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Posts with tag scientology

Tom Cruise Buys Adwords to Control Search Results On His Name

by Tim Stevens, posted May 5th 2008 at 2:14PMBreaking News

Tom Cruise Buys Google Adwords

Over the weekend it was noted that Tom Cruise, or some of his Scientology peeps, had purchased a raft of Google Adwords advertising indicating a new, re-launched personal site at TomCruise.com. Adwords is Google's text-based advertising program, allowing anyone to buy their way into the top of a search page for a certain term. The sponsored link to TomCruise.com was, naturally, appearing whenever anyone searched for "Tom Cruise," a seeming attempt to try to subvert his name's usual top search results: Tom's IMDB page, his Wikipedia entry, and, our personal favorite, TomCruiseIsNuts.com.

Tom's site currently displays only a counter that is ticking its way down to noon EST. What exactly is launching is anyone's guess, but we wouldn't be surprised if it was somehow connected to last week's launch of Scientology's YouTube channel. [Source: Hollywood Newsroom]
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Scientology's New YouTube Channel Praises Openness, Blocks Comments

by Tim Stevens, posted May 1st 2008 at 10:33AM

The Church of Scientology doesn't have many friends online. It's constantly attacked by hackers, mocked for its silly videos, and has had its secret documents published for all to see. But now it appears to be changing its approach to the Internet. Embracing the Web, The Church is spreading the word by posting its own videos on a custom YouTube channel.

The channel, which features softly lit images and an introductory video with gentle music, hosts a string of videos that explain the religion. After a first watch, we got a vague impression of Scientology's core beliefs and anti-drug stance, but found it curious that they left out many of the religion's more curious details. However, the group has chosen to prevent embedding of the vast majority of the videos, with only its public service announcements (like the one above) open for inclusion in blogs and MySpace pages. Posting of comments on these videos has also been disabled, which might be a good move given the kind of response Wal-Mart got to its own Facebook page. [Source: Wired]
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Hackers Take Out Scientology Web Site

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Jan 29th 2008 at 11:30AM


Well, it looks like the war is on. The Church of Scientology's attempts to squash circulation of a video of Tom Cruise last week seem to have been the final straw for a group that calls itself "Anonymous." According to a recent report in Wired, the cryptically-named organization recently stated that its main goal is to destroy the leadership of the Church of Scientology.

The first public salvo was launched over the past couple of days as a group of hackers claiming affiliation with Anonymous took down the home page of the Church with repeated distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. DDOS attacks flood target servers with requests, so that they become overwhelmed with data and shut down. This results in a site that doesn't work, which is exactly what visitors to the Scienology Web site experienced during the attack. The attacks flooded Scientology's Web servers with as much as 220 megabits per-second, which security experts claim is a mid-sized attack.

While this attack is not the largest of its kind ever seen, it does show some level of organization, "It's not just one or two guys hanging out in the university dorms doing this," said Jose Nazario, a senior security engineer with Arbor Networks. The church has since moved its site to servers run by Prolexic Technologies, a company that specialized in protection from DDOS attacks.

From Wired (via InfoWorld)

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Scientology Goes After Blog for Posting Video of Tom Cruise

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Jan 17th 2008 at 2:01PM


For those of you unfamiliar with the Church of Scientology let us give you a very, very abbreviated background. Scientology was started in 1952 by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. The secretive religion has proven to be very popular amongst the Hollywood elite, but has faced allegations that it harasses critics, abuses members trust, and is not a religious organization but a commercial enterprise and a cult.

Tom Cruise is one of the organization's most visible and vocal proponents. Not long ago at a ceremony held by the Church of Scientology International (CSI) Tom Cruise was awarded the Freedom Medal of Valor. His wild-eyed video acceptance speech talking about how Scientology holds the answers to everything made its way on to pop culture and gossip blog Gawker. CSI immediately jumped to legal action, as many of its critics would have expected, sending a cease and desist order to Gawker accusing them of violating copyright law by posting the video from the award ceremony.

Gawker has so far refused to remove the video, arguing that it was posted in the context of "news reporting and critical commentary" and therefore falls under the fair use doctrine. CSI has yet to respond, but we're pretty sure this isn't over yet. The Church of Scientology is, if anything, determined, as one BBC reporter found out.

The entire terrifying video, from fervent introduction and speech by the church's supreme leader David Miscavige, to border line psychotic description of the church by Tom Cruise is available here. And don't worry if they get taken down, we've got copies too.

Update:
Those videos in the last link were removed as expected. But don't worry as you can see we've already reposted. We're keeping an eye out for black SUVs parked outside of our apartments now.

From Boing Boing

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