4chan rushes to WikiLeaks' defense, forces Swiss banking site offline - Ars Technica

The forces of Anonymous have taken aim at several companies who are refusing to do business with WikiLeaks. 4chan's hordes have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance, and other sites that have hindered the whistleblowing site's operations.

A self-styled spokesman for the group calling himself "Coldblood" has said that any website that's "bowing down to government pressure" is a target. PayPal ceased processing donations to the site, and PostFinance froze WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's account. The attacks are being performed under the Operation: Payback banner; Operation: Payback is the name the group is using in its long-running attacks on the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations involved with anti-piracy lawsuits.

The initial attacks against PayPal were substantially ineffective; the PayPal blog was taken offline, but the main PayPal site wasn't harmed. The attacks against PostFinance, however, have resulted in the bank's website being unavailable for more than 16 hours. It remains unavailable at the time of writing. The latest target is the site of the Swedish prosecutors in Assange's sexual misconduct trial. This too appears to be offline. Twitter has also been named as a future attack target, due to its censorship of the #wikileaks hashtag.

The companies being attacked deny that their behavior is a result of government influence. Rather, they are claiming that WikiLeaks and Assange have failed to adhere to the terms of use of various services. Amazon, which for a time hosted the site, said that WikiLeaks was failing to ensure that it "wasn't putting innocent people in jeopardy." PostFinance said that Assange lied on an application form.

In a case of tit-for-tat, unknown forces have since launched a denial of service attack against Anonymous' own site (one that took it offline shortly after publication), though the IRC channel used for coordination is still operational, and its denial-of-service software, LOIC, is still functioning properly.

WikiLeaks was itself the target of massive denial of service attacks in the wake of its release of thousands of US embassy cables. The source of these attacks remains unknown. In addition to making the main WikiLeaks site hard to access, DoS attacks against DNS provider EveryDNS resulted in the company cutting WikiLeaks off, as it was unwilling to tolerate the excess traffic.

In spite of this, hundreds of mirrors of the site have popped up across the globe, with Anonymous claiming to have created many of them. An "insurance file"—an encrypted torrent of the entire cable dump—has been widely distributed, along with the promise that the decryption key will be published should anything bad happen to WikiLeaks.

Assange himself is currently remanded in custody in the UK. Swedish prosecutors are seeking to have him extradited to face sexual misconduct charges. He surrendered to police in London and was arrested. Bail was refused over fears that he might flee, and also due to some fear that he was at risk from "unstable persons." With widespread calls for his murder, this might not be too far-fetched.

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Defense witnesses flesh out Mitchell's earlier life - Salt Lake Tribune

By Stephen Hunt

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published Nov 16, 2010 08:17PM
Updated 30 minutes ago Updated Nov 16, 2010 08:54PM While working with Brian David Mitchell at OC Tanner during the early 1990s, Doug Larsen came to consider his fellow tool and die cutter “close to being a brother.”

“He and I hit it off really well. We had a lot of similar views about the world and religion,” Larsen testified Tuesday for the defense at Mitchell’s trial for allegedly kidnapping Elizabeth Smart.

Several years later, Larsen spotted a transformed, Biblical-looking Mitchell begging for money at Main Street and South Temple — a man who now refused to even acknowledge his former friend.

Larsen, hoping to find out what Mitchell had done over the years, said: “You gave that guy a ‘God bless you’ for fifty cents. Will you give me five minutes of your time for five dollars?”

Mitchell, money in hand, looked at him and said, “The Lord be praised. God bless you.”

Larsen said, “I will pray for you,” and then he started to walk away. Mitchell turned and over his shoulder said, “And I will pray for you.”

Before that, Mitchell had been a clean-cut and “utterly sincere” member of the LDS Church, who often was ridiculed by other workers at the Salt Lake City jewelry company for singing hymns and zealously expressing his religious opinions. But after Mitchell quit in 1994 and became a follower of a naturopathic health concept called lymphology, Larsen said he lost track of him for four years prior to the Main Street encounter.

Prosecutors rested their case in chief Tuesday morning after four days of testimony that laid out the alleged facts of Smart’s kidnapping and her nine months of captivity and sexual abuse at age 14 in the hands of Mitchell, 57, and his wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, 65.

