Your Internet, Your Access
We are dependent on our pipe/connection to the information highway, the internet. But who controls and manages that pipe continues to impact what you have access to, the information you see and hear and ultimately who gets to succeed in our new world. So it has been surprising to watch as the concept of Net Neutrality proposed has taken such strange turns with record numbers of people commenting to the FCC they oppose the idea of open and free access to the internet and information (thanks to Troy Hunt for covering this in his recent post).
Net Neutrality opened the doors for a modern-day technical version of civil war. The two sides unleashing record-breaking salvos of “comments” to the FCC for and against.
On the side of “For” are the beleaguered users and small businesses terrified of the control exerted by large corporations who actively manipulate and manage what you see and can access in your home on your television on your phone and more recently the internet. Don’t believe me just search for something unusual using a public search engine like google and then browse over to you facebook feed or any of the other social platforms and watch adverts show up that are linked to that search. It gets worse – I visited Lisbon Portugal recently and upon returning to the USA found my feed filled with an advert for Portugal vacations and everything to do with Portugal.
On the other side – those very same big corporations of this equation are the corporations who have made a business out offering a “free” service which you traded your personal data in exchange (think Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and increasingly others such as Uber and Airbnb)
The stakes are high – not just the financial interest but your future freedoms and the ability for any company to emerge without being crushed by incumbent data management overlords who control not only store all of your data but also what flows in and out of your devices and home.
The tally of comments reached nearly 4 million. A record-breaking number of people weighing in on net neutrality with the anti-net neutrality camp claiming a “landslide” victory. All appeared suspicious given the substantial polls showing support for net neutrality. As investigations showed
Nearly 8 million identical one-sentence comments supporting the existing regulations were tied to email addresses from FakeMailGenerator.com. Many of those used plausible names but with nonsensical street-and-city combinations that do not exist.
and even more telling
Another million comments, also supporting net neutrality, claimed to come from people with @pornhub.com email addresses.
Rest assured if you have a pornhub email the likelihood of entering into this argument seems unlikely at best and if you were you would lean towards net neutrality since the data pipe overlords could quickly squeeze your free access out of existence without any net neutrality regulations.
In an interesting this when Buzzfeed made a request for the server logs in an attempt to get to the source of all the fake comments submitted under the Freedom of Information Act they were denied by the FCC. Not deterred they managed to get details from box.com that had been used by the FCC to allow bulk comment uploading and left a clear trail back to Shane Cory from “Media Bridge” that used a data breach trove of personal details and email addresses (the Modern Business Solutions Data Breach)
You can read the sordid details exposed by buzzed in “The Impersonators”
The detail is important here – we cannot succumb to superficial understanding and belief of the material presented to us. Currently, your feed is controlled by the big data companies that feed you your access. They control everything – they will even subvert your search to point to their preferred results unless you take specific and technical action. For example, Comcast has the system named:
Comcast Domain Helper service
This is no “helper” to you or anyone close to you and works essentially to hijack your domain name service (DNS) and while they do offer an online “fix” they will enable this hijack on every customer unless they actively opt-out
Protecting your source of data and understanding and asking the questions as to where and why the results are as they are presented is an essential part of our lives now. It is no longer good enough to hear that millions of people commented that net neutrality is bad and should be abolished (it’s not).
Dig the Detail
Finding good sources of information is increasingly hard and teasing out the reality from the fake news and the depressing onslaught of weaponized content coming from many of the usual suspects and many more joining in the party. You can read the depressing detail in this “2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation” for some of the latest details of state government actors with some significant resources and investments creating content to target your feeds
As a starting point, I would suggest my post “Trust No One” is a starting point. But beyond that finding tools and techniques to dig into the detail. This recent to look at twitter feeds is a great tool from Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) that offers a simple visual tool to help identify bots simply by highlighting the never-ending stream of content
If you've been reading the analysis threads @ZellaQuixote and I post, you've probably seen the tweet schedule plots we include. Here's a simple web application you can use to make those plots yourself for accounts of your own choosing.https://t.co/67lk3ewfRx pic.twitter.com/rLOUUXAtPy
— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) October 4, 2019
If you want to channel your programming skills (or perhaps even learn to use the amazing machine that sits at your fingertips every day) you could start with some free tools that use the Python programming Langauge such as “Tweet Analyzer”.
No matter what tool or method you use this is not a single step or destination but an ongoing process and one that must continue to change and update based on the latest developments
This is your future and you need to protect it by paying attention and digging the detail
