RSSAT&T raises ire of 4chan users after ISP blocks access to popular forums
By Tim Conneally | Published July 27, 2009, 11:48 AM
AT&T reportedly blocked sections of message board 4chan, the popular wellspring of memes and clearinghouse for humor of questionable taste. For a short time yesterday, AT&T was blocking image boards (/b/ and /r9k/) with no explanation to its DSL and U-Verse customers or to 4chan's admins. Later in the evening, AT&T restored network access, but the site remained under a large-scale denial of service (DDoS) attack which continued into the morning.
While AT&T's blockage of img.4chan.org was confirmed, the relationship between the blockage and denial of service attack remains unconfirmed. Some reports (and some posters on /b/) claim that the DDoS attacks were coming from AT&T customers.
Of course, any ISP-level action taken against the popular site is sure to elicit retaliation from its users, no matter what the ISP's motive. In a matter of hours, users already began planning actions against AT&T.
For example, an article saying "AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was found dead in his multimillion dollar beachfront mansion, say official sources..." was posted to Digg, and has received almost a thousand votes by this afternoon, and a campaign to boycott AT&T has been put up.
On Encyclopedia Dramatica, under the heading "The Gameplan," a PR war is discussed as one option for retaliation. It says, "Make it absolutely abundantly clear that this is NOT acceptable to American consumers and this WILL NOT be allowed to happen, or else face financial and political suicide. Acting like an idiot and trying to DDoS them will only end with you being persecuted, and your actions being used as a justification. Fight with what works: this is David and Goliath. this is the little man and the big evil corporation. this is the honest consumers fighting back by being consumers: by stop giving them money, by making them look horrible, by causing a PR sh*tstorm. By having the consumerist press have headlines disparaging AT&T."
User DDos their own ISP. Like burning your own farm out of protest.
Score: 1
|does anyone here seriously expect a bunch of antisocial middle-class white kids to impact a multibillion dollar telecommunications company in any way? i mean, we're talking about people who split their time between watching anime, downloading cell phone camera p0rn and making stupid pictures and phrases on the 1 in a million chance it'll end up being seen by people with actual lives. the only reason anyone noticed the site block is that the average 4chan user spends as much time on the site as everyone else spends enjoying the real world.
this isnt news. period.
Score: -2
|yes... round here, folks got pissed at the internet company and actually cut the fibers (physically) i came back from vacation only to find the net knocked out... i can only imagine the same may of happened and worse :P besides the 'kiddys' have the media in their hands
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|"Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic.
Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question. We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers."
http://www.att.com/gen/p...amp;newsarticleid=26970
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|I've known about 4chan for years but had no desire to go there until I heard it was being blocked (see the Streisand Effect). My guess is the DDoS attack is all the AT&T customers checking if the site is blocked.
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|trying to block 4chan is like, trying to block the internet, its the entirety of internet f*ckedupedness rolled into one site ... basically, sure you have some bad stuff posted to 4chan, bad stuff is posted everywhere, YouTube gets some f*cked up s*** posted and is subsequently removed after enough folks flag it... so if this ends up being a censorship/TOS issue, what? AT&T should block YouTube and a thousand other sites why they are at it, Google even
i also read somewhere that AT&T was trying to talk to 4chan owners about content posted on the site and some of it needs to stop? not sure if thats true but, they do have mods, i'm sure mods do their best, what else can be done? :P
an ISP has no business disrupting or blocking content with the exception if all content posted is illegal (note disturbing images are not illegal, child porn illegal) or causing serious network issues that need to be resolved which seems to be the case here and even then they should of contacted someone first, to tell them what was about to happen... OR you know, posted something on their website about it? or used Twitter! god forbid... all these tools of communication and AT&T being a comms company and they can't even get a message out about something like this?
boggles the mind, its time to really buckle down on some true net neutrality law, seriously... this is only the beginning
Score: 3
|*shrug*
It's AT&T's service? They can do whatever the hell they want with it, so long as the users are aware they are blocking some content?
Sorry, I have nothing against 4chan (never been there), but if the content or users are giving AT&T trouble, why shouldn't they be able to block it?
Keep in mind: Censorship is the limiting of speech/content by the *government*. It has nothing to do with businesses. A business has the right to bar any form of speech on it's property or via it's services.
