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Sunday, January 20, 2008

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.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Friday, August 5, 2005

The Interfax news agency is reporting that a Russian minisub that was stranded underwater in the Pacific Ocean is trapped by two 60 tonne anchors.

The submarine propeller has snagged on the antenna of a sonar underwater coastal defense station, (or perhaps very long low frequency arrays, which can be thousands of yards) 623 ft below the ocean 43 miles off Kamchatka. “The anchor needs to be blown up” in order to be able to raise the AS-28 submarine, the commander of the Russian Pacific Fleet told Interfax.

“If the explosion is successful, the system will be raised to a depth of 100 meters and lit up by the Tiger [television camera], and we can at last be 100% sure that it’s the submarine, and deepwater divers will be able to continue work,” he continued.

The AS-28 submarine, with seven crew onboard, became entangled on Thursday while at a depth of 190 m.

Earlier reports that the submarine had been taken under tow have been proved false. Ships had attempted to trawl for the submarine in order to drag it into shallower water, but it is reported that they failed to capture the submarine.

The Pacific Fleet commander says that the crew have enough food and water to survive until Monday although oxygen will run out by Saturday. The three-man submarine was designed to supply the crew with a five day supply of oxygen, however with the seven man crew the supply has been greatly depleted.

Around ten Russian navy ships are attending, to be joined by four Japanese vessels on Monday. The US and UK navies are also flying in specialist rescue equipment, including two U.S. navy owned remotely-operated underwater robots capable of cutting through steel lines up to 1″ thick and one U.K. video array ROV. They will arrive on Saturday.

The crew have been using an underwater acoustic telephone to communicate with the surface, and are reported to be remaining calm. They have been told to keep still and to conserve the ship’s power supplies.

The same class of vessel, which measures 13.5 m by 3.8 m, was used during the ill-fated rescue attempt on the Kursk, which was lost with all hands almost exactly five years ago.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Following the Pilkhana massacre which occurred February 25 and 26 leaving 74 dead and the inferno at the Bashundhara City shopping mall complex March 13 leaving seven dead, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said security measures are being tightened countrywide across Bangladesh.

Fire drills will be enacted at all key-point installations (KPI). Fire fighting systems will be examined by the fire brigade and the public works department (PWD) to ensure functionality. Security measures will be enhanced supplementing areas under private security such as at the Bashundhara City Complex.

The Fire Service and Civil Defence Department requires modernization and needs new equipment to fight fires past the sixth floor of buildings. The Fire Brigade says it needs turntable ladders, snorkels, foam-tenders, lighting units, emergency tenders, fireproof uniforms, and rescue ropes for fire fighting and rescue operations. Transportation to fires is also an issue due to narrow roads, low electrical wires and congestion.

The Bangladesh National Building Code requires fire fighting equipment installed in buildings over seven floors. This code is to be monitored by authorities to ensure compliance with the new guidelines and to make sure buildings are being maintained.

The Bashundhara City Complex opened Monday for shoppers two days after Friday’s blaze. A probe is underway to determine the cause of the fire and to assess structural damage.

Loss of life was minimized as the blaze broke out on a Friday, the beginning of the weekend in Bangladesh, so offices in the upper floors were empty. The lower eight floors are used for shopping and the upper floors are all Bashundhara Group offices.

The mall is valued at Tk 7.0 billion (US$100 million). It is not known if the complex is covered by fire insurance.

It is estimated that it will take over two years to rebuild the area damaged by flames which were burned down to a skeleton. Bashundhara City’s technical advisor, Latifur Rahman, estimated damages at Tk 2.0 billion (US$29m).

Only one television cameraman has been allowed in to film the burnt area. None of the 2,500 shops, cinemas or cafes were burnt by the inferno. The seventh and eighth floors still experience smoke damage, and there was water damage to merchandise.

A three member committee is currently investigating the cause of the fire which will consist of Iqbal Khan Chowdhury, joint secretary of the ministry, representatives of the police, IGP Noor Muhammad, and fire brigade, Director General Abu Nayeem Md Shahidullah. The committee is required to report within the week with their findings. The forensics department is also sifting through the burnt remains.

The Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industries has also formed a committee which has begun interviewing witnesses and recording their testimony alongside the government committee.

It has been discovered that 150 closed circuit cameras were not being used when the fire started. Another mystery is why the mall fire fighting system has been found unused.

“In the shopping mall there is an ultra-technology elevator which runs even without electricity but we have found that locked,” Iqbal Khan Chowdhury, joint secretary (Police) of the home ministry, said. “Why the fire burnt so fiercely is a matter to think. We have to see if there was any incendiary substance there. These matters seem to be mysterious.”

Mall management has been asked to submit substances and items which would have been in the upper floors when the fire started. The fire erupted on the 17th floor and spread quickly to the two floors above and engulfed the three floors below. The aerial ladders belonging to the Fire Service and Civil Defence reached as high as the 13th floor of the 21-storey building.

Videos have been sent to the United States (US) for examination to assist in determining the cause of the fire and to help in the damage assessment. Experts from the US are expected to arrive soon.

Firefighters were brought to the rooftop of the 20-storey tower by helicopter. The only fatality in this operation was Baki Billa, a firefighter of Bashundhara City firefighting department, who fell when climbing down a rope from a helicopter to the roof of the building. Three other firefighters made the transition safely. At this same time, the chief security officer was safely rescued by the Bangladesh Air Force helicopter, a Bell 212. Six security officers of the complex also lost their lives.