AT&T Is (Still) a Bunch of Punkasses

We here at COED have long thought that AT&T was a giant pile of steaming sh*t, based purely on our cell phone service: constant dropped calls, disappearing voicemail, geriatric-like 3G speeds in New York.

But it seems the retarded behemoth of communication has now pissed off pretty much everyone – by effectively censoring the Internet.

The conspiracy started after AT&T blocked threads on the cesspool of the Internet, 4Chan.org, who’s responsible for about 90-percent of the online memes you know and love (LOLCats, Rick Rolls, etc…).

Claiming it was protecting its customers from a DDoS attack, AT&T disallowed traffic to 4Chan’s popular threads, /b/ and /r9k/. This came after a campaign on 4Chan and Digg to spread false rumors that AT&T CEO, Randall Stephenson was found unexpectedly dead outside his home.

To thicken the conspiracy, popular posts about the 4Chan block were mysteriously removed from the front page of Reddit.com.

The 4Chan block has now been lifted. But still, this DDoS attack claim is obviously bullsh*t, what with the false rumors and all.

Now, since AT&T’s communications infrastructure is so vast, pretty much all online activity goes through AT&T in one way or another – so you’re probably not going to be able to stop using all AT&T services altogether, without – gasp – quitting the Internet. But if you can stop giving them money directly, now would be the time.

UPDATE: According to an officially released statement from AT&T, the censorship of 4Chan was nothing but some good ol’ parental protection:

“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.”

The tech blogs seem to be accepting this statement as the truth. But since it, you know, came from AT&T, I’m not so sure…

UPDATE 2: PCMag.com is reporting that, ironically, the DDoS attack that AT&T claims was coming from 4Chan.org was actually directed at 4Chan.org.

…unWired, a different ISP [from AT&T], states on NANOG (North American Network Operators Group, an insider discussion board for ISPs) that they also had to block 4chan to mitigate the effects of a DDOS attack. Other ISPs on the discussion disagree, especially on a wide scale blocking of the site. 4chan’s “history of pulling pranks” also seems to have figured into this. The DDOS, ironically, seems to be an attack on 4chan. From my Verizon FiOS connection in New Jersey I can get to 4chan, but it’s very slow. [Emphasis added]