddos attack as defined in 3(b)y
OR
3. Authorized to be blocked by the commission
I've had success with very minor policy "adjustments" as well, saying the list should also include and item #4 foobar because while it is similar to a ddos, it doesn't exactly fit the definition in 3(b)y because whatever. I've never seen a policy reversal, or anything remotely resembling a reversal, take place during the comment period. Rather, it's minor adjustments to the details.
That's the type of comment that gets a change made. The FCC isn't asking what their policy should be, they are looking for bugs in the way they have written the rules.
Of the top fake / spam comments, six of the top seven bogus comments, the ones bulk-submitted the most times, were OPPOSING the policy:
http://www.pewinternet.org/201...
Such spam is utterly pointless since the comment process is not a vote. It's more like proofreading.
I can make it seem like I'm successful even if I'm not as well, at least for a short time. I simply mortgage my house and go on a credit fueled spending spree, which is exactly what the Federal government is doing. And you'd have to be living under a rock miss the fact that the North Korea "peace deal" is not really going anywhere. The "demolition" of the nuclear testing site was likely a PR stunt and whenever anyone talks about actions instead of loose promises the North Koreans feign outrage.
Bloomberg
Al Jazeera
No kidding? You mean the comments site which actually has an API for bulk submissions wasn't attacked by 1337 h4x0r5, just someone using the API exactly how it was intended? Who'da thunk it?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The Right are much better than the Left at doing both X and Y.
Where X=dodgy deals and Y=getting (evil) things done
The Left would love to do more of X and even Y, but they just don't have the gumption.
Nice fellow, that Obama.
The US is too accustomed to its way of dealing with small countries. They concede nothing and demand unilateral disarmament, or else.
This doesn't work well with a country that has some delusions of grandeur but also declared that they wouldn't finish like Libya and Iraq.
I wonder all this will end.
End result lol the US will sanction the whole planet, and the rest of the world will ignore it and do as they please. Mexico will build the wall, to keep the US out.
By posting Facebook articles.
Words and meanings are only loosely connected.
The millions of duplicative spams sent in opposition came primarily from Demand Progress, an organization co-founded by Aaron Swartz orginally to protest seizure of domains like MegaUpload which exist primarily to engage in commerical criminal copyright infringement for profit.
Is it your assertion that Aaron Swartz and his associates were trying to "make it look like those who opposed net neutrality were trying to game the system", apparently in collaboration with the Russians? Because that's who submitted most of them.
The term 'hack' comes from MIT train hobbyist and the "hacking" they did to their model train setups to do crazy stuff. It describes any elaborate and convoluted means of achieving a desired end. Arranging for tens of thousands of obviously fake comments to get posted and for those fake comments to be accepted as real definitely fits the bill.
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Technically, what happened actually does fit the definition of a DDoS attack. Oliver found a deep link that wasn't supposed to get much traffic, exposed it and encouraged people to send lots of traffic there..
Not if the traffic is intended to actually use the service offered at link. DDos attacks try to block servers by keeping connections open as long as possible WITHOUT transmitting data.
Didn't Oliver merely encouraged people to use their free speech by using a feedback form that was especially intended for this kind of feedback?
I would not want to give businesses or agencies a blueprint for handling critics by setting up a web form on a server too weak to handle it and then sue for hacking when some user feedback brought it down....
bickerdyke
As in:
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
bickerdyke
In my region unemployment is very low however wages are below 2007 levels despite a significant increase to cost of living. 70% off jobs do not pay enough to raise a family of 3. So yay, at least we have jobs.... even if they don't pay all the bills.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
It's bitztream the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating, Qualcomm-hating, Firefox tabs-hating, Slashdot editors-hating Slashdot troll!
It's bitztream the autism-hating, Musk-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Qualcomm-hating, Firefox tabs-hating, Slashdot editors-hating Slashdot troll!
Okay. Let's start with Ajit Pai. He is inept and was hired by the previous administration.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I think you mean that they are using someone who has been gone for a year as a scapegoat to hide their blatant lies.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I think you mean that they are using someone who has been gone for a year as a scapegoat to hide their blatant lies.
Let's call it blaming the mis-information on an Ex-Employee. Happens all the time.