—

The defense » Now, with the start of the defense case, comes what U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball has identified as the real focus of the trial.

Larsen’s testimony — and more to come this week from other defense witnesses who knew Mitchell prior to Smart’s June 2002 abduction — is designed to illustrate Mitchell’s alleged descent into madness.

The defense is asking jurors to find Mitchell not guilty by reason of insanity. They also have the burden of proving he was insane at the time of the alleged crime.

To that end, Mitchell’s father and other family members are slated to testify today about Mitchell’s childhood and teenage years. Barzee, who pleaded guilty to kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor and is serving 15 years in prison, could take the witness stand as early as Thursday. She is being held in the Davis County Jail awaiting her testimony.

The defense’s first witness Tuesday was Dru White, who was an LDS high counselor in 1987 when he met Mitchell and Barzee at a Salt Lake City ward. Mitchell was the bishop’s clerk, Barzee the organist.

White said Mitchell was “quite clean-cut and well-dressed — a normal, conservative young man.”

Mitchell had a reputation as “an active member of the ward, and willing to work and serve,” which earned him a promotion to counselor, White said.

“He seemed eager to do a good job,” recalled White. “He was quiet, but friendly. At meetings he was quite attentive and listening carefully to everything that was going on.”

On the witness stand, Larsen said he was devoted to his religion, but that Mitchell was even more devoted.

They both read the same religious books, both assumed the prophesied Davidic king would arise from the upper leaders of the Mormon Church, and both admired then-LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson as “among the great prophets.”

He and Mitchell also considered most church members to be “largely idolatrous.” He said they often discussed religion at work, and both were viewed by co-workers as “religious fanatic guys.”

Mitchell got into arguments with co-workers over religion because he was “very confident to the point of being dogmatic and inflexible, and he came across as abrasive,” Larsen said. When co-workers became annoyed and called Mitchell “crazy,” he would terminate the discussion by walking away, Larsen said.

But after Mitchell left OC Tanner, Larsen said the man he encountered was not the same Mitchell.

—

A changed man » Speaking to reporters outside of court, Larsen said of Mitchell: “The person I knew no longer exists; he’s completely changed.”

“It’s like Brian David Mitchell died,” said Larsen, adding that he attributed the changes to Mitchell’s experimentation with LSD as a teen.

But Larsen added that he didn’t doubt Mitchell knew what he was doing.

“He’s clever, he’s lucid. He was calculating and in control,” Larsen said, pointing out that Mitchell tried to keep from getting caught by police.

Larsen said that while listening to testimony last week from Smart about what she called her “nine months of hell” with Mitchell and Barzee, he recalled that it was similar to a religious, science-fiction fantasy novel he once wrote and allowed Mitchell to read.

He testified that Mitchell objected to a portion of the novel in which a female character “prostitutes herself” to distract some guards and allow other family members to escape.

Mitchell claimed “he didn’t think God would ask a girl to give up her virtue,” Larsen recalled. Yet Smart had testified to a scenario “almost identical to his objections,” Larsen said, referring to Mitchell’s alleged contention that it was God’s will that they “marry.”

Larsen also told an amusing anecdote about Mitchell from his time as an actor in a Creation play, which used to be held on Temple Square, but has now been replaced with a movie.

Mitchell, who played the role of Satan, was taken aside and told, “You are one of the best Lucifers we’ve had, but could you tone it down a little,” Larsen recalled. “He was amused by their concern [that] he played a good devil and he was convincing.”

—

More witnesses » Also Tuesday, the defense called two sons of the late C. Samuel West, a lymphologist who employed Mitchell to promote the concept that “bouncing” helps the blood and lymphatic system work together to prevent and to cure disease.

Karl West testified that when he first met Mitchell, he was clean-cut and dressed normally, but later wore robes, earning him the nickname, “The Israelite.”

Mitchell and Barzee lived off-and-on in the basement of the West’s Orem home, and also in a teepee in the backyard, while building a covered handcart, which they later pulled across the country, West said.

West testified that the couple left after having a religious disagreement with his father, possibly over the issue of practicing polygamy. West said the couple was also burning something in the basement of his house, which caused him to accuse the couple of “desecrating” the residence.

When Mitchell and Barzee reappeared in the spring or summer of 2001, West said they stood on the sidewalk in front of the house, yelling and “telling us the house was going to be destroyed.”

