Luckily for me, up here in Alaska, there’s a massive cold snap (well-below zero for almost two weeks in a row…which is exactly how long it’s been since my truck started).  Today it was 24- below-zero when I woke up and it was so cold in the house, I turned on my oven and went back to bed until it warmed up a little.  

I say “luckily” because I didn’t read about the SoapBlox hacking until approximately 3:00 PM EST, when Paul at SoapBlox had stopped the Chicken Little routine and it was obvious that some wonderful techie folks had stepped up to the plate to help.  I was also fortunate that I am obviously not on the same SoapBlox server with those blogs like this one that went down…and mixed with that relief is also empathy at what you went through!

I made my decision that I’m going to stick with SoapBlox for now.  I’m hoping that this wake-up call will cause Paul at SoapBlox to get permenant techie help and a structured policy on how to deal with crisis situations.

And he’s going to need to do so…It remains to be seen what the motivations for this particular hack-job may be.  It could be as simple as the perpetrators were well aware of SoapBlox’s vulnerabilities and wanted to make a splash or, even simpler, that someone has a grudge against Paul or someone else using the platform…who knows?  

However, we will will probably be facing much more of this in the future.  While China is (allegedly) repeatedly hacking the Pentagon, right and left-wingers were hacking political email accounts and websites leading up to the 2008 election.  Now that the Dems are in power, Conservatives will be that much more motivated…Clinton’s presidency directly led to the rise of right-wing talk radio.  What remains of the Republican Party also includes every faction of right-wing-fanatics.  Learning from the awesome Obama machine, they are trying to recruit a new group of tech-raised youth who will be able to drag them kicking-and-screaming into this century.  Remember, I said “fanatics,” which means this is a “holy war” for them.  Some will also do whatever it takes to push their agenda.  

I’ve already tangled with TeamSarah.org, a rather-impressively-set-up website with 70,000 members whose primary goal is to get their messiah, Sarah Palin, into the Presidency in 2012.  Their website was busted by a local blog for racist, homophobic, scary-religious-fanatic anti-Obama stuff that will curl your hair.  In response, they learned from their mistakes by taking a page out of Governor Palin’s defense manual.  Since the article they’ve tried to hide the worst of it, have accused those who post anything like that of being “infiltrators” and have blamed the rest on…yup, you got it, us:

TeamSarah.org, an online community of over 63,000 who admire Sarah Palin and all she stands for, currently is experiencing an attempt at framing the whole community as guilty of unsavory racist behavior.  This apparently is part of an overall attempt by the the worst elements of the progressive faction, conduct for which all liberals should be ashamed to be associated, even indirectly.

(Redstate.com is another site trying to “build a Conservative army” like TeamSarah.org.  As they are big Sarah supporters, I believe they are building the same army, but…shhhhhh…don’t tell them!)

I bring all of this up because we all know that Progressive sites far outnumber the Conservative ones.  We also know that what’s left of the “Republican base” is infiltrated with the “fringiest” of fringe elements.  Those two realities probably won’t change anytime soon.  The most attention these sites get now is when the media feels the need to mention them so they look “unbiased” when talking about political web sites. For some of them, it may just seem easier and more profitable to find ways to sabotage the sites than to try and drown out the Progressive sites with their much smaller numbers.

So, in this situation, the reason the vast majority of affected sites were Progressive may just be because the vast majority of blogs already ARE Progressive. There’s as much chance that this was not politically motivated as the alternative.

That may or may not be true the next time but the only thing that’s guaranteed…there will be a next time somewhere.

So, we in the blog community just had another, closer-to-home wake-up call.  I know a number of us have had techie friends screaming at us to back up our information.  We’ve all told them, “Yeah, I’ll get around to it.”

I guess it’s time to get around to it!

P.S. If anyone knows the best way to do that, please let me know!