Pranksters fight against AT&T for blocking 4chan

AT&T was reportedly charged for blocking broadband I.P. access to the notorious internet forum site 4chan where participants in the forum are well-known for issuing large-scale of stupid stuff pranks ideas for both online and offline. The charge were later on confirmed by the telecom company Monday.

Last October 2008, 4chan was traced as the source of a submitted hoax story about Apple's CEO Steve Jobs died on a heart attack to a CNN's user-generated news site iReport which
resulted for Apple Inc. stock price to fell significantly.

Recently, a similar hoax story surfaced on CNN's iReport site alleging that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had been "found dead in his multimillion dollar beachfront mansion" after a cocaine overdose. An idea that some thought as the reason behind AT&T's action against 4chan.

Michael Coe, an AT&T spokesman, e-mailed a statement that a denial-of-service attack was the reason for temporary block of 4chan traffic and that it has since been restored. This was to prevent attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer and the action was in no way related to the content of 4chan. Their focus was to protect their customers from malicious traffic.