The Social

A fake report on CNN's iReport site alleged that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had been found dead.

(Credit: iReport, screengrab from Business Insider)

Reports began to surface Sunday charging that AT&T had blocked broadband access to parts of the notorious (and powerful) Internet forum site 4chan, which the telecom company confirmed on Monday. Late in the evening, a fake story surfaced on CNN's iReport citizen journalism site alleging that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had been "found dead in his multimillion dollar beachfront mansion" after a cocaine overdose.

Suffice it to say that the two events are likely connected. Access to 4chan has since been restored for AT&T broadband customers.

For those who stepped in late: 4chan is sort of like the Internet's equivalent of a league of pirates, den of thieves, or whatever other sort of anarchic analogy you prefer. Decentralized and relying on anonymity, the participants issue large-scale pranks both online and offline, from teaming up with video site eBaumsWorld to launch the "Porn Day" campaign on YouTube to spamming Twitter's trending topics.

The fake iReport disappeared from CNN quickly, perhaps because it read that Stephenson was found "delirious" when "a friend called 911 after a night of what he called, 'male dancers everywhere and the best blow west of the Mississippi.'"

Last October, iReport was the victim of a prank in which a more believable user-submitted story reported that Apple CEO Steve Jobs--who has a well-publicized history of health problems--had suffered a heart attack. It wasn't true, but it was online long enough that Apple's stock took a dip.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe told CNET News in an e-mailed statement that a denial-of-service attack was what stemmed the temporary block of 4chan traffic and that it has since been restored. "Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org," Coe wrote. "To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic."

"Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question," the AT&T statement continued. "We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers."

This post was updated at 9:25 a.m. PT.

Wow. With all the drama and in-fighting among cable companies, TV content creators, and Web video companies this week, you'd think the whole industry was one big junior-high cafeteria. Oh, wait, it kind of is.

First, Hulu--a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.--pulled its content from TV.com (which is owned by CBS, publisher of CNET News). Then it did the same with Boxee, a company that makes software designed for watching online video on TVs via set-top boxes. The reason for these measures appears to be either mounting pressure from the TV content owners that have licensed their video to Hulu, or mounting pressure from the cable companies, or both, or something like that.

Now, we've got a report in The Wall Street Journal indicating that cable giants Time Warner Cable and Comcast are in talks with some of the companies that operate pay-cable channels, for a plan to make some of the networks' content available online to subscribers. It'd probably be on a streaming, ad-supported basis, and probably available for free to existing subscribers.

I've been watching all this with quite a bit of curiosity and amusement. You see, I canceled my cable subscription and ditched my TV a few months ago, and have since been relying on a combination of Netflix (which may offer a streaming-only option as early as next year), iTunes, Hulu, and randomly dropping in on friends' apartments if I really, really want to watch something live. If I show up with a pizza and a nice friendly smile, most of them are OK with it.

In this Digital Age, cable subscriptions just seem a bit convoluted to me; no offense to the people who run the Game Show Channel or Boomerang, but those aren't my cup of tea and I'd prefer to not have to pay for them.

If this shadowy, in-the-works cable deal involves any kind of Web-only cable subscription where, say, you can pay by the stream or by the channel, I'd be all for it. And if the content providers finally work things out with the set-top box makers and Web video hubs, it could be terrific for me and other people who've gotten totally fed up with Stone Age TV offerings. For now, however, it's just a dramatic mess and recent signs are indicating that it's taking steps backward as opposed to forward.

Consequently, I'm riding out the storm for now. I'm holding off on purchasing any kind of set-top box--or a television, for that matter--until the future-of-television compass stops wildly spinning. In a few years, I'm sure, the solution to it all will seem like it should've been obvious the whole time.

Isn't that always how these things are?

Social network MySpace has signed a promotional deal to bring free Wi-Fi to its users...but only in the U.K., and only to access MySpace-owned pages.

It's partnered with The Cloud, a European wireless provider that powers broadband access in establishments like hotels, fast-food joints, and airports. MySpace users will now be able to access the social network, which is owned by News Corp., on The Cloud's paid-subscription hotspots. The access company runs about 7,000 of them in the U.K.

Cool idea. It would've been an interesting extension of credential portability if social-network logins could be used to access Wi-Fi hot spots that would otherwise require subscriptions. But with access limited to MySpace (and what happens if something hosted on an external server is embedded in a MySpace profile?), this deal's usefulness is really limited, along the lines of having Starbucks' free wireless access limited to the iTunes Store.

But it's sort of a nifty promotion for the U.K., where Bebo and now Facebook dominate the social-network scene. The test runs until October, and will be cross-promoted on both The Cloud and MySpace.

NEW YORK--It's time to stop waxing philosophical about how this thing called "new media" is shaping American elections and time to focus on the real tech issues, like broadband policy.

We talked about bloggers in 2004, we talked about YouTube in 2006, and the 2008 version of the conversation (social media) has already worn out its welcome. Instead, as the sentiment of the Personal Democracy Forum conference here overwhelmingly indicated, it's time to redirect the tech-politics spotlight to what really matters.

We've already learned the basic lessons about the digital campaign trail. Ask nicely for small donations (thanks, Barack Obama). Pay attention to niche communities of political junkies on the Web (thanks, Howard Dean). And whatever you do, don't say anything stupid when there's a camera around, which more or less means don't say anything stupid ever (thanks, George Allen).

But there's much more to the American political system than elections, something that's difficult to augur in a media business that gorges on weekly poll numbers and campaign scandals. "We have this radical, exciting party and activism surrounding this ideal every fourth year and then we crash," free-culture advocate Lawrence Lessig said in a speech Tuesday morning. "We depend too much, we lean too much, we rely too much on this one year, this fourth year. It blinds us to the fact that there's something much more fundamentally missing."

