Re:Was Your Name Stolen to Support Killing Net Neutrality?
by neilsimp1 on Friday December 01, 2017 @02:31PM
(#15826572)
I'm getting a 503 Service Unavailable from the call to the FCC service.
<h2>FCC Message Alert!<h2>
<font color="red">An FCC error has occured</font></font><p></p>
<font type="Arial" size="2" color="#000000" style="font-weight:normal;">We're sorry, an unexpected error occurred with your request.</font>
Re:Was Your Name Stolen to Support Killing Net Neutrality?
by esaym on Friday December 01, 2017 @02:42PM
(#15826676)
Even better if you watch that API call (and it actually succeeds) you will see lots of personal info (emails, etc) that are not rendered in the HTML results.
Re:Was Your Name Stolen to Support Killing Net Neutrality?
by esaym on Friday December 01, 2017 @02:48PM
(#15826735)
And taking these email addresses and googling them only yields search results from some kind of random correlated "free public info" type sites. So I am assuming these accounts were put together by using info on these sites and then mass uploading them to the FCC. So it doesn't look like this is some sort of massive hack or anything of that nature.
I have no idea if these two tools do exactly the same thing, but I was able to identify about 60% of my family whose names were used (all NY residents, but the addresses that fake comments were submitted under were all from other states.)
And yes, it's possible that people with the same name as my family members were actually at those addresses in those other states, but it's extremely unlikely that they all decided to have the same opinion nearly word for word, all clustered on the same couple of days in May and July of this year.