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AT&T Blocks Part of 4chan
holdenkarau writes "Several news sources (Mashable, The Inquistr, etc.) are reporting that AT&T is blocking img.4chan.org in the southern United States. That server is used for the infamous /b/ board (the home of anonymous). TechCrunch calls the decision to block 4chan 'stupid,' noting that they may have 'opened perhaps the most vindictive, messy can of worms.' The Inquisitr suggests that 'The global internet censorship debate landed in the home of the free.' moot (who runs 4chan) asks users to call AT&T, while some others suggest more drastic action (like cutting AT&T fiber)." Update: 07/27 09:23 GMT by T : Readers' comments below suggest that a) the purpose of the block was to curtail the effects of a serious DDoS attack and b) that the block has now been lifted, at least for some regions.
So to stop a DDoS attack on a server, they remove any and all access to that server?
Am I the only one seeing the irony here?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
The question is whether 4chan is the real problem or the reaction to 4chan is. /b/ is what it is and has been for quite a while. And the American Southern culture also has roots that go back at least 300 years. So in a battle for legitimacy, which one should take precedence over the other?
We can talk about freedom of speech and such, but /b/ is home to content that is occasionally over the line illegal. On the other hand, only those who would actually seek it out would even know about it, so it doesn't make sense to "protect" the fair citizens of Hillbilly Valley by blocking the site.
Raymond Bradbury wrote about this in his seminal work Farenheit 451. Once we start allowing the minority to exert power over the majority in the name of fairness and protection, we lose a critical pillar of our society. Censorship is the first step, but later it will be outright censure.
Let's let that which is illegal stay illegal, and give everyone the benefit of full access, even if they don't want it. But I'm not from the South, so my cultural background doesn't lead me to the conclusion that censorship is better than freedom.
Its not about 4chan, its about censorship. By ignoring this kind of thing we would only let ATT know that they can get away with it. I never visit 4chan but if it turns out that ATT really was trying to censor them then this story deserves all the publicity it can get.
Of course if it really was just ATT's way of responding to a DDoS attack then perhaps everyone overreacted.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
I'm in favour to transitioning away from TCP/IP towards SCTP/IP personally. Any future network code I write will be based on SCTP instead of TCP, if I can get away with it. :-P Not only is it more resilient to SYN flooding than TCP is, but it gives me other nice possibilities like multiple streams per connection, multi-homing, the choice of ordered or unordered and the choice of reliable or unreliable. The disadvantage being that its not as widely used, so there may be some associated issues, though Linux, at least, does have SCTP support out of the box :-)