4chan, the infamously crude message board, is currently down due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and has been since the early morning hours according to the site's Twitter account. The attack comes just a day after similar attacks slowed down Bank of America's Web services.

The 4chan status page lists several parts of the site as being up, but "Boards", "Post images" and "Static files" are all listed as down and the site barely loads after a minute or two. Even this, however, is changing over time with the intensity of the attacks. Geekosystem editor Robert Quigley ponders who could be behind the attack, asking if it could be Tumblr users still hanging on to the Tumblr/4chan battle of earlier this year. Quiqley goes on to wonder if it could be the banks themselves acting in retaliation or even 4chan itself.

It would be a move straight out of a movie to DDoS attack yourself, wouldn't it? What's the best way to prove your own innocence? Make yourself the victim.

We don't have any information on who is behind the attacks, but that would be some high drama right there. The safer bet, though, might be that supporters of the various sites that have been taken down by Anonymous are retaliating. We'll keep an eye out on 4chan's status page for an explanation.

The hactivist group Anonymous, Tweeting as Anony_Ops, announced the attack with the hashtag #OperationBOA.

The outages were described as "sporadic" and what harm was done seems minimal but down, at times, they definitely were.

Bank of America was targeted by Anonymous because it joined other financial companies PayPal, Mastercard and Visa, in refusing to work with Wikileaks.

Discussion has been intense on whether this sort of limited interference constitutes non-violent civil disobedience or whether unwillingness to stand up and be counted disqualifies the actors from membership in such a group.

Other sources: The Street

In a defensive move, Bank of America now seems to be buying up domains for its senior executives and board members, including their names along with "sucks" or "blows." Domain Name Wire reports hundred of domain name registrations on Dec. 17 alone. For example, the company registered a number of domains for CEO Brian Moynihan: brianmoynihanblows.com, brianmoynifansucks.com and so on. It also nabbed the .net and .org versions of several of these names as well.

Of course, it seems unlikely that this strategy will be terribly effective in shutting down online critiques about Bank of America. There are still a variety of slurs and top-level domains to go, and as BoingBoing quips, grabbing them all would exceed the bank's capital reserves. (There's a government bailout joke to make here, but I will refrain).

Last week, Bank of America announced it was joining PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa and cutting off payments to WikiLeaks.

And Dell isn't the only RIM-switcher making headlines today, either. Two of the biggest U.S. banks, Bank of America and Citigroup, are seriously considering the iPhone, it's being reported.

Last month, Apple reported that 80% of Fortune 500 companies are testing the iPhone, including Procter & Gamble, General Electric and JPMorgan Chase & Co., the latter of which is also considering Android, says Bloombeg. 

The article also cited an August survey by Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., which found that 74% of U.S. and U.K. companies now let employees use non-Blackberry devices and in the U.S. alone, that number is 83%. Cost and employee preference were the two main reasons for the switch, the poll found.

Cost savings come into play when a company can either partially or entirely eliminate the need for Blackberry servers. In Dell's case, for example, Dell CFO Brian Gladden told the Wall St. Journal that the company will save around 25% in mobile communication costs by moving off of Blackberry.

But for the employees whose Blackberry phones would have to be ripped from their cold, dead hands (as the expression goes), it's not all bad news. According to Bloomberg, Bank of America's 284,000 employees and Citigroup's 258,000 employees would simply have more choice in devices if the companies decide to permit iPhone usage, it wouldn't be a forced switch.

With mobile usage on the rise one major US bank launched a suite of mobile banking services last year. A year later, Bank of America's mobile site has a million unique active user accounts. On peak days, Bank of America sees 100,000 users sign into its mobile services, with more use coming from mobile-savvy city dwellers (where cellular data and wifi coverage are generally better). 80% of the bank's mobile users are under the age of 45, and Bank of America reports that 2/3rds of users are under the age of 35.

Not surprisingly, the most popular devices are smart phones like the iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile-based phones. With some analysts expecting iPhone sales to triple this holiday season, we're likely to see the up trend in online banking continue. Where do you do your banking? Let us know in the comments.

But whether the Internet remains recession-proof or not, the mortgage crisis will affect the world of web advertising in very real ways.

"It’s highly unlikely that Bank of America will spend so lavishly on online advertising," writes Dignan. "Simply put, Countrywide’s penchant for advertising will disappear. To Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis Countrywide’s willy nilly ad spending will just be more fat to cut."

The good news for Google, et. al., is that help may be on the way from an unlikely source: the Hollywood writers strike. As the strike drags on, and original primetime TV content dries up, advertisers may begin to jump ship for other mediums. Chrysler, the third-largest automaker in the US, already has, choosing to run ads on sports and the Internet instead of primetime television.

The strike "is changing the whole broadcast model," said Chrysler marketing cheif Deborah Wahl Meyer. While analysts don't think Chrysler's move to jump ship from primetime TV advertising is an indication of a television industry in crisis, it could certainly signal the potential start of a trend. Many striking writers have already turned to the Internet as a place to ply their trade and with advertisers on board, the strike could hasten a paradigm shift in the media landscape that sees content shift from television to web distribution.

Related: Online Ad Spend to Jump in 2008 Thanks to Sports, Politics