New World/Old World

Ah, the brave new world of the new media. Jeffrey Toobin shows us some of the pitfalls of the internet age in this week's New Yorker, with a chilling tale of disappearing and disintegrating blogs apparently vandalized for the sport of it. (Hack Attack, Jan. 19, 2009, p. 23). More than a hundred blogs hosted by SoapBlox, a web site that specializes in administering blogs for political liberals, were damaged or erased by a Web 2.0 version of the kind of sport who in olden times would have perhaps poured rubber cement into newspaper coinboxes or stolen bundles of newspapers containing political views not in the favor of the vandal.

Bloggers found the damage when they tried to sign on earlier this month, and inundated SoapBlox with calls of alarm. "When I woke up on Wednesday" (Jan. 7), said Paul Preston, SoapBlox's sole employee, "I started checking my phone and e-mail and people were like, 'Oh, my God,' " Toobin wrote.

It seems that the site's founders had purposely kept the software simple in order to encourage non-techies to use it. And now they were paying the price. The damage to the websites was so extensive, that SoapBlox quickly ran up the white flag. By 8:15 that morning, Preston posted this announcement: "All those hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it. Consider this the 'We're Out of Business' post."

And that would have been the end of it, except that a number of volunteers rushed to Preston's aid and helped undo the damage and managed to get SoapBlox back up and running after one long day or labor. "We're not dead yet," Preston wrote on Thursday.

And so SoapBlox is back up and running, helping the more than a hundred bloggers get their messages out. And the only clue to the vandals is a post left behind on the group's site: "Hacked by Astalavista Team." Preston told the New Yorker, "I don't have a clue what that means."