Why I Dumped AT&T, and Why You Should Too

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&T ever did was Bell Labs, and that is part of Lucent now.

AT&T willing to spy for NSA, MPAA, and RIAA

By Nate Anderson | Published: June 13, 2007 - 10:13AM CT

In a move that has executives from movie studios and record labels grinning from ear to ear, AT&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's decision to offer IPTV television service as part of its U-Verse package, AT&T senior VP James W. Cicconi told the Los Angeles Times.

The first step for AT&T is coming up with a technological solution that works: something that can effectively filter out illicit traffic while protecting its users' privacy. That's a tall—if not impossible—order. YouTube hasn't managed to do it even for video yet, and that's when customers are sending them entire files which they can scan at their leisure. Monitoring all the files sent through BitTorrent—which splits them into tiny pieces—could be even more difficult; doing it in real-time sounds both expensive and impossible.

Without human intervention, it's also tough to tell if copyrighted content is even "piracy." 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.

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