Tag Archives | AT&T Fail

Illegal Warrantless Eavesdropping Still Unaddressed by Courts and Congress

By ralph on January 31, 2010 in News 4

David Kravets writes on Wired’s Threat Level:

Heads spun four years ago this weekend, when AT&T was accused of funneling every one of its customers’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency — without warrants. A Jan. 31, 2006, lawsuit alleged major violations of the Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches and seizures. Such a sweeping breach seemed far-fetched.

Yet months after the lawsuit was lodged, the Electronic Frontier Foundation produced internal AT&T documents allegedly outlining secret rooms in AT&T offices connected to the NSA, which was siphoning all internet traffic, from e-mails to Voice Over Internet Protocol phone conversations.

But four years and a mountain of court briefs and rulings later, the legal system has never addressed the merits of the allegations — and likely never will. Even Congress has weighed in and passed legislation to prevent the allegations from being heard.

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Did You Log Into Facebook, and See Someone Else’s Face?

By ralph on January 27, 2010 in News 2

Glad to see Facebook is on top of protecting their users’ privacy. Iljitsch van Beijnum writes on ars technica:

This past week, several users reported visiting Facebook, and, well, seeing the wrong face. Without any action on their part, a number of AT&T smartphone users found themselves logged into the popular social networking site under user accounts other than their own.

The problem was quickly attributed to “misrouting,” a term that suggests that information took a wrong turn somewhere in the network. It’s not completely impossible for individual packets flying across the network to be misdelivered — although there are multiple checksums protecting against that — but misdelivered packets will be uninvited guests at the destination computer, and thus thrown away. What apparently happened here was an unfortunate interaction of some kind between Facebook’s user authentication system and the way AT&T runs its mobile data network.

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AT&T To Customers: It’s Your Fault We Can’t Build A Network for Your iPhones

By ralph on December 10, 2009 in News 5

ATTiPhone Great job there on the consumer services, Ralph de la Vega. I’m sure your customers want to be “educated” on why you can’t build a network to handle the demand. If you’re wondering why, check out this interesting graphic explanation on GigaOM on how AT&T is making its money off of you with the iPhone.

PETER SVENSSON writes on AP via Google News:

Wireless data hogs who jam the airwaves by watching video on their iPhones will be put on tighter leashes, an AT&T Inc. executive said Wednesday.

The carrier has had trouble keeping up with wireless data usage, leading to dropped connections and long waits for users trying to run programs on their devices. AT&T is upgrading its network to cope, but its head of consumer services, Ralph de la Vega, told investors at a UBS conference in New York that it will also give high-bandwidth users incentives to “reduce or modify their usage.”

De la Vega didn’t say exactly how or when the carrier would change its policies, but he said some form of usage-based pricing for data is inevitable.

… Read the rest

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