8 ms·

Well that thread of conspiracy theories, hot air and cries of censorship yesterday was instructive. These corporations have zero benefit of the doubt level of

Well that thread of conspiracy theories, hot air and cries of censorship yesterday was instructive. These corporations have zero benefit of the doubt level of trust. A few voices to be fair pointed out 1.1.1.1 is often incorrectly used and issues with it becoming ‘live’ mostly likely caused the outage. Not judging this response btw, I can clearly see why ATT and other big telco wouldn’t get much leeway.

amaccuish 9y ago
I wasn't one of the conspiracy theorists but I do expect ISPs to get these things right. It's literally their job, they should be experts.
- supertrope 9y ago
  AT&T has long provided a sub-par Internet connection service. Their wireless router and DSL modem "U-Verse" gateway device lacks a true bridge mode, has a small NAT table, and you must use it because it contains a 802.1x certificate. You can use your own router with a rather involved hack: http://blog.0xpebbles.org/Bypassing-At-t-U-verse-hardware-NAT-table-limits http://blog.0xpebbles.org/Bypassing-At-t-U-verse-hardware-NA... They instructed customers (including small businesses) to get off 10.X.X.X, presumably because they were considering CG-NAT, although they have since done some IPv6 deployment. The original AT&T faded away with declining long distance revenue which they milked to the end until cellphones and Internet access became the main market. It took tax credits meant for "video dial tone" broadband deployment and used them to build their cellular network. Its ADSL deployment use PPPoE and ATM which can cause MTU mismatch. ATM itself is a telco mistake. European access oligopoly members wanted 32 bytes because that suited voice frame transport and they thought data transport would never sell. American counterparts wanted 64 bytes for better data delivery. They compromised on 53: 48 for payload and 5 for header. With newer "U-Verse" ASDL they've finally eliminated this layer of overhead. (But no more 3rd party modems). It decided to deploy VDSL instead of make the true upgrade to fiber. But they also cut costs by not building enough remote terminals so many customers have slow and unreliable links. Fast VDSL speeds (e.g. 100Mbps) aren't possible if customers are a mile away, or more. How much money have they spent on truck rolls diagnosing issues? Is it less than just building a more robust network to begin with? Since 2005 they've been complaining that customers are using too much Internet and they need to slice and dice the Internet with data caps, application specific throttling, etc. And get more tax credits and deregulation which they promise will be used for broadband investment.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    I've had better service from U-Verse and, more recently, AT&T Fiber than I have from Comcast. But really, the point this thread is making isn't about whether you approve of all of AT&T's business decisions, but rather whether their backbone engineers can properly manage a network. I'm interested in the opinions of people who have managed default-free BGP peering before on whether AT&T does a good job, but I'm not so much interested in reading another dslreports thread about whether AT&T is a "good ISP".
    - supertrope 9y ago
      This technical glitch is in their CPE boxes not the backbone network.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        Good to know! Add to the set of people who's AT&T network engineering opinions are interesting "anyone who has managed a very large scale distribution layer network". :)
    - mjcl 9y ago
      My experience with AT&T was that they were overly bureaucratic but outside of those rules anything goes. For example, they didn't ask for an LOA for BGP announcements of other people's IP space. When we were turning up a new Comcast circuit we accidentally leaked Comcast's customer routes (~5000) to AT&T and they were accepted.
  - paulie_a 9y ago
    Calling their modem/routers sub-par is being far too generous. They are pieces of shit.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
      From experience I can tell you that this guy is correct. Or at least he was. I had U-Verse as my first internet service at an apartment years ago and, in addition to waiting a month for them to hook it up, the modem they sent me didn't work. The tech came out (weeks later, of course), confirmed it didn't work, and proceeded to swap it with literally every single spare he had in his van. We got lucky on the last one. While chatting he admitted they were the some of the worst equipment he's ever seen. Some of the branch locations at work have U-Verse as their only option. I don't have to deal with their day-to-day problems but the help desk tells me they're still pretty crap.
- some_account 9y ago
  Experts get things wrong constantly.
- quakenul 9y ago
  While it's reasonable to expect them to get it right, it is obviously going to go wrong from time to time, as with experts working any other field.
- rayiner 9y ago
  I was just gchatting my wife in Edge, and the message entry box wraps lines on the character level (breaking a single word over two lines). Something that nobody would ever want to do and nobody could possibly think is the right behavior. Google and Microsoft develop two of the only three relevant browser engines, and indeed have basically supplanted W3C in setting web standards. But a simple text-entry field on a Google site running in Microsoft's browser doesn't work properly. So is it really surprising that AT&T handled an obscure IP address the wrong way?
  - sixothree 9y ago
    I am not surprised if/that google degrades the experience of their products on other browsers. I believe this has been topic of discussion a number of times on HN.
    - ben_jones 9y ago
