Someone has launched another attack on the Usenet group alt.religion.scientology. In the last five days, hundreds of messages have been posted to a.r.s. in what many presume to be yet another attempt by CoS to stifle criticism and shut down the newsgroup. The first poster used the return address "Chris Maple" <chrismpl@ a.crl.com>, and made use of a mail gateway at Yale. The Yale admins closed the gateway to the spammer, but several hundred posts had already made it through (I got at least 400 here). I believe the Yale admin said that 800 more attempts were made to post to a.r.s. after the gateway had been closed. Since then, "Chris Maple" has been followed by several other vertical spammers, all posting similar material, even formatted the same -- same intro and URLs at the end. As each new vertical spammer shows up we contact their ISP, but by the time anything happens we have several hundred more messages. The group has been flooded with spam for about five days straight. While there is no direct evidence, AFAIK, that CoS is responsible for the attack, it is consistent with their ongoing attempts to silence their critics, including lawsuit, harassment by private investigators, rmgrouping a.r.s., and (presumably) shutting down hacktic. Please let others know about what's happening, and feel free to repost this message in appropriate forums. Thanks, Rich ______________________________________________________________________ Rich Burroughs richieb@teleport.com http://www.teleport.com/~richieb See my Blue Ribbon Page at http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/blueribbon New EF zine "cause for alarm" - http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/cause