January 17, 2008
Anyone remember the HD-DVD encryption code madness? Its happening again. Except this time, its an an all out, no holds barred attack on the Church of Scientology.
Prompted I think by the Tom Cruise video, a new obsession is taking hold on the internet. An insurgency against The Church of Scientology. Lauched by “annonymous”. To join the “insurgency”, load up Project Chanology
What this actually means apart from being a random internet craze doesn’t bother me in the slightest. These things are damn fun. I have myself, as per instructions, loaded up Gigaloader and started bombarding the Scientology homepage. Theres something in the hilarious anarchy of the net that produces these “events” every now and again.
Here’s a quick recap of the teaching of Scientology. Scientology papers were leaked on a newsgroup on the net way back in 1995 by “annoymous”. This story was taken directly from them, and the church launched a flurry of take down demands for “copyright infringment”, and basically chased this thing around the net for years. Nowadays, they just deny the whole thing. Its was all a big hoax they say. Something about kettles and pots springs to mind.
Happy DDosing.
UPDATES:
A few news sources now are beginning to pick up on Project Chanology, WikiNews (as you might expect) and more oddly, The Budapest Times (buts is actually just a copy and paste of the WikiNews article). The Project Chanology page view count has risen quite dramatically too, from just over 1,000 on the day I first posted about it to over 23,000 views. Wheras when the whole thing began, Scientology.org loaded, albeit slowly, at the moment I can’t get it to load at all. The Project Page has been cleaned up somewhat, and organised very nicely. There is a recruitment section for newcomers, a roster for SciDBombing for different time zones.
In effect, this skirmish is the combined frustrations of thousands of John Sweeneys. Anonymous is John Sweeney.
What a hero, and what a national broadcaster for standing by him and his outburst.
The newly leaked Scientology Orientation Video.
Horrendous fun to watch. Part 3 viciously attacks psychiatry and psychology, presumably because anyone with such training can say for a fact that auditing is a joke.
“L. Ron Hubbard was truly mans greatest friend”
Also the founder of the worlds most troublesome cult.
Epic lulz. No?
For those that haven’t seen The UnFunny Truth about Scientology, check that out too.
A respected German academic likens Tom Cruise to Joseph Goebbels
UPDATE: Now the full version of the infamous Cruise video is here. Jam packed with wild claims and calls for Psychiatry to be outlawed, I give you a car crash in 4 parts.
''Wikinews'' has learned that according to an Internet posting made just over 24 hours ago, the Church of Scientology's website is being attacked by hackers, causing the site to shut down.

The attack was launched on Wednesday by a user labelled "Anonymous", on the website "Insurgency Wiki", a spinoff of 4chan.  The "History" section of the site explains, in a satirical fashion, that the incident was prompted by the Church of Scientology's attempts to remove a promotional video featuring Scientologist Tom Cruise from YouTube.  Though YouTube is complying with the Church of Scientology's requests to take down the video, other sites such as Gawker.com have stated that they will keep hosting the video.  

Writing in a blog post, Matthew Ingram of ''The Globe and Mail'' dubbed the ongoing conflict involving the Church of Scientology's attempts to remove the Cruise video from the Internet: "Scientology vs. the Internet, part XVII".  He characterized the conflict between the Church of Scientology and anonymous posters of the Cruise video as "another small skirmish in a war that Scientology has been waging for almost 15 years, since the early days of newsgroups such as alt.religion.scientology, which posted internal church documents in 1994. Lawsuits have been filed, mailing lists have been shut down, homes of discussion group participants have been raided and their computers seized -- an all-out war."


One poster admitted to being a part of the effort, writing in a blog post "I have myself, as per instructions, loaded up Gigaloader and started bombarding the Scientology homepage. Theres ''sic'' something in the hilarious anarchy of the net that produces these 'events' every now and again."  The poster wrote that "Prompted I think by the Tom Cruise video, a new obsession is taking hold on the internet. An insurgency against The Church of Scientology."

"Someone emailed me earlier today talking about a tool a group’s been using to attack the scientology website. It’s an interesting tool, created to overload/create malformed strings and crash a website’s database," said the post by an unknown author on ''pigmy.''

The Church's website is currently unreachable. Some individuals reported that when they are able to reach the site, all they get is a message stating, ''"The word scientology means search for truth..."''. As of 15:11 GMT the site was accessible again, but only loads at relatively slow speeds, and by the end of the day Saturday the site was not loading at all. 

Posts on the message board for the Scientology-critic site Operation Clambake from Friday theorized that a denial-of-service attack had occurred, and wrote that as of Friday the Scientology.org site was either not loading at all, or loading very slowly.  Critics of Scientology at the Internet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology were critical of the attacks to the Church of Scientology website, with one poster writing "How can people look at both sides if one side is gone?"

Traffic to the Scientology website had already increased 18-fold prior to the attack, following increased attention after the Tom Cruise video appeared on the Internet.  At that time, one in three visits to the site came from ''BBC News'', and the website increased to number 3 in the company Hitwise UK's Lifestyle-Religion category.