Author: Jamie Welch, Senior Editor

The internet was in an uproar Sunday when AT&T DSL subscribers around the country found they couldn’t reach the /b/ board on 4chan, a site that’s led to many an internet meme and more than one federal criminal indictment against Anonymous members. How would Anonymous retaliate? The pieces seemed set for the greatest battle between control and chaos. “If you’ve been affected, I would advise you call or write customer support and corporate immediately,” 4chan founder Moot wrote on the site’s status page Sunday. AT&T responded Monday morning with a press release confirming it had temporarily blackholed img.4chan.org. But it said the ban (which has since been lifted) was a defensive response to denial-of-service traffic hitting an AT&T subscriber, and originating from 4chan’s own network. Now 4chan’s founder, Moot, has admitted that his network was sending spurious traffic, but he still faults AT&T for going too far with its response. “They essentially dropped a nuke instead of using the fly swatter,” Moot said in an e-mail. “I was told by someone within the company that an engineer essentially overreacted and made a mistake in choosing how to deal with a rather trivial issue. That’s how we got to where we’re at now.” The trouble was triggered by 4chan’s response to a denial-of-service attack that’s been targeting the site’s image board for three weeks. “We were able to filter this specific...