/b/locked

[lord_casek]

Reports are spreading that AT&T is now blocking 4chan.org’s «/b/»-section.

 

 

 

 

 

Firing one of the first shots in the net neutrality war, AT&T has blocked 4chan’s /b/ image board. AT&T subscribers are unable to connect to /b/ and /r9k/ (both of which are hosted on img.4chan.org). However, subscribers can get on any of the so-called «worksafe» boards that 4chan.org offers.

The problem seems to be present only for wired connections only (AT&T Mobility customers are not affected). The problem is not caused by an DNS-error, as traceroutes indicates that AT&T is dropping img.4chan.org requests in the AT&T network.

Slashdot, Digg & Reddit are now running stories that are rapidly being upvoted about the topic.

As citizens of a free internet, what do we think about this kind of censorship?

UPDATED 1:Confirmation comes from several Reddit users that the website has indeed been blocked in a number of areas in the US and that it is not a technical issue.

UPDATED 2: A mere 5 hours after the problems were first reported on Reddit, sources on /b/ say that members of Anonymous has already started planning retaliation towards AT&T – amongst other things posting personal information about AT&T executives. One might quietly wonder if the AT&T megacorp. knows what’s it up against – with 4chan often being referred to as “The Internet Hate Machine”.

UPDATED 3: It turns out 15.5% of all US internet users use AT&T DSL, so this is quite a big problem. It will severly affect 4chan, both in regards of traffic and advertising volumes.

UPDATED 4: moot, the founder of 4chan, officially acknowledges the ban – calling for disconcerned users to «call or write customer support and corporate immediately»: http://status.4chan.org … Somehow, I get a feeling they’re gonna do a lot more than that, moot.

[lord_casek]

Re: /b/ locked

 

also this award winning quote:

 

First they came for the pedophiles, and I said nothing, for I was not a pedophile.

Then they came for the pirates, and I said nothing, because I knew the pirates would win.

Then they came for the youtube commenters, and I said nothing, because finally someone took care of those morons.

Then they came for me, and I was like 'Daaayum!"

[MrChupacabra]

haha, hoo boy. I predict large problems for AT&T execs from outraged nerds. Which is good, since censoring the internet is complete and total bullshit.

 

edit: also, it appears i can get onto /b/ from my phone, which is on AT&T, so they haven't expanded it beyond their DSL service and onto their wireless plans yet. Soon, i'm sure.

[shai]

"............and nothing of value was lost."

 

I'm sure most of those guys know about Open DNS, though. Just route right around the block.

[lord_casek]

"............and nothing of value was lost."

 

I'm sure most of those guys know about Open DNS, though. Just route right around the block.

 

 

a: too simple

 

b: no "lulz"

[MrChupacabra]

Yeah, its not so much about the fact that they can't get around it but about the fact that this is a start of what could be a much larger push to censor the internet.

[Dark_Knight]

mmMmmmmDMsmm.....cnat sotp teh 4orcahn....mmmmmmmmmm

[Eaten By Wolves]

I actually hope they fuck AT&T shits up, that company has fucked me over on bills so many times.

[SystemFailure]

That is some fuckin bullshit, and of course it won't halt at blockin /b/. As you know Casek and most others with half a brain it is always a domino effect. Just needs to build a bit more momentum. Those nerds better tear shit up.

 

To see if I was blocked I went on and low and behold look what I found on the first page.

 

[Kevin Harris]

Bad news for at&t..

[lord_casek]

oops

 

 

[MAR]

They'll never stop me. I'm behind 9 proxies.

[Dark_Knight]

half the kids on that site know more about teh internetz than anyone who in the govt./fbi. There's no way they will stop them

[*PROTOCOL*]

 

The new AT&T company car.

[lord_casek]

half the people on that site are govt./fbi.

 

 

*fixed

[a/s/l?]

AT&T IS GOING TO GET THEIR SHIT FUCKED UP.

 

:lol:

[lord_casek]

 

The new AT&T company car.

 

also *fixed

[Guest Ginger Bread Man]

Re: /b/ locked

 

also this award winning quote:

 

First they came for the pedophiles, and I said nothing, for I was not a pedophile.

Then they came for the pirates, and I said nothing, because I knew the pirates would win.

Then they came for the youtube commenters, and I said nothing, because finally someone took care of those morons.

Then they came for me, and I was like 'Daaayum!"

 

 

im a prude

 

 

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--

because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--

because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--

because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--

because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me--

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

 

-Martin Niemoeller

[shai]

Yeah, its not so much about the fact that they can't get around it but about the fact that this is a start of what could be a much larger push to censor the internet.

 

Yeah, but sometimes when you take a look at the content involved it's hard not to wonder "What exactly would be lost here?" in the sense of "what does this site contribute to culture or free speech that would be irreplaceable if it were to be suppressed?"

 

However, AT&T is a common carrier- therefore it's not liable for content transmitted on its hardware. So from that perspective, blocking /b/ doesn't make any sense. This article reveals another side to the story, though-

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2182152

[lord_casek]

From ED

 

"Listen up, Anon, this is serious business. We don't want to go all LOL LEGION FREE BOXES TILE SAMPLES on them. That won't solve shit. It'll probably justify it. We need to approach this with legitimate means. Flood the callcenters and inboxes of AT&T. Make them confirm that img.4chan.org (make sure its img.4chan.org and not just 4chan.org) is down. Then make the honest threat of service cancellation if this censorship isn't undone. We also should contact the FCC, (Or whichever federal body is the people to contact about this kind of censorship.)

 

Also, contact the National Coalition Against Censorship. http://www.ncac.org/

 

Digg to raise awareness. http://digg.com/tech_news/AT_T_blocks_4chan/

 

Basically, cause a stink.

