Mistakes happen with any corporation, but AT&T having network packets bound for Facebook routed through China?
Typically AT&T customers’ data would have routed over the AT&T network directly to Facebook’s network provider but due to a routing mistake their private data went first to Chinanet then via Chinanet to SK Broadband in South Korea, then to Facebook. This means that anything you looked at via Facebook without encryption was exposed to anyone operating Chinanet, which has a very suspect Modus operandi.
Not good. We don’t know for sure if it was an AT&T screwup, or if it was something worse, so I can’t speculate. However, if AT&T continually made mistakes like this, it would be nice to be able to switch to another provider with competent network admins.
(BTW, this is why I love the Internet’s inherent transparency and its ability to readily display information like this. And you should probably be using Facebook in SSL mode anyway, but that’s a different subject for another time.)
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