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ID Website Targeted to Disrupt Conference in Colorado

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Anika Smith has reported at Evolution News and Views an attack which appears to be original to Darwinists. Although the attackers are, as yet, anonymous, the apparent motivation was to obfuscate a conference featuring leading Intelligent Design proponents scheduled this weekend at Douglas County Event Center in Castle Rock, Colorado.

Earlier this month the Shepherd Project Ministries’ website was breached using a “brute force attack” to break the password. The hackers then deleted webpages containing information about an upcoming conference featuring Discovery Institute speakers Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and John West.

“No question whatsoever about [what] they were targeting,” said Shepherd Project Executive Director Craig Smith. “That was brazen. We were a little stunned, to be perfectly honest. We had seen some hostile language about the conference, but honestly we just assumed it was cyber-flaming. We didn’t really expect or anticipate any kind of actual attack.”

Mr. Smith, welcome to the world of ID and it’s sometimes vicious counterparts known as Darwinists, won’t you sit down and make yourself at home.

The web pages were re-instated, and additional security was implemented to avoid this nonsense. However, that apparently wasn’t enough,

[B]ut since then a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack crippled and even crashed the Shepherd Project website, preventing many from registering for the intelligent design conference. These attacks involve multiple people coordinated in an attempt to make a website unavailable, shutting down access to information in a form of modern-day book-burning.

Modern-Day book burning is right. Anika Smith also has a podcast at Intelligent Design The Future in which she and the Shepherd Project’s Craig Smith discuss the incident. This is the third blog I’ve written in just a few weeks about censorship originating with Darwinists (if, indeed, these attackers are found to be such, which, given the escalation of online attacks that Craig Smith mentions, seems likely). There was the John McWhorter and Michael Behe bloggingheads fiasco, the California Science Center’s reneging on showing Darwin’s Dilemma, and now this. Victor Hugo is attributed with saying that “Nothing else in the world… not all the armies… is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” Agreed.

Comments
#15 And, if there isn’t any such thing as “objective” morality, then why bother with the equivocation in using the word morality at all? Do you think there is an objective thing as "interesting"? I doubt it. But there is plenty of reason to discuss and make the case for one thing being more interesting than another. And the result need not be trivial. Suppose for example that a museum has to spend a million dollars on one exhibit or another. The debate over whether one exhibit is more interesting has important implications. Just because there is no objective property underlying a word does not mean that attributing it is trivial or without foundation.Mark Frank
October 29, 2009
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Nakashima
The kind of level of effort calculations you describe are common in cryptography.
Apparently it's not common in biology.tragic mishap
October 29, 2009
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Wow! I've achieved a happy medium that could allow criticism or applause from both friend and foe. Awesome! Sorry to be unclear, but Cable got it right. I wasn't expressing frustration at Barry's posts, rather that it dovetails with the discussion and it seemed it should be pointed out. naontiotami, I know that athiests do have morals, although none of them can seem to figure out the reason why. And, if there isn't any such thing as “objective” morality, then why bother with the equivocation in using the word morality at all?Brent
October 29, 2009
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naontiotami - I think Brent was alluding to BarryA's pronouncements that materialists can't have any real morals. I read the comment as expressing frustration in Barry's posts.Heinrich
October 29, 2009
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#11 Cable: Sure, there might not be any "objective" morality, but is such a thing really necessary? (Plus, this isn't relevant to the topic of the post. But whatever.)naontiotami
October 29, 2009
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#10 naontiotami: I think he really alluding to the idea that there is no rational basis for objective morality in an atheistic system. Morals are not things atheists can argue for objectively. But anyway who cares when an argument comes from. Surely the quality of the argument is what is important.Cable
October 29, 2009
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Brent: Please. A moral argument? That's so... 1800s. :p You really think that evolution-defenders have no morals? Really? Wow.naontiotami
October 29, 2009
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Resorting to brute force and sabotage sends the wrong message – that we can’t effectively address your arguments, so we have to resort to other means.
Actually, it's not the wrong message at all—just the truth :)
Only a very small minority of evolution-defenders on the Internet would be in support of the actions that took place on the Shepherd Project Ministry site, let me assure you – there’s “violent” people in every group. Painting all “Darwinists” with the same brush is not accurate, yet you seem to be willing to do that.
Cue Barry's post asking what morals Darwinists can possibly possess to tell them that such actions are wrong?Brent
October 29, 2009
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As Graham the 1st(!) relates, a couple of athiest websites in Australia were knocked out by hackers. Condemnable as that act is and the other in Colorado, I found a quote by the president of the athiest group interesting: "This may not be just an attack on atheism, but an attack on freedom of speech." I agree, and it cuts both ways.AussieID
October 29, 2009
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This was a despicable set of actions by anyone.
I agree - whatever one thinks of those one disagrees with, trying to disrupt them like this is wrong.Heinrich
October 29, 2009
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You guys should put spread your stuff more widely -- facebook, other's blogs, twitter, etc...NZer
October 29, 2009
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Mr Mishap, The kind of level of effort calculations you describe are common in cryptography. This was a despicable set of actions by anyone.Nakashima
October 29, 2009
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Just days ago an Atheist website promoting a conference in Australia was crippled by the same method. Should the Atheists start blaming the ID crowd ?Graham1
October 29, 2009
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While I am a "Darwinist", as you would call me (a silly label at best, but I'm not going to talk about that now), I'm not a fan of the "attack the ID websites" strategy. Resorting to brute force and sabotage sends the wrong message - that we can't effectively address your arguments, so we have to resort to other means. Only a very small minority of evolution-defenders on the Internet would be in support of the actions that took place on the Shepherd Project Ministry site, let me assure you - there's "violent" people in every group. Painting all "Darwinists" with the same brush is not accurate, yet you seem to be willing to do that. Oh well, you're waging an intellectual war with someone - you've got to take all the shots you can, I suppose. ;)naontiotami
October 29, 2009
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Howdy, Mr. Hayden- Truce for a moment. You may be aware that certain "news" outlets have decided that Arnold Schwarzenegger put a coded, insulting phrase directed towards an enemy legislator in his recent veto. I'm pretty sure that he didn't. Would any of you fellows be willing and able to refute this nonsense by way of detection of design - as in, put some numerical value to the possibility that such a series of three letters could have been arisen by chance? BarrettBrown
October 29, 2009
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They really need to report this to the FBI's Internet Crimes Div. I have been trying to register for several days and have been unable to even load the page.Gods iPod
October 28, 2009
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I listened to this. Craig Smith says that they used a "brute force" attack, i.e. random, to obtain the password for the server. Smith says they then changed the password to something so long it would take "months" for them to break it using a brute force attack. Interesting applications of ID. I would like to know how long the first password was and how long the second one was. Conceivably one could then take a given computing capacity and calculate the odds of getting both passwords, which you could in turn calculate how long you should expect a brute force attack to require to break it.tragic mishap
October 28, 2009
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