{"id":199971,"date":"2007-06-13T19:42:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-14T00:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/06\/13\/why-i-dumped-att-and-why-you-should-too\/"},"modified":"2007-06-13T19:42:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-14T00:42:00","slug":"why-i-dumped-att-and-why-you-should-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/06\/13\/why-i-dumped-att-and-why-you-should-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Dumped AT&#038;T, and Why You Should Too"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had them as my long distance provider for nearly 20 years.<\/p>\n<p>When I heard about them breaking the law to turn over records to the NSA.  I dumped them, and switched to QWest.<\/p>\n<p>The only good that AT&#038;T ever did was Bell Labs, and that is part of Lucent now.<\/p>\n<p><a style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\" href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/news.ars\/post\/20070613-att-willing-to-spy-for-nsa-mpaa-and-riaa.html\"><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-size:130%;\"><a style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153); font-weight: bold;\" href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/news.ars\/post\/20070613-att-willing-to-spy-for-nsa-mpaa-and-riaa.html\">AT&#038;T willing to spy for NSA, MPAA, and RIAA<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">By Nate Anderson  | Published: June 13, 2007 &#8211; 10:13AM CT<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">In a move that has executives from movie studios and record labels grinning from ear to ear, AT&#038;T has announced that it will develop and deploy technology that will attempt to keep pirated content off its network. The move is spurred in part by the company&#8217;s decision to offer IPTV television service as part of its U-Verse package, AT&amp;T senior VP James W. Cicconi told the Los Angeles Times.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><\/span><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">The first step for AT&#038;T is coming up with a technological solution that works: something that can effectively filter out illicit traffic while protecting its users&#8217; privacy. That&#8217;s a tall\u2014if not impossible\u2014order. YouTube hasn&#8217;t managed to do it even for video yet, and that&#8217;s when customers are sending them entire files which they can scan at their leisure. Monitoring all the files sent through BitTorrent\u2014which splits them into tiny pieces\u2014could be even more difficult; doing it in real-time sounds both expensive and impossible. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">Without human intervention, it&#8217;s also tough to tell if copyrighted content is even &#8220;piracy.&#8221; Fair use carves out exceptions for news reporting, criticism, and commentary (among other things) which is nearly impossible for a machine to understand in context.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<br \/><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had them as my long distance provider for nearly 20 years. When I heard about them breaking the law to turn over records to the NSA. I dumped them, and switched to QWest. The only good that AT&#038;T ever did was Bell Labs, and that is part of Lucent now. AT&#038;T willing to spy &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199971"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}