      I think Google is aware their products perform better on Chrome and does not devote resources to correct this, leading the user experiences on Edge or even firefox to be similar but not equal. I'd make the argument that the parent should not be down voted because Google, perhaps in a small way, allows degraded experiences on other platforms for one reason or another.
      - sli 9y ago
        There was a short time when Google made Hangouts Chrome-only, but faking the User-Agent would make it load. Turned out, yep, Hangouts worked totally fine in Firefox. They just refused to let me load it and that's it. I don't think you can do that anymore, though. But I haven't tried it in a while. A huge problem I see with the web is that it's is missing concessions for "advanced" users. I get that we're a smaller market, but come on.
        leesalminen 9y ago
        I tried to use Hangouts last week with the latest Firefox on a beefy machine. While it wasn’t explicitly blocked, it froze the whole browser after 30 seconds. Never got into the meeting.
- halbritt 9y ago
  Yeah, no. ISPs don't really employ experts any more. The experts won't work for them. They haven't done anything innovative since the heady days of the dotcom boom.
- cbsmith 9y ago
  You have an amusing belief about the correlation between expertise and the lack of errors/mistakes. Also, reading your comment, I couldn't help but think of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
- monochromatic 9y ago
  I’m an expert at my job. I still get things wrong sometimes.
tptacek 9y ago
Instructive in the sense that for any given technical controversy on HN, there will be a couple people that have some connection to the topic and can speak with some justified confidence about it, and several hundred people who read the title and, if we're lucky, the lede graf of the story and then just write stream of consciousness extrapolations --- also, instructive to note that HN does not, ceteris paribus, do a good job of upvoting the authoritative comments over the superficial riffing.
- berg01 9y ago
  > ceteris paribus I enjoy googling a new phrase as much as the next person... but really? From WP: Ceteris paribus or caeteris paribus is a Latin phrase meaning "other things equal". English translations of the phrase include "all other things being equal" or "other things held constant" or "all else unchanged".
- throwaway41441 9y ago
  > lede graf Journalistic jargon for "lead paragraph" https://underthecurve.github.io/jekyll/update/2016/12/29/hed-dek-led-graf.html https://underthecurve.github.io/jekyll/update/2016/12/29/hed... > ceteris paribus "all other things being equal" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceteris_paribus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceteris_paribus
- brownbat 9y ago
  > HN does not, ceteris paribus, do a good job of upvoting the authoritative comments over the superficial riffing. Top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16982493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16982493 Seems... fine? Our comments were useful enough for Ars to apparently base their entire reporting on them. (Ok, mixed feelings there...) Or, wait, are you saying Prince's reaction was the useful, authoritative one in this example? Most commenters thought he was making a bit of a leap. Is that what you're actually pushing back on?
notatoad 9y ago
The thread might have been fun of conspiracy theories, but the top comment the whole day was the one giving At&t the benefit of the doubt. (Fwiw, I was personally on board with the conspiracy theorists.)
dang 9y ago
It's at least gratifying to see that the top two root comments after the dust settled were ones that got it right. Though I suppose some of the upvotes may have come in after this information was available. (Edit: I checked and it doesn't look like it.)
- kbenson 9y ago
  > Though I suppose some of the upvotes may have come in after this information was available. (Edit: I checked and it doesn't look like it.) Oh, man. It would be so fun to run vote analysis on comments over time. I'm jealous now. :)
  - phyller 9y ago
    dang should do a Hacker News AMA
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      The risk far outweighs the reward.
craftyguy 9y ago
Why would you trust what AT&T is saying publicly? This could have very well been an experiment to "see if anyone noticed", folks noticed, so here's the default "we didn't mean it, you can trust us" explanation. Major ISPs generally do not act in the best interest of their customers, especially when the action is allowing access to service that hurts their ability to collect more information about their users. They certainly do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
- notyourwork 9y ago
  Here come the tin foil hats. Not everything is a conspiracy. I get it these companies suck.
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    It's easy to dismiss comments you don't like as "tinfoil hat"-like, but it's much harder to explain why they should be suddenly trusted. Care to try?
    - fourthark 9y ago
      Don't trust, but also don't overestimate. Incompetence is always the likelier explanation.
      - craftyguy 9y ago
        Except AT&T has a long history of malice under the guise of incompetence. Just today: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170426/05094537241/att-unveils-fake-5g-network-hopes-youll-ignore-t-mobile-is-kicking-ass.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170426/05094537241/att-u...
        fourthark 9y ago
        I'm sure you can find a better example than that. That's not malicious, it's just annoying marketing.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
avree 9y ago
Anyone have a link to the thread?
giancarlostoro 9y ago
Well it never made sense to me why block one DNS provider and not the rest? Ah well...