Score: -4
|has nothing to do with government, ATT blacklisted 4chan and their subscribers who use the site, they controled what their users can see online (because of an apparent DDoS attack eating up ATT server bandwidth ... thats all well and good, they should of sent out a notice in any way they could though
AT&T provide a service/gateway to the internet and the internet overall is free and uncensored, thats the nature of internet
if AT&T suddenly found betanews unacceptable and banned it without reason, what would you say then? what about any other site online, say Hulu, because AT&T has their own portal to near the same content... meanwhile everyone else on various ISPs enjoy free and uncensored access
its about the principle of what happened and also how it was carried out the wrong way and not surprisingly old school way of doing business for AT&T, thats not acceptable
it is their 'service' but AT&T doesn't control the internet, they are a gateway to a service now, they aren't the police, though NSA and ATT i'm sure would disagree :P
either way its all over now, still hope this stirs up much debate
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|Censorship is censorship regardless of the censor.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/censorship
Yes, AT&T can censor Internet content if they want. I don't think it's in their best interests though. Nothing provokes populous wrath like taking away their entertainment.
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|@ART:
Wow...
Internet access provision is a service they provide. They can limit that service however they choose. If they are stupid about it, they will get the bad PR that goes with it.
I wouldn't care less if they blocked BN..I don't use AT&T.
g3028:
Agreed. I never claimed what they did was a good or bad thing, just that it is their right to do it.
Now, I think it'd be great if we could ban stupidity, but then how would any of us make any money? ;)
Score: -4
|they could, the only thing i want to see them limit is bandwidth... and even thats not right, now i don't mean traffic shaping, i mean... setting up internet packages for individuals :P thats the extent of control i want to see :P
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|I usually agree with you Art, but in this case I think ATT was in the right for blocking the site. Considering that the attack came from their IP....for all the contacting/trying to find people/communication ATT could have/should have? participated in, the quickest and best thing to do was a temporary block. That fixed the problem right? (albeit creating a whole other one for them).
If my beloved websites were blocked to me because I use ATT, as long as the company has a GOOD reason and the blocks are indeed temporary and not permanent, I don't see the issue.
Score: 1
|they had a good reason, not saying that... but, you throw up notices, even have a page dedicated to notices of this type, updated IRT, or close to real time...
THEN, you don't have anyone wondering whats going on :)
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|Ok, so for every domain that ATT blocks for spam, virus attacks, DDOS attacks, and whatever else, they should post out for the world (and said attackers) to see. A lot of companies see malicious traffic, block it for 24 hours (or less) and when the attack is over, re-enable the traffic. For all we know, it could have been an automated tool that blocked it until a human could verify weather or not it was legitimate.
From my understanding of the articles I have read, only a portion of 4chan was blocked, not the whole site. So, they detected a DDOS from img.4chan.org, so they block that alias. They probably did some sort of search, and blocked the range of the cluster or whatever that portion of 4chan runs on, and because of the way the internet works, more than what they intended got blocked.
I would rather ATT (and other ISPs) err on the side of caution and block something temporarily, than be afraid of customer ire and let something through they may interrupt more customers and possible take down the whole network.
This happens all the time, the difference is that 4chan is made up of a bunch of juvenile "i live therefore I deserve it" kids who have nothing better to do than cry when their perceived "I want it now" mentality is interrupted.
I applaud their ingenuity in how they affect the internet. I mean anyone who can direct the internet in a way that can influence a Time Top 100 poll the way they did can do anything they put their minds to. It reminds me of the movie “Hackers.” Imagine what they could do if they put their minds to it, instead of feeling deprived because their favorite website is down for a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.
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|i think its been confirmed an trigger happy engineer did it, that and EVERY person on the internet knows of 4chan, its not like it was some obscure domain
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|"think its been confirmed an trigger happy engineer did it"
source? every article I read indicated it was done to prevent an escalating DDoS issue, and immediately reversed when the attack stopped.
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|"“They essentially dropped a nuke instead of using the fly swatter,” Moot said in an e-mail to Threat Level. “I was told by someone within the company that an engineer essentially overreacted and made a mistake in choosing how to deal with a rather trivial issue. That’s how we got to where we’re at now.” Moot / Wired
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|ROFLMAO!
moot??? As in,"the founder of 4chan"??
That's your source???
I thought I had seen it all...
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|lol, i tend to believe moot more so than AT&T at this point in time :P
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