Operation Clambake presents:
Cult Censoring Themselves
Operation Clambake (OC) is offering you a critical view at the Church of Scientology (CoS). But I do not want you just to read my view, I have always urged visitors to also check out the other side. That is why I always have included links to official Scientology web pages on the front page of OC and elsewhere when appropriate.
But from November 1999 CoS changed their site so that anybody surfing to their site from a link at OC only got a blank page. Why CoS would prevent you from reading their version is difficult to understand, like so many things Scientologists do. Even though the Scientologist do not want you to read their side of the story, I still suggest you should. To avoid their weird attempt to censor themselves I have created this page on another server with a link to the page you are trying to reach. If the link still fails then the Scientologists have discovered this page too...
Some posts to ARS explaining how the cult might have done this:
From: jan.kalin@zag.si (Jan Kalin) Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: Re: Think for your self? Not Scientology!! Date: 25 Nov 1999 18:51:51 GMT Message-ID: <slrn83r194.2im.jan.kalin@charm.zag.si> In article <a8dq3s8884uc4hsilfgcpor4vc4n1k5plb@4ax.com>, Andreas Heldal-Lund - www.xenu.net wrote: >On Thu, 25 Nov 1999 12:53:23 GMT, Andreas Heldal-Lund - www.xenu.net ><heldal@online.no> wrote: > >> >>Very funny, seems like the cult is moving images around >>to prevent me from linking to them. Poor cult, it their >>plan to harass my ISP didn't work out like they hoped. ;) >> >>If you check out the Scientology Illustrated pages at you >>will see that all the Scientology images now is missing: >> >> http://www.xenu.net/archive/scientology_illustrated/ >> >>But something weird happens here on all the machines I've >>tested it on: >> >> - Try surfing to www.scientoloy.org, just to check >> that it works. Also test the link at the bottom to >> their trademark info page. Did it work? >> - Then go to the disclaimer at the end of the main Op. >> Clambake site (www.xenu.net) and press the link >> there to the Scientology trademark page. >> - On my computers the page will not show from there >> even though the link is correct. >> - Then try to go to www.scientology.org >> - Suddenly this page will not show either. > >In Internet Explorer 5 the error is "Action canceled", but >in the Opera browser a dialog box pops up with the message: >"Remote server accepted the request - no content returned". > >What is the point? Censoring themselves? The Scientologists >are now suppressing their own right to free speech! Gee, >are they that desperate for sympathy???? Heh, seems they are preventing anyone reading your page from reading theirs. Here is the relevant part of the 'conversation' between my computer and their server when I click on www.scientology.org link on your page: -------------------------------------------------------------------- GET / HTTP/1.0 Referer: http://www.xenu.net/ Connection: Keep-Alive User-Agent: Mozilla/4.6 [en] (X11; I; IRIX 6.2 IP22) Host: www.scientology.org Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */* Accept-Encoding: gzip Accept-Language: en Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8 HTTP/1.0 204 No Results Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 17:49:41 GMT Server: WebSitePro/2.3.18 Accept-ranges: bytes Content-type: text/html Set-Cookie: check=referer; path=/; -------------------------------------------------------------------- Same thing happens on my other computer with Netscape, IE4 and, incredibly, with Palmscape for my Palm IIIx :) And this is what happens if I just type www.scientology.org in the URL field in Netscape (which then proceeds to load the page): -------------------------------------------------------------------- GET / HTTP/1.0 Connection: Keep-Alive User-Agent: Mozilla/4.6 [en] (X11; I; IRIX 6.2 IP22) Host: www.scientology.org Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */* Accept-Encoding: gzip Accept-Language: en Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8 HTTP/1.0 302 Moved Temporarily Connection: Keep-Alive Location: http://www.scientology.org/scnhome.htm Content-length: 0 -------------------------------------------------------------------- They are checking the "Referer" variable and returning an empty document if the link is located on your page (and I suspect other critics' pages as well; check them out). I also tried with Opera and the page didn't load. However, when I turned cookies and referer off (Preferences|Advanced|Logging: "Enable Cookies" and "Enable Referer"), the page loaded correctly. -------------------------------------------------------------------- GET / HTTP/1.0 User-Agent: Mozilla/3.0 (Windows NT 4.0;US) Opera 3.60 [en] Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/png, */* Host: www.scientology.org HTTP/1.0 302 Moved Temporarily Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 18:11:19 GMT Server: WebSitePro/2.3.18 Accept-ranges: bytes Location: http://www.scientology.org/scnhome.htm Content-type: text/html Content-length: 196 -------------------------------------------------------------------- The same story with the Scientology Illustrated pages (e.g., http://www.xenu.net/archive/scientology_illustrated/intro12.htm). The image of Elron isn't there, but if I type http://freedom.lronhubbard.org/img/index2.jpg as the URL, it is loaded. I can then go back to intro12.htm and the image is there (loaded from cache, of course). Reload the page and the image is gone. Cheers, Jan -- Jan Kalin (male, preferred languages: Slovene, English) contact information |
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: Re: Think for your self? Not Scientology!! From: gorilla@elaine.drink.com (Alan Barclay) Message-ID: <943571985.717436@elaine.drink.com> Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 23:14:17 GMT In article <slrn83r194.2im.jan.kalin@charm.zag.si>, Jan Kalin <jan.kalin@zag.si> wrote: >GET / HTTP/1.0 >Referer: http://www.xenu.net/ Probably this is how they are doing it. The Referer is a header passed to show the page you came from. It's useful in scripts, for example to program a 'back' button. It's also useful when processing your logs, you can tell how a user navigated through your site, and the keywords they entered into a search engine to get to your site. It's also possible to use this to prevent deeplinking, as is happening in this case. There are privacy proxies which block the Referer header. |