CYBERWAR UPDATE: Visa.com NOW DOWN!

http://isitup.org/www.visa.com IT'S DOWN! KEEP FIRING!!! #DDOS #PAYBACK #WIKILEAKS
23 minutes ago via web
Retweeted by 100+ people
.Anon_Operation

https://twitter.com/Anon_Operation/status/12613369827692544#

9.20pm: Visa.com is now unavailable with Operation Payback coordinating the attack.

8.56pm: That was quick: the Personal Democracy Forum is holding a symposium on WikiLeaks and internet freedom in New York City on Saturday, asking questions such as "Is WikiLeaks a terrorist organization, or the beginning of a new kind of transnational investigative journalism?"

The panel includes luminaries such as Esther Dyson, Emily Bell and Arianna Huffington.

8.29pm: A reader emails to say:

I've just watched Hillary Clinton stroll out of the Freedom Forum: First Amendment Center in DC, looking particularly cheerful.

The reason for the cheerfulness may be that according to her schedule, Clinton's visit had nothing to do with the first amendment. She was there to meet CEOs from the Business Roundtable.

8.15pm: Is Visa the next target after Mastercard? This tweet purporting to come from the hacktivists at Operation Payback suggests it is:

WE ARE ATTACKING WWW.VISA.COM IN AN HOUR! GET YOUR WEAPONS READY http://bit.ly/e6iR3X AND STAY TUNED. #ddos #wikiealsk #payback

Military’s Cyberwar Command Is Fully Operational

Fifteen thousand military computer networks became protected on November 3, 2010. Those ensconced within the informational phalanx called the event Cyber Command Day. They lived only to face a new challenge — the war against the Machines.

In truth, yesterday wasn’t quite so dramatic. The Department of Defense announced that the military’s new command for protecting its networks against cyberassault had achieved “full operational capability,” meaning the new U.S. Cyber Command, which opened for business in May, is 100 percent ready for duty, just a month behind schedule. Not that “full operational capability” fills in many of the blanks about when it’s acceptable for Cyber Command to attack a foreign network or how deeply it’ll be involved in the civilian internet.

History Unfolding- The 1st World CyberWar: All-out Cyber war’ erupts over WikiLeaks: ‘Anonymous’ hackers take MasterCard offline

Sites for Visa, PayPal, Sen. Lieberman also targeted
Yesterday, MasterCard Worldwide became the latest financial institution to face the wrath of online hackers acting to avenge secrets outlet WikiLeaks over the credit card provider's declaration that the site was engaged in "illegal" activities.
Not 36 hours after MasterCard froze payments to WikiLeaks, their website was down as hackers with the group "Anonymous" launched a new wave of cyberattacks. The company said its customers could still use their credit cards for purchases, but the PayPoint retail network told a BBC reporter that MasterCard's "SecureCode" service had been taken down, interrupting service all over.
The hackers also claimed responsibility for taking down the website for Swiss bank PostFinance, after it froze an account with over €31,000 set aside for site founder Julian Assange's legal defense.
Assange was arrested in London yesterday on an Interpol warrant out of Sweden, where he's wanted for questioning in an investigation of sexual assault.

Our 1400th Post: Evidence For Alien Life Is Mounting Daily, But Not Proven

WASHINGTON — Lately, a handful of new discoveries make it seem more likely that we are not alone – that there is life somewhere else in the universe.
In the past several days, scientists have reported there are three times as many stars as they previously thought. Another group of researchers discovered a microbe can live on arsenic, expanding our understanding of how life can thrive under the harshest environments. And earlier this year, astronomers for the first time said they'd found a potentially habitable planet.
"The evidence is just getting stronger and stronger," said Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, which studies the origins, evolution and possibilities of life in the universe. "I think anybody looking at this evidence is going to say, 'There's got to be life out there.'"
A caveat: Since much of this research is new, scientists are still debating how solid the conclusions are.
Another reason to not get too excited is that the search for life starts small – microscopically small – and then looks to evolution for more. The first signs of life elsewhere are more likely to be closer to slime mold than to ET. It can evolve from there.

Wikileaked Cables from Beijing Reveal China's Pursuit of Fusion Power, Teleportation

It’s no secret that China is beating up on America and the West in everything from infrastructure to technology investment, but news of exactly what the People’s Republic is up to is often scarce. So while the diplomatic establishment continues to reel from the stink of its own dirty laundry in last week’s Wikileaks document dump, cables coming from the American Embassy in Beijing are also shedding light  on the strides Chinese scientists are making in far-out fields like nuclear fission, biometrics, and even quantum teleportation.
One confidential diplomatic cable sent from the Beijing Embassy to Washington in February suggests China is doing big things at the small scale. For one, China is aggressively expanding its nuclear energy resources, with plans to open at least 70 nuclear plants in the next decade. More interestingly, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is pouring research funding into its Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) to conduct ongoing research into nuclear fusion.