“I’d never seen him like that,” West told defense attorney Wendy Lewis. “He was off his rocker.”

Asked if Mitchell appeared mentally ill, West replied: “Yeah, in retrospect.”

But when prosecutor Felice Viti asked if Mitchell and Barzee may have burnt incense in the basement to cover the smell of marijuana, West agreed that after seeing pictures of Mitchell on the news with a beer in his hand, he decided it was marijuana.

“Are you saying he fooled you?” Viti asked.

West replied: “Yeah, definitely.”

shunt@sltrib.com

Pamela Manson and Cimaron Neugebauer contributed to this report.

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Giants' defense batters Cutler, Bears - msnbc.com

updated 11:27 p.m. ET Oct. 3, 2010 EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - The New York Giants' defense delivered a knockout punch that sent Chicago Bears reeling from the unbeaten ranks.

The Giants knocked out Jay Cutler with a nine-sack first half, sent his replacement to the sideline late in the fourth quarter and limited Chicago to 110 total yards in a 17-3 victory on Sunday night.

The win left the NFL with only one undefeated team.

Can you say, or believe the idle Kansas City Chiefs (3-0).

Ahmad Bradshaw rushed for 131 yards and a touchdown against a defense that had allowed 119 yards on the ground in its first three games and Lawrence Tynes kicked a 22-yard field goal as the Giants (2-2) snapped a two-game losing streak and beat the Bears (3-1), who had come into the game as the NFC's last unbeaten team.

Brandon Jacobs, whose fourth-quarter fumble inside his own 30 set up Robbie Gold's 40-yard field goal for Chicago, capped the scoring with a 2-yard touchdown run with 4:31 to play.

On a night the Giants inducted 22 of their greatest players into their new Ring of Honor, including Hall of Famers Lawrence Taylor and Harry Carson, this defense emulated some of the great ones of the Giants' 86-year history.

The Giants' defense performance ranged on spectacular both in appearance and statistically.

New York limited the Bears to six first downs, did not allow a third-down conversion in 13 attempts and forced three turnovers in addition to the 10 sacks.

The sack total was two shy of the league record, which the Giants tied in 2007 in a Sunday night game against Donovan McNabb and the Philadelphia Eagles. Osi Umenyiora had six that night. He had three against Chicago.

Cutler and Todd Collins paid the price. Cutler was sacked nine times in the first half and suffered a concussion and did not return. The veteran Collins took over in the second half and lasted until about four minutes remained in the game.

NFL Week 4 roundup, analysis Michael Heiman / Getty Images  N.Y. knocked Chicago QB Jay Cutler out of the game and rolled to a 17-3 win against the NFC's lone unbeaten team.

That's when he was sent to the sideline after taking a blindside hit from linebacker Michael Boley.

Lovie Smith was forced to send in No. 3 quarterback Caleb Hanie and he got sacked by Justin Tuck for New York's 10th and final sack with about three minutes to play.

The Giants took an early 3-0 lead, driving 76 yards in 11 plays with Tynes hitting the chip-shot field goal.

New York didn't take control until the third quarter when Eli Manning engineered an eight-play 90 yard drive that featured passes of 21 yards to Hakeem Nicks and 25 to tight end Travis Beckum. Bradshaw had runs of 13 and 25 yards before capping the drive with a 3-yard run on which his line seemed to shove him into the end zone.

The Giants led 3-0 at the half and the margin certainly should have been more.

Perry Fewell's defense limited the Bears to 22 yards, two first downs and sacked Cutler an amazing nine times and forced two turnovers that gave the Giants the ball twice inside the Bears 30-yard line.

Tynes missed a 38-yard field goal wide left after an interception by Terrell Thomas gave New York the ball at the Bears 28.

Instead of going for the knockout punch with a 3-0 lead, the Giants called a run by Bradshaw and two Manning passes, the last one on a third-and-2 play to Kevin Boss that would not have gotten a first down.

Early in the second quarter, Umenyiora caught Cutler from the blindside and got his third sack of the half, forcing a fumble that was recovered at the Chicago 29.

Three plays and false start against guard Chris Snee pushed the Giants back to the 34 and New York was forced to punt.

© 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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