Several Australian government websites were slowly recovering Wednesday hours after the online prankster group Anonymous unleashed a massive distributed denial-of-service attack to protest the country's evolution toward internet censorship.

The group, which previously brought down Scientology's websites has also undertaken a host of other online pranks. It dubbed the new attack "Operation Titstorm" to protest the government's move to require the filtering of pornography that uses adult actors if they appear underage. Violent material targeting children is also to be censored.

Anonymous' past targets include uncool virtual worlds, an epilepsy message board and a Neo-Nazi webcaster. The group sent Australian media e-mail messages warning of the attack, the Sydney Morning Herald said.

"No government should have the right to refuse its citizens access to information solely because they perceive it to be unwanted," the e-mail said. "The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn. No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason."

At one point Thursday, parliament's website was felled after getting 7.5 million hits a second. Usually, it receives a few hundred a second.

Flyers seeking recruits for Wednesday's barrage said the group would follow the service attack with "a shitstorm of porn e-mail, fax spam, black faxes and prank phone calls to government offices."

See Also: