Blog P.I.

SoapBlox is one of the more important but less heralded platforms in the progressive blogosphere’s infrastructure. Or, it was. If you visit the main SoapBlox website today, you will see this post at the very top:

SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST

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.

This is unprecedented, I think. TypePad suffered a particularly nasty DDOS attack in 2006, but it lived to tell the tale, and is none the worse for it as far as I’m aware. And normally I don’t quote blog posts in full, but from the tone of the message, I wouldn’t count on it remaining up for long.

SoapBlox, for the uninitated, is two things: community blogging software and a weblog hosting company. Right now, any blog hosted by the company is down and is not coming back, at least until the owners migrate their sites to a new content management system, such as Scoop (on which SoapBlox was based and had largely replaced) or the widely-used, open-source WordPress.

Some of the sites offline already are among the most prominent in state-level blogospheres, including Blue Hampshire, Blue Jersey, Blue Mass Group, and Left in the West. Also down is Pam’s House Blend, which has a national audience.

Blogs using SoapBlox but hosted elsewhere are, for the moment, still up. However, I’m hearing that the software has been irretrievably hacked: security can no longer be guaranteed, for anyone. If true, this means that hackers have private information — including passwords and IP addresses — from supposedly anonymous accounts on some or all of the blogs using the software.

Among the sites still up but presumably compromised are Burnt Orange Report, Square State, The Albany Project, and nationally-read netroots blogs including My Left Wing and Open Left.

What happens next? One expects that the more popular SoapBlox websites will go temporarily offline as they transition to new software. In the short term, they may change appearance dramatically (layouts are specific to blogging software) and lose their archives. Less active sites, or those run by people with fewer time and money resources, may not survive.

But what does this mean for the netroots, or the blogosphere writ large? That will be very interesting to see.

Update: Ben Smith at The Politico, himself the proprietor of a state blog, writes:

The attack is a reminder of how little redundancy there is in big portions of the rapidly-expanding Internet, and how fragile the systems that manage content can be.

I presume that most, if not all, of the text from these sites is already cached by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. So for contributors now scrambling to back up their essays, this may prove a useful resource. But it doesn’t save images consistently, and those files may be gone for good.

Update 2: Some of the sites listed above have returned, at least for the moment. Pam Spaulding, whose site is back temporarily, writes:

Around 10PM last night, I found out Soapblox.net, the service that hosts many of the state blogs, has been hacked. I reported it on a couple of listservs and put an email in to Soapblox.

Pam’s House Blend, RadicalRuss.net, American Liberalism, BeThink.org are some of the sites affected, but many more went down later. I didn’t go through down the whole Soapblox blogroll but it seems most of the state blogs were not affected. The hack is restricted to only one server, but once they got in, other servers were compromised. …

Well, as you can imagine, there were a lot of unhappy bloggers losing their minds; in my case 3 years of my blog is on that platform, and it wasn’t clear what data was recoverable or when I would see it.

At some point later this morning the site is up. Now I have to get my content off of here and as of this moment, I don’t have FTP access to copy it down.

So enjoy the Blend while you can in this location.

And Eric B. of Michigan Liberal writes:

So far, it appears that Michigan Liberal’s servers haven’t been effected. Who knows…

What I do know is that a post on the SoapBlox site said that they are out of business. I have no idea what specifically that means. I am keeping a very close eye on the situation.

If you come back, and the place is dark, then you’ll know that we’ve lost our server.

Clearly, the fallout from this disaster is not yet known because it is not yet even understood. On the other hand, it’s providing a major opportunity for another company to step into the breach. One possibility: Markos Moulitsas, who has spent his own money customizing the old Scoop platform, could license it to others. I wouldn’t count on it, but a lot of people are in dire need of a solution right now.

Update 3: My NMS colleague Simon Owens of Bloggasm posts an e-mail making the rounds this morning. Here’s what it says:

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.

Update 4: The showrunner at SoapBlox, who blogs as “pacified”, has removed the post I led with and replaced it with one titled “SoapBlox is a Phoenix?”, which reads:

I am nothing but a dramatic person. I am sorry for that.

SoapBlox needs help. From all of you. How do we salvage this. How do we keep this going?

When you create something that becomes larger than yourself.

I apologize for being so dramatic. Again, I have a knack for that.

Giving up the fight may itself have been an overreaction, but it sounds like the software still has very serious problems. No matter what happens, it won’t be an easy dig out.

Update 5: Of course, it didn’t take long — just the third comment on the SoapBlox post — for this kind of speculation to emerge:

Maybe it was not such a good idea to have so many liberal websites at one ISP. The hackers, of course, are anonymous, but I smell a Rove-like rat out there.

The first point is a very good one. The latter, more like a natural defense mechanism.

N.B. Yes, it’s a weak headline. At least I didn’t go with “Ablogalypse Now”.