AT&T just can’t seem to get enough bad press as of late. First it comes out that AT&T Wireless won’t be bringing MMS to the iPhone until August. Then there’s the lack of tethering for the iPhone, followed closely by a push-back of iPhone MMS to September. Now it looks like AT&T’s DSL service wants to get in on all of the bad press by seemingly blocking sections of 4chan to a large percentage of its users.
4chan, in its simplest form is an image board. However, it is also the source of most of the Internet’s pranks (like messing with the Time 100 poll a few months back), memes (RickRolling, LOLcats) and Anonymous (a group leading a campaign against Scientology). Many AT&T DSL subscribers are finding it impossible to connect to img.4chan.org, specifically the /b/ and /r9k/ sections of the site.
The problems do not appear to be simple DNS issues. There are rumors from 4chan and related site that AT&T is filtering the site because it is a heavy target of DDoS attacks from AT&T IPs. The rumors cannot be proven as of yet. What can be proven is that m00t, the site’s founder has confirmed the filtering/blocking on the 4chan status blog, and that it has brought AT&T to the trending topics list on Twitter.
There’s no proof that this is exactly intentional on AT&T’s part, though the fact that it’s the only major ISP that cannot access the site is very suspicious. There’s going to be a lot of backlash on AT&T for the issues either way. There are plenty of complaints calling this a Net Neutrality issue, which in a way it could be. If it were any other site, there would be a backlash, but it would soon be forgotten. AT&T made a big mistake by messing with people’s access to 4chan. There are already numerous actions being taken by the community (including some the webcomic Xkcd blocking access to the site from AT&T corporate offices, and email campaigns to get majot news outlets to cover the story).
If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how this helps. Even those who dislike 4chan and its tendency towards very NSFW content should be able to agree that this is wrong, especially if it’s intentional on AT&T’s part.
Read [Metblogs]
Read [Stormen]
Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