Lessig was talking about the need to keep an eye on government corruption all the time, not just when there's an election around the corner, but his argument stands when it comes to the rest of the conference: Too much of the talk about technology and politics is still focused on how to win an election using Facebook and YouTube. But as the conference indicated, that's going away as the American political system matures into its 21st-century incarnation and more serious topics bubble to the surface.

"It's like forming a new academic field," Harvard law school professor and Personal Democracy Forum speaker Jonathan Zittrain told me. The early years of the relationship between politics and technology were all about defining the medium, he said. "Once the hard work recedes, you're left actually figuring out what you want to do."

Good thing, because there are plenty of issues that need some attention.

I asked Larry Lessig to name the most overlooked tech policy issue facing America, and he said it's the management of the broadband spectrum. And at a cocktail party Monday night for Right Is Wrong, the new book from Huffington Post co-founder and Personal Democracy Forum speaker Arianna Huffington, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark explained in a conversation that while there are more pressing issues facing the country than anything "tech," that access to broadband technology nevertheless demands attention.

That was a big topic of discussion on Tuesday, when the focus of the Personal Democracy Forum was consciously oriented toward ongoing policy rather than elections--an admirable decision on the part of organizers Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry. The conference's big announcement was Internet for Everyone, a new initiative designed to ensure open Internet access as a "basic right" in the U.S.

"We need to bring affordable, truly high-speed broadband connections to everybody regardless of where that is," FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said to an audience at the conference. "The government has to make it a higher priority than it is today." He cited reasons including healthcare cost management, education reform, public safety, and energy policy.

There was a healthy dose of cynicism among audiences over whether anything could actually get done on such a feel-good issue, especially given the kind of telecom dollars flowing into Washington. But there was nevertheless a sense of urgency, given that Europe and Asia continue to leap ahead of the U.S. in terms of broadband speed and affordability.

"The '96 telecom act is a dud. It didn't work, it wasn't enforced, and it didn't take Internet into account in it," Web pioneer Vint Cerf said in a panel Tuesday afternoon about the future of tech policy. "Broadband is important, it's part of the country's future, and we've got to fix it."

But just as difficult as bringing tech issues to the forefront in Washington is bringing them to the millions of Americans who still haven't heard about Net neutrality or the broadband spectrum. It's an issue that just doesn't look quite as good on a cable news ticker as presidential candidates' gaffes caught on YouTube, but it's important--and relevant.

"Use the bully pulpit to be able to explain to some 90 percent or more of Americans that the media that they consume every day is all transforming to a digital platform," Josh Silver, director of Free Press, said in the same panel when asked what he'd do first to change tech policy if he were elected president. "It's all gadgets and terabytes and widgets and they don't' get it. (Explain) how it connects to their lives."

Americans should know that they can only use their iPhone on the AT&T carrier because of "a conscious policy decision that allows Steve Jobs to do that," Silver suggested as an example of a newsworthy item that could clue the public into the importance of broadband and telecom policy.

And it's clear that the message is getting out about the issues that matter, finally. A discussion on Tuesday afternoon debated the ambiguous definition of piracy, whether to nationalize telecommunications, and whether the U.S. should declare Internet access to be a civil right. A panel about the use of live video streaming in campaigns, on the other hand, devolved into a talk about what happens when the births of babies are broadcast on the Web.

Enough said.

The biggest problem with JetBlue's inaugural "BetaBlue" flight, equipped with Yahoo and BlackBerry e-mail and instant messaging, was the fact that there aren't power outlets on board the aircraft.

Sure, there are those little 110-volt things in each bathroom. But if you hog the airplane toilet so that you can give your laptop some juice, you're going to be the second most unpopular person on that flight. (The screaming kid in seat 15D still beats you.)

All joking aside, if in-flight Wi-Fi is going to take off, airplanes are going to need power outlets. Virgin America already has them, as do many pricier foreign airlines (some only in first class). So do high-end Amtrak trains, like the Acela Express line from Washington, D.C., to Boston. Sure, you might be able to make it from New York to Miami on your laptop battery, but New York to San Francisco just doesn't cut it, especially if you're not sure when you're going to be able to get to a power outlet on the ground.

As for the service itself, let's just say it's complicated. If BetaBlue's connection were my home ISP, I'd ask them to cancel my subscription; it was hardly ultra-reliable, and the instant-messaging application took quite a bit of time to boot up. But this was the first flight of a brand-new program, so I'll give JetBlue the benefit of the doubt here.

And JetBlue representatives, including a handful of engineers from its LiveTV division, which operates the Wi-Fi service, seemed quite thrilled when BetaBlue touched down. It didn't have to work perfectly. It just had to happen.

That's because the upside to BetaBlue (in addition to the fact that I was able to send IMs to every single one of my co-workers and say "Guess what?! I'm on a plane!!!") is that it was an actual realization of in-flight broadband access. In other words, JetBlue's extremely limited offering was potentially a kick in the pants to any other commercial carrier that's been wringing its figurative hands over a similar project. After the disaster that was Boeing's Connexion service, and the trepidation that followed, some airline needed to take that first step forward in order for Wi-Fi on planes to become a reality.

And there are going to be a ton of questions to answer. Will it be free? Ad-supported? Will there be a subscription charge? What if the guy in the seat next to you is looking at porn? Even worse, what if he plugs in a Skype headset and starts yakking away?

But at least the ball is rolling. TechCrunch reported last week that the Aircell service--which owns part of the same 800 MHz spectrum that hosts JetBlue's air-to-ground wireless--may soon make appearances on both Virgin America and American Airlines.

And additionally, I will remember BetaBlue fondly for this most paramount of reasons: it lifted me up from cold, rainy New York and planted me in the middle of a sunny, mild San Francisco day.