Tumblr – Heads-up for AT&T customers | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr – Heads-up for AT&T customers

tumblr.zendesk.com

66 pointsdhotson15 comments

Is this designed to be a test of (lack of) net neutrality or something?

Verizon now owns Tumblr. AT&T e-mail addresses will suddenly be blacklisted from logging in to Tumblr.

Maybe I am reading too much in to this?

Edit According to TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/25/take-the-oath/) it's all cool. Except that the explanation still makes no sense. It sounds like what they are saying is that (for example) an att.net e-mail address won't be a Yahoo account anymore, which I assume means that Yahoo won't be hosting their e-mail or something like that. But why wouldn't those addresses become the "username" on Yahoo logins, in the same way that any e-mail address can sign up as a Google account, even though the e-mail itself is hosted elsewhere (i.e. my "username" for Google could be a non-Google-hosted e-mail address, but my e-mail itself has nothing to do with Google - i.e. it's not a GMail account).

This isn't a net neutrality thing, it's the breaking of a relationship that AT&T and Yahoo has had for 15 years. AT&T email addresses were once Yahoo accounts. Now they're not.

SBC, prior to acquiring BellSouth and AT&T, originally contracted with Yahoo to run email/web portal service for their customers.

The SBC/ATT email addresses were essentially premium Yahoo accounts but with SBC's domain, and had access to all of Yahoo's products. At least at one point, SBC/ATT customers got free Flickr Pro as part of this.

AT&T evidently has left email the same (for now) but they've set up their own web portal. People have been informed that the former Yahoo-enabled accounts will no longer be usable for Yahoo properties.

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31478297-Legacy-swbell-use...

edit, after your edit: since it seems like Yahoo is still handling the email side (for the time being) I imagine their system just treats these email addresses as neutered Yahoo accounts, so they'd be unusable on Yahoo-owned services that expect a Yahoo account.

This should be a top-level comment... and really, the only comment in this thread. Everything else is clickbait hysteria.

Up until last year I was still on AT&T and using a dumbphone. The phone I had came with software to sync contacts with "the cloud". It was much easier to edit the list online (or even just as a CSV file) than on the phone itself. I never figured out how to access this list using the normal AT&T online portal, but I did find it through the Yahoo portal, if mostly by accident.

I had an independent Yahoo email for years before having SBC/ATT. When I signed up they offered to tie my yahoo email into their system. What they didn't tell me was there is no way to unconnect when you cancel ATT services. So now, many years later, my login always redirects to an ATT/Yahoo! page for whatever I'm trying to view (news, email, etc.)

This is not a net neutrality issue but walled garden/integration one. Net neutrality is concerned with ISPs discriminating between services at the packet level, while this is a limitation imposed by a service itself (albeit one owned by an ISP). There's nothing preventing AT&T customers from accessing Yahoo! or Tumblr other than possibly using another email address.

It would be interesting to know how many users are impacted. AT&T stats imply some astronomic numbers: https://www.att.com/Common/about_us/pdf/att_btn.pdf

Does anyone know if this will affect email access to the listed domains? My parents use an @bellsouth.net address as their primary email.

So long as they use the AT&T portal, they should be unaffected by the changes.

Is that legal ?

Why wouldn't it be?

Verizon flexing it's muscles?

What the fuck happened to the internet?

Yeah, even I'm confused about this

*the American Internet

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