amaccuish 9y ago

I wasn't one of the conspiracy theorists but I do expect ISPs to get these things right. It's literally their job, they should be experts.

supertrope 9y ago
AT&T has long provided a sub-par Internet connection service. Their wireless router and DSL modem "U-Verse" gateway device lacks a true bridge mode, has a small NAT table, and you must use it because it contains a 802.1x certificate. You can use your own router with a rather involved hack: http://blog.0xpebbles.org/Bypassing-At-t-U-verse-hardware-NAT-table-limits http://blog.0xpebbles.org/Bypassing-At-t-U-verse-hardware-NA... They instructed customers (including small businesses) to get off 10.X.X.X, presumably because they were considering CG-NAT, although they have since done some IPv6 deployment. The original AT&T faded away with declining long distance revenue which they milked to the end until cellphones and Internet access became the main market. It took tax credits meant for "video dial tone" broadband deployment and used them to build their cellular network. Its ADSL deployment use PPPoE and ATM which can cause MTU mismatch. ATM itself is a telco mistake. European access oligopoly members wanted 32 bytes because that suited voice frame transport and they thought data transport would never sell. American counterparts wanted 64 bytes for better data delivery. They compromised on 53: 48 for payload and 5 for header. With newer "U-Verse" ASDL they've finally eliminated this layer of overhead. (But no more 3rd party modems). It decided to deploy VDSL instead of make the true upgrade to fiber. But they also cut costs by not building enough remote terminals so many customers have slow and unreliable links. Fast VDSL speeds (e.g. 100Mbps) aren't possible if customers are a mile away, or more. How much money have they spent on truck rolls diagnosing issues? Is it less than just building a more robust network to begin with? Since 2005 they've been complaining that customers are using too much Internet and they need to slice and dice the Internet with data caps, application specific throttling, etc. And get more tax credits and deregulation which they promise will be used for broadband investment.
- tptacek 9y ago
  I've had better service from U-Verse and, more recently, AT&T Fiber than I have from Comcast. But really, the point this thread is making isn't about whether you approve of all of AT&T's business decisions, but rather whether their backbone engineers can properly manage a network. I'm interested in the opinions of people who have managed default-free BGP peering before on whether AT&T does a good job, but I'm not so much interested in reading another dslreports thread about whether AT&T is a "good ISP".
  - supertrope 9y ago
    This technical glitch is in their CPE boxes not the backbone network.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Good to know! Add to the set of people who's AT&T network engineering opinions are interesting "anyone who has managed a very large scale distribution layer network". :)
  - mjcl 9y ago
    My experience with AT&T was that they were overly bureaucratic but outside of those rules anything goes. For example, they didn't ask for an LOA for BGP announcements of other people's IP space. When we were turning up a new Comcast circuit we accidentally leaked Comcast's customer routes (~5000) to AT&T and they were accepted.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  Calling their modem/routers sub-par is being far too generous. They are pieces of shit.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    From experience I can tell you that this guy is correct. Or at least he was. I had U-Verse as my first internet service at an apartment years ago and, in addition to waiting a month for them to hook it up, the modem they sent me didn't work. The tech came out (weeks later, of course), confirmed it didn't work, and proceeded to swap it with literally every single spare he had in his van. We got lucky on the last one. While chatting he admitted they were the some of the worst equipment he's ever seen. Some of the branch locations at work have U-Verse as their only option. I don't have to deal with their day-to-day problems but the help desk tells me they're still pretty crap.
some_account 9y ago
Experts get things wrong constantly.
quakenul 9y ago
While it's reasonable to expect them to get it right, it is obviously going to go wrong from time to time, as with experts working any other field.
rayiner 9y ago
I was just gchatting my wife in Edge, and the message entry box wraps lines on the character level (breaking a single word over two lines). Something that nobody would ever want to do and nobody could possibly think is the right behavior. Google and Microsoft develop two of the only three relevant browser engines, and indeed have basically supplanted W3C in setting web standards. But a simple text-entry field on a Google site running in Microsoft's browser doesn't work properly. So is it really surprising that AT&T handled an obscure IP address the wrong way?
- sixothree 9y ago
  I am not surprised if/that google degrades the experience of their products on other browsers. I believe this has been topic of discussion a number of times on HN.
  - ben_jones 9y ago
    I think Google is aware their products perform better on Chrome and does not devote resources to correct this, leading the user experiences on Edge or even firefox to be similar but not equal. I'd make the argument that the parent should not be down voted because Google, perhaps in a small way, allows degraded experiences on other platforms for one reason or another.
    - sli 9y ago
      There was a short time when Google made Hangouts Chrome-only, but faking the User-Agent would make it load. Turned out, yep, Hangouts worked totally fine in Firefox. They just refused to let me load it and that's it. I don't think you can do that anymore, though. But I haven't tried it in a while. A huge problem I see with the web is that it's is missing concessions for "advanced" users. I get that we're a smaller market, but come on.
      - leesalminen 9y ago
        I tried to use Hangouts last week with the latest Firefox on a beefy machine. While it wasn’t explicitly blocked, it froze the whole browser after 30 seconds. Never got into the meeting.
halbritt 9y ago
Yeah, no. ISPs don't really employ experts any more. The experts won't work for them. They haven't done anything innovative since the heady days of the dotcom boom.
cbsmith 9y ago
You have an amusing belief about the correlation between expertise and the lack of errors/mistakes. Also, reading your comment, I couldn't help but think of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
monochromatic 9y ago
I’m an expert at my job. I still get things wrong sometimes.