BTW - A lie is "an intentionally false statement" so please step back from calling somebody a liar until you can prove they knew what they where saying wasn't true and they indented to mislead when they made it. Being mis-informed and making a statement that turns out to be false, does not make one a liar, nor does saying something that can be interpreted in a way that makes it untrue. In order to call someone a liar you have to prove that the INTENT was to mislead, in which case, even a TRUE statement can be a lie if it omits contextual information necessary to understand the actual truth.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
> Infowars called - they want you back
I'm not sure if you're being voluntarily ignorant, or you're just letting your personal opinions take over your ability to read poll data.
I'm not sure if you are confusing me with someone who bases much of anything on "poll data".
If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Chill, my dude. You have me more convinced than ever that you need to be on infowars.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So by exposing the link that takes you to that actual comment form (instead of taking the circuitous route the FCC set up) is trying to set up a human level DDOS?
His intent was to let people actually comment on the proposed removal of net neutrality instead of spending their time looking for the actual comment form.
You skipped the most important part of his point:
unemployment is being counted the same way as it was before, which Trump himself said was a lie
It's a lie. They knew that it wasn't a DDoS attack the whole time. They intended to deceive the public, because the truth makes them look bad.
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It seems you missed the last eight years of democrat rule.
Clinton took a 9 figure "donation" in exchange for supporting a big mining deal. Nobody even batted an eye on the left. That's gumption.
Obama expanded wars into a dozen countries - even going for regime change in Libya - all without bothering to go to congress for authorization. He had a secret, extra-judicial "kill list" that he used to target people for assassination... including american citizens. Remember code pink protesting that? Yeah, not so much.
Don't pretend "my team doesn't do that... at least not like your team!" You don't amass hundreds of millions in speaking fees because you are a dynamic speaker. And you particularly don't get paid to make speeches when you are pretty terrible at it... like Hillary is. At least Obama and Bill Clinton are dynamic public speakers. But notice who is paying for the speaking fees. It ain't greenpeace.
Do I need a fucking citation to claim that someone is lying when they say that the sky is green? The hacking claim was a pathetic deflection, and everybody knew it.
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What does his job not including something preventing that didn't happen have to do with him lying to the public?
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Pai was announcing an upcoming report from the FCC's inspector general. That inspector general is David L. Hunt. https://www.fcc.gov/inspector-general He was appointed in 2011, during the Obama administration, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/137015-david-hunt-named-fcc-inspector-general So this an Obama appointee reporting on an Obama appointee, not Pai going after an Obama administration official.
They have more envelopes now. There's "They did it first." "They made us do it." "We didn't do it." "We did it, but it wasn't illegal." "It's illegal, but still not as bad as when they did it." and "Hey, look at those job-stealing Messicans!"
Party of personal responsibility!
The real purpose of any government worker is to grow their budgets !!
that the comments weren't real. Also, if you're a Russian troll you're doing a terrible job of it. And if you're not you're even worse at whatever the hell it is you're doing. I can't decide.
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"suffering so much that the government had to step in and institute limitations such as the 40-hour work week, holiday and sick time, overtime rules, breaks and lunches, and other basic rights that many workers take for granted today."
False. Leftist militant workers banded together and continually inflicted violence and destruction, and what you cite is the result.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
And this flood of legitimate users attempting to make know their opinions on the matter at hand was none of those types of DDoS. This is no way, shape or form was a DDoS; it was inadequate server provisioning & scaling, plain and simple. The resources at hand were not adequate to the demand.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
If you want to get specific, he actually reduced server load by not bogging down the server with requests for superfluous pages. That it encouraged more action is just a side benefit.
They literally blocked further investigation. You can sit there all day and say that the smoking gun has no fingerprints on it, but the gun has been shot.
Please, all those tax breaks resulted in a few people getting a 1 time bonus and the increased profits going to the shareholders.
Luckily for me, my wife and I live well below our means and have significant investments despite being late 30s/early 40s. Our goal is to retire in our mid 50s and live only off investment income. This "boom" has helped us out but we're already in the top 15% of income earners in the country. Poor people are getting more poor. This is a trend that has been going on for a long time so I'm not blaming any one party.. however Republicans are less discrete about their intentions of funneling more money to the already wealthy.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
My point is that calling it a hack is merely stretching the truth, and with all the blatant lies coming out of DC lately it's curious that this is what gets apologized for.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Seems more accurate to say that like capitalism, communism and socialism naturally fail without regulation.