AT&T CEO Found in Dead Spot - The UpStream

AT&T CEO Found in Dead Spot

posted Sunday Aug 2, 2009 by Jon Wurm

AT&T CEO Found in Dead Spot

If you have been keeping up with the show or any other news source recently, then you are probably aware of the agro AT&T is building with some customers and especially 4chan (www.4chan.org) users due to the recent block their broadband internet services has placed on the site. It is not surprising that angry forum trolls and internet non-censorship activists would try to dish out some retribution.

On July 26th CNN's iReport citizen journalism site had a story posted about Randall Stephenson, the standing CEO of AT&T. The article went on to say that Stephenson was "found dead in his multi-million dollar beach-front mansion after a coke binge with male dancers everywhere." While I find this amusing, the story was reported falsely and was taken down quickly. The real question here is why did AT&T block them in the first place? You can read their explanation below as stated from Business Insider.

"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."

In the past 4chan has been speculated to be involved with DDoS attacks and they have developed a reputation but all that put aside there are bigger issues here than just 4chan. Under what circumstances if any, should ISPs be able to moderate internet content?

Was AT&T just protecting its customers or is it something else? Also, did AT&T and 4chan overreact? What do you think?

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