tptacek 9y ago

Instructive in the sense that for any given technical controversy on HN, there will be a couple people that have some connection to the topic and can speak with some justified confidence about it, and several hundred people who read the title and, if we're lucky, the lede graf of the story and then just write stream of consciousness extrapolations --- also, instructive to note that HN does not, ceteris paribus, do a good job of upvoting the authoritative comments over the superficial riffing.

berg01 9y ago
> ceteris paribus I enjoy googling a new phrase as much as the next person... but really? From WP: Ceteris paribus or caeteris paribus is a Latin phrase meaning "other things equal". English translations of the phrase include "all other things being equal" or "other things held constant" or "all else unchanged".
throwaway41441 9y ago
> lede graf Journalistic jargon for "lead paragraph" https://underthecurve.github.io/jekyll/update/2016/12/29/hed-dek-led-graf.html https://underthecurve.github.io/jekyll/update/2016/12/29/hed... > ceteris paribus "all other things being equal" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceteris_paribus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceteris_paribus
brownbat 9y ago
> HN does not, ceteris paribus, do a good job of upvoting the authoritative comments over the superficial riffing. Top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16982493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16982493 Seems... fine? Our comments were useful enough for Ars to apparently base their entire reporting on them. (Ok, mixed feelings there...) Or, wait, are you saying Prince's reaction was the useful, authoritative one in this example? Most commenters thought he was making a bit of a leap. Is that what you're actually pushing back on?

notatoad 9y ago

The thread might have been fun of conspiracy theories, but the top comment the whole day was the one giving At&t the benefit of the doubt. (Fwiw, I was personally on board with the conspiracy theorists.)

dang 9y ago

It's at least gratifying to see that the top two root comments after the dust settled were ones that got it right. Though I suppose some of the upvotes may have come in after this information was available. (Edit: I checked and it doesn't look like it.)

kbenson 9y ago
> Though I suppose some of the upvotes may have come in after this information was available. (Edit: I checked and it doesn't look like it.) Oh, man. It would be so fun to run vote analysis on comments over time. I'm jealous now. :)
- phyller 9y ago
  dang should do a Hacker News AMA
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    The risk far outweighs the reward.

craftyguy 9y ago

Why would you trust what AT&T is saying publicly? This could have very well been an experiment to "see if anyone noticed", folks noticed, so here's the default "we didn't mean it, you can trust us" explanation. Major ISPs generally do not act in the best interest of their customers, especially when the action is allowing access to service that hurts their ability to collect more information about their users. They certainly do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

notyourwork 9y ago
Here come the tin foil hats. Not everything is a conspiracy. I get it these companies suck.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  It's easy to dismiss comments you don't like as "tinfoil hat"-like, but it's much harder to explain why they should be suddenly trusted. Care to try?
  - fourthark 9y ago
    Don't trust, but also don't overestimate. Incompetence is always the likelier explanation.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      Except AT&T has a long history of malice under the guise of incompetence. Just today: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170426/05094537241/att-unveils-fake-5g-network-hopes-youll-ignore-t-mobile-is-kicking-ass.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170426/05094537241/att-u...
      - fourthark 9y ago
        I'm sure you can find a better example than that. That's not malicious, it's just annoying marketing.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

avree 9y ago

Anyone have a link to the thread?

giancarlostoro 9y ago

Well it never made sense to me why block one DNS provider and not the rest? Ah well...