There are different channels for different interests, from anime and automobiles to papercraft and, of course, porn. On the surface, 4Chan is an online bulletin board for people to post images and make comments. So like a middle-aged Australian businessman going on walkabout, I decided to spend a couple of weeks embedded in this famously depraved, raucously fertile community. Project AT&T called a temporary truce, the bar piano started playing again, and the world went back to normal.īut the whole episode reminded me that, in spite of the Web's seemingly secure and consumer-friendly facade, there is still some Wild West left out there. (Hackers create a feedback loop of pings and requests that overloads the target Web site.) AT&T’s solution-to move 4Chan to a new IP address-was crude but ultimately effective.
It turns out AT&T was really just trying to protect the site, and its own servers, from a typical "denial of service" attack. The site's founder posted a note telling his minion's to write and complain to AT&T, and the dog whistle having been heard, a posse called "Project AT&T," quickly formed, dedicated to revenge.Īs I perused the porn, I got the overwhelming sense that I had landed in the Internet's equivalent of the parking lot behind a 7-Eleven. The 4Chan community-a diehard, if ever-changing assortment of the Net's most-desperate, most-anonymous, and most-wanted, well, punks-smelled censorship, top-down control, and an evil corporation trying to keep down the world's last squat for hackers.
People move to the side of the room, climb under tables, and wait for the shots to fly. It was like one of those bad Westerns, when an arrogant newcomer sits down in the saloon, and then insults the baddest, most trigger-happy gunslinger in the county. When AT&T recently blocked access to a hugely popular hackers' Web site,, many of us Internet old-timers froze in place.