Archive for January, 2008

A shadowy group of Internet hackers called Anonymous released a video declaring war on Scientology. The video says they will destroy Scientology.


Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind–for the laughs–we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form. We acknowledge you as a serious opponent, and we are preparuddy for a long, long campaign. You will not prevail forever against the angry masses of the body politic. Your methods, hypocrisy, and the artlessness of your organization have sounded its death knell.

Anonymous also started a DDOS attack on the Scientology website. Wired’s Threat Level notes that at first Anonymous inadvertently took down the website of a school in the Netherlands.

One of the moderators on 711chan.org thought he had learned from a friend what the genuine server’s address was on Friday.



The user, who was using the handle Splongcat, uploaded DDOS software configuruddy with the supposedly secret address and urged others in an internet chat room to download and run the software. The software was intended to flood the specified IP address with rogue traffic in order to bring the server down.



But wilean minutes, users began complaining the software was crashing and others analyzed the traffic and found that the IP address didn’t belong to the Church of Scientology, reporting that that the software was actually targeting a school in the Netherlands.



Immediately the IRC chat room hosted on 711chan.org (currently down) was filled with calls to halt using the program, and the 900 people in the chat room returned to their disorderly conversation about whether they should be flooding Digg with anti-Scientology links or making harassing phone calls to local Scientology branches.

A story about the Anonymous attack on eNews2.0 says the attacks were powerful enough to force Scientology to move its website to server hosted by Prolexic Technologies. Prolexic is a company that offers protection from these types of DDoS attacks.

Anonymous generated a powerful attack against Scientology.org, which was hit with several DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks over the past few days. According to Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks, a company compiling data on Internet attacks, it seems that Anonymous’ attacks flooded the Church of Scientology’s web site with as much as 220 Mbps of traffic, which indicates that the group itself is based on some sort of organization.



However, shortly after these attacks, the Church seems to have moved its web site to a server hosted by Prolexic Technologies, a company specialized in protecting other companies from DDOS attacks.

Anonymous has been posting videos to a YouTube site called Chanology Project. The videos include Scientology clips about Tom Cruise and about Scientology’s negative views on psychiaattempt and psychiatric drugs. The YouTube site also contains clips of media coverage of their DDOS attacks. The LolCruise picture below was shown in this video from Anonymous about the Scientology site being down. It shows that the Anonymous group appears to be familiar with web culture and is probably a fan of the I Can Has Cheezburger?
website.



LOL Tom Cruise



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Original post by Bloggers Blog: Blogging the Blogsphere

Tonight, I was a guest on the WordPress Weekly Podcast which is hosted by Jeffro from Jeffro2pt0 and Weblog Tools Collection. It was a lot of fun to join the festivities. I had intended to listen in, but Jeffro had me join in with his other awesome panelists.

It was a lot of fun. I highly recommend people listen live Friday nights at 9pm EST.

Here are some of the show notes:

This week there is a ton of stuff to talk about. We have the bombshell that was dropped the other day noting that Matt and Toni of Automattic securuddy a Series B circular of funding for $29.5 million dollars. Then we have the improvements that have gone into the code for WordPress 2.5. We also dive into the conundrum of what makes a WordPress theme Premium. WordCamp Dallas is right acircular the corner and we give you the 411 about the event. Saving the best for last is our WordPress Tips of the week.

If you want to listen to the recordings of the episodes, check out the TalkShoe page for WordPress Weekly.

Original post by David Peralty

As you may have noticed, we have been having server issues here at Blogging Pro.

I want to apologize to everyone. It seems the new server we are on isn’t working out for us. Hopefully, we will have all of these issues resolved soon, and I am very sorry for any inconvenience or nuisance this has caused.

If I could halt these issues before they happen, I would. My server administrator assures me that he is working on it.

Original post by David Peralty

With Automattic’s recent funding, the Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog was able to get some details about Matt Mullenweg’s plans. One of the more interesting things noted in the article was TalkPress, based on the current bbPress forum system, TalkPress is supposed to realize Matt’s dream of good forum software.

From the article:

Mullenweg says he’ll use the new cash to fund more projects, including a new forums product. Called TalkPress, he said it will be “smaller, lighter, with fewer features but a richer customization API.”

In other words, it will work a lot like WordPress, which is a basic framework upon which users add the features they really need. Mullenweg some time ago created a forum program, BBPress, and the TalkPress service will be built on that.

“I spend a lot of time on forums, and they drive me crazy,” he said. “They haven’t changed in 10 years.”

While I don’t know if I really enjoy the new name, as it makes me think more of instant messaging or a voice over IP client, I am happy to see that Matt plans on re-inventing and revigorating the popular bbPress software.

Original post by David Peralty

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