 

The objective of this little operation is to basically make sure that this precedent is not set. 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 shitstorm. By having the consumerist press have headlines disparaging AT&T. "

[shai]

Another thing to consider is that AT&T, being a telco, doesn't make snap decisions. It's very likely that they have been thinking about this for a long time from plenty of different angles. In other words, you don't arbitrarily block one of the most popular sites on the web overnight.

 

Read that article I posted. It's pretty crazy. Actually, I'll just post it here...

 

Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?

 

By Tim Wu

 

Chances are that as you read this article, it is passing over part of AT&T's network. That matters, because last week AT&T announced that it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws. The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such a bad idea that it would be not just a disservice to the public but probably a disaster for AT&T itself. If I were a shareholder, I'd want to know one thing: Has AT&T, after 122 years in business, simply lost its mind?

 

No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we're looking at the beginnings of a private police state. That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people's Internet consumption? That's not just Orwellian; that's Orwell.

 

The puzzle is how AT&T thinks that its proposal is anything other than corporate seppuku. First, should these proposals be adopted, my heart goes out to AT&T's customer relations staff. Exactly what counts as copyright infringement can be a tough question for a Supreme Court justice, let alone whatever program AT&T writes to detect copyright infringement. Inevitably, AT&T will block legitimate materials (say, home videos it mistakes for Hollywood) and let some piracy through. Its filters will also inescapably degrade network performance. The filter AT&T will really need will be the one that blocks the giant flood of complaints and termination-of-service notices coming its way.

 

But the most serious problems for AT&T may be legal. Since the beginnings of the phone system, carriers have always wanted to avoid liability for what happens on their lines, be it a bank robbery or someone's divorce. Hence the grand bargain of common carriage: The Bell company carried all conversations equally, and in exchange bore no liability for what people used the phone for. Fair deal.

 

AT&T's new strategy reverses that position and exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders. Today, in its daily Internet operations, AT&T is shielded by a federal law that provides a powerful immunity to copyright infringement. The Bells know the law well: They wrote and pushed it through Congress in 1998, collectively spending six years and millions of dollars in lobbying fees to make sure there would be no liability for "Transitory Digital Network Communications"—content AT&T carries over the Internet. And that's why the recording industry sued Napster and Grokster, not AT&T or Verizon, when the great music wars began in the early 2000s.

 

Here's the kicker: To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data "without selection of the material by the service provider" and "without modification of its content." Once AT&T gets in the business of picking and choosing what content travels over its network, while the law is not entirely clear, it runs a serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. An Internet provider voluntarily giving up copyright immunity is like an astronaut on the moon taking off his space suit. As the world's largest gatekeeper, AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.

 

On the technical side, if I were an AT&T engineer asked to implement this plan, I would resign immediately and look for work at Verizon. AT&T's engineers are already trying to manage the feat of getting trillions of packets around the world at light speed. To begin examining those packets for illegal pictures of Britney Spears would be a nuisance, at best, and a threat to the whole Internet, at worst. Imagine if FedEx were forced to examine every parcel for drug paraphernalia: Next-day delivery would soon go up in smoke. Even China's Internet, whose performance suffers greatly from its filtering, doesn't go as far as what AT&T is proposing.

 

If this idea looks amazingly bad for AT&T, does the firm have an ingenious rationale for blocking content? "It's about," said AT&T last week, "making more content available to more people in more ways going forward." Huh? That's like saying that the goal of a mousetrap is producing more mice. If the quote makes any sense it all, perhaps it means that AT&T, the phone company, has aspirations to itself provide Internet content. Could it really be that AT&T's master strategy is to try and become more like AOL circa 1996?

 

A different theory is that AT&T hopes that filtering out infringing material will help free up bandwidth on its network. What is so strange about this argument is that it suggests that AT&T wants people to use its product less. That's like Exxon-Mobil complaining that SUVs are just buying up too much gas. It suggests that perhaps AT&T should try to improve its network to handle and charge for consumer demand, rather than spending money trying to control its consumers.

 

I just don't get the business aspect, so perhaps the only explanation that makes any sense is a political one. It may be that AT&T so hates being under the current network neutrality mandate that it sees fighting piracy as a way to begin treating some content differently than others—discriminating—in a politically acceptable way. Or maybe AT&T thinks its new friends in the content industry will let them into Hollywood parties if they help fight piracy. Whatever the explanation, AT&T is choosing a scary, expensive, and risky way to make a point. It is also, so far, alone on this one among Internet service providers; the cable industry is probably licking its chops in anticipation of new customers. That's why if this plan goes any further, and I were an AT&T shareholder, I'd have just one thought: SELL.

[Bojangles]

My girl works for AT&T and I'm trying to explain to her the shitstorm that /b/ will unleash and she is a non-believer as of right now.

 

 

...She'll see.

[lord_casek]

ATT>NSA

[SystemFailure]

Oh, they will all see.

[SystemFailure]

AT&T>CIA

[Mercer]

Can /b/ also do something about the monopoly AT&T has on iPhones?

Basically, the iPhone being superior to all other mobile devices, is stuck with the worst mobile network know to man.

It's a crime against humanity, the free market, and the internet.

[lord_casek]

My girl works for AT&T and I'm trying to explain to her the shitstorm that /b/ will unleash and she is a non-believer as of right now.

 

 

...She'll see.

 

 

Show her this

 

 

[lord_casek]

Can /b/ also do something about the monopoly AT&T has on iPhones?

Basically, the iPhone being superior to all other mobile devices, is stuck with the worst mobile network know to man.

It's a crime against humanity, the free market, and the internet.

 

 

[Fezz]

I dont think AT&T knows what they just started. this is going to be entertaining.

[Mercer]

 

:lol: