By the time you read this the story will be long dead. That’s what you have to appreciate about the social constructon of news media. Between Reddit, Digg, Delicious and Newsvine (heck even Twitter) topics can be top of the world one minute and totally forgotten the next. When it comes to the current flashpoint of American DSL provider AT&T and message board 4chan the Web will be long past caring. Which is why it deserves writing about.
4chan has been called many things over the past few months. Yes it is a haven for griefers intent on infiltrating everything from MMORPGs like EVE Online to Time magazine’s Man of the Year poll but it has also given us memes like LolCats and Rick Rolling. Some have lebelled it the ‘Wild West of the Internet’ but I think that’s a bit mild; it’s more like a suburban free gaff crashed by the cast of Lord of the Flies in celebratory mood having just received an honours in Higher Level Debauchery from the Marquis de Sade School for Young Apostates. It’s one of the most NSFW sites on the Web, made even scarier by the knowledge that most of the people posting on it are too young to have a job in the first place.And, if the hype is to be believed, it’s also insanely popular.
So what gives with AT&T? Well, depending on who you ask, the supplier of broadband access to 15% of the US population has taken issue with 4chan’s content and has blocked their customers’ access to it. AT&T, in their defense, say they are following policy after a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack hit the website. In simple terms 4chan was being hit by possibly millions of bots and by blocking the site AT&T protect the level of traffic on their network. That’s their version anyway. According to 4chan the site is under attack by an operator that just doesn’t like what it’s users get up to. Shenanigans have been called and it’s not going to be pretty.
I’ve been following this story on and off for a day now and the speed at which it has spread is nothing short of fascinating. In the space of a morning blogs have been constantly updating with claim and counterclaim. 4chan’s own wiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica, has posted a short history of the outage, user reaction and a (somewhat muddled) plan of action involving a DDoS attack of a very diffferent kind: flooding help desks with geniune calls and publishing the personal extensions of company executives. Comments on the site range from outright declarations of war to calls for a concerted, mature response. Most ingeniously some have even argued that sites block access to AT&T customers in protest. Good luck with that.
As of 4.45 today the story seems to have shifted again. This time we have a new player: 4chan’s mortal enemy Kimmo Alm and his site anontalk.com. It is believed Alm is responsible for a three-week long DDoS attack and has been alleged to be behind numerous pernicious complaints about 4chan to AT&T in the past. If true this would make a lot more sense than for a provider to suddenly shut down a client’s website. Cancel the revolution lads, change the wiki, start a different flame war, bury your fury on Digg and start up a whole new campaign.
By 5.30 the shift will be complete, AT&T will be out of the picture and 4chan’s army of /b/tards will declare war on anontalk.com and its own army of script kiddies.
In the space of a single day a tale of David versus Goliath has turned into David versus David. That’s a lot less entertaining to watch. For AT&T’s sake I hope the hysteria dies down before someone does something really stupid. Oh wait, here comes another update….
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