Right-Wing Attack Machine Hacks Liberal Blogs
January 23rd, 2009I breezed right by this headline the other day, having seen it on the wires and linked to it on the news page before. But when a friend in Knoxville mentioned it again in an e-mail message today, I chased down Jeffrey Toobin’s version of the story in The New Yorker: Hack Attack.
Key points:
There the evidence of hacking was obvious: SoapBlox.net had been redesigned, with a logo of a hand and a message that said “destroying online communities.”
Almost accidentally, Paul Preston, the owner and creator of SoapBlox, come to control a critical crossroads in the netroots nation: the informal community of progressive bloggers and online activists who now play an important role in Democratic Party politics.
“We have built this new progressive movement on a lot of volunteer labor, a shoestring budget, a lot of heart and soul, but not a lot of resources,” said Moulitsas, of the Daily Kos. “We’ve got to professionalize our movement, and we can’t rely only on labors of love, like what Paul did.”
Preston plans to assemble a bigger team and to get some backup servers. As for the hacking, he doesn’t know who did it; he has retained a lawyer. In a message on the SoapBlox home page, the vandals wrote, “Hacked By Astalavista Team.” Preston said.
This has Karl Rove’s name all over it if you ask me. We’ve been fighting the bastards down here for four years to keep them from shutting us down with blog spam and server attacks and fake reports to Internet Service Providers about harassing e-mail and every other dirty trick in the book short of hacking and taking over our sites.
Here’s my strong suggestion for activists: Contact the Obama Justice Department and raise this issue and tell them to look deep into Texas, Alabama, Florida and Paraguay for a good chunk of the hacking and spamming that goes on around here. We’ve spent some time tracking it, but not enough. If we spent all our time doing that, we would have no time for journalism.
Now for a funny technology blog rant…
Techno Time…
Speaking of techno time and how to spend it, I spent a couple of wasted hours today trying to make a comment on YouTube about a video I linked to a long time ago that is now relevant again and just as funny as the first time I saw it.
Giving Up Golf For the Good of the Country
But even after I recently spent significant parts of several days setting up an iGoogle page, I couldn’t get past the YouTube comment interface for some reason. Them crazy letters would never take, if you know what I mean…
Another friend e-mailed, it turned out accidentally, wanting me to join something called Plaxo. My reply?
Shit, another social networking site to sign up for? I’m already in LinkedIn. Let me suggest setting up an iGoogle page and subscribing to RSS feeds, including mine. Or, I can add you to my e-mail list — or just bookmark this page and hit it every day:
Maybe you’ve even had that experience trying to make comments on this Word Press blog or dealing with other technology. It pervades our lives and eats time. One of our programmers is so mad at Word Press this morning that he did a blog post on it with the headline:
I sent him an earlier e-mail message saying, in part:
Does this blog shit allow for a print button? Is there a widget for that? Did you find a gallery widget?
Should I freaking join Twitter and add all them damn social network share buttons?
Geeze Louise…
Just another techno rant. It’s dinner time on a Friday afternoon late…
If you get the same feeling sometimes, rant in the open comments…
They call that an open thread on some other blogs we rarely have time to visit. Between chasing down real stories and big headlines and keeping up with the latest gadget and dot dot dot and … we don’t have time for open threads around here. It’s hard enough to keep threads on our backs in Bush’s goddamn depression…
Thanks for the calls from New York, though. We don’t mind, really…
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Tags: Karl Rove Can Kiss My Ass, Right-Wing Attack Machine Hacks Liberal Blogs
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:56 pm
I don’t want Karl Rove kissing me anywhere. However I think he should be hanged by his tiny little testicles.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:01 pm
That I would like to see : )
January 24th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Lagging again, yep I’m guilty. I was aware of the Soapbox attack, but hadn’t heard much otherwise. Gonna wait a few weeks before calling Feds to complain about Badnesses; during last 8 years, the means of contacting Fed agencies and tattling have become far fewer and difficult to use, and almost always unresponsive, and pretty much never even give you the pretense that you will be anonymous. Phone numbers for a lot of Regulators are for offices no closer than Atlanta. I’m looking and hoping for Change.
January 24th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Techno whizz kids already understand widgets, which I originally thought was some kind of of “midget porn sites,” but how wrong was I. I suspect Rove has been to such sites and has them bookmarked for easy access in his little cabin.
When I began to learn the intricacies of WordPress, after finally learning Moveable Type before abandoning it for the new, I realized that for every piece of code designed to make sites cool and easy to navigate there is some crack-induced hysteria involved in the writing of such programming.
While programmers understand the minutia that will, for example, allow readers to see this post, they must laugh their flat asses off – they sit a lot writing codes – knowing creative people merely want to write and not spend hours trying to figure out why adding an RSS feed can override previous sidebar entries.
For every new realization as to why something works – or indeed doesn’t – there are wasted moments trying to put it into context: “Oh, I see now,” when in fact I just give up and more on dot org.
Your site is looking better and better, however, so you must have figured out what works and what is time better spent than spending three hours of revisionist jibber jabber.