Bloggasm

UPDATED BELOW

Oh wow, SoapBlox, the host and blogging platform for dozens of mullet blogs, just abruptly gave up its fight against hackers today and shut down. What does this mean? It means that several very influential blogs just exploded overnight. Here’s an email I just received:

My sincere apologies for posting this to several lists all at once, but this is a serious issue:

We are so goddamned screwed right now.

I spoke to Paul Preston a little while ago on the phone, and SoapBlox, according to him, is dead. Hacked, not worth resuscitating, and would cost too much money to restore with his ISP. We need to stop this from happening — if it turns out to be a matter of money to at least get the dead sites back up so we can archive them until we can move them all to another platform, then I would personally and on behalf of the other bloggers who are TOTALLY SCREWED RIGHT NOW appreciate it if the folks receiving this message who are interested in the continued existence of easily-built-and-maintained state-level community blogs could commit to making this happen.

Again, only if that proves to be the issue. But several of us are in true DEFCON 1 freakout mode here, and there’s not a whole lot else we can do.

Thanks for your consideration.

–Joe
(formerly?) MN Progressive Project

And this was posted on the SoapBlox blog today:

It was a good ride, but it’s over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these 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.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the “We’re Out of Business” post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox’s ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

UPDATE : My coworker Bill Buetler has a comprehensive roundup of the unfolding events.