AT&T blocks 4chan, home of weird smut

AT&T has apparently blocked DSL access to popular bulletin board and bad taste depository 4chan. The image site is the home of LOLcats and thousands of other, less pleasant, internet images. The boards cover bizarre Japanese animation along with other rather niche adult content. But apart from hosting weird tentacle porn the …

[OFI]

Proxies

When the users all boast of being through 7 proxies how will this effect them? ;-)

[Forename Surname]

Not for everyone.

I have ATT DSL, and still see 4CHAN sites as usual.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Oh noes!

While 4chan is best compared to Mos Eisley Cantina without a good band, you are not meant to exclusively look for smut & internet rage there. They _do_ have wholesome boards. Kinda.

You forgot to mention that moot is Time's Man of the Year! "AT&T snubs Man of Year" would be a good subtitle for the story.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894028,00.html

Troll as picture. Evidently.

[Barn]

Internet Rules:

1. Don't anger the /b/tards! How hard is this rule to follow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on guys

The reason - 4chan has been under sustained DDOS attacks, hence the blockage in an effort to curtail it - has been available online since last night. AT&T hasn't been the only ISP to block access - see http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg19609.html. A good explanation for the reason behind it can be found at http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2009-July/012198.html.

The story and proper reason has been available all over Slashdot, Reddit and the entire internets for the past +24 hours, so I'm frankly surprised you've released this story at 11:07am without checking those first.

I have not love for AT&T whatsoever, but I expected a bit more fact-checking from you guys.

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought

http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2009-July/012182.html

I thought it'd been blocked because of the above?

[Anonymous Coward]

/b/tards and Robots...

Appear to be the only ones affected by this, seems like all the other boards are still accessible for them, so it's not like they're actually missing anything good.

[Anonymous Coward]

FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-

'nuff said. ;-)

[Zub]

Hackers

Since when are 4chan kiddies considered "hackers"? I don't mind television news using it in this context but this is an IT website...

[EdwardP]

No...

4chan is currently under attack by a ACK DDoS attack.

The general principal: The attacker sends a SYN packet to Target A. This packet has a spoofed source address, pointing to Target B. Target A picks up the SYN request, and responds it it with an ACK packet. The ACK is sent to the spoofed source: Target B. Of course Target B didn't send the inital SYN, so it returns a RST to Target A (who is expecting a SYN-ACK). Inronically, some classic DDoS protection rules will filter out RST packets, causing Target A to send multiple ACK packets, making the DDoS more effective.

So you're getting two DDoS attacks for the price of one, and Target B has no idea who the REAL attacker is.

AT&T (and others) didn't shut down 4chan to censor it, they did it to protect 4chan itself and, more importantly the unknown Target B.

[nicholas king]

over hyped 4chan users meet their match

So all these 4chan users who boast about being the master of the internets and untochable because they go through 7 proxies have finally realised that actually they do depent on a ISP. The last laugh i think is on them!

[Anonymous Coward]

re: /b/tards and Robots... #

/b/ was never good.

-Anon, of course!