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AT&T Block of 4chan Raises a Ruckus - InternetNews.
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AT&T Block of 4chan Raises a Ruckus

By Andy Patrizio   |    July 27, 2009
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Project 2501 by Andy Patrizio (bio)

Making sense of an overwhelming sea of information


AT&T, one of the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in the country, put a temporary block on its Internet customers over the weekend to an underground Web site due to a denial-of-service attack. The block is gone but the fuss kicked up among bloggers remains.

Over the weekend, Christopher "moot" Poole, the owner of the site 4chan.org, noticed that AT&T users were blocked from accessing a portion of his site. Specifically, AT&T blocked the server on img.4chan.org, the dedicated server for the site's Random board, also known as /b/. The Random board alone gets around one-third of all of 4chan's traffic, so it has its own server.

But even though AT&T said it blocked the server because it detected a denial-of-service attack, the board's rabid user base smelled censorship at work.

Poole, a fan of Japanese anime, started 4chan about six years ago, copying a similar Japanese anime board called 2chan. Since its founding in 2003, 4chan quickly gained popularity, with its various message boards enabling people to post and trade pictures and chat anonymously: unlike other message boards, 4chan requires no login account.

Next page: Boom goes the blogosphere.

[Continue reading this blog post at Project 2501 by Andy Patrizio]